Man addicted to wearing casts after nearly dying turns fetish into career
A man who loves wearing orthopaedic casts has turned his unique fetish into a career.
After a near-death experience in a motorbike crash in 2009, Kevin Masters started regularly applying casts to his body. The 36-year-old said: "I know people have a lot of anxiety when it comes to being open about their desires to wear casts. I'm very open and honest about it but other people might not be as comfortable.
"It can be anxiety-inducing telling someone that you like casts but I am the way I am, telling people or hiding it won't change that." Now, he's making money by selling pictures of himself and other models in casts online, earning around $1,250 a month. He also helps others experience being placed in casts, and still casts himself once a month.
Kevin, who is a dad and lives in Chicago with his wife Erin, 33, appeared on the TLC show My Strange Addiction in 2015. Kevin, who had a fascination with casts since childhood, broke his wrist rollerblading at the age of 12. He confessed: "When I was a kid I had seen a few people in casts and that sort of sparked my interest. Like what does the cast feel like?
By 2011, Kevin started ordering supplies online to cast himself and even attended a training course in Florida (Cast Productions!/Youtube)"When I broke my wrist, I hid my cast, I think pretty much nobody knew that I had it. I think I hid it because I felt guilty, I had this thought process of, 'What if somebody found out that I enjoy it?'. One of the things I would do as a kid is I would steal all my parents' toilet paper and I would wrap up my legs and arms, and it kind of gave me that feeling of pressure.
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"I liked the feeling of it at first and then as I grew older and I hit puberty, then it became a sexual thing." In 2009, Kevin had a near-death experience in a motorbike accident where he broke his femur. He shared: "When I made a full recovery, I just thought about it and realized I didn't want to hide it anymore. It didn't seem as big of a deal after the accident."
By 2011, Kevin started ordering supplies online to cast himself and even attended a training course in Florida to learn the proper healthcare techniques for casting. Since then, he's been buying his supplies in bulk. Kevin admitted he felt "overwhelming anxiety" when he first started casting himself.
He said: "I would worry that if I put a cast on then what would I tell people and if I was honest with them, then I had that fear of rejection. When I was first starting out, I told my girlfriend at the time and one other friend and they let me try out casting them. At some point, I realized that there was a big gay community that liked seeing men in casts so that's when I started wearing more casts and I started producing my own content."
Kevin first showed an interest in casts as a child but it wasn't until a near-death experience in 2009 that he began applying them himself (Cast Productions!/Youtube)In 2015, Kevin featured in the TLC show My Strange Addiction and said interest in his hobby "boomed" overnight. He added: "Because of the show, I've gotten a lot of people who have messaged me and say 'Hey, I want to tell my wife that I want to cast her, how do I do this?' I always start back with, 'Have you asked her to wear a cast?' and the answer is almost always no.
"You've got to start from there, people fear so much judgement but you've got to ask your spouse or your girlfriend or whoever you're dating or want to cast. If they say no then that's the end of it but tell your significant other that you want to cast them and see what they say, they might say yes."
Over time, Kevin said that the hobby has started to lose its "sexual component" for him and now he focuses a lot of his time on turning it into a side hustle with the hopes of growing a business. "Over time it's sort of lost the sexual component and now it's more of the social component, it's more that wearing a cast out in public to have people sign it is fun," he said.
"I'll have people contact me who want to experience wearing a cast and I'll happily cast them. They just pay for the supplies and sometimes we'll do a photo shoot. I cast myself whenever the mood strikes me, sometimes it'll be once in three months, other times it's more regularly. I probably cast myself on average once a month now."
Since his motorcycle accident in 2009, Kevin has needed further surgery on his left leg and said his expertise in casting has also come in handy during his recovery. He said: "Doctors tend to give you medical boots instead of casts now so I was prescribed a boot which I wore for two weeks but I realized it was not making my leg heal so I ended up putting on my own cast and I found out that a cast can actually heal a fracture much better than some of these boots can."
Trained as a mechanic, Kevin has been unable to work since his latest surgery, so the dad has been focusing his attention on his growing business, Cast Productions. Kevin runs two Patreon pages where people can subscribe to see photos of him and other models wearing casts, and also posts content on YouTube which makes him a combined income of around $1,250 a month.
The dad hopes that by being open about his interest in casts, he will help to break down the stigma around the fetish. He added: "I feel like a lot of people think it's like stolen valor, why would you pretend to be injured? But that's just the scenario of when you'd get a cast, really it's just people's desires to wear the cast, not to seem injured.
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"I'm honest with people now if they ask why I'm wearing a cast. I tell them that I'm not injured, I just like wearing it. I am who I am, I am the way I am, and that's kind of how I found my wife because she was very cool with it all. I'm at a point now where I'm just like, take it or leave it."
* An AI tool was used to add an extra layer to the editing process for this story. You can report any errors to [email protected]
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