The Balloon Fetish: A Pop Kink

"When I first discovered the balloon fetish on the Internet I felt like a virtual Indiana Jones hacking through the website jungle seeking information-age buried treasure on a mission to unearth new niche kinks from the sexual underground. When I followed a link to “Balloon Buddies, Ltd. Bringing Balloon Lovers Together Since 1976,” I knew I had stumbled upon the mythic “lost tribe” of undiscovered fetishists. Here was a classic fetish that as far as I knew no researcher had ever documented. The current medical literature on paraphilias makes no mention of it, and Brenda Love’s otherwise exhaustive Encyclopedia of Unusual Sexual Practices misses it entirely.
For a moment I suspected that I was the
victim of an elaborate hoax. The world-weird-web is filled with pranksters who try to out-freak everyone else with their newly invented perversion. What could a balloon possibly have in common with a woman’s high-heeled shoe that would make it fetish-fodder? Balloons seem too cute and too prosaic, not glamorous or mythic enough to be the focus of erotic ritual. Balloon Buddies doesn’t even look like a fetish site; it seems more like a
digital version of a child’s birthday party. On the opening page, a bouquet of animated balloons bounces around on a series of happy Crayola™ colored backgrounds like Grass Green, Sunrise Yellow and Firetruck Red. It’s like some neat online game from Nickelodeon — when you roll the cursor over the balloons, they pop. The whole thing is happy and friendly and lacking the usual slick gothic quality of most fetish material. You’d probably never know this whole thing was sexual at all, if it weren’t for the fact that you can’t get any deeper into the site without passing an age statement warning. When I did, I struck the mother lode of kink.
I had made “first contact” with an entire community of people who proudly call themselves “balloonatics” or “looners.” These are the thousands of men and women, both straight and gay, who have a lifelong sexual passion for collecting, fondling, inflating and popping balloons. Although a few folks log on with tales of boinking vinyl pool toys or bouncing on special buttplug-fitted Hoppity Hops™ (those big rubber balls we used to ride as kids), the vast majority of looners just want to play with regular old birthday-party-type latex balloons. Most never wish to stray from the ideal balloon they remember from their childhood, and they can get quite snobbish about the aesthetic failures of those Mylar and vinyl things that have started showing up in party stores. Looners like to rub up against balloons, jerk off while inflating them, or fuck them in various rather ingenious ways. They love to share balloon porno, downloading JPEGs of models sitting on, blowing up or popping balloons with various implements like high heels or cigarettes. (One of the most heavily traded video clips shows a hot “oral inflation” scene from the saccharine TV show “Touched by an Angel.”) Most of the pictures aren’t remotely naughty — no naked tits, no “pink” shots, and no suggestion of intimate acts — yet the subjects still have the black strip over their eyes that implies forbidden thrills.
This rich archive of online material consists of far more material for getting your rocks off, balloon-style — it’s also a gathering place for some fairly serious conversations. Looners share childhood stories about how they discovered their fetish, and speculate about why they developed the way they did. Older looners offer sage advice on how to come out to friends and lovers, and how to bring balloon sex into relationships with non-looner partners. Looners agonize among themselves about balloon play with someone other than their spouse — even if there’s no sexual contact. “That’s what I consider sex, so is it infidelity?” They argue at length about the ethics of tricking unsuspecting strangers into inflating or popping balloons. Is this sexual harassment or not? The most emotionally heated arguments of all, however, happen over the issue of popping. Some looners feel extremely protective of their beloved fetish, and would be devastated if it were destroyed. Others just don’t see the point of balloons unless they pop. As one looner said to me, “If it doesn’t pop, I don’t pop!”
People like to say that there are no new kinks under the sun, but the balloon fetish proves them wrong. Every era seems to have a fetish that is uniquely its own, and there’s something so post-modern/pop culture/McDonalds ™/VH1 about balloons that the idea of eroticizing them feels particularly contemporary.
It makes sense that the balloon fetish is such a new thing; after all, rubber latex toy
balloons were not even invented until the 1920s, and have only been a routine part of the American suburban home since the 1950s. And although there exist looners as old as 70 years of age, most balloon fetishists are in their twenties and thirties. It’s really a baby-boomer and Gen-X
phenomenon.
Balloon Buddies was the very first looner
organization, founded in 1976 as a snail-mail correspondence list by a man named Buster Bill. (Buster is not his real name. There are — what a surprise — plenty of “Busters” in the balloon scene. Other punny pseudonyms include Kaboom, Puffin, and O.
Max — as in the maximum inflation of a round object.) Buster gathered together the first 100 Buddies by taking out ads in straight and gay male fetish magazines. Membership swelled slowly over the years, but the
balloon fetish really exploded when Buster put it all online in 1993. In the past five years alone, Balloon Buddies has expanded to over 2,000 members, including a handful of women. A separate gay male list called The Buddymen started up in 1995; it now has over 1,000 members. In the summer of 1999, the female balloon fetishists founded their own group. Balloonatics now have a choice of at least 100 websites, chatrooms, IRCs and newsgroups, including 25 pay sites selling videos and hot live one-on-one balloon action geared to the particular
interests of a looner audience.
The online balloon fetish community continues to expand at an extraordinary rate. Every day Buster Bill gets the requisite “I thought I was the only one!” message from another happy looner who has found their way home. And there are probably tens of thousands of balloonatics worldwide who are still wandering in the desert. For each of the 3,000+ online looners, there must be many more that are not yet hooked up to the Internet. Buster Bill’s list attracts only
people who speak English, but anywhere in the world where children play with balloons there are certain to be a few looners. His list bans people under 18 from participating, but it is quite likely that there are plenty of lonely adolescent balloonatics out there as well. (Ironically, the adolescents probably need to know they’re not alone even more than adults do). And for every looner who has the temerity to seek out his fellows, there must be dozens who are too ashamed or horrified by their desires to make first
contact.
One of the first things looners discover when they join the Buddies is that they are part of an extraordinarily diverse group of people. Looners are as complex and varied a crowd as any random bunch of heterosexuals or
homosexuals. I may have expected them to share some sort of personality traits or interests outside of balloons, but they don’t. I met a sheep farmer, a professional architect, a corporate lawyer, several artists, a talk-show host and a college professor. There are looners in Australia, Germany, Japan, the United States and Britain. There are African-American looners as well as European-American ones. I know of at least one deaf looner, and at least one who is wheelchair-bound. I also met many looners, both straight and gay, who are in long-term relationships with non-looners. And,
although male members currently outnumber females about 30 to 1, Buster Bill finds that the Internet has made women far more comfortable about opening up and talking about their desires. “I hear from at least three to four women a month now, as
opposed to three or four a year in the past.”
So what is it about balloons that makes them such a perfect fetish object for so many
people? Part of the answer lies in the very material they are made of — latex.
What latex has, and materials like Mylar or vinyl do not, are the critical “smelly” and “touchy-feely” qualities required for the full-on fetish jolt. Most classic fetishes — the most popular being shoes or feet, leather and underwear — have a distinctive odor or tactile quality that evokes strong emotional and psychological responses. They tend to recall body odors and the tactile experiences of affection and hugging that we had as infants.
Looners find the smell of balloons to be one of their most powerful sexual triggers. Jeff, a 46-year-old gay male looner, mailed me an extraordinary 3,000-word essay on the sensual joys of balloons. He devoted five hundred words alone to the various odors and flavors of latex. A true balloon gourmet who enjoys combing through his collection of thousands of different balloons, Jeff
effused about the wide world of excitement available to the true latex connoisseur: “Different manufacturers and tempering methods make every rubber unique. Some are oily and sweet, others bitter, sharp, or musty. Balloons are usually treated on the inside with a drying, mildly antiseptic talc. Though never ‘perfumed,’ each talc has its own savor.”
Smell, more than any other sense, has the capacity to trigger memories.
Every looner I spoke with mentions some treasured early balloon memory that they
return to over and over, and the smell of the balloon brings it back into sharp focus. Doug is a 20-year-old looner who remembers balloons as beloved friends: “For me, balloons have always been an erotic ‘plaything.’ From my first memories as a child, I remember loving balloons. Not necessarily sexually, but loving them truly from my heart.”
Looners seem to cultivate these memories as a kind of “origin myth” of their own
erotic and symbolic connection to balloons, and sharing them is an important part of bonding with other looners. Balloonatics overwhelmingly dismiss the idea that these early experiences are the cause of their balloon fetishism, however. They recognize how illogical that idea is. After all, almost all of us (non-looners and looners alike) had a balloon when we were children. We probably all experienced the unusually evocative smell and texture of balloons, and I’d even go so far as to say that almost all of us had some emotional or psychological connection to them. I suppose some of us even masturbated with balloons. Yet even using a balloon as a first masturbation toy doesn’t make sense as a stand-alone cause for loonerism. (After all, I remember jerking off with the leg of my teddy bear during my formative years — but I never turned into a teddy bear foot fetishist.) Childhood events may not be complete explanations for later practices, but they are powerful psychic memories that can be accessed to bring emotional life to a particular adult experience.
Balloons are successful fetish objects not only because of their rubber latex material, but also because their shape has the
capacity to call up powerful images. The fetish object is, before anything else, an
aesthetic object. Like an abstract painting, it works only if it is able to hold many meanings at once and mean different things at
different times. Objects don’t work as fetishes when they limit themselves to only one single interpretation; the best fetishes are opaque and flexible, much like balloons themselves. And, depending on how looners use them in masturbation sessions or with lovers, balloons can be nurturing like breasts, empowering or threatening like
engorged penises, or even receptive and containing like anuses, vaginas, or wombs. A balloon can be a whole body as well — a fragile reminder of our mortal selves.
The one human body part that balloons most obviously suggest, with their pear shape and nozzle, is the female breast. Doug, who slept with balloons as a child, now uses them as breasts in his regular masturbatory routine. The balloons are part of a subtle cross-dressing ritual, as well as a way of creating a female sexual partner he does not have.
Doug has an almost anthropomorphic identification with balloons. The balloon is a lover or a friend. Some guys literally fuck balloons. One young straight looner likes to wrap long thin clown-type balloons around his cock and use the hole like a pussy. Jeff has seen gay men press their cocks between the inflated ears of a Mickey-Mouse-type balloon and “fuck” it. Walt Disney must be spinning in his grave. Buster Steve, a 38-year-old married gay architect, uses the nozzle as an orifice. In Steve’s case, the entire inflated balloon becomes like a big translucent body, and the nozzle is a tight vagina, mouth, or asshole.
You’re probably aware of the Freudian concept of castration anxiety — that all fetish objects are “stand-ins” for the beleaguered infant phallus. The idea is that the fetish is some sort of magical talisman protecting them against the loss of their precious penis. (The corollary to this idea was Freud’s rather unscientific insistence that women could not possibly have fetishes, since they don’t have penises!) Of course, Freud’s phallocentrism has itself been neatly dissected in recent years. Women DO have fetishes. So, some fetishes must relate to experiences shared by both girls and boys. In their 1994 book Female Fetishism, Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen propose that in an earlier stage of development, infants focus their emotional needs on their mother’s breast. During weaning, the child could experience some of the same fear of loss associated with castration anxiety. Gamman and Makinen suggest that some fetishes could function as “transitional objects” between breast-feeding and independence — sort of like a stinky old security blanket that will never abandon the child. I would also add that the breast shares with most fetishes a “smelly” and “touchy-feely” quality — and as far as I know castration anxiety lacks that sensual component.
Balloons are extraordinarily powerful metaphors for looners, and games and
rituals involving the balloons have the status of profound narratives. It is a balloon’s ability to embody the delicate transformation
between power and fragility, between control and annihilation that makes it such a compelling object. The balloon works as a fetish not only because it suggests all sorts of body odors and parts, but also because it can perform the allegorical drama of growth, tension and explosion. The process of inflation, the spectacle of balloon tumescence, can mimic the looner’s own sexual tension and arousal.
Children enjoy blowing up balloons because they magically illustrate the idea of growth — and kids just love seeing things get bigger and bigger and bigger. Small children are
almost obsessed with size differences in a world where everyone but themselves seems gigantic; kids often feel small and impotent compared to adults. Growth is inherently
exciting because it implies the mysteries of power and fecundity. This might also explain why most looners feel that, in terms of
balloon size, bigger is always better. Playing with larger balloons makes adult looners feel proportionally smaller — it reminds them of how balloons looked so huge and awesome when they were children.
Those who aren’t getting quite enough hot balloon action from their partners occasionally try to get strangers to act out their popping fantasies. Kaboom has thought up some ingenious methods for getting unsuspecting women to “put out,” balloon-wise: “I once managed to arrange a party for a very attractive co-worker, in the form of a quiz. I set it up so that in order to determine the next question or challenge in the quiz, she had to sit on a large helium balloon with a number inside and pop it. Of the sixteen balloons I prepared, she sat on and popped twelve. The remaining four, I’m happy to say, were sat on and popped by three other very attractive ladies who wanted to share in the fun. Heaven!”
Stories like Kaboom’s provoke all sorts of lively ethical debates online. Some looners agonize deeply over whether balloon play with someone other than your wife is infidelity — even if there’s no sexual contact in the “normal” sense of the word. Carrie
explains that for looners, playing with balloons is a sex act. “It’s a very difficult question for a lot of Buddies: ‘What is acceptable if your mate is not approving or
sympathetic?’”
It’s nice to see that looners are so conscientious, because this runs counter to some folks’ assumptions that fetishists don’t care about ethics — but the argument seems a bit overwrought. I think the looners doth protest too much, and that somewhere inside the anxiety is a relatively underdeveloped sense of sexual pride.
As an adolescent, Dan was horrified by his
desires, and lived on an emotional roller coaster of guilt and compulsion. He was convinced that he was all alone, a “sick little pervert.”
Dan’s discovery of the balloon community changed his whole view of his fetish. Knowing that he was not alone completely changed Dan’s looner practice as well; he felt less compulsive and more in control of his desires. He began to masturbate less with balloons, and began to think about “coming out” to
others. Most importantly, the Internet put him in touch with the BDSM community; he read Different Loving, and now thinks the motives behind his fantasy are very similar to those behind other kinds of BDSM role-play. “Rather then whips, paddles, and restraint devices, we are fixated on balloons.”

Afterword

The balloon fetish may become extinct
almost as quickly as it appeared. Congress is considering a bill to make latex balloons for children illegal. Apparently, a shocking number of infants die every year from accidentally swallowing and choking on uninflated latex balloons. Needless to say, the looner community is quite upset at the idea that their fetish object may actually be banned from the shelves, and some are stockpiling reserves just in case that happens.

This is a shortened version of a text from Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex by Katharine Gates (www.deviantdesires.com), Published by Juno Books, distributed by powerHouse Books, available at www.powerHouseBooks.com
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01.02.2002