Club Foyer>Chillout Room>Depositions

One Man’s Story of his Attraction to Ladies’ Rubber Garments and Mackintoshes

by pm

Part One

It is a sad fact that the era of the abundance of ladies’ garments and mackintoshes made in all kinds of rubber and rubberized textiles, in a multi-hued spectrum of primary and pastel shades, is apparently over. I say apparently, because one never knows if there might be a renaissance in the manufacture of these delightful designs.

[Again, I wish to make a distinction between Latex rubber, and that other kind of rubber material, variously called Continental rubber, Pure rubber, Gum rubber (U.S.); and named — as proprietary brands — as Sheersilk rubber (Weather Vain), and Starsheen rubber (Kastley). Weather Vain also has available a limited range of garments made in “Malaysian” rubber, obviously made in Malaysia!

The difference between latex and this other kind of rubber may be summed up thus: latex has an unpolished “sticky” inner surface, and for a lot of people who like to put on rubber garments, who find that that “sticky” aspect can painfully pull on the skin, it needs talcum powder to make wearing them more comfortable. (I like to use Johnson’s Baby Powder!)

The other kind of rubber I call “dry”, “non-sticky”. A lady friend — who used to work at Kastley — called it “papery”. Weather Vain still markets a material called Sheersilk, and it has that “dry” quality, but is different from the original Sheersilk material. Weather Vain’s Malaysian rubber garments, while being made in exactly the same material as those earlier designs, are limited to a very few colours and designs.

Kastley no longer makes any garments in their Starsheen range; only in latex.]

One has - I think - to take into account that during an earlier era, say from the 1920s through to – at the latest - the mid-1970s, the greater majority of those ladies who purchased panties, pants, sanitary panties, bloomers, directoire knickers, girdles, corsets, corselettes, bras, nursing bras, aprons, skirts, blouses, shower caps, bathing caps, gloves, sheets, shower curtains, etc., and, of course, Mackintoshes, all of which made in several different kinds of rubber and rubberized textiles, bought them all for reasons only to do with waterproofing, personal hygiene, or for domestic care, not thinking for one moment that there may be another – perhaps more unusual - purpose for these particular garments.

In most instances – the vast majority of instances - I believe that the millions of mothers and nurses who provided rubber sheets, pants — and who wore those thickly rustling white rubber aprons — for all the babies born during this period, had no idea that they would be colluding – largely unwittingly, I think – in the formation of several generations of devotees of ladies’ rubber garments.

I can attest to this, in actually being one of those babies, whose first memory, in fact, consists of waking from a dream in which a sound, a smell, and a feeling penetrates so deeply into the consciousness of that baby boy, in that it wakes him up so completely, that it establishes itself as the first memory of his life.

That is the beginning of my story.

That baby boy awoke from that inchoate dream, which was so filled with deeply pleasurable sensation, to discover that he had removed the cotton sheet upon which he was lying in his cot, to expose the pale red rubber 'Mackintosh Sheet', which covered the mattress. The pungently sweet scent of that rubber sheet, inextricably blended with that of baby lotion and baby powder; the almost infinitely soft rippling sensation on his exposed skin, and the sound it made as he moved against it, almost overwhelmingly made up his universe for those first moments.

These intoxicating sensations went to very quick of his soul, his very being.

It is hard for me to use the first person, because that was a two-year-old baby, and I am a 63-year-old man, and so it seems more realistic and appropriate to describe these events in this manner, i.e., in the third person. But that baby boy was me, and his story, without any break or discontinuity, is mine.

So, four sensual elements made up the deep-imprinting on rubber for that tot, and one can place them in any order, as they are all of equal importance, and they are: sound, smell (or scent), feel, and look.

During the mid-70s, I discovered a magazine called Pussycat, with which you may be familiar, and which contained articles and letters relating to readers’ experiences with rubber, and photos, too. I was disconcerted to read an article by the editor, in which he stated (I paraphrase) that anyone who claims that they became attracted to rubberwear because of an early childhood experience were lying. He dismissed any such claims as “pure poppycock”, and insisted that people became “rubber-lovers” at much later stages in life, and “chose” to do so.

pm

© 2009