Drifter said:
The best theory I've heard is called imprinting, which is a process animals go through in the early stages of life. It's not completely understood but is known to be a factor in social relationships and mate selection by causing emotional bonds to certain aspects of other individuals or objects. It is responsible for what we would consider "normal" bonding, and would no doubt have gone completely unnoticed by the scientific community except for the fact that it occasionally produces strange results; such as baby ducks bonding with a stick instead of their mothers, or a man finding unusual comfort, or even sexual arousal, with diapers.
I'd expect it can have any of several common triggers, the big three being comfort/safety, regression, and sexual. We've seen polls and threads asking people's opinions about why they think they have these feelings, and it's almost always some mix (or single pick) of those three. For me it's exclusively the latter, though I'm certain I had some attraction to the concept before I was even a teenager. For at least my group, I think it has a lot to do with instinctive behavior. Every species on earth needs to have a sex drive and enough instinctive behaviors to continue the species with very little or no training/learning involved. So there's got to be some "hard-wired" behaviors and basic identifications that every person has from birth, that will drive them to somehow want sex and assist them in doing it, even with
no instruction or understanding of what they are doing or even WHY they are doing it.
Sights, sounds, smells, and physical sensations are all tied into this. But nobody is born with an image of a naked man/woman in their head, knowing what to do, knowing how it feels to have sex, or why it should be a priority in their life. So it has to be something more abstract. I can't see a simple universal explanation for every aspect of why I'm attracted to diapers, but I think I can see a lot of it. I believe a big part of it is feeling the soft smooth plastic, seeing the round curves of how it fits me, the place on my body it shows up, and most importantly the soft touch, warmth, and rubbing it provides down there. I think this simply "presses a lot of the buttons" that have been hard-coded into my brain from birth, that say "this is something you need to do, this is important". It's not quite what my body intended, (a naked woman and having sex) but it satisfies most of the
stimulus I've been hard-wired to yearn for and enjoy.
The "process of imprinting" is just taking abstract concepts and finding a real-world stimulus that satisfies the requirements, and then "locking in" that more specific example that's being experienced. Then the desires and urges that were previously frustrated by looking for a very abstract experience suddenly become tied to a real, available, repeatable action. So now we know how to immediately satisfy those instinctive demands, and every time we repeat it, the connection is made stronger.
Although a big part of those urges manifest at puberty, there are still some that are active from an early age, and I think that helps explain why I feel I have always been attracted to diapers. It probably started with something I saw or felt from an early age that began connecting with needs I had but didn't understand. And I'm well-beyond the point of being able to just drop those connections that have been made in my head. Like classical imprinting, I'd expect it's something that's very difficult or impossible for me to undo since it's had so much time to solidify.
Maybe you think that's a little too deep, but that's my opinion on why there are a lot of Diaper Lovers in the world today.