Of My Trash Fetish

Of my trash fetish: Sexual deviancy or latent normality?

One autumn night after my bedtime in 1982, at the age of 13, I started rolling up wads of tissues and throwing them around my room.  I went through an entire box of Kleenex and after I was finished, my bedroom floor was a sea of wadded-up tissues. My room had just been "trashed."  And I got off on it.  It was one of the most orgasmic experiences of my entire puberty.  I must have made more noise than I realized, however, because my mother came into my room, turned on the light, looked around with amazement and asked, "WHAT are you DOING?"

It was the same sense of profound, almost morbid, embarrassment I felt 15 years later when a custodian caught me, clad in only a pair of briefs, among the bags of trash in an office building dumpster.  He was just as amazed and had asked, "What the f*** are you doing?!"

Welcome to the sometimes humiliating but always orgasmic world of the trash fetishist.

At 13, an erotic love for trash suddenly took over me.  Whenever I was alone, I would lie in bed with sheets of newspaper draped over me from chest to ankles, something I still do to this day.  I also starting wearing trash bags.  Some nights, before trash day, I would take a full bag of trash up to my room to cuddle like a child snuggles a stuffed animal and touch it the way a horny teenager feels up his girlfriend.

Then, at 16, I started dumpster diving.  I would seek out dumpsters that contained any trash that I liked.  I would prowl around town, through empty lots, back alleys and so forth, during the early morning hours in the summertime, searching for dumpsters that caught my fancy.  If the material inside the bags felt and sounded really trashy, I was in there like a shot.  I found that I loved office dumpsters the best because they contained so much paper, plastic waste and other dry stuff.  I don't mind cafeteria trash either, even if it's a bit more "garbagey." 

You won't believe it, but I'm actually a neat freak.  I am always cleaning and organizing things and I subscribe to the motto "a place for everything and everything in its place."  So I've never been fond of food waste.  I don't like anything really messy.  That is why I go for dry trash because it doesn't leave any mess behind, doesn't stain anything, and it is easily picked up and contained.  It won't leave me covered in goo once I've finished playing in it.  With "dry" or "clean" trash play, I am fooling around on the border with messy play without ever really getting messy.  It suits me.

But even those who do love garbage—and they are a big part of the so-called trashcan fetish—feel the same as me:  It's about being part of the waste, about actually being trash or garbage or rubbish.  It's about having a sexual, sometimes even emotional, attachment to refuse, the daily detritus of human activity.

For most of my post-pubescent life, I constantly questioned myself as to why the sight of a trashcan overflowing with wastepaper, a big, plump bag of trash, or a dumpster full of trashbags causes me to stir down below and why I actually become a raw, sizzling bundle of nerves whenever I am unable, for whatever reason, to become much more closely acquainted with the trash I'm seeing.  Whenever I am unable to play with a lovely bag, barrel, pile or dumpster full of trash, it is like seeing a gorgeous person that you know you'll never be able to sleep with.

For me, being in the trash and finding it sexual is about being close to society while at the same time being removed from it.  I find it erotic to make out with the dry stuff people throw out rather than the people themselves.  Strange, yes—but true.  I consider myself a "trashsexual"!

It might also be a case of "if you can't beat them, join them."  I am often appalled at the amount of waste people produce, but I also realize that as long as greed, laziness and man's eternal quest for convenience continues, large amounts of trash will continue to be produced, no matter how much people claim to approve of recycling.  So having an erotic love for trash is perhaps my way of dealing positively with something that causes me a certain level of guilt and anxiety.  As much as I am unnerved by trash, wishing that households and businesses would produce less of it, I am just as deeply sexually attracted to it.  I recycle religiously myself, but I often have fun with a trash bag packed full of it before I fulfill my environmentally conscious duty.

I can't tell you why I get so excited at being in the trash, and why I sometimes think of myself as trash when I'm in it.  It's weird but also exotic to have an attraction to something most people don't even think twice about.  Most people don't throw more than a cursory look at a pile of trashbags; I, however, will look at them, wondering what's in them and if I'd like to play with them based on what they contain. I've learned to stop caring about the reasons why.  For whatever reason, this fetish took hold of me in my puberty and has never once let go.  I'm nearly 40, and trash excites me as much as it ever did.

*     *     *

I am a happily married man.  You may find yourself shocked at this revelation if you read my story Trash Goth, in which I expose an obvious fascination with male-on-male activity (and that story was, in every way, my ultimate fantasy).   But, even more unbelievably, my wife not only knows of my bi-curiosity—something I chose to tell her—but about my trash fetish as well, though she only found out about that by accident.

She says that as long as I don't cheat on her and as long as my fetish doesn't harm me, her or anyone else, then she doesn't care about my sexuality or sexual proclivities.   She has given me permission to sleep in bed with her while covered in newspapers or while wearing a trash bag.

But I can't bring myself to do that.  I can only take part in my trashiness in private.  Because I work nights—and she works days—I can get nice and comfy with a trash bag lined with papers on a cold morning before drifting off to sleep, luxuriating in having the house to myself.  But I always get up half-an-hour before she arrives home to neatly fold the papers and the trash bag and put them away.  She wouldn't mind catching me like that, but I would be embarrassed if she did.  And the thing is, she's seen both the pile of newspapers and the trash bag on the floor by my side of the bed several times.  She's just never seen me wearing it all, and that's how I intend to keep it.

Why can't I be my trashy self around my lovely, open-minded wife?  Why would it cause me great embarrassment to play with my bag and my papers in her presence, especially since she has assured me that I have nothing to be embarrassed about.

The fact is, I can normally only admit this fetish via the anonymity of the internet, and I can only engage in it privately or with somebody else who shares the fetish and truly understands it.  My wife does not have the fetish—she's tolerant of it, but doesn't SHARE it—therefore I cannot satisfy my trashy urges while she's around.

I do often wonder, however, just how many people have trash fetishes or at least some fascination with trash or garbage.  Trash bag fetishes are actually quite common, as plenty of people love polyethylene for the same reasons they love spandex, leather or rubber: it's shiny, it's soft, it's supple, it's tight-fitting and it just feels good.  Trash bag enthusiasts know there's nothing quite like soft, slick plastic against the skin of their bodies and how sexy it looks when they're wearing it like a dress or a leotard.  It is rumored that John Lennon enjoyed plastic bag play after meeting two young women who were into them—hence "Polythene Pam" with her "black dress"!

I know I'm not the only one who feels great sexual affection for trash.  After all, it seems like a short leap from trash bags to trash itself, and several trash bag fetishists fill their bags with trash or garbage during their play, and many of them find the idea of being a bag of rubbish attractive.  But I wonder how many other people besides the 50-odd few I've encountered on the 'net feel the same.  Do they have an attraction to rubbish that they have trouble admitting even to themselves?  Is it because no-one would talk about this fetish in public that it seems indescribably weird and on the fringes of lunatic sexual deviancy?

I would love to send a sexual survey to people throughout the country, promising them anonymity, and ask them about their fetishes, including "trash bags/trash/garbage" as one of the options.  How many people do you think would check that category if they knew they could not and would not be ridiculed for it?  How many latent trash fetishes might suddenly be unearthed?

But, again, it's not something people talk about with each other.  I submit myself as an example.  Obviously, I love trash very much, but you'd never know it from hanging out with me.  Unless I knew that you loved trash too, I'd never mention it or give anything away that would lead you to conclude that I had a "thing" for trash.  To reveal this to anyone that I didn't know well would cause me embarrassment, largely because they might very well think of me as weird or crazy.

I'm not weird, I'm not crazy.  I just have a fetish that is not easily understood or admitted.

I know that I will continue to look longingly at trashcans and trashbags in the street.  I know that I will continue to dress in trashbags and fill them with dry trash.  I know that I will continue to hop into office dumpsters—clad only in my briefs—and, if time's not wasting, spend several hours in them until I've really had my fill. 

Trash is, for whatever reason, a major part of my sexuality. And this sexual attraction ensures a pretty strong bond that is not likely to be broken anytime soon.

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17.12.08