Christmas and advent traditions

In Caracas, the capital city of Venezuela, a rather unusual costum occurs shortly after midnight of Christmas Eve. One of the main streets fills with hundreds of roller-skaters who skate together until time for a special church service in the early morning. After that, they skate home for a delicious hallacas (like a tamal) breakfast.


An artificial spider and web are often included in the decorations on
Ukrainian Christmas trees. A spider web found on Christmas morning is
believed to bring good luck.



In chilly Greenland of course most of the costums and traditions are in some way related to ice. In spring a bird called “whole small auks” is wrapped in greasy seal skin and buried in the permafrost to rot until Christmas. Then, the “Kiviak” is dug up, the bird’s head is biten off and the fermented intestinal juice, the tart guts, which is slightly toxic, is eaten directly or served as sauce. This delicious Christmas dish is said to taste like old blue cheese…

Even though the whole process of preparing this Christmas delikatessen sounds kind of disgusting, it’s actually the same concept that is being used to produce other fermentation products such as alcohol, cheese, yoghurt or bread – controlled rotting.

Krampus

Every December 5th and 6th people in Austria remind their barbarian ancestry.
(On the picture, a drawing from 1896).


Imagine you are 7 years old on December 6th. Your family has gathered in the cosy living-room, the smell of cinnamon and cloves filling the house. All of the children, sitting on the couch, are pale and nervous. You are waiting for the warm-hearted and friendly St.Nikolaus to come and reward you for having been such a nice kid this year. Suddenly you remember that some weeks ago you had a fight with your little sister – what if the bearded man remembers that day? Will he show up with the Krampus? This horned, shaggy and grotesque looking guy, that scares the hell out of even the meanest of the children (and of the adults, who are happy not to be children anymore…)?

In some Austrian villages, if a family’s children have been naughty during the year, their parents may hire not only a bearded Santa Claus-like man acting as St.Nikolaus, but also his evil companion - a monster (or two) that could perfectly cast a Lord of the Rings or Saw-movie called the Krampus. Whether or not he is the henchmen of St.Nikolaus or his adversary is never made totally clear. However, imagine on of the guys on the photo entering your living-room and “punishing” you in front of your parents and cousins.


My father, being a child, was taken away be the krampusses in a sack! They drove him to the next village, together with other kid-napped children they had recollected earlier. He was lucky and could cut out his way and escape thanks to a Swiss army knife he was carrying.

Following an ancient pagan rite, krampusses riot in the streets of some Austrian localities like a punch of Orks on December 5th. Young boys take the opportunity to measure their strength and bravery getting mixed up in the battle after having some cups of hot and strong Glühwein. And the next day, the hangoverish krampusses are hired to assist good old Santa Claus to teach little children what is right and wrong!
I would like to know what a typical krampus does during the rest of the year. Is he the butcher? The baker? Or maybe the village’s priest experiencing a strong need for revenge…?
We can all guess which movies had seen the guy who made the following video. I can’t wait to learn that “Krampus – The Movie” is being exhibited in my neighborhood’s theatre.



Don and Carol Richardson, a missionary couple from Canada, preached the tribes of Papua New Guinea about the Holy Son of God in 1962. They talked about how God sent his only son to be the peace child. They took the whole story quite literally and started the custom of exchanging an infant son among the tribes known as the Peace Child.

In reality, this is the best that can happen to a child in a society that has just left the stage of cannibalism and headhunting, whose value system was based on ever-increasing treachery and where a young life isn’t worth as much as in other countries: the adoptive tribe has to do the best it can to keep the little Peace symbol alive; otherwise, the renewal of wars would be the consecuence.



Of course, one of the most exciting ways to celebrate Christmas is to spend a wonderful evening at the nearest McDonald's or Burger King restaurant. A very popular option in some Asian countries, where a fast-food restaurant is a perfect place to spend this special night with the beloved ones.

In China, where Christmas celebrations are a recent phenomenon lacking the actual religious meaning, the day of Christ’s birthday is just a good excuse for spending money, consuming and copying all the worst of Western Xmas kitsch.

For sure there are high society establishements that important authentic European Christmas trees with Swedish pedigree. Japanese style, let's say.



There was also this funny Catalonian tradition - a puppet or something that is fed candy during December and then has to poop it out at Christmas Eve, am I right? I wish there was a reader from that region who could provide me with more information - leave your comment (in any language!).

See you next week with more Christmas oddities!

Let's finish this month of Paraphilia: 4 of the World's strangest fetishes

DENDROPHILIA

"I have splinters on my tongue."

What may a Greenpeace activist and a weirdo fetishist have in common? Their love for trees. While one has a desire to protect them, the other may have a desire to abuse them. I think, we should let animals be animals, let trees be trees. But apparentely not everybody shares my opinion.

The picture on the left shows an installation by artist Carol Hummer.

Chelsie, a fan of the Dendrophilia on Facebook, was curious and asked: “Does Dendrophilia only pertain to live trees? Or are dead ones good as well?” :-)

TRICHOPHILIA

Tricophilia - an intense love for the brushing, shampooing, shaving and pulling of human hair.
This video describes the fetish in a very innocent and cheerful way. Wait to see the sponsor at the end...



Haircut fetishism is all over the net: the pleasure to watch women getting their hair shaved, leaving “a clean and sexy scalp”.

A noted haircut fetishist was the author Ernest Hemingway, who put haircut scenes in several of his books and stories, most notably "For Whom The Bell Tolls" which includes a detailed description of a forced head-shaving.
A few short-lived American hair-fetishist magazines, including "The Razor's Edge" and "The Bald Truth" were published in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Some men have have a paraphilia for hair, even if it’s not on a woman’s body. An Australian baggage courier was jailed in Melbourne for at least two years for collecting women’s hair from hairbrushes and underwair in delayed luggages.

Others may get excited by the sight of a really hairy woman, suffering from hirsutism. Some pornographic sites offer special “hairy” sections for lovers of furred cleavages.

MACROPHILIA

The love for the big...

The definition of macrophilia is something like: Love or attraction for / to a giant or larger person. How the hell can somebody have a preference for a species that has long been extinct (together with poor elfs and dwarfs)?? In reality these people fantasy with big people, big breasts, big muscles, big hands or mouths or whatever. Some of them have fantasies with giants or even elephants! On a specialized website I found out that some of them love the big in any aspect of live: “When I think about an erection, I also think about building permits, environmental impact statements, site surveys, demolition and telephone poles, all located in my bedroom.
The world of macrophile is also a world of illustration art (series of sketches such as the “giant green kangaroo” ) and is sometimes connected to the furry movement (macrofurries).

ACROTOMO- AND APOTEMNOPHILIA - THE AMPUTEE FETISH

Acrotomophilia refers to sexual interest in. It is a counterpart to apotemnophilia, the sexual interest in being an amputee.
(Wikipedia)

This paraphilia was quite difficult to understand for me, at least at the beginning. It was also a challenge to find pictures and videos for this blog. Some of them look much more "dirty" than they are in reality, maybe due to the aspect of the stumps...
Nevertheless, some very beautiful pictures, such as this one, can be found.

It is supposed that amputee fetishists prefer leg amputations over arm amputations (of course: arms have hands and hands have their functions…), and amputations that leave a stump are the best. I guess it may remind them of dolls – we all have removed a leg, arm or the head of our favourite Barbie when we were children. Besides that, the stump of an amputated limp is the exciting part of the story, I heard. Eventually, I could find a very sensual video involving a (dressed, of course) one-legged woman.


This is the nice part of the story.
The terrific side of this paraphilia is that there are some people who are ready to get one of their body parts amputated (or worse, one of their partner’s body parts) – only for the sake of sexual pleasure. Psychiatrists would talk about these individuals as “suffering from body integrity disorder (B.I.I.D.). Of course, this is a serious problem for the surgeons involved.

No more paraphilias on this blog. See you next month for ODD CHRISTMAS!

Parafilia III - Adult babies

Paraphilic infantilism is a paraphilia characterized by the desire to wear diapers, due to reasons other than medical necessity, and/or be treated as an infant or toddler. It is also characterized by the carrying out of these desires on a regular basis. Within the community of such diaper wearers, one who engages only in the erotic or sexual aspect of diaper wearing without experiencing any accompanying regression fantasies is known as a diaper lover (or DL). An adult who only engages in the infantilistic play aspect is known as an adult baby (or AB). An adult who may experience both of these things is referred to as an AB/DL.
(Wikipedia)

In the United States, everything is possible. I don’t live in the United States. I’m ashamed to say that it was in a curious C.S.I. chapter called “King Baby”, when I first heard of the existence of the adult baby “movement”.




I mean, of course I’m perfectly aware that some people have different sexual and emotional needs and behave in a way that might seem bizarre to other people.

Men who want to be treated as part of the furniture, people who walk around dressed as Little-red-riding-hood asking for lollies in the street … But what was new to me was the fact that apparently there are so many grown-ups desiring to escape back to early childhood, that the term “adult baby” is just like any other word of the dictionary, producing thousands of results when searched in Google. At least in America and the UK.

First, I learnt that there are two – let’s say – “currents”: DLs (diaper lovers) and ABs (adult babies). Yes, really – professional websites directly define themselves as “the reference place for DL / ABs”.

Diaper lovers are what we would consider the typical fetishist. Lot’s of websites offer pics and videos showing young nices girlies wearing (normally clean) diapers and sitting in a cosy crib with lots of cute teddies. I didn’t pay the membership for getting access to the full graphic material, but I guess that these girls start showing what makes them adult, at least in the third photo.
















Some diaper lovers also feel sexually excited when wearing diapers themselves. Many online shops offer a wide range of adult-sized diapers and pull-ups. In the video below you can see an English reporter peeing in his diapers for the first time.

But to me, what really seems weird are the pure, authentic ABs. These individuals don’t use baby items for sexual excitation (even though they may experience some kind of excitement when being punished or diapered). Day after day, they live their regression to early childhod, in search of protection, motherly love and a life free of responsability.


Lots of online “boutiques” can be found which offer a wide range of adult baby clothing and furniture – top quality hand-made stuff, even personalized embroidery with baby’s name is possible.

Baby Apparels – best maker of fine adult baby furniture - proudly announces that the shop was chosen by the CSI producers as the official provider of adult baby furniture for the chapter titled “King Baby”. And you have to know, they say, that the production crew had plenty of other AB/DL businesses to choose from! In Spain, a poor production assistant would have a hard time to find even one single adult crib!

Some of these online shop also function as a kind of meeting place for ABs. A place to find friends and meet other babies and their mommies/daddies.
What you see below is probably the first authentic message written by a baby you read in your life!


Maybe psychiatrists would talk about these people as “patients suffering from adult baby syndrome due to childhood trauma or the unability to deal with life or blablabla”. But this is certainly true in many cases.


The American Journal of Psychiatry describes the case of a 35-year old Caucasian man who contacted the clinic by telephone, speaking in a soft, childlike voice: “I am supposed to be a 35-year-old, but I want to be a baby. I won’t ever get married or have kids if I am stuck as a baby.” He would answer questions by saying “I don’t know”.
He arrived for his appointment with the therapist dressed as child and said that he wanted to be a baby since the age of 12 and was wearing diapers since he was 17. He was looking for treatment because he was heaving problems with interpersonal relationships and with managing his life in general, due to the AB syndrome.


Some ABs are quite extreme, such as the guy in this video. But of course, weird people can always be found, not only among wanna-be babies. Some ABs complain about the TV-news only highlighting these kind of extremists in such a stupid and sensationalistic way (the TV-presenter is wonderful - just like Barby used to be).



A lot of perfectly normal people, even very young people, are ABs, as well. No freaks or psycho-cripples at all! These people lead two parallel lifes – adults in the morning, babies in the afternoon.
Adult babies seem to be the perfect partners for diaper lover. Such as the girl in the video who’s desire to be a baby is rather emotional, while her boyfriend, a DL, plays the role of her daddy, being his motivation slightly different.



What happens if a AB doesn’t find a mommy willing to actively participate in his weird roleplay day after day? Yellow pages - nursery services! A nice one is Nanny Betty from Chigwell in Essex, UK. Even though she also accepts fetishists (Dls), this is a good place to go for an AB who’s real mommy needs a rest (or for the poor ones who never had a mommy waiting for them at home).

Nanny feeds them her home-made rice-pudding or bib (sorry, no breast-feeding), diapers them, reads for them and, if required, even punishes them! How cosy and exciting!

The baby-clients’ comments are just positive:
Dear Nanny Betty,
thank you for another memorable visit to your nursery on Friday. I loved being able to choose from so many pretty baby dresses, frilly petticoats and plastic panties.


I loved being able to hug and cuddle you.
I loved being spoon and bottle fed by you. I loved being bathed by you. I even loved being spanked by you because I knew that I had been naughty and thoroughly deserved my punishment. I know that you love your babies and only want the best for them and from them and that any naughty behaviour has to be controlled for their own sakes.


If you need more information on online-shops, please visit the links posted on the left.
See you next week!

PS: What really worries me now, is that while I was writing this post, I had my real baby next to me, waiting to be diapered and fed. Unexplainably, this really makes me feel like a weirdo.

INTERESTING LINKS:
Adult baby furniture
Online-shop for adult baby diapers
Adult baby boutique
Adult baby clothing

Parafilia II - Objectum sexuality

“Objectum sexuality commonly referred to as OS, is a pronounced emotional desire towards particular inanimate objects. Those individuals with this expressed preference may feel strong feelings of arousal, attraction, love, and commitment to certain items or structures of their fixation. For some, sexual or even close emotional relationships with humans are incomprehensible.”
(Wikipedia)

After last weeks quite funny post about the German rubber-boot fashion, I was actually thinking about Dendrophilia (paraphilia for trees) for this second post on paraphilias. But then I stumbled upon the website objectum-sexuality.org. I have to admit that I had never heard about this phenomenon, even though the cases of Erika Eiffel and Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer have been discussed extensively in the media in the last years.

Objectum-sexuality cannot be compared with any other paraphilias. It is rather a psychological condition, often consequence of a lack of affect during childhood, and only about 40 people around the world, mostly women, know how it feels to actually start an emotional relationship with an object. About half of them also suffer from Asperger syndrome and have severe difficulties forming relationships with other people.

For most of us it is hard to understand that somebody who fails to build up a social network, to form a human relationship, may flee into a relationship with a radio, for example. That is exactly what happened to a British woman aged 43: she was in love with a Hi-Fi system called Jake. She would take care him, repair him and even communicate with him by making love to him about twice a day.
(Please don’t ask how such a sexual relationship may be performed, that would be pure voyeurism…)

The term “Objectum sexuality” – short “OS” (almost “SOS”, what an irony) – was coined by Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer who runs a kind of OS organization. You wonder about her second last name? She deeply fell in love with the Berlin Wall in the 1970ies and, after about six visits, she decided to “marry” him before a handful of selected guests (I say him, because OS individuals often believe in animism of their beloved objects).






One the photos, you can see her at her wedding in 1979 (left) and with "OS-sister" Erika La Tour Eiffel (right).










Eija remains a virgin with humans but insists she had a full, loving relationship with the wall. "The Great Wall of China's attractive, but he’s too thick – my husband is sexier.” After being married for ten years, IT happened. “What they did was awful. They mutilated my husband." After a while she shifted her affections to a nearby garden fence.
Nowadays, Mrs Eklöf Berliner-Mauer runs a little museum at her house in Liden, Sweden. There, a collection of her exlovers (a guillotine, among them) can be admired.

Eija-Riitta voluntarily talked about her condition, when OS was still to be defined. She had the self-esteem to appear in newspapers and TV-reports.
With Amy Wolfe, it didn’t happen like that. Age 32, fat, ugly and said to be “slightly retarded”, she was the perfect prey for sensationalistic TV channels and magazines. Since her childhood she suffered Asperger and OS. After being in love with different objects such as models of spaceships, a church organ or a banister, she found her ideal partner – a fairground ride in an amusement park. In a US documentary, Amy herself has to read a psycological analysis of her “disorder” – quite shameful, I thought. I didn’t post the video because I didn’t like the way it exhibited the woman’s most intimate thoughts and emotions. Kind of pornographic. The filmmaker accompanied Amy to meet her lover, watching how she kissed and caressed the crane-like machine, talked to him. “I felt embarrassed, like a voyeur”.

Of course, not all of the OS individual are in search of the glamour of being a famous landmark’s spouse. Most of them just feel love, attraction, arousal and commitment for a particular, everyday object. A fan, a suitcase, food items, a virtual reality avatar, a doll. People seem hostile to them while inanimate objects appear friendly – they won’t let them down ever (as probably their parents did).

I don't know if this video is for real or just a joke. Anyway, these things exist!



Another famous OS personality is Erika La Tour Eiffel who legally changed her last name to reflect her bond to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Years ago, La Tour Eiffel, a former soldier from San Francisco used to be in love with Lance, a bow that helped her to become a world-class archer. Besides having a secondary, physical relationship with a piece of fence she keeps in her bedroom, she pledged to love and honor Paris’ Tour Eiffel in an intimate ceremony in the presence of a small group of friends.




Below I posted part of the documentary in which she openly talks about her being an Objectum-sexual woman. She blames her upbringing for her condition.

I'm looking forwards to reading your comments. See you next week!

Paraphilia I - The German rubber-boot fetishism

Paraphilia (in Greek para παρά = besides and -philia φιλία = love) is a biomedical term used to describe sexual arousal to objects or situations that are not part of normative stimulation [...]. The view of paraphilias as disorders is not universal. Groups seeking greater understanding and acceptance of sexual diversity have lobbied for changes to the legal and medical status of unusual sexual interests and practices.
(Wikpedia)

Even though I’m just a girl born in a rural area I know that one of the most common parafilias is the foot- or shoe-fetishism. It’s easy to understand that a beautiful foot with red toenails can inspire a man’s fantasy, and the feet on the foto, surely sweating in transparent rubber-boots, can definitely call a sane person's attention.

But what follows is slightly different.

Some years ago, I was looking for an online shop to buy funny rubber-boots for a friend of mine. First, I looked up the word “rubber-boots” and found quite a lot of shops. But when using the German word, “Gummistiefel”, I discovered a new world of paraphilia. I was so astonished by the Google results, that I repeated the search several times during the last years.

And always the first pages that appeared were foto galleries of normal people posing in normal rubber-boots.

I discovered several “currents” of the rubber-boot paraphilia. First of all, the English speaking fetishists are more what we would expect from such people – sexy girls with sexy rubber- or latex-boots, sometimes semi-nude, sometimes naked and engaged in sexual activity. Pah, too boring, I said! But the Germans – they are really weird!!
What they are interested in is just normal, ordinary rubber-boots, the black or khaki-green ones, the ones used in cow stables or in fishery. No lipsticks or bodybuilders or high heels or bikinis – nothing of that stuff that would make us understand the use of these working boots.
Actually quite innocent, I said at the beginning. But maybe not for them, I suppose now.




Rubber-boot fetishists can be men or women, hetero- or homosexuals. Male hetero German-type rubber-fetishists may get excited simply at the sight of a female wearing her working boots or taking a walk in her dark-green gum-boots.
















A guy writes in a forum: “I love your fotos of girls in rubber boots, even though I feel more attracted by ... balloons.” Well… that’s another story.


In a rubber-boot website I even found erotic stories: A man walking through a forest on a Sunday afternoon meets a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench. Her rubber-boots call his attention. He get’s very excited at the sight of the rubber pleats and folds and of the area where the rubber-boot ends and the leg (in totally unerotic trousers, of course) starts. The woman says: "So, you are a fetishist?" And she touches his cheek with her ... rubber-gloved hand!!! Of course the guy almost suffers a heart attack.


Some like clean boots, but most of the fetishists love the combination of rubber and mud, or muddy water. Girls wearing rubber-boots up to their waists are one of the favorites. I'm quite sure that these two young girls on the foto don't suspect at all that one of their friends or neighbors who went fishing with them one day, published their foto in THAT context (and now I do it, as well).


When watching the following video I have to admit that the sound of the muddy boots may have a slightly erotic component for some people. That’s what most of the rubber-boot-in-mud videos have in common. And of course the lascivious way of moving their legs.



People commented on this video:

aline40:
“I love these green rubber boots with skirt. Have you ever flooded them?”
joannbar85:
“Rubber Boots Fan, not just black but COLORS. Very earthy and sexy. Especially when being worn and combined with water and squishy.

It’s really amazing how the guy on this second video is able to put on his ugly working boots in such an erotic way. The guy who is shooting the scene get’s really excited, stretching his legs when the “actor” pulls the boots up to his knees. Want to know the end of the story?



But the weirdest page I found was www.gummistiefel.net - a page for gay farmer perverts. It’s basically a website for men who have been working on their farms for years (or generation), milking their cows, cleaning the septic tanks, being dirty the whole day. No nudes, of course!
I think something similar as to priests and prisoners may have happened to them: they probably adapt their sexuality to their environment, deprived of what we would consider normal sexual stimuli. I mean, how can you explain this stuff otherwise? Especially the latex guy milking his cows is kind of, I don’t know what to say.






But can anybody tell me why this is basically a German thing? What’s going on on German farms? When visiting one, be careful – they may ask you to put on visitor’s boots to enter the cots and then publish your foto in one of these websites…

I also found a post in a forum where a hetero guy says: "I suffer from a specific form of rubber-boot paraphilia. I get excited when I see girls working in cow stables, wearing black and dirty boots". Of course this man spends every weekend in the countryside and is member of several farmer clubs, he admits.

So, next time you do some field work – pay attention on how you put on your boots. And be careful – your flatmate may get too excited!!!

I’m looking forwards to reading your comments and see you next month with more weird paraphilias!



LINKS:
Parafilia at Wikipedia
Rubber-boot fetish
Farmer Heinz Rubb
Rubber-boots
Gummistiefel