What Defines A Rubberman?

What Defines a Leatherman?

By Kevin Alderson, PhD, R.Psych.
Gay leather culture gets itself noticed. It is conspicuous, blatantly sexual, and clearly not attempting to pass as heterosexual or be respectably homosexual.

My first impressions of leathermen came from raunchy masturbations while lusting over Tom of Finland and Etienne drawings. The presentation of large muscles and unrealistically huge genitals made me salivate more than I care to admit (crap, I think I just admitted it). Anyway, what I learned then has stuck in my mind ever since: symbols of leather and leather culture "accentuate hypermasculine forms of sexuality."

I vividly remember the first time I actually saw leathermen at a gay bar. It was back in 1993, the year I came out. I was both awed and afraid at the same time while conjuring up fantasies of what these men do sexually, which I assumed was to whip the living crap out of each other until the top had fully realized his pleasures - or until the bottom passed out from the pain. What were your first thoughts when you saw guys in leather? What are your thoughts now?

Truth is, the actual scene is nothing compared to what we might envision it to look like. Leathermen are part of an established subculture within the gay male community who eroticize leather garb or symbols. Collectively, they form a leather social network or community and they practice leathersex. Let's look at each component of this definition.

For many leathermen, leather acts as a sexual fetish - the smell, texture, color and firt are a turn on. This is dissimilar to the reasons drag queens dress in women's clothing, but similar to the motives that transvestites have for cross dressing (transvestites are heterosexual males who enjoy cross-dressing as a fetish). Leather is not a fetish for all leathermen, however, and it means more than this for the vast majority. For most leathermen, their dress and affiliation with the leather community is also about enjoying varying degrees of sadomasochism (SM). That is the part of leather culture that is least understood. Social scientists have not helped much either: "all the large survey studies of sexual behavior have ignored SM behavior almost completely."

According to one article, it is easier to describe what SM is not. "It does not entail violence and it is not non-consensual." In fact, the common adage used within the leather community is "safe, sane, and consensual." SM generally consists of five components, but all of them do not need to be present at the same time:

1. "The appearance of dominance and submission; the appearance of rule by one partner over the other.

2. Role playing

3. Consensuality, that is, voluntary agreement to enter into the interaction.

4. Mutual definition, i.e., a shared understanding that the activities constitute SM or some similar term.

5. A sexual context, though the concept that SM is always sexual is not shared by all participants."

At the core of SM is creating power differentials via role-playing within a sexual encounter or within a relationship. Some individuals live out a SM script on a full-time basis within their relationship. Although both systems that provide diagnostic criteria for mental problems (DSM in North America and ICD-10 throughout most of the world) list SM as a mental illness, studies do not suggest that SM practitioners suffer from a mental disorder. On the contrary, SM practitioners appear to be emotionally and psychologically well balanced, accepting of their sexual orientation and socially well adjusted. As is common practice in psychiatric diagnostic systems, practices that are not understood are often seen as mental disordeers instead of extreme variations of unusual behavior, or simply viewed as harmless "kink". The leather community is not small, and obviously if individuals wer maliciously hurting each other, we would hear about it!

SM is about recreation and mutual enjoyment, often performed in a scripted roleplay. Leather roleplays have safeguards built into them, including code words for when the action is getting too intense or not intense enough. A simple system, for example, is for the bottom to say "red" to stop the scene, "yellow" to cool it, and "green" to intensify the action in that scene. The top has the responsibility to respect the boundaries (which they do) and to be of service to the bottom. SM sex is about mutual respect, caring, and compassion. I don't want to suggest, however that SM is not also about pain for many sadomasochists, but it is pain that is eroticized and that is enjoyed to the level of the bottom's pain-pleasure threshold.

Research has shown that there are some differences between how gay and straight men emjoy SM. Gay men prefer leather outfits, anal intercourse, wrestling, dildos, rimming, special equipment, and uniform scenes. Straight men, on the other hand, are more into being masked and blindfolded, gagged, verbally humiliated, and whipped with a cane. They prefer to wear rubber outfits, straightjackets, or to cross dress. They are also into vaginal intercourse. Overall gay men prefer hypermasculinity and straight men prefer humiliation.

Only about 5 percent of individuals who enjoy SM do so exclusively. There are no studies that inform us as to how many engage in SM behavior, but two experts in this field suggest that it may be about 10 percent of the general population.

Findings form a qualitative study revealed that the core idea oassicated with the leather community was its use of "signifiers of heightened masculinity to fortify itself against sexist and heterosexist stigma from both heterosexual and gay cultures - that as gay men they are effeminate and therefore weak." Other finds of lesser import were about the following:

1. Communicating sexual roles in an expedient manner. Although the "master" and "slave" persona exist within the leather community, these terms are more commonly associated with SM in general. The terms "daddy" and "boy" are strongly rooted in leathersex.

2. Marginalization in both gay and straight communities leading to greater freedom.

3. Belonging to a "brotherhood".

4. Celebrating closeness between men while emphasizing trust and loyalty.

5. Exchange of power in scripted sexual roles.

6. Embracing or incorporating masculinity into a gay identity.

Another aspect of the leather subculture is that it is a community unto itself and organized. As many informants of one study reported, the leather community has many official leaders, they take care of their members, and they organize many AIDS fundraisers. The Folsom Street Fair held in San Francisco, for example, is an event that draws 400,000 people per year to celebrate their interest in and support of Leather and SM interests.

Some writers view an interest in the leather culture as the final stage in a gay man's progression in his search for something new. This search for something new centres on developing interests in "more radical forms of sexual activity." Anecdotally, this appears to be true given that the average age of patrons in a Stockholm leather bar is about 40, and my observations of leather bar patrons in Calgary, Montreal, and Berlin would suggest similar findings.

It is easy to fear something you have not experienced. I am reminded of the words of one of my interviewees in Beyond Coming Out: "Leather relationships are like any relationship: there are many things that need to be negotiated and agreed upon. We still have to go through the relationship dynamics of being in love and settling in and making the adjustment to live together. My friends in the leather community live normal lives like everybody else." (Glenn, age 46).

Please view original article for references.

I found this article very interesting. I wanted to put gay rubber fetishism in perspective of the findings of Dr. Alderson's research, and although I found many similarities between leathermen and rubbermen, there are some striking differences in the symbolism of the fetishes.

I don't think hypermasculinity is a defining characteristic of gay rubber fetishism for most. It is for me personally, since I prefer the look of a well-muscled man in form-fitting skintight rubber (and there are many other gay rubbermen who agree). For most rubbermen I don't think this is a priority. For many it is inclusion in a BDSM scene, more heavy on the bondage and discipline (rubber restraint, rubber breathplay, hogsacks, vacuum beds, straightjackets) than the sado-masochism idea that defines leather fetishism. Some rubbermen are into pain/pleasure thresholds and experimentation, many others are not. For many gay men into rubber fetishism, their role definitions would be similar to the description of hetero-SM interests: bondage and humiliation of a slave by a master/mistress, most likely stemming from a need to play a role opposite or remarkably different from those played out by the players in their normal, day to day lives.

For many white straight men, this would be a release of their normal power role to play a subservient role, particularly giving dominance to the women they are playing with, who in their normal lives tend to play the submissive role. This is testament to the very huge following of female rubber fetishism for many straight men online and in video.

This is a similar idea for many gay men into this scene. In the gay rubber scene, there is also the dominant/submissive role, but for others the power structure devolves even more exclusively into helplessness, and play scenes of extended immobilization, restraint, abduction, even simulated torture and rape scenes.

For many gay rubbermen, the simple fetishism of the material, much the same as leathermen, is a fundamental fulfillment provided by the fetish. The male figure in an otherworldly rubber skin is considerably bizarre and perverted and completely flies in the face of contemporary sexual roles and expectations. It is tight, shiny, impermable, but also thin and stretchy. For many rubbermen, a primary definition of rubber fetishism is the ability to temporarily, but completely remove oneself from his environment. By enclosing yourself in a rubber sheath or some type, you have effectively removed yourself from your immediate environment, but requiring breathing/feeding/drinking/waste evacuation connections to the environment over the long term.

Also I think for some it is also an extremely visual fetish that goes even further than leather in its perverted and bizarre pseudo-humanoid (vs. hypermasculine) nature, the 'alternate skin' which many gay rubbermen find attractive about the fetish. Many gay rubbermen are not surprisingly also into gas masks (often as integral a part to a rubber scene as the rubber itself), scuba diving, SCBA apparati within contained environments such as hazmat suits, water submersion, inflatable/deflatable, and breathplay scenes. Many gay rubber fetishists begin their interest in rubber from an affinity to scuba diving (breathing from a system dependent upon 'machinery' and self-contained), wetsuits (environmental control) and submersion (in a medium different from our natural one).

Similar to this are those men who have evolved their rubber fetishism further into more specialized puppy play (animal transformation) and cyborg/android/robot reprogramming/assimilation (humanoid transformation) fetishes.

Mummification/immobilization and bondage scenes including hogsack immobilization, vacuum beds, and balloon bondage add to a need for tactile stimulation which for many rubbermen is sexual in nature. Power differential occurs with a bondage scene where the slave player has been rendered helpless while bound or vacuumized while the master plays a monitoring and touching/tactile role. In more intense breath control scenes, the master also controls air supply, temperatures, and session length, which is a step of control giving even further beyond the BDSM most fetishists would associate with.

All in all, the reasons why we are all fetishized by leather and rubber are as varied as the people that practice these fetishes. It is most important to play safely and respectably and to realize that we're all fundamentally kinky beings! Some of us are better at accepting it than others and therefore much more comfortable with our sexual and fetish experimentation.