On heavy rubber and weirdness liberation

Writing this felt like an early Christmas gift – for all these times when I shared a meaningless Monday dialogue with a colleague omitting the fact that I spend Sunday night washing a latex straight jacket. I love being a weirdo. Thank you for staying subscribed during this year - was definitely part of my personal lifeline  <3 

Happy holidays! xxx

Standing by the coffee machine at work, I admit that I had another “very chill weekend”. I look out of the window and rest my eyes on elegant offices across the road - as elegant as this one. I do not mention spending hours indoors, taking turns making each other a shiny object. 

The first thing that I feel is the unbelievable softness. I am wrapped in a rubber straight jacket over a latex catsuit and gloves. The feeling of softness mostly comes from moving my arms around in the sleeves of the straight jacket. Buttery softness is all around my arms and fingers. Latex is black, but there is no colour – just drifting in the darkness. There is music, there is the sound of the thunderstorm far away. Rubber is tight around every little bit of skin – toes, fingers, legs, breasts, crotch, neck, face. Holes for eyes, mouth and nostrils are so small in comparison. 

It is an odd feeling, which gets mentioned often, of being very present and very absent at the same time. You can’t see, can’t speak, like you’ve been poured into a vessel with thick rubbery sides, like a heart chamber squeezed, like a soft late Sunday morning in bed when the sheets are warm with light, like deep velvety shadows in the park after sunset. The yearning to connect, which makes your mouth close around someone’s fingers, to interact with the world from this compact space of ecstasy. A little moment away from hyper-connected human agency. 

The latex gear is pretty uniform. It’s produced by a certain company using designs that are probably a few decades old. The existence of this industry means that many people enjoy it – an alien thought in the moment of extreme closeness between you and material. To enjoy it sometimes means to forget that these things have a commercial application – and that they ever had a past.

In the 1982 novel Enter with Trumpets by Helen Henley, the whole story is told to a gimp in heavy rubber bondage. I came across Henley at the UK Leather and Fetish Archive – her writing appears in almost every single Atomage magazine, alongside photographs of her in various elaborate rubber and leather outfits. She wrote extensively on fetishism, or what she described more often as “dressing for pleasure”. 

Enter with Trumpets is written in a flowery language that now reads as old-fashioned, even though it still manages to be incredibly sexually explicit at times. It features wading in the moonlit river in three layers of rubber (and then fucking), 12-hour-long sensory-deprivation scenes, and the aforementioned silent gimp. It’s not dissimilar to going through latex magazines from the 1970s if you ever had a pleasure – a little embarrassing potentially seeing your own reflection in a couple that embraces in the forest in gas masks, or makes out knee-deep in the mud puddle. It leaves an odd after-taste of a cringy little secret, a claustrophobically cozy suburban fantasy.

I have already written about latex in detail here, and here, touching upon that strange suburban air of historical latex imagery. But what I’m continuously interested in is how the look of heavy rubber has evolved.

The latex shine of today is so beautifully amped up in post-production that it reflects everything: the camera, your gaze and the room, the expansive world on the other side of the rubber. It’s shiny as if to imply the existence of the coy, mysterious, strange shadow self beneath. It has a sense of play that tests the boundaries of identity – or even humanity.

Bloodshrimp taps into the ambiguity of gender, while also trying on a creature alias from time to time: a demon, a fish-tailed siren, or an anonymous swimmer. Ravyn Alexa and Cam Damage reframe what sex in shiny gear could be. Self-portraits by Winter are both serene and eerie, like sleek sci-fi which is very close to the present moment.

There are straightforward ways to conclude why the appeal of heavy rubber is so timely. Same reason why a photograph of Bloodshrimp seated on a yellow sofa head-to-toe in rubber bondage has been turned into a meme with the caption “i’m healing”(you can buy a T-shirt version here). Heavy rubber allows one to channel a creature devoid of gender or social attribute – a relaxing sweet spot of not being perceived. It allows one to delve into anonymity, embody the void and empty the mind. Heavy rubber might appeal to nerdy adults who grew up on the internet because sometimes it helps to navigate our technological gamified interaction-saturated society. Heavy rubber makes you acutely aware of the body – but also helps you to transcend the restlessness and sadness which comes with having flesh, blood and skin. Heavy rubber is playful, absurd and unapologetically weird.

It’s snowing outside, but none of us are aware of it yet. I am filled with excitement of laying my hands on him. I get to be mean, or treat my desire as practical. Between us are my skin packed with nerve endings and two layers of heavy rubber that envelop my favourite human. There is no before and no after, no cultural conclusion to it, just the heat trapped in respective skins.

Images: 

1. Bloodshrimp by No Nothing Inc

2. Ravyn Alexa and Cam Damage by Reflective Desire 

3. @abnormawinters