Balloons Everywhere

Summer is a time of year when I get to spend very little time with balloons. Not because I don’t think about it, but because the kids are home from school, and it’s hot and sticky and contact with latex just makes my skin feel even more hot and sticky, and so the balloons just never get pulled out and blown up. But it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about them.

And seeing them. Everywhere. You know that phenomenon wherein the very thing that you’re thinking of seems to be all around you? It’s just because you’re paying more attention, of course, not because the Universe actually cares what happens to be on your mind. On the other hand, when it comes to balloons, that kind of thing happens to me all the time, because I don’t see balloons the way other people see them, so I notice them wherever they happen to be, even when no one else notices them. In the back of someone’s car, in a corner of the restaurant (I notice if the restaurant has a helium tank, even if they don’t actually have balloon around), even un-inflated balloons in a box behind a store counter.

So why do I seem to notice more balloons at this time of year, when I am deprived of actual contact with balloons? Well, I think it’s mostly because it bothers me so much more, and so the sightings stand out in my mind. But there’s also the fact that a few of the situations in which I see balloons in the summer are more annoying to me.

For one thing, there are water balloons. My wife tries to tell me (and I try to tell myself) that it’s not the same thing, that I don’t even play with balloons that small, that they don’t pop like air-filled balloons and so it shouldn’t bother me. But it does. I think it’s because small balloons (not necessarily water balloons) were an important part of my childhood play because that was often all I could get hold of. In fact, the first orgasms I had with balloons were with five-inch rounds and airships that were about a foot long, balloons I’d never consider buying today. But that’s what they sold at the market, and it was better than nothing.

As an aside, 9-inch balloons were my favorites in those days, when I could get them. They were the perfect size for stuffing into my clothing. Now I use Qualatex 11s and 16s almost exclusively.

But I digress. The other thing that comes out in the summer is something called a Balzac. It’s a cloth sack, originally made my Wham-O, now owned my Hasbro, and currently no made by anyone, that holds a balloon inside to make a fairly rugged play ball. I have to admit, that it’s a very clever idea. We’ve had ours since the mid-90s, and it is one of the prized playthings in my household.

And I hate it. I hate that I have to use one of my lovely 16-inch balloons for a play ball, that the balloons will get inflated, tied, and eventually popped, without me ever having seen it, much less played with it. My wife offers to buy official Balzac balloons for it, but it doesn’t make sense, since they cost about three times as much as the better-quality Qualatex balloons, and are hard to find. So I capitulate. But it makes my unhappy. (Though, granted, I do try to wrangle some extra balloon-play out of my wife by way of compensation.)

Summer will soon be over, and here in the Northeast I will come to regret wishing for its end when the snow has to be shoveled. But the air will cool, the windows will get closed, the kids will go back to school, and the balloons will come out of the drawer for my pleasure.

But meanwhile, they just seem to be everywhere.

Scholarly Source?

Recently—well, in fact, after May 29th of this year, I've been seeing traffic from Wikipedia on this blog. At first it didn't make sense to me, since the last time I had looked at the entry about balloon fetishes, there was no reference to me at all, which is how it should be, because I'm not (as I keep saying) an expert.

Although I guess I'm as much of an expert as any of the people who are claiming to be experts out there, so who knows?

But when I looked, there it was, a footnote with a link to my May 29th entry about the difference between kinks, fetishes, and fetishistic disorders. It follows the text:

"However, it is now in the DSM-VI to where a fetish is no longer considered as a disorder (except for fetishistic disorder where if the fetish interferes with the person's life)."

Ignoring the poor writing for a moment, linking to my blog to support this statement hardly seems rational. Especially because I was mistaken, partly. I think I read something that mentioned DSM-VI and the description of fetishistic disorders (I can't find my source because I was not writing a scholarly article), but in fact DSV-VI has not been released, and the definition I used was as from DSM-V, which was released last year.

Unlike the editor of the Wikipedia article, I have corrected my mistake.

If someone is going to edit a Wikipedia article, they should be looking for more authoritative source material than, well, me. It would be fine to mention my blog or any of my books as an example of writings on the subject, but not as a factual authority.

I am not a Wikipedia editor (and I don't have time to become one), but I hope someone will correct this error sometime soon. I want the entry, such as it is, to be as factual as possible, and including me as a scholarly source hardly serves that purpose.

There are a lot of Wikipedia articles that are lacking in factual information, written by biased people, which is why, in my opinion, the site should only be used as a jumping-off point. And since the subject of balloon fetishism is near and dear to me, I hope that everyone who reads the Wikipedia article about it will, if they have any interest in arriving at the truth of the matter, heed that advice.

And on that, you may quote me.

Surprise

There is a story that I have been struggling with. I think I know where it is going, but I don't have any idea how it gets there. I probably will have to abandon it altogether or start it over with a different situation or a different character to support the same theme. I don't know.

What I do know is that, out of the blue, another story idea came to me, and to find out whether it seems to be going anywhere, I decided to just sit down and write for about 30 minutes.

And I pumped out about 700 words! They just flowed out, as if I had been preparing to write the story for months. I don't know if I'll run into any roadblocks or not—that sort of thing does happen—but from the first scene, knowing who these characters are and what their relationship is (although I haven't actually revealed that in those first 700 words), I find myself liking them already and seeing ahead to what's in store for them, and being very excited about getting them there.

With luck, you'll be able to see the results of this burst of creativity soon. No pun intended. Well, maybe a little.

From Kink to Fetish to the DSM

What is the difference between a kink and a fetish? And are either of them anything to worry about?

I often see postings on Internet sites about people who are "experimenting" with a balloon fetish, or just "getting into it." And I think they're using the term in too broad a sense. Now, I'm not going to get into a fight over semantics, but I think the difference is worth noting. If you are experimenting with a sexual variation, like sexual activity with balloons, for example, I don't think you are participating in a fetish; I think you are trying out a kink.

It's something you are deciding to do, something you want to try out. It's not something that you feel compelled by some inner feeling to do, and most likely if you decided to give it up tomorrow, you could do so without any difficulty.

This applies to any kinky sex you might decided to experiment with, not just balloons, but since this is a blog about balloons and sex, we'll stick to that topic.

And as kinks go, I think balloon play is probably a pretty good one. It's harmless, with a low risk of injury. Balloons are fun, sensual, and yet in some ways kind of scary, though in a superficial sense. That is, the balloons won't really hurt you, but popping them might give some enough adrenaline rush to provide some extra stimulation.

I wouldn't know. I can't see balloons the way others do without it being influenced by my very real fetish, something I did not choose, feelings that just happened to me along the way, starting very early in my life. They are ingrained in me, and I can't just decide that I don't want to be turned on by them (or afraid of them or emotionally attached to them) and change my feelings overnight.

If I did want to make such a change (and I don't), it would be a long battle, and I truthfully believe that some vestige of those feelings would just never go away. And that, in my opinion, is the difference between a fetish and a kink.

That and the fact that I am convinced that not all fetishes are sexual, whereas all kinks are, by their nature. There's nothing wrong with that; I have nothing against kinky sex or experimentation as long as no one gets hurt, but I do care about the difference, personally.

Now, what about the second question: is kinky sex or fetishism anything to worry about?

I once had a commenter on Twitter tell me I need to see a psychiatrist. I was tempted to reply: "I don't think you'd agree with what the psychiatrist had to say." (I resisted the temptation.) Because according to the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V), which is what the psychiatric profession uses as a guide, fetishism in itself is not any kind of disorder.

There is something called fetishistic disorder, but that only comes into play if the fetish interferes with the subject's daily life. I wouldn't qualify. It's true, I do sometimes get very anxious when I'm around balloons in public, but that has little to do with my fetish and everything to do with my phobia.

So, whether you're doing balloons as a lark, or you're in it for the long haul through no choice of your own, there's nothing to be concerned about.

As long as nobody gets hurt.

NOTE: If you arrived here from Wikipedia, you should know that citing my blog as a source for what DSM has to say is a bit misleading to say the least. To see my opinion about that, click here.

Fetishist From Birth?

After my last entry, someone on Facebook was discussing the post, and talked about being "born with the fetish." And I asked, as an aside, "Do you think we're born with the fetish?" Because I don't actually think that's true. I think that, even for true fetishists (a subject my predecessor touched on a couple of years ago), there is an event, before our earliest memories, that triggered some reaction to balloons that became an attachment to balloons which became, for most of us, a sexual connection to balloons, of some stripe.

But I could be completely wrong.

Anyone who claims to know how fetishes occur is blowing smoke into your balloon. Because, for us who truly have the fetish, our reaction to balloons was never something we chose. It was a reaction to something that happened to us; exactly what we have no way of knowing because most likely it happened in that time before we were four while we were forming memories that, for whatever reason, don't stay with us.

But born with it? Well, of course, there's no gene or birth trauma that makes us have a particular fetish. We're not born to love balloons, specifically. But maybe, just maybe, we're born to have this kind of attachment. After all, there are a lot of fetishists in the world, if you count all the fetishes that there are. Maybe there is a rather large subset of the populace is predisposed to have an emotional and/or sexual attachment to some object or another, with the particulars of which object falling to the whims of circumstance.

I don't know. And I don't think anyone else does either. My inclination is that fetishism is more likely an awakening of propensities that almost all of us share, but some incident or series of incidents turns the attachment process on its head and sends us in an unusual direction (and, as I said, not all that unusual for fetishism as a whole).

Not necessarily a bad direction, either. Sometimes my life would be simpler if I didn't have a fetish for balloons. But for the most part the balloons not only bring me sexual excitement, but comfort and happiness as well. It would only be a problem if my fetish interfered with living a full and satisfying life. And frankly, if that was the case, it probably wouldn't be just the fetish that was the issue.

So, while I cannot say with any confidence why I feel as I do about balloons, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.

It's Not All About Sex

If you do nothing but skim the surface, balloon fetishes seem pretty simple. Some guy or gal blows up a balloon until it pops and gets horny. Or does the nasty with a balloon or watches someone else play with a balloon.

And I guess for some balloon fetishists, it really is that simple: the balloon is an object that stimulates or enhances their sexual desire. There's a lot of variety within that description, of course, but it does cut to the chase. I think that my character in Popping Out meets that description pretty well, and maybe even the guy in Eric's Secret.

But for me, and I suspect a lot of us, it isn't nearly so cut and dried. I had a non-sexual relationship with balloons for at least eight years before they began to relate to sexual feelings at all. I will never understand how it started, around the age of three. I do know that I was deathly afraid of balloons popping, and that I felt a sense of loss when they were destroyed. I do know that I loved having balloons around whenever my parents would let me.

And for some reason that I do not understand, I loved having balloons stuffed into my pajamas. Aha, you say, a sexual relationship after all. No, not at all. A sensual relationship, maybe. It just felt good, like a stuffed animal or a particularly warm and fuzzy blanket. I just loved balloons. Even as I was afraid of them.

The sexual feeling for balloons came later, with puberty. Oh, there was probably some anticipation of that transformation earlier. After all, I was a boy, and things that get held against a boy's penis, especially with any amount of pressure, tend to cause an erection.

That's not necessarily a sexual response, mind you; often it's just the body protecting a vital reproductive organ from loss of blood flow. But your mind treats protective erections and erections from sexual arousal pretty much identically, and so the connection was made.

But discovering my sexual feelings for balloons did not take away the non-sexual feelings, and even decades later, as a middle-aged man, balloons in various circumstances can bring on waves of varied—and sometimes conflicting—emotional and even visceral responses.

I still love just having balloons around. At a former job, I decorated my office with them (we were in the entertainment business—such quirks were tolerated). Now I decorate my house with them in the winter. They oxidize in the summer, and I don't like oxidized balloons, even though when I was little, I kept them until they were oxidized and nearly flat. See? It's complicated.

I still like to cuddle with balloons, although I don't get much opportunity these days. Some of the cuddling leads to sexual activity, but a surprising amount of it does not.

And where popping balloons is concerned, things get even more complicated. I pop balloons now, something I never, ever did until I was in my teens. I can even do it without earplugs, in most circumstances.

But when I'm around someone else who has a balloon, I get a sudden flight response, and I want to get away as quickly as possible. I don't like being around popping balloons if I'm not in control of the situation.

And yet, watching a lovely lady do something that might pop a balloon is sexually arousing for me. So there's where the conflicting feeling come in. I really want to get away from the balloon, and I really want to stick around and watch the lovely lady pop the balloon.

Provided she's popping it the right way. If she's going after balloons with a pin, forget it, I'll run away as fast as I can. If she's sitting on it, I'll stay. If she's blowing it up until it pops...well, I don't know what I'll do because it scares the crap out of me and it turns me on. Conflicted!

I'm sure that there are a lot of stories out there just like mine—not in the details, you understand, but in the general sense that their feelings for balloons are not simply sexual.

Not, in fact, anything simple at all.

A New Story, Finally

I know that I have neglected this blog for a very long time; I have spent most of my balloon-fetish-writing energy on fiction for the past three months. And the result is a story that ended up being a novelette: Popping Out.

You can buy Popping Out on Amazon.com now. I'm still working out a few kinks that fail to link the  Kindle and paperback editions, so if you want print, search for "Tim Popper Popping Out" in Books, and if you want an e-book, search for that same set of terms in the Kindle Store.

Not sure if you're ready to buy? Then download a sample of the Kindle edition. Because the story is so long, the preview actually gives you quite a good feel for the story, without really giving anything away.

And, as I've mentioned before, if you don't have a Kindle, you can still read the sample (or the whole book—hint) on a free Kindle reader for your tablet, phone, or computer, or in the Cloud Reader.

And if you haven't yet, why not download samples from Blowing It! and Eric's Secret?

So no excuses! Download the samples today and get a little taste of inflatable latex fun.