An Unintended Success -- Why We Submit

[Undisclosed]

I've been fooling around with the incontience files, trying to understand my desire to wear diapers. I have come to understand the situation, revealing a root cause that I think is applicable to almost all submissive behaviours. Below you will see my essay detailing my journey. I hope you find it interesting and useful.




I have, or rather had, a diaper fetish. There was just something about wearing a diaper, knowing you can wet it at any time that seemed so much better then normal, so exciting, so natural, such a turn on. However, I didn't just blindly accept this desire, that's not my nature. I experimented with it, wetted myself a few times, slept with one on, and it was all very pleasurable. From the softness of the material to how it held my genitals so comfortably and closely. From the feeling of just letting go to the warmth of the urine. Everything was fresh, new, vibrant and yet also natural, relaxing and nice. Of course, despite these great feelings that wasn't the point of the experiment. Rather, I was seeking to understand the root cause of those feelings by studying the feelings directly.

I asked myself, "Why do I get these feelings and why are they so powerful?" What I found was a potent mix of the rational and irrational, logic and emotion. There's no doubt that the softness and padding of the material is very nice. There's the pleasurable rubbing now and then. There's the old natural comfort of it, since I was a bedwetter until age 12. However, more then anything else there was the feeling of release. Wearing diapers was like its own type of orgasm. While I did it, anxieties just melted away and worries turned to dust, and wow... it was pleasurable. All I felt was me and my diaper, unified and free. There was no more thought of holding it in, no need to rush to the bathroom or interrupt what I'm doing. I could just go right there and then. It was so natural, so easy and so free.

All this has strong parallels to the sexual release, and so naturally it filled me with sexual lust and vigor. Generally, I would wear the diaper for a few hours until it was really good and wet, and then masturbate in it. Curiously, right after the orgasm my entire diaper fetish was gone. I looked down and said, "What the FUCK am I doing?!" I would take off the now wet and somewhat aromatic diaper, clean up and just stand in a bit of shock; unable to really reconcile with myself what I had just done. This state only lasted for less then an hour usually, until my body recharged and was ready for another go.

Of course, this initially led me to believe that the fetish was entirely sexual. I can clearly remember purposefully wetting my diaper around 11 or 12 for the pleasure of it. Back then it was the warmth, squishiness and wetness of it against my genitals that I found exciting, and to a lesser extent the naughtiness of it. This was still the case now, but the diaper itself was a turn on too. Perhaps this can be attributed to time's tendency to blur the lines between old memories and desires, but I still asked myself how this connection came to be made. Given that I still could enjoy simply wearing and wetting diapers without the sexual component, I honestly felt that this passion was really secondary and complementary to the overall experience. Thus, there must be some deeper root cause, and pure sexual pleasure was not it.

I turned my attention to what was triggering that sexual avalanche of pleasure, and found myself looking at the feeling of release that diapers gave me. As I mentioned before, the most powerful driver for wearing diapers was the feeling of freedom they gave me. They created a freedom without anxiety, worry or fear. I felt that diapers gave me this secret personal freedom that could help compensate for the stress of life. For me, this private openness was an immense turn on. In this space I could be naked, both physically and emotionally, and it made me feel alive. Wearing diapers is a private and personal experience, and given how privately I hold my sexuality, it's no surprise there was a connection. It was obvious that my sexuality was feeding off the feeling of wearing diapers, not the other way around. I knew for a fact there was another cause, the one that resulted in my feeling of freedom.

So I asked myself, "Why do I feel so free?" As soon as I did that, the answer I sought became clear. I was free because I was giving up a responsibility. I was no longer responsible for taking care of my bladder. It could run free and urinate whenever and wherever it wanted to, and I could be free to not even think about it. The need to urinate would never again interrupt my conscious mind, and when it did it would only be pleasurable thanks to the sexual connection. In public, I could quietly enjoy the kinkiness and naughtiness of it, while being free to let the urine flow. In private, I could relax in enjoyment or feed off of it to create a sexual experience of extreme potency. Overall, the freedom was in how it turned a responsibility into a pleasure.

But wait! "Turn a responsibility into a pleasure"? What does that mean? What does that imply? And here I found the base contradiction, the root irrationality, of the whole thing. No matter how kinky and sexual it might be, no matter how free and released I felt, the whole house of cards was dependant on one thing. I, deep down in the dark corners of the mind, had somehow connected responsibility with pain.

Sure, I've had painful moments in regards to urination. Bedwetting during the childhood years can be very embarrassing, especially at sleepovers, and we've all peed our pants once, twice, maybe many times. However, these stresses only serve to make one want to wear diapers and urinate less, not more. My incredibly shy bladder is proof enough of that. A part of me is so paranoid about urination that I can't even go until the bathroom is empty AND the last person out is well down the hallway. These terrible memories play their part in my life, but making me want to wear diapers is not it.

No, everything boils down to this. I've associated responsibility with pain, stress and anxiety, and wearing diapers removes a pretty significant responsibility. However, this root association is completely irrational, wrong and I dare say stupid.

Think of the mother. Think of the tremendous responsibility she bears in raising her children, yet somehow it brings her such joy! No matter how arduous it may be, in the end it's worth it, generally speaking. In truth, responsibility isn't painful or joyful in itself; it's what you make of it that counts.

Responsibility is like money. It's not good, not evil, just responsibility. For example, with money you can spend it on hookers, drugs or even killing people, or you can spend it like the two richest men on Earth, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, do. Together they've donated about $70 billion to their joint charity, the William & Belinda Gates Foundation. Their annual donation budget is more then half of what all of the United Nations spend each year! Responsibility is the same way. You can let it destroy you or make the world beautiful. It all depends on what you do with it.

Now how does this relate to submission in general? Well, pretty easily. The central action of submission is the giving up of your will, leaving it in someone else's hands. Only those who truly detest their ability to choose or truly enjoy not having one, can do such a thing. Likewise, only those who truly love their own will, the dominants, can accept it. The thing to note is that every choice, will itself, is a type of responsibility. Every person is responsible to make good choices, or at the very least follow the laws of the land. Merely having your own will is a responsibility. If you associate responsibility with the negative, then having a will will feel bad and giving it up will feel good. Thus, we have discovered the underpinnings of submission.

Extending this to diapers, we also see a form of submission. The wearer submits control of a part of their body to the diaper, entrusting it to handle urination and other excrement. If it doesn't, it's not the wearer's fault. After all, it was the diaper's job to take care of everything. By giving up our bladder to the diaper, we submit to it. Incidentally, a large number of those who wear diapers are definite submissives, further solidifying this result.

I believe, and am an example of how, understanding this central truth can really change one's life. It's only been perhaps a day since I've reached this conclusion, and I can't say that the desire to wear diapers is gone, there's still the edgy kinkiness of it, but I can say it has much declined. I know that if you reflect each day on this basic truth, this obvious and clear truth, the same will occur to you. You will find yourself less and less submissive. More and more accepting of your ability to choose and who you are. You will find true freedom, one a thousand times greater then any submission can ever afford. This can only be a good thing.

Now, keep in mind, I'm not saying that wearing diapers is bad or evil, I'm just saying that it's based on a flawed assumption. There are very real and important uses for them. For example, astronauts have to wear diapers, because it takes way too long to get in and out of the spacesuit. Moreover, with my shy bladder situation it seems like a useful tool to make myself comfortable with urinating in public places. After all, if you can pee in a diaper in public, then using a urinal the "normal" way is a piece of cake! On the other hand, if you wear a diaper because it affords some "freedom" or "stress relief", you ought to know why it does, and know that the reasoning is flawed.

[calvera_x]

too long/didn't read

[liljonny]

might look at http://understanding.infantilism.org/

[joe]

too long/didn't read

that's an asshole thing to say. if you didn't read it, you didn't read it. why comment on something you didn't read? at least this guy's making an effort to understand. go sterilize yourself.

[calvera_x]

too long/didn't read

that's an asshole thing to say. if you didn't read it, you didn't read it. why comment on something you didn't read? at least this guy's making an effort to understand. go sterilize yourself.

go huff raid

[EMG]

too long/didn't read

that's an asshole thing to say. if you didn't read it, you didn't read it. why comment on something you didn't read? at least this guy's making an effort to understand. go sterilize yourself.

go huff raid

Ok, thats the end of that. I don't want to see a flame war here.

[OMGWTFBBQ]

too long/didn't read

Dude, you're sooooooo from totse!

SCREEEEEEAAAAAAWWWW!!!!

[patrickolee]

I thought it was a very interesting and honest analysis. I don't have a diaper fetish myself, but it is interesting to analyse the reasons for various fetishes. Glad I took the time to read it.

[Patch_Winter]

I'm the same as you when it comes to trying to figure out my deviance/deviancies (micro-macro/paws/death), but I'm not sure that figuring out the root necessarily nullifies the desire.

One of the reasons I'm on this site is because the attainability of being a furry and interacting as one is somewhat hard to come by as of reality. As a kid I was exposed to a crap ton™ of furry material in cartoon shows, books, commercials, etc. And the same with macro stuff, but when I think about it, it's still something that I want to be real, something that I want to happen, and I'm not sure what could change that for me.

It's non-dom all the way for me.

Is it the fact that you just don't want to feel childish anymore that your diaper kick lost it's momentum?

[willingsub]

Warning: long post

@Undisclosed: This is an interesting analysis, but I think it's a little too black and white. Your conclusion is that the wish for submission is based on the - in your words - 'flawed assumption' that responsibility is a bad thing. Of course I cannot judge if that is or is not the root cause of your (former?) wish to submit, but I do have some remarks regarding the general applicability of this conclusion to all submission. As I have very little understanding of your diaper fetish other than the fact that for you wearing a diaper is a form of submission, so I will concentrate on bdsm in a very broad sense of the term.

The majority of submissives submit only in certain situations, at certain times, or in certain aspects of their lives. True total power exchange 24/7 relationships are the most rare in the total spectrum of bdsm. 'Vanilla' couples who occasionally 'play' with power exchange (even if just blindfolding or tying the other to the bedposts) are the vast majority. Even considering the people who would like to submit more deeply but are suppressing that urge, I think it would be safe to say that the vast majority of 'submissives' only like to give up responsibility under defined circumstances and only on their own terms. (this is a decision they have to take full responsibility for every time!) Those people don't necesarily see responsibility as a bad thing, just as something that feels good to give up some of the time. It is the same way someone who takes a day off doesn't necesarily hate their job, and someone who kicks back and relaxes for a day doesn't necesarily equate exercise with suffering.

For some - as apparently for you - submission may be an temporary 'escape' from the responsibility they always consider to be a 'bad thing'. And for others - as for me - that may not be the case. I personally love my freedom and consciously seek out challenges and responsibility because that is the way I like to live. I react very badly to infringements on my personal freedom and independence. And sometimes I like to be helplessly tied and beaten, or to be a 'slave' for a week, taking orders and asking my spouse permission for certain things, for example permission to use the bathroom.

And sometimes I like to warm his ass, watching him writhe, becoming more and more submissive under every stroke, loving to see that magical moment when he enters subspace. To take another person there is a huge responsibility and I, though for selfish reasons I like submitting better than dominating, love taking that responsibility and giving him the opportunity to experience that. That is the second remark I have about your analysis: it doesn't explain why anybody would be a switch in stead of either a dominant or a submissive.

My last remark is about your statement that seeing responsibility as a bad thing is an assumption, and a flawed one at that. For an opinion to be an assumption (flawed or otherwise) one has to have that opinion without real knowledge of what they are talking about. I can only assume I hate Brussels sprouts if I've never eaten any. If I have eaten them I don't assume I hate them, I just hate them period. For you the opinion that you disliked responsibility was indeed an assumption. You obviously hadn't closely inspected the way you felt before. On closer inspection and analysis of your feelings, you discovered the assumption, which indeed turned out to be flawed; hence your vanished desire to submit. But you overlook the possibility that for some the dislike of responsibility may not be an assumption at all, let alone a flawed one. Maybe some, especially submissives in 24/7 relationships, don't assume they don't like responsibility, but really just don't like responsibility. Some may have closely inspected and analysed their feelings and come to the conclusion they really find responsibility unpleasant and submission pleasant. There is nothing 'flawed' or even irrational about that, no more than not eating Brussels sprouts after you discover you don't like them is irrational.

I think this is all part of the natural variety in the human race: some like Brussels sprouts, some don't. Some like having responsibility, some don't, so they seek out a fulltime Master. The latter is viewed by some as some sort of 'sexual disorder', but when you think about it, this dislike of responsibility is also widespread outside of the 'kinky' realm. Some people vote after carefull consideration, some don't vote at all or out of habit. Some have ambition and strive for a responsible job or have their own company, some like to push pencils from nine to five and never take their work home. Some like relationships based on equality, some like relationships based on consensual inequality, and some have other shades of grey.

All in all I think your analysis is very interesting, it certainly offers some insight, and I think the responsibility issue does play a pivotal part in many kinds of submission, if not all. But I also think that you're leaping to conclusions at some points based on your own experience. The responsibility issue may play very different parts in different kinds of submission: it may not always be based on the thought that responsibility is always bad, and even if it is based on that thought, that may not always be a 'flawed assumption' or even an assumption at all.

[Undisclosed]

Well, I don't see how the taste of Brussel sprouts and responsibility are really comparable, although I see the point you're trying to make. However, unlike flavours and tastes, which change anyways over time, responsibility is a much more basic human function, like the beating of your heart. Sure some people may not "like" it, but it doesn't make that dislike rational. There are people who dislike living (suicidals), and they certainly arn't rational. The key problem in your comparison is that taste in an inherintly emotional thing, whereas responsibility is a logical function. Therefore, treating responsibility with emotional subjectiveness is logically incorrect, meaning that there is an absolute truth here. Namely, responsibility is a tool, neither good or bad, as I stated previously.

Now the crux of my argument is the idea that responsibility is logical, and to solidify that point we can look at it's definition. It is the state of commitment and accountability to a chosen course of action. Another way to put it, it's the state of being true to one's self, the world and their interactions. If you do not believe such a state to be "logical", "true" or "correct", then I can't convince you. On the other hand, if you do appreciate such truth, then the truth about responisibility becomes instantly apparent.

Of course, I understand there are some that simply don't care for the possibility of universal truths: the fundamentalist moral relativists. It's extremely difficult to change the mind of one so convinced, just as it is for all extremists, and I won't bother. However, people are generally a shade of grey, only over-indulging in personal "truth" for its often illusionary and temporary benefits, not on principal. I've met such people myself, and some I've changed from the path of self-deceit. For those absolutely convinced though, my essay and arguements are largely meaningless.

Ironically, the principal of moral relativism is in itself an absolute truth, making the whole idea is self-contradictory. This is very strong evidence that the idea is inherintly wrong. Irony is the measure of absurdity.

It's not that I see all things in black and white, it's that I realise some things, logical things, simply are black and white. I'm not saying that submission is bad, I'm saying it should be done for the right reasons. Although responsibility issues are surely not the only reason for submission as you say, there are still some people that simply can't or dislike handling large amounts of it. They may use submission as a release for their stess and frustration, but they should realise that the root issue in within their own character. Maybe they'll try to improve it, maybe they'll just release their stress through more submission. Either way, for these people, they should never blame responsibility itself, but simply realise that that the question is with themselves and how they deal with it.

Also, while this difference in perspective may seem subtle, it's very important. If you blame an external entity, then you close the door to self-improvement and change. This way the door is open, should you ever want to venture through someday.

All in all, I too would enjoy submission and infantile/diaper play with my partner (should I get one, lol), but only if it was on equal terms. I'd do it as an expression of our trust, commitment and mutual responsibility, nothing else. There is a real beauty, a real truth, in that kind of relationship, I think.

[willingsub]

First-off, I'd like to say that I'm neither a fundamentalist of any kind nor a moral relativist. Truth matters, very much so. Truth is not about tastes. But that doesn't mean the assumptions you implicitely base your analysis of the concept responsibilitty on are correct.

Human rationality means acting in a way that best promotes your goals. In other words, if your goal is to become rich, the rational course of action is to act in a way that ensures the growth of your wealth, working, investing, not overspending, entrepeneuring etc. If your goal is to find inner peace, it may well be that the same course of action is highly irrational.

This definition of rationality is clearly different than yours (but certainly not an unusual definition). According to this definition, if your goal is not to live, taking your life is rational. Of course that doesn't mean suicide is automatically good, that is a moral judgement, not a logical one. Throughout your post I think your concepts of rationality, morals and logic are rather muddled. Rationality has to do with logical truths. Yet you qualify my disagreement with you as moral relativism. While logical truths and moral truths are both very important (and yes, I do think there are universal truths to be found in both), mistaking the one for the other leads to flawed reasoning.

Back to responsibility. You call it 'a basic function, like the beating of your heart'. In a way this is true: everyone (even the most submissive 24/7 slaves) needs to take a certain amount of responsibility for their own life, otherwise you would simply not act at all and die. But responsibility is not an absolute in the sense that transferring responsibility to someone else is illogical or irrational. When you look at history, civilizations in which transfer of responsibility is a factor, are more successfull than civilizations without any transfer of responsibility. To name a very basic example: do you take responsibility of actually producing your own food? This is a very important responsibility, one that makes the difference whether you live or die, yet you probably, as most people, transfer the responsibility to make sure there is actually enough food for you to survive to farmers, to factories, to distributers, to stores, to the farming and food procuction policies of you government etc. Of course, you take the responsibility of making enough money to buy food, but as you know, you can't eat money. For the system to work, there has to be someone to take over your responsibility to produce food. Does that transfer of responsibility make you irrational? Of course not! All these transfers of responsibility allows members of a society to specialize, and speciallization brings great benefits to the members of society. If everybody had to take responsibility for producing their own food, you wouldn't be sitting in comfort behind a computer screen right now, you would be hunting rabbits or toiling on a tiny piece of land, struggling to survive.

To bring the topic down again from society to relationships, there are all kinds of circumstances where transfer of responsibilities is perfectly rational. Only a few feminists would call the soccer mom who transfers the responsibility of earning a living to her husband irrational. And neither is the husband who gives up responsibility for financial decicions to his wife because 'she has a better head for it' irrational. It would be irrational to demand to take responsibility for something you know your spouse is better at! In these personal relationships, you can begin to see the aspect of 'taste' in the decisions to take on or transfer responsibilities. The soccer mom transfers the responsibility to earn a living to her husband because she prefers to stay at home and be a fulltime mother. And the working mom (assuming she is not forced to work to ensure survival) may transfer the responsibility of wiping snotty noses to day care because she prefers to develop herself in a work situation as well as raising her kids. The one is not necessarily less rational than the other. Nor does either woman has to have the exact same amount of responsibilities (even if such a calculus were possible) as her spouse to be rational. Relationships are not about keeping score, and relationships are very rarely, if ever, completely symmetrical. Living in a situation where you are primarily being taken care of, while not my thing, doesn't have to be irrational. Such an attitude would only be irrational if you don't make sure you actually are being taken care of.

So what about submission? I think it's part of the same spectrum I described above. Submission always means a certain transfer of responsibility. It may be a transfer on another level than the above examples. A 24/7 slave in a total power exchange relationship transfers more responsibility than a housewife. Or it can be a transfer in a different aspect of life, not necessarily a transfer of more responsibility. For example, while I love to occasionally submit to my husband, I daresay I take much more responsibility for my own life than my mother, strictly vanilla, stayed home after having me, never made a big decision since, has done in a very long time. So where is the line? When is transfer of responsibility rational or irrational? The irrationality (if there is any) cannot be in the brute fact that someone transfers responsibility. We all do that to a certain extent, and it may very well be rational. I think the potential irrationallity is not in the transfer of responsibility itself, but in the way i which you make that transfer. Transferring responsibility to someone incapable of handling that responsibility, or someone inclined to abuse instead of use that responsibility is indeed irrational. Allowing yourself to be tied and beaten by someone you don't trust is irrational. Enslaving yourself to a master who doasn't take care of you is irrational. Just like in the vanilla world staying with an abusive spouse or leaving financial decisions to your economically challenged partner is irrational.

I think, apart from your muddled concepts of rationality, morals and logic, your biggest assumption is to be found here:

It is the state of commitment and accountability to a chosen course of action.

You assume that someone who submits, doesn't accept that commitment and accountibility. I think you are wrong. Submitting is in itself a course of action, one that submissives are often deeply committed to and very much accountable for. In a way, submissives are more committed to and accountable for their course of action than for example the people who don't vote because they can't be bothered with it. Submission is not something the submissive passively allows to happen to him/her, a submissive makes a decision to submit and is very much committed to and accountable for for the consequences of deciding to submit, and for 24/7 submissives the consequences of deciding to keep submitting.

Also a submissive doesn't have to be 'blaming' anything on an external entity. There simply are differences in the amount and kind of responsibility different people can function best with. This is very clear in professional life. There are huge differences in the amount and kind of responsibility different people have in working life. Yet nobody would tell the employee who functions well in a job with little responsibility that he is just 'releasing stress' by having this job or that he should stop 'blaming' responsibility and 'realise the question is with himself and how he deals with it'. We just acknowledge that there are some people better suited to lead a work force, and some better suited to take orders. And while some of the latter may grow to a more responsible position if they choose so, there is nothing irrational about preferring a comfortable low-profile job. I think this is parallel to personal relationships, whether vanilla or kinky.

[Undisclosed]

First of all, your definition of rationality is essentially acting in rational self-interest, and this is a very common definiton. However, this is something different then pure rationality. The prisioner's dilemma exemplifies this perfectly. Two people are givin a choice to rat on the other or keep silent. If they both stay silent they get 6 months, if they both rat on each other they get 2 years, and if one rats and the other doesn't then one goes free and the other gets 10 years. Acting in rational self-interest requires one to rat every single time, which garuntees you will both get 2 years. However, the ideal solution is by far for both of you to keep silent, which gets you only 6 months. Rational self-interest doesn't allow for that sitation. Instead, truely rational individuals will act in consideration of the entire social group as well, yeilding the 6 month term.

Therefore, the question becomes, is suicide, fetishes or submission a net benefit to the individual and society at large? Suicide robs both you and society of opportunity and value, so it clearly is not. Fetishes are more mixed. On the short term it benefits the individual with pleasure and society is indifferent, but on the long term it can, depending on the nature of the fetish, cause personal harm and spread disease. Look at auto-erotic asphyxiation and group sex respectively. Finally, submission is again mixed depending on the nature of the situation. Wanton submission can easily lead to placing control of one's self in the hands of an unscrupulous agent, to the detriment of yourself and possibly others. On the other hand, exercising it within a quality and trustworthy environment is not nearly so risky, as you illustrate.

I began to touch upon this aspect at the end of my last post, and I believe submission can be good if it is done responsibily. As you said, there is nothing wrong with it in the correct environment. However, determining that environment is the responsibility of the submitter, and during the whole process they are still responsible to continually verify this. If they do not, then they may soon find themselves in a potentially dangerous situation, to the detriment of themselves and society at large. Healthy submission is responsible submission.

Of course, there appears to be a significant contradiction in terms here. First of all, submission is defined as the giving up of responsibility, but to do so rationally and safely, one cannot give up full responsibility. Thus, you are no less responsible for your actions then if you were to not submit at all. After all, you must still ensure that the one giving the commands is doing so responsibly. In practical terms, this is no different then if you were to act independantly and responsibly yourself. You're just adding a additional layer of indirection. This seems to be a great irony!

Now I say seems, because I don't believe it's really a contradiction at all. I think what's going on here is really a transformation of responsibility. The same applies in your examples with farmers, since the citizen is still responsibile to ensure the farmer is producing food safe to eat. The individual is no less responsible. It's just that instead of being reponsible to farm well, they are responsible to ensure that another person farms well. The case of submission is a close analogue. Here, the submitter is responsible to ensure that the dominant gives responsible commands. In fact, one could argue that there is a net gain in responsibility! In any case, what we see is not a giving up of responsibily, but a transformation of it into a more practical and desirable form.

This sort of thing is not what I am arguing against. This is perfectly acceptable and often necessary, as you stated. What I am declaring irrational is the submission to another with wanton disregard for personal safety and society at large. This is the kind of submission where the submitter truely does give up all responsibility. For example, I know there are people on this board that get jollies from public humiliation. However, it doesn't help the person in any practical terms to say, wet themselves in public, and most people don't care to witness it either. There is no real benefit to them or society, other then a temporary injection of pleasure chemicals into the individual's brain. I call this irrational submission, even though it does acts in self-interest, but the prisioner's dilemma shows us that this is not real rationality. This kind of behaviour is what I argue against, and I believe its primarily rooted in a fundamental dislike of responsibility. My reasons for this are illustrated in my previous posts, should you desire to review them.

On a final note, I can understand your point about it seeming that I mix rationality, ethics and morality together. However, we have seen that any truely rational process necessairly involves more then just the individual. To be truely rational one must consider all inputs, and there are very few situations where one can be omnipotent of all the factors in play. Thus, most of the time one must consider the changing probabilistic forces of external society. This renders one's rational conclusions necessairly probablistic and subjective.

One of our human behaviours is to categorise things, and so we do the same with these sorts of results. We group them into what we call rational, ethical and moral results, which are only seperated by the probablitily of them being true. That is, "rational" things are those that are almost certainly true, "ethical" things are those that are probably true and everything else we call "morals". Likewise, we have "irrationality", "inethicality" and "immorality" for the varying degrees of things that we believe to be false. This is necessary for us to make some sense out of the world, even though one can never be 100% sure of anything. We just set some minimum standard of probablity, after which we are "sure" of the result and leave it at that. Most people are not really aware of this, but it occurs nevertheless.

Thus, I admit there is a possibility that wanton submission may in fact be of net benefit and fully rational, even only in certain limited circumstances. However, I think we can be assured that this is extremely unlikely for the reasons I've described, and place it in the category of irrational behaviour.

How does this relate to my original post? Basically, what I was feeling then was an irrational drive. One that didn't consider responsible action or the proper environment. As I stated, I would have no problem doing AB/DL play with the right person in a safe place. This original feeling did not consider that, so it was unacceptable and I removed it. Don't get me wrong though, I still eye the diaper section in the grocery store, but the fundamental nature of the feeling is entirely different. It now exists only in responsible and rational terms. If it costs too much or my situation isn't compatible, I'm not bothered at all. I no longer want them in and of themselves. I guess you could say, the desire has lost its corruption leaving only it's innocence, and isn't that what AB/DL is all about? :lol: