Beyond a kink-free, heterosexual relationship, there is little doubt that anything wouldn't be met with a high amount of criticism. As you said, a lot is bred out of ignorance, people not only unwilling to accept it, but going as far as to completely shun it. With this fetish it's very easy to do that, especially since there are diapers so a connotation with babies is made. People don't realise that the fetish is with the diaper itself - as an object - or with being treated like a baby. There is, in no way, any attraction to the baby itself. Unfortunately, many people just take the easy explanation, no matter how falsified it may be.
In fact, it seems people are willing to believe anything just to explain something that they've been confronted with and are confused about. It's been said before, our society, however developed you want to call it, has a serious lack of understanding and acceptance. We just don't seem wired up to be able to handle anything outside what is considered societal-norm - we live in a world where the collective thought thrives and majority rules. We blindly throw our reasons and justification at a problem rather than trying to understand it better. In that, we have hardly developed at all. Knowledge is something that moves us forward in life, but knowledge comes at the price of actually wanting to understand what is presented to us. A concept people just don't want to grapple.
With that said, previous examples of this fetish have been thrown into the spotlight before, as we've all seen. A large portion of that has been relatively negative, thanks to those select few that feel they must flamboyantly proclaim something that is rather personal, not to mention sexual to the rest of us. It's a shame to think that there are those in our own community who are destroying us. As a society that lives off what is fed to us by the media, there is no surprise really as to why people would have such a negative image of this fetish. Since that plays well into the [false] connections that this fetish has to do with babies, is there really any surprise that people do think that paedophilia is somehow involved? Any surprise that people think we are sexual deviants? Or any surprise that people think we are seriously messed up mentally, physically, socially or emotionally?
To a great extent it is ignorance at its finest; I simply see it as a lack of understanding and an unwillingness to accept something that is very confronting and something that has been portrayed very negatively in the past. All these factors that have led to a general consensus that we are people who have some issues that are in dire need of professional attention. Not true is the sense that the most intelligent people I've ever spoken to have been from this fetish-community and I feel that has a lot to do with the fact we are open about it and that we do accept it. Regrettably and in great contrast to this, some of the most stupid and idiotic people I've ever spoken to have been from this fetish-community. It's a two-way street where the big question is which way are you going. Do you wish to strive for understanding and acceptance, or are you fine with it being a solely deviant and sexual experience. The latter, I find are the one's who do go into the spotlight and who do give the rest of us an unfavourable reputation.
If it were up to me, I would stamp it out. But in that sense, I would be contradicting myself in that I strive for tolerance, yet am reluctant to harbour discernment for those who - albeit part of the same fetish - are travelling in a completely opposite direction to which I am. I wouldn't be practising what I preach and to me that is something that has struck me as one of human's greatest logical flaws. You could say that nothing positive comes from a person's actions, but I would disagree. What we are given is an example of how not to behave so that the rest of us can benefit by not falling into those pitfalls that this other person has. That doesn't, however, make a difference to the fact that it's these people who are put out there and not someone with a little bit of common sense and intelligence.
That all swings back to the ignorance outsiders have to this fetish. It's safe to say that no community is deprived of such misinformation, that every fetish group has members who are just as uneducated and nescient as those who do not participate in it. Only through proper channels could we conduct such an orchestra of reason and sense into the matter. Nonetheless, for now, as long as we all empathise that there is a lot of hear-say and opinion going around, and that we know that their ignorance is unfounded, then we can sleep easy at night being quite content with having this fetish.
