To outsiders we are a typical sort of couple in the Pacific Northwest: a gymnast bodied Midwestern blond built on compact, slim lines and a penchant for short sleeved polos as casual wear, and a long limbed heavy hipped pile of curves in black and jewel toned low effort alt fashion. We live in still mildly mortifying comfort (to me): nice gym with Cross Fit (for him) and Pilates (for me). I am learning to crochet at a Stitch and Bitch. We go to the Farmers Market biweekly and there’s fresh berries with most breakfasts. Once a month or so, we take his practical little car into Seattle proper from our exurb situation and do something cultural with an art show or music.
You would assume correctly our politics are progressive and our hobbies involve things like tabletop RPGs or board games. There’s thousands of versions of us walking about, drawn here by climate, employment and the privilege of not having your values and aesthetics be the lunatic fringe.
Unlike many people, we are latex fetishists. Other than being hard on the pocket book, this presents its own risks.
Rubber, in its natural state, is neither shiny nor inclined to slide easily over the contours of the body. Latex clothing is hard to get into. It sticks to you and it’s not particularly resilient, tearing under too much rough handling. If you want in to your wardrobe you are going to need to make yourself slippery, and ideally you will want something that buffs what you are wearing to a gloss.
Those who are familiar know this means copious amounts of silicone lube, a clear, oily feeling substance that’s insoluble in water and largely inert.
Oil (as any person with good sex ed knows) will cause the material to start to break down. That’s why you don’t use oil based lubes with traditional condoms. Talcum was the old timey solution and is now known to regularly contain asbestos – so much as baby powder has switched to corn starch, so is this used as an alternative, though as you might imagine it does nothing if your goal is shine. I also find powder based lubricants gum everything up while adding more of an abrasive than a shiner. A fancy process (chlorination) gives pieces a permanent slightly duller gloss, but takes away some of the stretch and gives it a papery feel.
The solution is the aforementioned silicone lubricant. Made (elementally) of the same stuff as the sand on a beach and the glass in your windows, it’s a modern miracle of science that gives us much more rugged baby bottle nipples, a caulking agent, easy demolding bakeware, hair defrizzer, bendy yet body safe dildos you can sterilize by boiling, and this. You get it for a bit of extra money online or through specialty (sex) shops, because even the good pharmacies in Canada tend to only stock water and occasionally oil based options.
Maybe we will discover, years from now, that we’ve made a huge mistake with this magical material, but for now we have bottles of this all over our home. Guests over means a quick whip round to retrieve them lest they require explaining. Sure it’s a bit odd to have it everywhere, but it’s handy. We use it for edging Silver, several times a day if that can be managed; for sex where it plays nice with my flora; and of course for the rubber escapades I mentioned, which compliment the whole BDSM femdom thing we have going on.
Getting dressed in rubber is about like the cliche corset yanking scenes in bad historical films combined with trying to haul a pair of mid aughts skinny jeans up to your shoulders. That is, if the garment in question cost more than most of your wardrobe and sometimes as much as a wedding dress, of course, and also needed silk stocking level careful handling. To do so you slick yourself up and the inside of it up. That’s palmfuls of silicone on your limbs, but also any expanse of you that you want the garment to go over AND squirting liberal dollops of silicone into the garment and then smoothing it all over.
You also don’t want the garment to be too slick outside, until you have it on, lest it sproing from your grip and you pull it on. Most pieces have a zipper down the back and there’s all sorts of hacks like using a boot lace and a safety pin to pull them up, but generally you also need to hold the garment closed while you pull. A second pair of hands dressing make all the difference, and there’s a technique on top of it, in dressing. Like getting a toddler into a snow suit, firm but not too firm. If you have sharp nails you further can protect your outfit by wearing gloves.
The garment (except for fresh from whatever atelier that made it) will also already have at least some silicone residue on it. For storage, after a wash in a very gentle (unscented!) soap, you rinse in cool water with more silicone mixed into that, leaving a surface coating. Once dried you further pack it with archive friendly tissue paper, so it won’t do the other thing rubber likes to do, which is stick to itself to the point of fusing. After it’s on, something will feel misaligned and you will probably gloop a bit more silicone in through neck or arm holes.
In short, you will be wearing a skin tight rubber bag very full of lube. The process of getting it on will also be surprisingly taxing, wrestling a full body resistance band. It wants to grab and pinch fleshy bits, at least if you don’t smooth it right or it doesn’t sit on your widest points just so. Then you will do activities that make you sweat even more, mixing with the aforementioned lubrication. And maybe other fluids.
When the deed, whatever you were doing, was done, be it a fashion shoot or fornication, you will be even more damp. Getting out is usually easier, with the sweat/lube mix enough to slide everything back off into a distressing crumpled pile on the floor. The first thing you will notice, once stripped, is that you are absolutely freezing. Your body in the latex adjusted itself for what it thought was the height of summer humidity. With the gear off, all that sweat and lube is now lukewarm and chilling fast as it drips off you. You will probably immediately want a shower.
And you will discover the other magical property of silicone lube is that it lasts and lasts. You will be spectacularly moisturized. If you used it in you, your cavities will still have traces a day later. After you wash your clothes, the sink or bathtub will need a good scrub. And while if you were smart your play (or model) space was protected by drop cloths (nothing says sex appeal like draping the room in old bed sheets!), but somehow or another it will also get everywhere else.
On carpet it tends to vanish into the “try not to think about this too hard” situation the way most invisible contaminants are left to rest. On tile or linoleum, well…
Our apartment is done with that currently fashionable, grey-beige faux wood linoleum, in all the main areas. The kitchen, living area, bathroom and the long hall that connects everything else is the same glossy grey, varied enough in texture you won’t spot where the pattern repeats, smooth and easy to spot mop. It beats carpet in my kitchen, but it has its own drawbacks. Remember how I said the first thing you want after latex comes off is a shower? Thanks to the layout of the place, that’s a near half minute trek in a connecting long bit that joins kitchen/living area, bedroom, office, bath and some rather large closets. Inevitably, somehow in the most trafficked area a few drops of silicone find their way. Invisible until you step, just slippery enough to make your foot slide askew and check your balance.
Days later, every latex session is still a slip and fall hazard, but worse, a camouflaged surprise one that can materialize anywhere down that hall.
This happens every damn time. You can mop it, but you can’t see it. Finding it is caressing your hand against a smooth surface and looking for something just a bit more slippery. Soap and water helps, but it’s not a perfect solution because of that aforementioned lube’s staying power. Even bringing out the big guns of a teaspoon of dish soap on where you think the spot is, and you very well can miss just a micro drop.
Dear reader, if my debauchery someday does me in, it won’t be breath play gone wrong. It won’t be a folie à deux into increasingly deranged power exchange, nor sadomasochism loosed to run riot. It will be a mundane slip fall where I break my neck because one tenth of a gram of lube escaped the mop four days after my submissive spent fifteen minutes in a neck to toe rubber sleep sack.
