For almost 30 years, a young man had a vision: to get inside of an inflated whale pool toy.
In a video taken in 2003, you can see him finally succeed. Set to the dulcet tones of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” our hero is first seen lying beached on his bed, fully ensconced in an Intex-brand whale pool toy. He pushes himself backward off the bed with his puffy fins, and stands on the tail, victoriously upright, straining with a tube in his mouth to keep air pressure in the suit.
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He bounces, wiggling to stay balanced, and as the song crescendos to the chorus his fins snap dramatically wide. His elation is palpable.
That video, “Adventures of Whale Man,” went as viral as one possibly could in the early aughts; he told me that it was featured on MTV’s Ridiculousness, Tosh.0, and Comedy Central’s Attack of the Show. But in the moment, he was simply overcome with unexpected joy.
“I had no idea it was going to feel so good!” Whaleman told me. (He requested to be cited as Whaleman for this article, having adopted the title of the viral Youtube video as his own pseudonym.) “There was a whole new aspect of the pressure that just felt so good. Like the world’s best hug. A very calming effect. I think it’s in our nature to feel calm when held tightly. My theory is that it is possibly from our time in the womb.”
He went on to create Candy Coated Squeaks, a business that makes inflatable toys for like-minded people’s enjoyment. He’s serving a niche whose interests are unusual, but he and his customers aren’t alone.
Inflatable fetishists are all over the internet, often popping up as a subset of other kinks. Perhaps most commonly, they’re looners—people with an erotic interest in balloons, popping them, humping them, or watching someone else do either. Looner content is a huge category in the porn industry, especially popular with people who order custom videos from models. But while that genre most frequently focuses on watching a hot woman play with or pop your standard party balloon, pool toy and inflatable enthusiasts are more interested in large, vinyl, sculptural balloons.
They’re also frequently furries (sometimes called balloonies, often with magical backstories), or inflationists (who enjoy things like out-of-control breast expansion fantasies or blueberry cosplay). Within these are shades of bondage, breath play, and objectification. It’s a menagerie of kink wrapped in PVC.
And then there are those, like Whaleman, who like to get inside of the inflated toys. “It is very risky and can easily result in death,” he said, but some people get off on that danger.
For people outside of this kink, the most exposure they’re likely to have to inflatable art is Jeff Koons’ giant balloon dogs, standing inside a hushed museum or in an office building’s lobby. But the people making and buying inflatables often consider their collections as much “art” as any museum piece—they just happen to sometimes hump the sculptures, too.
Despite its early aughts virality, I hadn’t seen Whaleman’s original video until I contacted him for this story. I stumbled across his legacy, and his business, when Etsy recommended his listing for a clear plastic inflatable couch that a person can crawl into and lie down inside, with their face peering through a hole cut in the cushions.
The rest of his creations on the Candy Coated Squeaks website are equally eye-catching: full suits, beach ball Speedos and shorts, inflatable shoes, giant dragons, an Evee Pokémon, and sea mammals with dildos or holes on their backs. Customers can add “strategically placed holes” to their orders, starting at $65.
Whaleman opened the Etsy shop around 2018, when someone who saw the nearly two-decade-old Tina Turner video asked if he could make a similar suit for them. He listed it, and got six orders in his first week. He’s sold thousands of inflatables since, in a process that involves modifying existing pool toys for sale at mainstream stores like Target, sourcing from other inflatable makers, or creating fully custom toys on commission and outsourcing some of the production to vinyl crafters in China.
“Then puberty hit, got one of my first boners while chilling on a beach ball.”
Whaleman was not alone in seeing opportunity in this ballooning market. At around the same time in Germany, a man named Dirk—who requested we cite him using his first name only—was doing his own experiments with breaking into the inflatables market. He’d been working with artists to print artwork on inflatable shapes since 2014, and in 2015, designed an inflatable horse and sold 100 of them. By 2018, his hobby projects evolved into a small business, Horseplay Toys. Today, he sells printed inflatable “dakimakura” or body pillows with furry-style illustration, inflatable animals like sharks, whales, horses, and leopards.
Dirk told me that there are only a handful of shops—four, by his estimate, between the U.S. and Germany—that specialize in such niche inflatables, as well as numerous individuals pursuing this as hobbies on a smaller scale.
It’s not all about the sexual side of the fetish, Dirk said, but also about the artists he collaborates with. “My focus, at least over the past few years, is the play with sensuality and sexuality in a suggestive, rather than in an explicit way,” he said. Many of the toys Horseplay sells are technically “safe for work,” but still playfully fetish-oriented.
Each of the inflatables makers and fetishists I spoke to traced their passion for vinyl shapes filled with air back to an early childhood memory.
Dirk recalled his pool toy interest beginning on family vacations in places much warmer than his home country. “They kind of had a certain fascination for me for a long time,” he said. He remembers inflatable sharks and killer whales at beaches and pools, bigger than he was at the time.
“Most people who try it for the first time say ‘that is not what I was expecting’ and say that it felt really good to be squeezed all over.”
“When I was about four, I would run outside naked and my mom would get quite upset and tell me to put clothes on,” Whaleman said. “So to be goofy, I just put on my vinyl raincoat and went outside. I quickly realized it did things to my body that I had not yet discovered. This love for the feeling of soft vinyl has grown throughout my life.” He compares it to the feeling of someone else’s bare skin touching yours, or the way latex or leather fetishist feel about their materials of choice.
When he was 12 years old, a whale pool toy caught his affection. “I thought about how amazing it would be to be inside it since it was made of this same amazing material that I was just madly in love with,” he said. He tried to make a suit version with a zipper, but it wouldn’t hold air—until he finally crafted the airtight version in that viral video, years later.
“I am an exhibitionist because my family used to shame me for my love for vinyl and pool toys and now people love seeing me doing the things I do with vinyl and inflatables so it is empowering,” Whaleman said.
Another inflatables enthusiast I spoke to, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that he remembers being more into pool toys than other kids. “Loved being around them, chilling on them or whatever. Sometimes I even hoarded them a bit so I could have all of them,” he said. “Then puberty hit, got one of my first boners while chilling on a beach ball. Young and horny, so I found some water wings etc at home which magically found their way into my bed. Found a inflatable gator too which then also got a spot on my bed.”
His collection is now worth more than $10,000, he said—40 pieces total, a mix of basic Intex whales and alligators, vintage toys, and newer toys from places like Austin, Texas based maker PuffyPaws.
For Whaleman, the sensory appeal of a big, air-filled PVC pony can’t be overstated. “There are sexual and emotional factors. Their smell and feel turns me on. A strong smell is amazing, soft vinyl just feels really good to me. Touching the soft vinyl is amazing. Then emotionally, they are comforting, help me to relax and just make me happy,” he said. When he has a bad day, he cuddles with a pool toy for a while.
“Also there are some toy shapes that are just really sexy to me. I prefer them big usually so I fit nicely on them when riding or cuddling,” he said.
Not everyone climbs inside their inflatables, or feels an urge to. But for some, like Whaleman, being inside is a huge part of the sensory experience. He sometimes gets into one of the all-black suits to “get away from the world for a while,” he said.
Breathing is done in a few ways depending on the suit: Some suits have a patch in front of the face that’s perforated to let air circulate, while others have a tube that connects to a snorkel mouthpiece, a CPAP-style mask, or a full face snorkel.
“Most people who try it for the first time say ‘that is not what I was expecting’ and say that it felt really good to be squeezed all over. It is worth trying,” Whaleman said. “Pretty much everyone loves the ‘being squeezed’ feeling, but some people have an issue with their head being covered.”
This process usually takes two people—and for safety reasons, he strongly recommends that whoever’s hopping into the suit has a helper standing by, for emergencies. Candy Coated Squeaks offers some suits without head coverings, or open faces. The suits come with zippers and valves on the inside for a quick escape, and he suggests people carry a retractable knife when getting into a suit, just in case. If someone needs to cut themselves out of a suit, he’ll repair it for free—but he hasn’t had to, yet.
As a fetish that runs the kink spectrum, inflatables are something to be experienced firsthand. Putting the elation of finally getting oneself into a welded-together whale toy from a department store and inflating it is hard to describe, even for people who’ve been doing it for decades.
“It’s not what it seems. There is no real good way to explain it until you just try it,” Whaleman said. “If you like being hugged, you will probably love it. Have an open mind. You never know what you are missing out on if you don’t try things!”
“It’s more than just dudes humping children’s pooltoys,” Dirk said. “There are many shades to it, and where it’s a fetish it’s mostly a fun fetish – impossible to really enjoy if you can’t laugh at yourself.”
