Fetish guide: Latex Masks and Taboo

Female Latex Mask Fetish

The Latex Mask fetish combines the latex fetish with an erotic fascination for transformation into a female mannequin, doll, or cartoon/comic character. As far as I know, the latex mask fetish is almost exclusively a male phenomenon and is almost always combined with cross-dressing.

From the wearer’s point of view, the mask provides an opportunity to be completely surrounded by the powerful smells and tactile qualities of latex. They can heighten sensitivity and fear/excitement in the way leather and rubber sensory-deprivation hoods used in BDSM scenarios do. And because many of the maskers combine the mask with tight-fitting corsets and layered clothing, there can also be an element of containment or bondage. In these respects, the female mask types share much in common with the fursuiters of furry fandom. Secrecy, mystery and revelation become the operating dramas in the erotic fantasy.

In a sense, the female mask represents a desire to transform into the ultimate sex object: perfect, blemish-free, stylized, mute, pretty — and female. In general, having sexual intimacy with another person is not as exciting to these folks as the process of self-transformation. Some report having a feeling of empowerment and control over their surroundings because no one knows who they are.

Taboo

You could easily argue that most sexual fantasies derive at least some of their ooomph from messing around with taboos. In a puritanical culture like our own, practically anything sexual is laden down with social rules and regulations about who can do what, with whom, where and when. One function of sexual fantasy is to liberate ourselves from those rules in a safe way.

Rule-making and rule-breaking is the primary drama at the heart of messy fun and its related fetish complex, including adult babies and the clown fetish. For messy fetishists, it’s about liberating themselves momentarily from the constraints of ordinary life by literally “messing up” authority figures and breaking rules of tidy, stay-between-the-lines adult life.

Messy Fun

Messy fetishists get off on anything from baked beans poured over them to brides falling in swimming pools. It’s about messing up the structures of everyday life and throwing a pie in the face of society’s rules and regulations. For true messy fetishists, taking a slapstick approach to breaking taboos about propriety is an intensely ecstatic experience.

Bill Shipton, publisher of Splosh! Magazine (the UK’s premiere messy fun mag) divides the messy crowd into three main subgroups: wetlook (water) mudlarking (mud and clay) and sploshing (food and paint, etc.). As a general rule, messy fans require that mess be thrown on people wearing clothes, and some folks have a particular clothing they want to see doused. Most messy fetishists have a messy substance they prefer. Within the mud crowd is the quicksand scene — these are people who like to fantasize about people sinking in quicksand. Within the food crowd are the custard pie fans — people who like to see pies thrown in people’s face, slapstick-style.

Splosh! is all about humor, the lowest-common-denominator type of awful puns, predictable pratfalls and infantile splatter. While to outsiders it might look like messy types get off on humiliating women, it’s more about knocking the stuffing out of stuck-up unapproachable people. Military uniforms, starched maids and prim teachers are popular sploshing victims. And the photo sets just don’t work for sploshers unless it looks like the women are having fun in the end. The explosive release of laughter, the little ego-death of light-hearted humiliation, is ultimately orgasmic.

It’s all about regressing back to a time before childhood rules like “You mustn’t mess your clothes” “You mustn’t play with your food” or “You must keep all fluids under control!” It’s about returning to infancy, when we could be fully sensual. playful beings without fear of social recrimination. It’s not about exhibitionism so much as breaking a fundamental psychological taboo.