I asked a correspondent who’d enjoyed H2H whether they had any requests for future posts, and they responded that everyone loves an origin story. Since my memories tend to exist as fragments, rather than a narrative, here are some snapshots of young Katzenbaer finding her way into all this pervery.
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Aged about 3 or 4, maybe, and way past toilet training, I remember managing to pin myself into a cloth nappy and wandering downstairs, only to find my Mum had a bunch of friends round, who laughed in surprise. There were lots of ‘awws’ and I think they thought it was very cute, but I freaked out and burst into tears, because even then I had an acute sense of embarrassment. I knew I didn’t want to be seen like this, and the kindly coos just added to the mortification. I ran off upstairs and wouldn’t come out of my room for hours.
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Because my parents both worked, Mum left me with a paid childminder before and after school – a local lady she knew who had two children of her own. When I first went to her, I was about 4 or 5 and the younger kid, a boy, was about 2. When the little one needed changing, for some reason it was a bit of an event and we’d troop upstairs, me tagging along behind the 4-yr-old daughter as she followed her mum to the changing mat with her brother. I don’t know if this was meant to be a teaching moment for the girls on how to take care of babies but we would literally just watch the nappy change take place, or the girl would help her mum, then we’d all go back down and watch TV. It didn’t strike me as weird at the time, but it sure does now. I realise I identified with the little lad being watched and changed – the attention of onlookers at such a vulnerable moment was a potent and scary idea. For years after, I associated the smell of Vaseline with nappy changes. As a teenage cross-country runner, I used to use it on my running spikes, smearing it on with a matchstick to stop them rusting in place. As the scent rose up, it took me back to those feelings of exposure and embarrassment.
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I must have been 5 when we visited my grandparents and they took us out in the car. There was a toddler’s booster seat in the back and it became clear they had set it up for me. Despite my protests that I didn’t need one, my parents insisted I just get on with it so as not to upset my grandparents, and not make a fuss. My brother was delighted at my embarrassment over the ‘baby seat’ and mocked me as I was buckled in, which enraged me to tears. That was one of the earliest scenes of belittlement I recall.
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At primary school when I was about 6, I made friends with an older girl called Emma, who was very maternal. She took me under her wing and we would play together. In the playground she suggested Mummy and Baby as a game, and I would crouch down to make myself smaller, holding her hand as I waddled along. She suggested a nappy change so we would go to one corner of the playground and mime this. Occasionally one of the other kids would notice and ask what we were doing and Emma would start to tell them, innocently enough. In embarrassment, I would hurriedly get up and deny everything. I frequently suggested this game but remained vigilant in case anyone else suspected for a second that this was what we were doing.
Now that I come to think of it, I’m fairly sure I got Emma to pretend-spank me too, laying me over her lap. What a crafty little pervert I was, even then! Emma, if you’re out there, thank you for indulging me. You were a very kind girl. Had I a homosexual bone in my body, I’d have sought women just like you my whole life.
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As a general rule, I liked things to happen to me. If there was a doctor and patient game, I always wanted to be the patient, and would grudgingly take my turn as doctor out of a sense of fairness. If we were doing hairdressers, I would do my best to style my friend’s hair, but want desperately to sit in the chair and have my hair played with for hours. I liked being examined, touched and amended, feeling like a toy in other people’s hands.
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That said, a constant battle throughout my childhood was my resistance to girly clothes. My Mum tried everything to get me to wear pretty dresses to parties and events. I was obsessed with Disney girls and Sarah’s dress in Labyrinth, which were extreme girlycore – all flounces and petticoats – but the idea of being seen in such froofy, princessy outfits was a fate worse than death.
I started drawing cartoons about tough tomboy girls being forcibly dressed up in horrifically frilly outfits with big poofy sleeves. A male character would normally dress them up, or else a magic spell would transform them in a flash, with onlookers laughing at their sissy humiliation. They would have massive satin bows in their hair, perfect ringlet curls, a huge bonnet or a sparkly tiara, and be blushing miserably as they were paraded in front of the crowd.
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These kinds of stories morphed into cartoons about forced marriage. An extension of the forced dress-up routine was being forced to marry some smug, powerful man against your will and take on an ultra-feminine role (wife). I’d clocked plenty examples in fiction. (Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and Beetlejuice to name two) so the combination of public shame and forced obedience was quite intoxicating.
I was also captivated by the smarminess of Gaston’s proposal to Belle in Beauty & The Beast, and the terrifying prospect of that coming to pass, especially when he later tries to blackmail her into marriage to save her father. This informed a recent story, You Are Invited.
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Aged about 8 or 9, I found myself obsessed with having the feeling of a nappy between my legs, and would try MacGyvering a pillow and even a carrier bag to create a plastic crackling sound. I was one of those presexual frottage fans, though I didn’t know why it felt so nice to rub against stuff. Mum would knock briefly then try to come in and I would throw a duvet over myself in horror, or fling myself against the door with all my strength, or yell as bloodcurdlingly as possible that she couldn’t enter. She must have been very confused and hurt. I was in such a panic she probably thought something was terribly wrong, and kept asking if I was ok. Eventually, thank goodness, she usually went away, but I felt bad for being so aggressive.
The closest comparison I have is this scene in the movie Splash, where Madison takes a sneaky bath to relax as her secret mermaid self, and her human boyfriend Alan comes looking for her:
Splash was an oddly formative film, now I think about it. A lightweight 80s Tom Hanks comedy, it suckered me in because I was obsessed with mermaids (thanks Ariel). But on watching, it also spoke to my weird space cadet heart. I felt just as out-of-place as Madison at times, and couldn’t rein in my stranger side to appear normal, but I liked that Alan loved and embraced her oddities. I also felt confused at how much I loved the later scene in which her true nature is revealed. She is soaked, forcibly transformed and laid bare in front of flashing cameras, unable to run away. Scenes of public humiliation, exposure and vulnerability have fascinated me for as long as I can remember.
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The only clue I have to my love of restriction, pinning down and nonconsent was a strange and unnerving encounter, around the age of 10. Two sisters about my age had come to stay for a short while in my village and their garden backed onto ours. They invited me over to their uncle’s house one day and I okayed it with my mum. We played a game one of the sisters suggested in which she would play a bad man who liked to kiss girls against their will. While her sister was out of the room, the bad-man sister pinned me down and touched and kissed me. I was scared, by now genuinely struggling to throw her off and screaming against her muffling body, but she wouldn’t let me up. Suddenly her sister re-entered the room, at which point she climbed off me, said we’d been playing, and it was as though nothing had happened. I went straight home and didn’t tell anyone. It was frightening at the time, and I still have dreams in which I can’t move or breathe properly, but ultimately I think this is the root of that particular kink, translated onto men.
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I have only stolen two things in my entire life (told you I was a good girl), if you don’t count interesting signs and notices I spotted and yoinked in my teens. One was a piece of paper from a Little Mermaid notebook I found in BHS when I was about 7, which Mum said I couldn’t have (fair enough). I ripped off a slightly shop-soiled sheet and slipped it into my pocket. As soon as we got outside I burst into guilty tears and showed Mum. She told me not to do it again but said it didn’t matter too much. Nevertheless, I insisted on taking it back and leaving it on the shelf. The second theft, aged 14, was from a family I babysat for. (I’m a terrible babysitter, by the way. One 11-yr-old charge wanted to watch Channel 5’s softcore show Exotica Erotica and I just let him). The youngest child was still in nappies and after thinking about it over several visits to the house, I got up the courage to slip one into my bag to take home. It was obviously too small for me but I pressed it against myself anyway, pulling pants on over the top. It felt kind of amazing, though again, the guilt was very intense and I got rid of it as soon as I could.
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We got dial-up internet when I was about 15 (c. 1998) and after exploring the wonders of the Tamagotchi Graveyard (tell me you’re a 90s kid without telling me you’re a 90s kid), I moved onto searching for more secret stuff. I managed to find an infantilism story site that contained a long piece called ‘The Tale of Prissy’. It was about a high school senior guy who had given a sexist speech about a woman’s place being in the home. He was trapped by some of the girls from his year group and forced into a nightmarish sequence of humiliating little-girl clothes, baby outfits and slutty maid outfits, with the results filmed for blackmail purposes. I printed it out on our wheezy printer and re-read it until the ink practically lifted. Again, I identified with him, but imagined the captors as men, and though I didn’t love all of the kinks covered, there was a lot of mind-blowing stuff in there.
Once I was absorbed in reading diaper fiction when my big brother began to open the computer room door. I panicked and flew at the door, trying to block his view. Of course, this made him ask what I was looking at and since he was a lot stronger, he began to push past me to see the screen. I couldn’t think what to do, and went a bit feral. I screamed right into his face like I was possessed. This clearly sent his brain haywire for a split-second, because for the only time in his life he punched me in the face, hardly knowing what he was doing, before running off in horror. I was much happier to have taken a punch than for him to have seen what I was reading, though it was a very strange moment for us both. Despite his fears, I didn’t grass him up to my parents. I think we both knew we were even and that some things were best left unexamined.
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What’s surprising, looking back at some of these moments, is just how early on I developed a sense of shame, and of the power of embarrassment to shape behaviour. Shame was the reason I never smoked (my parents mocked it as stupid, rather than tutted at it, and I wanted their respect) and shame was the reason I tended to follow rules set by authority figures – the prospect of being hauled up in front of everyone and told off was terrifying. Brains are funny things, and I’m just glad mine took all of these odd experiences and used them to conjure something fun.