Can role playing and infantile regression be sexual without involving sex? The Indiana Court of Appeals so ruled in upholding a lower court’s preliminary injunction closing My Inner Baby in Noblesville, IN, on the grounds that it constituted a “sex shop” in an industrial area not zoned for sex shops. The store, which does most of its business online, sells no toys shaped like or designed to stimulate reproductive organs (the legal definition of “sex toys”), but adult-sized baby clothing, bottles, pacifiers, and incontinence supplies. The City’s attorney argued that AB/DL is a form of BDSM and a “sexual fetish” (citing the Urban Dictionary for authority), and a marriage/family therapist whose office was across the street asserted that it was a form of “pedophilia” that endangered children at a nearby day care. That Hustler magazine ran a story about the shop was cited as key evidence of its sexual nature. So intense was the City’s desire to be rid of this business, housed in a nondescript industrial building, that it spent huge sums in litigating the matter and scotched a separate $5.5 million industrial development involving the shop’s owners. No price appears too high to maintain a small town’s public morality.
The courts are showing no love for My Inner Baby
