Saturday, December 29, 2007

Why A Panty Tontine?

The ultimate goal of this Blog is two fold… first to create a safe home where men with panty (and other similar) fetishes can talk about their shadow lives, feel better about themselves and perhaps to even gain a few useful insights into the stuff that drives us to be what we are.

Second will be to try to create a worldwide think tank of sorts where we ponder how "collectors" of vintage panties and other fine lingerie – can deal with the knotty issue of how our collections (stashes) should be dealt with when we toddle off to meet that great Gusseteer in the sky. I’m not concerned with mainstream lingerie collectors, but only those whose collecting is driven by a fetish for the items.

I'd venture a guess that many of you who’ve stopped by will find yourself resonating with the terrifying question of what might happen if you dropped over today. What would your family think to suddenly discover not only that you lead a secret, shadow life, but that they must now decide what to do with the (possibly huge) stash of panties and who knows what else you’ve left behind?

The embarrassment alone is enough to have kept most of us from thinking about this horrifying problem. Many years ago I started this conversation with my friend Bill Turlock, who runs Lingerie Lovers & Panty Art (www.llapa.com). We spent more time talking about the crisis part than coming up with a viable solution. Though it was a concern, and because there didn’t seem to be an easy answer, it ultimately never got much play in our always too busy lives.

But we continued to age, and continued to talk about this problem of “final disposition”. But it was only after each of us confessed to having this same conversation with many others in the panty underground, did it become apparent that we were not the only ones troubled by the issue of what to do with our most valued possessions.

Thus, I’ve launched the Panty Tontine Blog - where together we can begin the search for an answer.

None of us of course can bear to think about what sort of disastrous decisions our surprised, and horrified family members will make. What they'll choose to do with our, often irreplaceable, stuff is almost unthinkable. I know several men whose stashes are easily valued in the tens of thousands of dollars – and there are others who I am sure own far more than that, so the issue is more complicated than simple embarrassment.

What happens in a crisis? Besides dying, what happens if you become disabled and someone must take over managing your affairs? Worse still, what happens if your spouse or life mate discovers your secret? Being “Busted” is probably our deepest and darkest fear, no?

How many of us have a good enough friend, who we can tell about our fetish, and about the secret stash? Someone who we can ask to step in and take possession of those precious items in just such a crisis? The answer for most of us probably is “none"!”

It’s not that those friends aren't around... it can happen. I’ve been asked by two close friends to be that “fail safe” friend, and am in possession of keys to their public storage units, each of which is filled to the ceilings with extremely rare and quite valuable lingerie. I am their "fail safe", but not many of us have that luxury. The issue is a difficult one to sort out… one made doubly difficult by the isolated, shadow world that drives our fetish activities.

A month or so ago, one of my friends (with one of the mentioned storage units) went through a full blown “Busted” crisis. His wife discovered the existence of his storage unit and demanded to see what was in it! He was traveling and could not get home, and when he did get there, he needed to take her over to the unit with him.

I was asked to step in and drove the 200+ miles to his unit to manage the safe transition of his stash to a new location. The timing was good for me this time, but going forward, he knows he may not be so lucky again. He is joining Bill and I (and hopefully many of you!) in the creation of this forum to begin the serious discussion of what guys like us can do next.

The good news is that we already have a loosely formed underground "brotherhood" made up of very creative people: lawyers, salesmen, business executives, doctors, engineers, teachers... you name it, we’ve probably got them as part of this brotherhood of panty fetishists. We know of each other through Internet sites we all may have visited.

The next task is to figure out how to join all our heads together, feed off each other's ideas and come up with a solution or solutions that make more sense than just giving up. Let's not have to say: "After I'm gone I guess it'll be someone else's problem". As a group we’re more responsible than that!

We’ve probably all seen movies where a group of men join together in a pact where the “prize” is a fine bottle of brandy, some property or other valuable. For lack of a better concept, that’s why I've decided to call this Blog “Panty Tontine”. It seems that part of the solution involves finding a way to pass along our secret stashes - to someone who values them in the same way we do. Making our stash a part of our "estate" does not seem to be an option for most of us!

This Tontine idea won't be like those classic, “last man standing wins” tontines. But there seems to be wisdom in joining together with other like minded souls to find a better solution than to force our embarrassed relatives to give our stuff to Good Will or worse yet, to just toss it in the bin!

Lots of knotty problems remain - legal questions, storage space, money and someone to manage the process are just the start. But until we begin thinking and talking about the issue, nothing will ever get done. I’ve launched this Blog as a forum for exploring brilliant ideas.

We also have a strong panty and soft fetish underground network… so in that light I’ve also sent notes out to some of the “giants” in the panty world (Bill Turlock, Sheerio, Sonia Dane and many others), asking if they’ll link to us, and help us in this quest. They can help us get the word out that there is a place to talk about "what happens next".

Sorry this has been such a long rant… but those who already know me know that when I get passionate about something, I write and write and write…

Hopefully this Blog will become a regular part of your online life… and going forward, I hope it will become a part of your everyday thinking as well. OK brothers, put your thinking caps on and let’s get this thing going!

INDY – Chief High Gusseteer!

Friday, December 28, 2007

Last Post From Panty Confessions...

Thanks for your patience with me dredging up all this stuff, but I think you may find it helpful, and hopefully even interesting to read. Going forward, I promise to post new ideas... but I do invite you all to tell me what you think!!

We're approaching the beginning of a brand new year, and no matter how you prognosticate the future, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart: "Friends, I do believe we have the start of a beautiful friendship"!

Be careful over the New Year Holiday and be sure to post your thoughts.

Thursday, January 05, 2006
The Journey Home...

As I've already pointed out several times, isolation is one of the unfortunate results of having a fetish of any kind and is one of the driving forces that require us to live dual or secret lives. In my early years, long before there was anything like the Internet, I was convinced that I was the only male in the world who was so hopelessly attracted to the look and feeling of silky, nylon panties.

There was nothing I could do to change that it seemed, no matter how hard I tried. I periodically threw away all my lovingly saved pictures (torn from catalogs), and throw away my carefully collected a stash of pretty panties (a story for another day) and would promise myself (and yes, god too) that I'd stop looking and touching and thinking about panties.

These purge cycles usually came after overwhelming feelings of guilt and shame would build up and drive me to try to will myself to become "normal" like all the rest of my friends. But it was always to no avail... after a few days or weeks or sometimes months, I'd find it impossible to resist peeking up a careless girl's skirt or would come across a lingerie ad in a newspaper or magazine, and the whole cycle of compulsions would begin again.

Where did a young boy, or later man, turn to try to understand this powerful compulsion? Sadly the answer was - almost nowhere. I have always loved to read so the local public library was one of the places I spent a good deal of time after school and on weekends. Naturally in those days (early to mid 50's) all the "sex" books were kept safely guarded by the gray haired librarians, but a clever boy like me eventually discovered there were psychology books that contained amazing information about a all things sexual.

There I discovered the name for one of my compulsions; masturbation. My mother had caught me playing with myself several times when I was in bed and would scold me and make me go to sleep with my arms outside of the blankets. I was already sure this was an activity that was deeply wrong so when I read that these psychologists seemed to consider masturbation a fairly normal thing I was a bit relieved, but now a lot more confused. Where could a boy ask someone about this stuff?

Fast forward to nineteen ninty something, when this much older, graying guy discovered there were things called chat rooms on the Internet where people could openly (but privately) talk about every conceivable kind of sexual interest - including the love of my life, panties!

Those days on-line were like a feeding frenzy for me. I could strike up open conversations with others who by clever screen names openly advertized their membership in the underground brotherhood of panty lovers! There were lots of surprises as I discovered not only how many men loved panties, but how many different ways they loved them! My eyes and world were opened wide and my compulsive stashing now included hoarding tens of thousands of panty photos on my computer hard drive.

I also gained a better understanding about this mania for panties that controlled so much of me and my life, and that eventually resulted in me accepting myself for who I am, and what I am.

The process of getting to that place was not quick, nor was it easy, for despite the enormous pleasure I derived browsing through the almost endless supply of photos and chatting with hundreds of others who shared my fetish, I found myself still searching for more - for a place where I could feel at home and talk about my life as I might with a brother or close friend who would understood and care about me the way my brothers and friends did in my other, public life. Next time I'll describe the homecoming I finally experienced... but this is enough for now.
posted by Gusseteer at 7:37 AM

Why We Love What We Love...

Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Grieving Over Thongs

One of the things I've enjoyed most about having this obsession with women's panties has been how much pleasure I get from browsing around public places looking for the delightful hints that are offered by women's outwear - hints about what's being worn beneath - ie - VPL.

I understand how hard most women work at avoiding a display of VPL (visible panty line), but in my experience, short of wearing no panties at all, there is probably no way for her to keep a professional peeker like me from finding enough hints to decide what kind of panties the lady is wearing.

Inevitably there will be a slight indentation where the leg elastic binds just a bit, or perhaps her trousers gap just a bit revealing a flash of the elastic waistband, or it might be when she bends over I will see the faint telltale line of her panty gusset. It's also possible to pick up a hint of the woman's panties' color through the fabric of a carelessly chosen pair of shorts or trousers. By wearing only pantyhose, or (gasp!) a thong style panty, a woman can derail even the most professional of peekers.

But when I do find a VPL it is both a satisfying and exciting find.The point of this little rant is that most of us who have a panty fetish are actually sort of old fashioned romantics at heart. I suppose it's not very politically correct to even admit to having such a condition, and many women may feel it's not very polite for me to want to take advantage of those careless moments when her panties have been exposed in public, but I do believe peeking is pretty much a normal male response to finding an opportunity to get a look at something as intimate, exciting and forbidden as a woman in her panties.

It's a hobby shared by the regular Joe as well as the hard core panty lover. I enjoy the mental exercise offered by VPLs and how they allow me to use all the visible clues presented by the woman to come up with my best guess as to what she's got on. But where Joe's curiosity is satisfied by a lucky peek, mine is revved up by it causing me to fantasize about what she may have looked like getting dressed that morning, who she may have had thoughts of as she selected her lingerie, and of course, what else she may do later on.

Growing up as I did in the late 40's and 50's was a delightful time for a young panty lover. Women wore glorious clothes, and most often over wonderful delicious layers of lingerie. By the time I was dating in high school (quite a few years before the launch of the "sexual revolution" of the 60's) she allowed me to slowly discover all the detail of each of those marvelous, sexy garments she was wearing... but only over the extended time it took me to earn her trust.

In the 60's Carole King sang a song titled "Anticipation" which pretty well describs the joyful process I went through with my girlfriend - working through layer after layer of her most intimate garments before ever finding the few square inches of exotic bare skin that were covered and shielded by all that wonderful lingerie.

Today where is the mystery? Where is the anticipation? How can any man feel he's got anything to look forward to when the Lingerie Industry has mandated the "Less Is More" theory for their lingerie and clothing designs. Whoever designed the thong (as an undergarment or swim suit) ought to be drawn and quartered!

Women's clothing styled to "Give it all away" to every and anyone who casts a casual glance her way has taken the delight out of watching them. What's to look forward to anymore? Most men today probably see a woman in her clothes and wonder what she looks like naked... a panty fetishist such as me sees a naked woman and wonders what she'd look like in her panties (full briefs, please!)... and her bra... and her full lacy slip....Now that's kinky, no?

Thongs are Awful, Unforgiveable Stuff!I believe the sense of mystery, anticipation and awe men (and boys) experienced decades ago fostered a more polite and romantic culture. We can all agree that the progress generated by the women's movement have helped move women rights closer to where things ought to be today... but I'm really talking about here is not seeing women as objects, but growing up with a respect and appreciation that just doesn't square with teenaged girls hanging most of their naked bodies out for public review when the go to the beach.

I suppose these are the hopeless rants of an old geezer who has lost his modern sensibilities - perhaps he's too caught up in memories of the past to appreciate today's definition of "sexy", but it does seem to me that both young men and women today are missing out on something quite lovely. Discovering everything about each other doesn't have to happen on the first date. I do think they just might enjoy the agonizing anticipation of earning things the old fashioned way... one delightful, slippery layer at a time.

Oh, and please write your congressperson and ask them to make thongs illegal?
posted by Gusseteer at 6:15 PM

The Crux of the Matter

Here's another re-post from Panty Confessions... this time it's much more personal, but I think many of you will have your own version of this look at what this fetish is like, and where it may have started.

Saturday, December 31, 2005
Peeking Up Skirts

I suppose there's a similarity between the skills you develop as an unrepentent panty peeker and those honed by professional athletes - both require excellent timing, anticipation, good eyes and of course the "three P's"... practice, practice, practice.

Growing up as I did in the late 40's and early 50's, girls almost always wore skirts, so there was an abundence of ways to practice my craft. The school playground was a place ripe for peeking because girls would always be someplace there, sitting on the blacktop in a circle chatting. The almost universal posture, was with legs crossed at the ankles and hands folded between the knees, holding their skirts demurely down.

I quickly learned to covertly shift my attention to whatever group a burst of laughter was coming from, because whatever it was that was causing the girls to laugh was sure to effect one of them more than the others.That girl might be showing off, or just have been caught off guard by whatever funny had been said so she just might throw her head backward in her fit of laughter and pitch backward enough to require her to move her hands to keep her from rolling onto her back.

In that brief moment, with her skirt unattended and knees being pulled upwards, a clever peeker would no doubt be able to see all the way up her slim legs to catch a peek at her silky panties. The real trick was in timing your glance so you'd see the flash of her panties, but without being caught doing so - by the girl, her friends and most importantly by your friends!

Yes, in those days there were lots of chances to peek at panties, but as sex was a forbidden topic, a boy could not risk being seen practicing his fetish craft for fear of being laughed at (by girls!!), tormented as a girl lover by his friends, or worse yet, being called into the principal's office and be accused of being a pervert.

So for self preservation a clever peeker learned the art of anticipating just which particular girl might get careless - without showing any outward attention to her, then timing his glance perfectly so he'd see her panties and be looking elsewhere by the time she looked up to check if anyone had seen her little mistake.

The other way my mania for seeing girls' panties was fed was by finding pictures of girls in panties. Now this was long long before the world created porn magazines that specialize in such photos, but the good folks at Sears Roebuck, JC Penney, Montgomery Ward and Spiegle provided almost every young boy with all the material needed to learn in detail everything he could want to know about panties!

Those catalogs were clearly the porn of choice in that era for boys like me.In our house catalogs came regularly, so my mother would dutifully throw the old ones into the trash. Being a good son, on those days I would not need to be asked to take out the garbage. Of course along the way, the discarded catalog would be stashed safely someplace where I would later tear out every single page displaying girls or even grown women standing brazenly in their panties.

Oh the frenzied activity that would occur in our locked bathroom for the next few days, as this peeker devoured every detail from his precious new stash of panty pictures! None of us who suffer from this need to peek chose to be this way, nor do most of us have any real idea what caused us to develop as we have, but the one thing we all learned early on was it was nothing you dared have anyone find out about you.

So it is that almost all of us grew up being slightly shy (especially around girls). Even if we had lots of friends we played sports with and hung out playing with, we never ever hinted to them how much we loved looking at and collecting pictures of girls wearing panties.So it was that we all developed this parallel secret life and learned the importance of being secretive.

We all had secret places for our stash of catalog pages, had secret places where we practiced our peeking, and most of all we eventually learned where those pretty panties were kept by the girls and women we secretly watched.

But that's a topic for another day.I know I am far from being the lone practicioner of this dark art - have I struck a chord in anyone else? Perhaps some of the women reading this might share their comments on our panty mania or what it was or is like to worry about keeping one's knees together in public.Enough for now - I hope you all enjoy this final day of the year. May the next bring you much joy and happiness.
posted by Gusseteer at 3:21 PM

Re-Post from "Panty Confessions"

Hi:
Upon further consideration, I've decided to repost several of my original "Panty Confessions" articles here... as they do set the stage for much of what I'd like to have us discuss here. This is the first post, which I think also fits well with the purpose of "Panty Tontine".


If you've read this before, I'd still be interested in your comments!

Thursday, December 29, 2005
With Great Fear and Trembling ...
I have had a secret love affair with women's panties for as far back as I have memories of my youth. I've decided to set aside my powerful fears of being discovered and instead launch an offensive - this blog - where not only will I write about what I've learned about this powerful fetish, but can invite others to share their own thoughts and experiences about how their lives have been shaped by their own secret love affair with those wicked, silken garments.

My panty life has been very private, so much so that I have lived two separate lives: my public life as a businessman, loving husband and father, and a parallel life where I am hopelessly consumed by an overpowering love of panties. No one in my public life would ever guess how much of my life has been dominated by the other invisible side of me.

I was six or seven when I first recall having a strong need to peek at and touch nylon panties. It wasn't until I was in my twenties before I realized that there were other men who shared my mania for women's panties, though I had no idea just how common an affliction it was in men. I was well into my thirties before I discovered and read voraciously about the psychological description for my panty mania... until then I thought fetishes were limited to leather and rubber and great spikey high heels. Who knew from panty fetishism?

But it wasn't until the internet blossomed that I came full up against the sheer number of other men whose lives were dominated by those same silky garments. My own suspicion is that perhaps ten percent of all men may share this fetish, and most suffer the same fears of being discovered and publically humiliated, or being marked as gay or worst of all being accused of being a sexual preditor.

I know none of those things is true of me, and I suspect it's not true of the vast majority of men whose only sin is being controlled and consumed by a love for women's panties. I'd like for this Blog site to become a place where stereotypes and fears are buried and caring understanding dominates what we say here.

There is no universal description for what it is to have a panty fetish; how it is expressed depends on the myrid of experiences each man has had. Some love only to look at them, for others it is primarily a tactile experience, some choose to wear them while others have no need for that, and most have private stashes of pretty panties hiden away from wives or lovers.

These stashes of course have most often been gotten under rather shady circumstances, which those same wives and lovers would be horrified to hear about. Professionals write very little about this fetish, perhaps it's more exciting to write about the "harder" fetishes (rubber, leather, S&M etc), or is it that this fetish comes a bit too close to home for others? That's my suspicion!

There are no doubt many common experiences all panty fetishists share - secret double lives, bingeing and purging cycles as we've attempted to "give it all up", hidden stashes of panties, compulsively searching catalogs, magazines and the Internet for photos of panties, and of course, peeking up any carelessly arranged skirt for a glimpse of the thing we love most. All of it is driven by an overpowering compulsion to see, touch and own women's most private garments.

There will be time enough for detailed confessions later on, I would rather outline what I hope can happen here in this anonymous public forum, and invite you to offer your thoughts.
First this is not intended to be a fantasy site, though I expect I will want to explore how much of a role fantasy plays in my secret life.

If confession is truly good for the soul, then this should be a very healthy place indeed! I will bare my own soul here as well as offering insights that have helped me come to terms with my fetish. Hopefully this will become a safe place, where everyone is free to honestly explore this usually very private topic. Sharing life experiences and asking questions is encouraged, but name calling and flaming is not.

Enough for now - I'll try to post at least once a day, and invite you to comment or post your own confession - to quote the great Bluto: "It don't cost nothin'!"
posted by Gusseteer at 1:11 PM

"Panty Confessions" Continues...

Two years ago under the name of "Gusseteer" I created a blog that I am unable to moderate any longer (http://pantyconfessions.blogspot.com/) (duh!! forgot the password).

Interestingly though I've posted nothing new there since those first few months, that amazing and uncared for blog continues to attract much attention from the panty fetish community. Obviously this speaks volumes about the need to have a place where real issues about our gentle fetish can be explored honestly, openly and without guilt.

Hopefully this blog can also become a place where those whose lives are complicated by being involved with one of us can raise their questions and concerns (a few already have replied at Panty Confessions). As in any good confessional, no name calling, flaming or other trash talking. All other questions or comments are welcome - join me in a discussion of what this woefully unexplored fetish is truly all about.

I plan to continue what was begun, but also to carry it forward to explore some of the more difficult subjects that are part of panty fetishists' lives.

One of those difficult issues gives rise to the name of this Blog: Panty Tontine.

Many of us are older men, and as we ponder the knotty issue of our mortality, the haunting question arises: "what is to become of our stashes" - the secretly stored collections of panties (and/or other lingerie) we have collecting, sometimes for years? At Panty Confessions I talked about how I have gone through endless Purge/Binge cycles with my collecting, and the panty brotherhood universally acknowledged that they too had each had that sad experience - many many times.

I have spent many long hours talking with friends, looking for a reasonable plan for how we can sanely dispose of our (sometimes quite valuable) stashes when we pass on to be with that great gusseteer in the sky. But how to resolve things without creating yet another "purge" event, this time caused by our unsuspecting (and embarrassed!) families doing the only thing they can think of - tossing it all into the bin! Thus the search for a better solution... perhaps a Panty Tontine?

More on that later... in the meantime, I'm happy you've found us. If from this first meandering post you're still not sure what my point of view is, I invite you to go visit the original site (link above) where you will find those first four posts and the many, many thoughtful responses they've elicited.

So Welcome... the Confessional is Re-opened!
INDY