Opmerking van de redactie: Omdat Shiny onderdeel is van een internationale community en bij wil dragen aan het groeiende bewustzijn rondom de liefde voor rubber, communiceert hij in het Engels.
What if the love of your life is so elusive and has so many faces, that it takes you a lifetime to get to know her? And to let youself love her. As she is. As you are. This is the story of “Shiny” (54). Still in his teens he was attacked by the sensational and exciting feeling of a rubber rain suit on his naked body. It left him puzzeled and somewhat insecure. Was this okay? It was the beginning of a lifelong search.
“It happened when I was about 15 years old. My parents owned a summer cottage in a remote area. It was one of those perfect holiday days, when the sky is the bluest you’ve ever seen, the sun is shining abundantly and the temperature is just right for playing outside in the orchard-like nature, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and boxers.”
Overtaken by a thunder storm
Sensorically wired as he is, although he wasn’t very aware of this at that point, the balmy weather had aroused him. Then all of a sudden the weather changed. Shiny: “There was a thunder storm and it started to rain very hard. I had to make my way home, but I got soaked just by getting to my bike. I decided to put on the rainwear that was always strapped to the bicycle.” He goes on: “Because at this point my clothes were wet already I had to take them off first. So I got into the rubber-lined rainwear naked. Immediately a shock went through me, like electricity. The sensation of that thin layer of rubber, it’s scent … It felt overpowering and yet familiar. Like some hidden circuitry suddenly switched on in the most profound way.”
“The feeling overtook me, I had no idea this existed!”
Smuggled back home
He cycled back to the summer cottage, slightly absent because of the inexplicable and special experience he just encountered. “I arrived, changed clothes, put away the rainwear and that was that. Or so I thought. Because the seed had been planted. So when the holidays were over I decided to smuggle the rainwear back home.” He spent the rest of his boyhood exploring this new sensation. In secret. With the rain suit he all along had kept to himself. “I was already sexually awakened, so every time I was home alone I would take out the rain pants, put them on and play with myself.”
Something weird
Asked how this was for him he says: “It was new, I was excited. It felt like a discovery, as if some kind of internal switch had been flipped. I didn’t know this sensation from anything else. It also confused me. I would get aroused by stuff that tipically arrouses growing boys. I wasn’t different that way. But this sensational experience I had with rubber felt like an exception, like there was something weird about me”, he looks back. It made him feel lonely at times too, as he wasn’t aware of the many people worldwide that share his love for rubber. “Fortunately, there was no feeling of guilt. I was raised with free sexual morality, so I did allow myself to enjoy it.”
“This is real, I realised. I’m not the only one with this mindset.”
Not the only one with this mindset
Then he moved to the city. His college years awaited him. And so did the genuine rubber experience, as he was now free to explore. “At some point I laid eyes on an announcement in the papers. It stood there, simple and clear: the words ‘rubber’ and ‘clothing collection’ combined. So this is real, I realised. I’m not the only one with this mindset.”
Weeks later he finally got himself to go to this store. “It was like entering heaven”, Shiny says. “Rubber outfits, specialised magazines and sex toys all around. And that scent, overwhelming! A whole world opened up for me!” Although it was pretty expensive for a college student, he decided to buy something small, a tank top. Finally, the first piece of rubber was now his!
Internet makes things easier
Three more years of college followed and then working life – a period in which he continued to figure out his evolving relationship with rubber.
“In hindsight these years truly were my formative years. Around this time the internet emerged and that made it a whole lot easier. It turned out that there were these newsgroups on rubber, whole communities that chatted exclusively about my special subject. So I dove in.”
Online he got into contact with likeminded people. “I’d chat with them, would meet up with them and attend gatherings on topics that interested me. Tipically, I would go there by train, wearing rubber underneath my clothes, taking my normal outfit off once I got there. The happiness, the excitement. Gosh, those were the years.”
“There is something occult to rubber, like it’s something for a group of initiates. I like that about this scene.”
Doubt kicks in
In case you were wondering about the real life relationships he had at that point in his life: they were there, on and off. Some of the girls were aware of his ‘other love’, some never got to hear about her. “There still was this struggle with shame, so I mainly kept it to myself”, Shiny says.
One girl did know about his rubber fetish and decided to ignore it alltogether. “It was this girl and the relationship I had with her that made me doubt what I had with rubber”, he says. Then adding: “There is something occult to rubber, like it’s something for a group of initiates. I like that about this scene. But because of her knowing about it and at the same time pretending it not to be there, I started feeling weird about it. As if I was doing something bad.”
“I tried hard to fit in with the standard and decided to hide what felt like my funky kicks.”
In complete denial
It rocked his relationship with rubber and resulted in the terribly sad moment when he threw away all of his rubber outfits. Someting he regrets up till today. “Amongst them were the most fantastic creations, beautiful to the eye and wonderful to wear. But I didn’t know myself then as I do now and I wasn’t that assertive yet. I tried hard to fit in with the standard and decided to hide what felt like my funky kicks. In hindsight I was in complete denial of who I was when I threw out all my rubber stuff.”
Then life decided to cut things short and gave Shiny an unequivocal reason to end the relationship with this girl. Whilst throwing out the proverbial junk, the right one this time, there came room. Room for reconnecting with himself and for doing things his way. He started spending time again with people that shared his fetish and he gradually extended his renewed collection of rubber outfits. He also met a woman who he can be open with about his love for rubber, who stimulates him to explore it further.
“I don’t feel like I need to hide it any longer.”
Now a part of daily life
Today rubber is an explicit part of his life. “I don’t feel like I need to hide it any longer.” He started wearing rubber in public, although he chooses the occasions carefully because of the potentially harmful judgments that are always lurking. [Reason why this interview is something he would only do anonymously, red.]
Since then he has been reconnecting with rubber for what she really is to him: a lifelong compagnion of many feathers. Sometimes arrousing, sometimes reassuring. Like a trusted acquaintance at one moment, the next instance making him question himself as if he was 15 all over again. And then turning herself around to show him even more sensational sides of her.
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