A lot of this kink for me is about making someone feel comfortable and sated. I want you to relax while I make you food, I want you to enjoy everything you eat and not hold back, I want you to feel warm and appreciated by me. Watching someone else eat lots is so cute to me. It’s just like I want to take care of someone. I want someone to get round off of me doting over them and making sure their belly is always filled, maybe even overfilled at points. I just love the idea of making someone feel so comfortable with eating that they just eat to their heart’s content all the time and always indulge themselves, and get chubbier and softer as a result. If you’re not struggling and heaving to get up after we’ve eaten together, I’m not loving you hard enough. And then, after stuffing themselves to the brim, I want them to rest and sleep off their food coma somewhere warm and cozy.
Feedism is at its best when indulgence is allowed to feel warm and shared instead of transactional. Having a comforting, caring partner who helps you feel safe enough to enjoy yourself just seems central to a good experience to me.
I've seen a fair amount of fat liberation activists explain that they have always been fat, they're not about to stop, and that's natural and beautiful and fine. That's an incredibly important message.
What I've seen less - and what I want to remind people of - is this: if you've become fat, that's also natural and beautiful and fine.
When you're a fat person who has been thin in the past, that comes with its own brand of shaming. People take your history of thinness as proof that you don't have to be fat. You often fear the look of disappointed surprise in the eyes of someone you haven't met since you were thin. People try to determine "what happened". They don't see your fat body as just you, but as a sort of symptom that isn't part of you.
Becoming fat is not a tragedy, it's not a sign of failure, it's not a bad or shameful thing. The thin you is not the Real you. You are always real and always worthy of freedom, respect and peace. You are allowed to be fat no matter how or when you became fat.
if your dms were open this would probably go there lol. But I just want to share that it is refreshing seeing another human with this “kink” who is also asexual. I see so seen with your blog and it’s nice seeing someone else here in the community. Thank you for your blog.
Yeah, I just don't have the energy to have my dms open, most people have been very disrespectful and I no longer have any desire to be in the trenches, even if it means closing myself up to niceties such as this one :P
It feels oddly nice to be refered as "another human" ngl. You'd be surprised how many people in this community are in the ace spectrum, I've seen many artist into this kink that are ace, seems like there are many fat lovers who only want to do that, love a fat belly.
I'm glad you feel seen with my blog, darling, it is nice to feel some representation out there in the wild 💖
Okay, hot concept time once again! So, another inherently super attractive thing is when formerly athletic people get fat (as feedees). Like, listen; once again, JUST THE MESSENGER. Like, someone going from fit to like REALLY chonky is just umph, you know? Like, they could run like SEVERAL laps before, but now get winded climbing the stairs? Getting off of the COUCH??! All because they got super into eating to satisfy their fantasies??! Because stuffing their face became more important??!
Someone on Feabie made a post along the lines of "I don't want a partner that views my fat body neutrally - I want a [man] who's enthusiastic about me BECAUSE I look like this".
That resonated with me HARD. On the other side of the matter, at least. I realized I NEED a partner who's into feedism. With a big appetite and a fat belly to sink into. To adore and squeeze and love, and it's clear now that no other type of body will do.
Being fat in summer is hard for a lot of reasons, and one of them is skin folds. This is because skin folds love to trap moisture, and moisture+heat=bad. And moisture+heat+friction=worse.
When you have skin folds, summer can really suck. I'm not going to touch on any of the mental and emotional issues that come from the way fat bodies are treated- I'm talking about the physical issues that come from heat. Fat people sweat more! Our body fat acts as an insulator, meaning that we have to put out more sweat for evaporative cooling to be effective- and trust me, it's not always that effective.
There are lots of places skin folds develop, but the two I'm going to focus on today are abdominal and chest skin folds, and give you some specific information and recommendations for what you can do about them.
The abdominal skin fold, also known as apron belly, is tissue that hangs down over your abdomen and upper pubic area. The more technical term for this is a pannus. This tends to be a skin fold with a lot of surface area, since it usually goes from hip to hip, the whole length of your front. Pannus can also develop after a pregnancy, or after weight loss (and weight loss surgery). The principle is the same- the area under it needs to be cared for no matter how it develops!
Chest skin folds are probably the most common type of skin fold because most people with breasts has them. But you don't need mammary tissue to develop this skin fold! Anybody, regardless of sex, can develop overlapping skin on their chest. There's many more protective products available for people with breasts, due to the cultural expectation of bra wearing. But for folks with gynecomastia or pseudogynecomastia, there's less information and resources out there.
By the way: gynecomastia is excess breast gland tissue that develops in men/AMAB people. Pseudogynecomastia is when the glands don't develop but the fat deposits do. Externally and visually, they're very similar, but there are some physiological differences that... don't matter for this piece honestly. Whether it's glands or fat, the tissue is still there, and still needs to be taken care of!
Skin Fold Skin Care
Nobody teaches you this stuff, so don't feel bad if you don't know it. When you're fat, nobody ever tells you how to take care of your skin, unless they're shaming you for it. Usually the only people who care about fat people's comfort are other fat people. So let's talk about how to take care of your skin folds in the summer.
The key elements to skin fold care and comfort are keeping the skin dry, but also keeping it hydrated. Sounds a little paradoxical, I know, but when I say "dry" I'm referring to the surface of the skin. You have sweat glands all over your body, and when you sweat on the surface of your skin, it evaporates or it's wicked away by your clothes. But when air can't get to it because it's under a skin fold, the moisture just stays there. And that's not good!
Moisture trapped between skin folds can lead to a few things that aren't a lot of fun. It can promote skin yeast infections and bacterial infections. It can lead to intertrigo, a red bumpy friction rash. Heat rash is more likely in the summer... because, well, it's hot.
One of the best things you can do is introduce a barrier between the sides of the skin fold. This can be barrier cream (my least favorite, it's messy), body powder, friction gel (like the kind of thing you use for chub rub on your thighs- think Gold Bond or Bodyglide sticks, or Monistat anti-chafing gel), or a physical barrier made from soft cloth.
For a pannus, you can get these things called tummy liners that are a crescent-shaped band of cloth. You lift up the pannus, lay the band against your upper pubic area, and let the skin fold hold it in place. Some people will tuck the front of their underwear under the skin fold, but for others this is less comfortable. And this whole thing is about keeping you comfortable, so do what feels right.
If you have breasts, a bra with cups is a great way to help keep them dry. A bra without cups will often squish them together, and while it can still keep the area under your breasts dry, it can promote moisture between the breasts. For some people, this isn't a problem- it all depends on the size and shape of your body. The cups don't have to be wired- they just need to keep your breasts separated so that they're not rubbing against each other.
If you don't want to wear a bra with cups, or if you don't like the feeling of wearing a bra at all, or if you want extra sweat protection, you can get cotton bra liners, just like the tummy liners. They work the same way- lift your breasts or chest tissue and put the liner in the fold beneath. If you have a small skin fold that doesn't come down very far, this might not work so well, but if you have a larger skin fold that's got more than half an inch or so of overlap, this should stay in place just fine.
You can also of course wear bra liners with with bras. The band will hold it the liner in place, adding an extra layer of padding and sweat protection. But if you don't wear a bra, if your breasts or chest tissue is substantial enough, it will stay in place.
Bra liners are flat. If you wear one, unless you're shirtless, nobody will know. They can help keep you dry, even if you don't have developed breast tissue- like think about the skin folds that fat people without breasts get.
Even if you're not getting a shower before bed, it's a good idea to take a gentle wipe and swipe in between the skin folds. It'll help soothe the skin and prevent bacteria or yeast from colonizing the surface. Be sure to wash the folds with a gentle, ph balanced soap or cleanser. And when you get out of the water, whether that's a shower, bath, pool, lake, whatever, take some time to dry your skin folds. Don't rub- pat them dry. Rubbing can irritate them. It's easy to forget, but you'll be glad you did. This kind of hygiene practice makes the skin feel nicer, calmer, and less irritated, and you deserve to be comfortable!
Hydrate or Die-Drate
When you're fat, you need to drink more water than smaller-bodied people. We sweat more and we have more surface area to our skin, which means more sweat glands, which means we lose more water. The best way to do this is simply to drink more. Drinking will help keep you cool and replenish the water lost to sweat anyways, so it's really important to keep that up in the summer, when it's hot!
If you don't like plain water, no worries! All liquid counts! I drink a lot of iced tea- even though it has caffeine and caffeine is a diuretic, the net effect is not dehydrating. And everything with water content counts, including the food you eat. Watermelon is 92% water. Cucumbers are 90% water. Popsicles are almost entirely water with some sugar in there. Get them at the store, or make some ice pops in the freezer with your favorite fruits. Freeze grapes, they're super delicious when frozen, and grapes are like 82% water. Try to think about your daily snacks and meals in terms of water, and see where you can add a little more hydration!
Now, you may want to know, how much is enough? The old 8 glasses a day adage isn't really accurate. The current science suggests 3,000 ml for men and 2,200 ml for women, but where do these numbers come from? The fact that there's a sex difference suggests that this is based on average body size- and it turns out these numbers come from European population studies that did not include a lot of fat people. So I did some more hunting and some reliable, but not peer-reviewed sources, suggest that you should drink about half an ounce of water per your weight in pounds. That's an easy enough metric to understand! And you can always drink a little more. While you may have heard of people becoming sick from water intoxication, that's extremely rare.
So in conclusion: drink lots of water and keep the area underneath your skin folds dry. Allow yourself to prioritize your comfort and don't feel bad about the skin you're in. Eat a popsicle.
Feel free to add on with any additions and other helpful tips, but remember: fatphobic commentary is not welcome here, and mean comments will be removed. Advice to lose weight is not helpful- even if someone is losing weight, they still have to live in the body they have now. And that body deserves to be cared for.
Fat camp but instead of wasting your time with useless diets and exercise they encourage you to move as little as possible push you into eating until your gasping for air at each meal and constantly being bombarded with snacks.
Just think about it your sleeping quarter having built in funnels in eacg bed, never being a few feet away from a snack, feeders flooding the place making sure your stuffed around the clock, tailors constantly letting out your clothes trying hide the damage the food has done to your figure and so much more!
By the end of the camp your forced into clothes that can't hold your blubber back waddling off the campsite with your stomach out and your mind racing on what to eat next after all you just spent the past few weeks eating non stop why stop now tubby ;)
It’s so cute when you’ve updated your wardrobe. Suddenly, you have shirts again that fall loosely over your round belly. You wear them feeling relaxed and content; it was time for an update—everything used to be too tight, too short, but now you have room again and can move more freely.
But it’s so hot that this won’t last long! The way you’re eating, you’ll soon be filling out that new shirt size. I’m already looking forward to the day when we see our success in the fact that the new shirts are getting tight around the belly again, because then there’s even more of you for me to love. And when you sit next to me on the sofa and your shirt rides up while I feed you snacks, I personally feel that the best fit has been achieved again. Come on, dig in—we’ve got work to do!
The Beauty, Liberation, and Healing Potential of Feedism
Last year I wrote a popular article about why the thin partners of fat people owe them not just their respect, care, and affection, but indeed they - we - owe them solidarity. A lot of that article is spent laying out the bigotry that fat people face in the world on a daily basis and trying to make it clear how thin people like myself can be good to the fat folks we want to be with, whether that’s sexually, romantically, or otherwise.
In many ways that article was really a prelude to something else I’ve wanted to write about for quite some time. I and many others are militant that being attracted to fat people is not a fetish. Depending on who you ask, it’s a preference or an orientation, but not something that deserves nearly the amount of hand-wringing it gets.
However.
Being attracted to fat people is the ticket to entry to a larger world of kink and fetish-play that extends far beyond vanilla sex that happens to involve a fat body.
Beneath the horrors of anti-fat bigotry and the beauty of relationships with or between fat people, is an entire world of sex and sexuality that centres on fatness above and beyond beautiful bodies. I have been working on this article for quite some time, but in particular with @fatliberation's recent post about feedism, I want to talk about that - and how I think it offers unique opportunities for healing.
Deviance, Fat, Fetish, and Kink
For those of us attracted to fat people, the claim that such an orientation is fetishistic has been deeply hurtful and, to most of us, is completely wrong. After all: being attracted to thin people isn’t a fetish - why would people with a different body type be any different? But it goes deeper than that. As Najarian and Nee wrote in their brilliant 2023 paper “Fat Beyond the Fetish”:
The reality of fat attraction is more complex than fetishism allows. Fat bodies are admired in fluctuating and unstable ways across social, cultural, historical, and demographic boundaries, making it impossible to provide any sort of comprehensive definition of or persuasive explanation for fat beauty. Sociological and psychological research has focused (too much) on the deviancy of fat attraction, leading researchers to speculate about, among other topics, the possibility that “fat admiration stems from an idealization of individuals who challenge social norms about sexual identity and appearance” (Swami and Tovée 2009, 90).13 While it can be useful to theorize various forms of sexual desire (related to fatness or not) that challenge dominant and restrictive standards perpetuated by many contemporary societies, imagining fat attraction as subversive and deviant sustains prevailing suspicions toward fat beauty, closeting fat bodies and the people who admire fat bodies and repositioning them outside the realm of socially acceptable behavior. This logic implicitly (and perhaps unintentionally, though perhaps not) blames individuals for failing to abide by the oppressive circumstances of the culture they inhabit rather than critiquing society for failing to account for the diversity of its population. But fat sexualities are not deviant sexualities.
The use of the word deviant here is a profound one, and for younger people like myself, it’s hard to grasp the power of what that word means, especially in a sexual context. As Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider wrote in their breakthrough work Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (1980), there was a historical moment in post-Enlightenment Europe that led to the development of the very idea of a ‘social problem.’ Echoing historian of ideas Michel Foucault, while there’s something attractive about a move away from a punitive system of punishing sins towards ‘treatment’ of a ‘sickness,’ Conrad and Schneider are resolute that this transformation of how we viewed phenomena such as homosexuality was still tied up in many of the assumptions of prior systems. A sin, in other words, became a sickness.
This kind of thinking was what led the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to declare homosexuality a mental disorder in 1952. The same normative thinking, wherein cis, straight, monogamous couples are the only way to be “healthy” similarly led BDSM to be put in the category of sexual deviancy. It took decades of queer activism to remove homosexuality as a sickness from the DSM, and for BDSM only in 2014 - and even still, the medical and psychological communities love to demonize and pathologize any form of ‘alternative’ sexualities.
The same story is sadly even more hegemonic in terms of fatness, where its vilification has been hegemonic and virtually immovable for almost a century. As has been written about constantly by fat people and allies, fatness is a unique category of social marginalization with a huge degree of permission, and indeed encouragement from society at large. While racism, for example, often requires some minimal degree of euphemism, everyone in society (including, and indeed especially other fat people) has an incredible degree of not just permission, but indeed encouragement, to view fat people as lazy, dumb, unfeeling, unworthy, and, for our purposes here, non-sexual.
So, if you’re someone who is attracted to fat people and, for the sake of argument, you find the idea of people (including yourself or others) getting fatter attractive, where does that leave you? What happens, in other words, if you’re a feedist?
Before I go into the specifics of what it means to be a feedist, I want to lay out the three arguments I want to make in this essay. They are as follows:
Firstly, the attraction towards fat people is perfectly normal, and indeed beautiful and uplifting
Secondly, any form of kink behavior related to fat people needs to be viewed through a lens of social justice and sex positivity, lest any invisible anti-fat bias creep in around the edges.
Lastly, feedism, as a particularly reviled instance of fat-oriented kink, can offer unique pathways towards healing ant pushing back against anti-fat bias, done correctly and consensually.
Let’s dig in.
Fat Attraction
It’s almost bizarre to have to ask the question, but psychologists, sexologists, and medical practitioners have routinely explored why some people are attracted to fat people and others are not. Many of us, being peered at under the microscope, have pushed back: why? Hanne Blank, a fat activist, writes scathingly of this ‘curiosity’:
“Fat people have sex. Sweet, tender, luscious sex. Sweaty, feral, sheet-ripping sex. Shivery, jiggly, gasping sex. Sentimental, slow, face-cradling sex. Even as you read these words, there are fat people out there somewhere joyously getting their freak on. Not only that, but fat people are falling in love, having hook-ups, being crushed-out, putting on sexy lingerie, being the objects of other people’s lust, flirting, primping before hot dates, melting a little as they read romantic notes from their sweeties, seducing and being seduced, and having shuddering, toe-curling orgasms that are as big as they are. It’s only natural.”
Gurleen Khandpur, writing in Media/Culture, follows in spirit with: “While sexual, romantic and/or intimate acts between people where at least one individual is fat (Fat Sex) are deemed atypical, abnormal, fetishistic and even abusive, such encounters between able-bodied individuals who are thin or of average weight (Thin Sex) are deemed normal and desirable” and that “fat prejudice and thin privilege underlie this discrepancy.”
Another way to put this is to say that to classify the attraction to fat people as abnormal or, at the very least, harmful to fat people because it “encourages” them to remain fat, is to say that both fat people are inherently unattractive and unworthy of attraction, but that being fat itself is bad. (We’re not going to even indulge the “what about their health” argument here - the science is wildly complex on the relationship between fat, health, and most ‘solutions’ are merely attempts to sell something from an ideological or commercial viewpoint).
This means that when fat people - and those who find them attractive - can enjoy a genuine connection that celebrates fatness, it can have a kind of dual significance. Most of us like to feel attractive and wanted, but if you’ve been told you’re ugly, unworthy, and sinful just for existing in your body, imagine how much more significant it is to have someone who says “Nah, you’re hot just the way you are.” It’s also why, as I wrote in “You Owe Your Fat Partner Solidarity,” it’s so important that potential thin partners also understand the fat experience and be an ally to fat people as best they can. But as someone who has had the privilege to be able to share my attraction with people who hadn’t had that (consensual) experience of lust, I can tell you personally, it’s been really special both to me and them.
Fat Admiration and Fat-Forward Sexualities
Those of us who are significantly, primarily, or solely attracted to fat bodies are sometimes labeled as “fat admirers” (FAs for short). This is a strange term in many ways because it still inherently pathologizes fat bodies - ever met a ‘thin admirer’? - but it also can be helpful in conceptualizing people who, as I say, are significantly, primarily, or solely attracted to fat people. Because of its narrowness and, for some of us, the somewhat cringey connotations around “admiration,” I’ll generally use “fat-forward sexualities” as my term of choice in this article and note the importance of the word forward for a moment.
Sexualities that significantly centre attraction to people in fat bodies are not inherently interested only in those same bodies. As an older study from 2009 showed among surveyed men who were “fat admirers” (FAs), those with a fat-forward sexuality had a much broader range of body-types that they found attractive than so-called “normal” people. As someone with this kind of attraction, I feel both proud and grateful that I have access to desire for a significant range of how humans show up in the world – and, honestly, I feel really sad for people who don’t.
Source: Wikipedia User Mewtu synthesizing data from: Swami, Viren, and Martin J. Tovée. "Big beautiful women: The body size preferences of male fat admirers." Journal of Sex Research 46, no. 1 (2009): 89-96.
At the same time as Najarian and Nee push back against fat-oriented attraction as being fetishistic, they do think there is something unique about this world, as well. As they write:
”We have found it useful to adopt the discursive framework of what we call fat-forward sexualities, which opens a range of opportunities to theorize, articulate, and describe the alluring complexity of fat attraction and fat sexuality.” [emphasis added]
They are careful to hit home the challenge of defining any sexuality because of the inherent breadth of any sexual community and, at the same time, the danger of cementing one particular understanding that can become restricting, and even oppressive, to the people it is supposed to identify. In their “sketches” of fat-forward sexualities, they identify six features:
Attraction to fatness transcends the straight male (white) gaze and is deeply implicated in queerness; furthermore, the role of lesbians and gay men in making space for fat attraction is often overlooked and under-valued;
Attraction to fatness has often been (and to me anecdotally, is increasingly) associated with transness. Expressions of gender euphoria related to fatness are commonplace in trans communities (even at the same time as disordered eating and anti-fatness are also extremely strong) and can be deeply beautiful;
Attraction to fatness can break down familiar stereotypes even in a cis-heterosexual context, and they believe fat-forward sexuality always retains a “queer subtext,” citing from Don Kulick’s essay on fat porn in 2005 where he notes that “[fat porn] displaces erotic pleasure from the genitals and disperses it to other parts of the body, thereby reconfiguring what can count as a pleasurable body” (while also retaining a reflexively critical view of pornography, too);
Attraction to fatness takes myriad combinations, with fat people actively, happily choosing to date one another, fat people seeking out contrastingly thin partners (as some of mine have in the past), and thin people seeking out fat partners;
Attraction to fatness is not the only, and sometimes it is not even the primary reason, why someone may be attracted to a particular fat person. As I have had to say to my partner and other fat partners over the years: fat people are not interchangeable for someone with a fat-forward sexuality simply because they’re fat.
Attraction to fatness is a broad field that contains pluralities of different forms of sexual attraction, just like queerness, and there is no overarching “right” way to embody a fat-forward sexuality.
Because of the diversity of experiences, orientations, and, unfortunately, the range of positive and negative behaviours from those with fat-forward sexualities, one of the groups that are most suspicious of fat admirers are often fat people themselves. This is because there can be so much internalized shame about being attracted to fat people that sometimes their worst abusers can be the people who find them most attractive. One of the tamest, but most common versions of this is the “secret fat girlfriend” (sadly, women generally get this the most), but there are other, more ugly instances of this kind of internalized shame being taken out on others in cruel and dismissive ways.
There is a great deal written about how badly fat people are treated in the dating and sex world, including by their would-be admirers, but fat voices can, should, and do speak for themselves in this respect.
And while I am frustrated that people like me need an identifying label just for being attracted to people we find hot, being attracted to fat people is beautiful. I feel deeply grateful that, for whatever unknown reason, I have been wired to find softness beautiful to behold and sensuous to touch.
More important than my take as a thin person, however, is what fat people themselves are saying:
Marie Southard Ospina, writing about her experience as a fat person encountering Big Beautiful Women (BBW) and Big Handsome Man (BHM) porn, notes appreciatively the “images or clips of fat babes lovingly caressing their bellies, zooming into the waves of their bodies as they dance, posing like classic pin-ups, or delighting in the movement of their jiggling thighs. They capture their fatness in ways we are told, both overtly and covertly, are off limits for people without flat tummies and thigh gaps.” And that: “In all the content I’ve seen, though, fatness is framed as intriguing, powerful, sensual and beautiful. There is no hint of shame – a word that is arguably meant to govern our entire sense of self-understanding as fat people.”
I could write a treatise on the different fat people I’ve found attractive, but Ospina’s writing here about why she likes people like me says more than I think I ever could:
“It’s people who think every stretch mark and roll is a turn-on who subsequently turn me on; people who know that I want them to bite and suck and dig their fingers into every inch of my body, as anyone remotely kinky of a smaller size might want and expect of partners.”
Feedism
All of this preamble pushing back on the bigotry that fat people, and, to a lesser extent, those of us who find them attractive, face, is to really hit home just what a unique category of social exclusion fatness really is. I have yet to see any evidence why being attracted to fat people is bad in any way, let alone a form of fetishism, any more than being attracted to someone particularly tall, muscular, or with red hair is. But that’s about a generality; now I want to talk about a particularity:
Kinks and fetishes generally take shape in one of two ways: either someone is attracted to something fairly common and has a fixation and need for that thing that it becomes a core part of their sexuality above and beyond what it means to others, and/or they are attracted to things that are generally considered non-sexual (e.g., feet, knives, diapers, etc.).
In the context of fatness, if we correctly reject the premise that being attracted to a fat body itself is abnormal, then there is still an entire world that exists as part of that latter category of traditionally non-sexual things that have become sexual for some. This, to me, is where the conversation about feedism starts.
Academic literature on feedism is woefully inadequate and often sex-negative and pathologizing. Most often they make the mistake of equating a heightened attraction to or preference for fat people as the same as feedism (which, a la Najarian and Nee, it is obviously not), but the occasional articles from the early 2000s generally are resolute in perceiving feedism as a unsalvageably patriarchal, dehumanizingly fetishistic, and anti-fat practice. I won’t bother to mention the gonzo journalism that has largely defined coverage on feedism since the very beginning and largely continues to.
One of the earliest articles to “define” feedism, in 2004 Social Semiotics paper, states:
“Feederism [sic] is an underground fat sexual practice that involves women who allow themselves to be submissively force-fed through a funnel by a dominant male master, who derives sexual excitement from watching his submissive servant grow fatter and fatter as he forces her to eat more and more. [...] Disturbingly, men who engage in this sexual practice fetish (known as “feeders”) often force-feed the feedee to the point where she is completely is immobilized.”
A more nuanced and empirical, though still somewhat negative, study on feedism in 2013 in the International Journal of the Social Sciences concluded that:
“[W]hen it comes to feederism, men are still in control of the behavior and of how women are portrayed and treated as feedees. Although some of the [circa 2012 feedist] websites discussed here may be advancing transgressive ideas about fat women as sexual beings, the objectification of women as sex objects is further perpetuated by these same websites. [...] At its extreme, ideas about control over women involve manipulating their bodies using dangerous means, and the lines between consent and sexual assault are blurred. Consent is a difficult term to define in a culture where patriarchal values about sex have been internalized by members of society. Still, [online feedist spaces have] the potential to create loving, supportive communities for people of size rather than exploitative communities that mimic the offline world”
A smattering of papers and articles, such as Don Kulick’s 2005 book of essays on fat, and a masters thesis in 2008 by Alyshia Bestard, Feederism: an Exploratory Study into the Stigma of Erotic Weight Gain, were some of the first attempts to treat feedism with a more curious, and occasionally appreciative, approach. Both from her interviews and secondary research, Bestard defined “feederism [sic] asexual practice where participants are aroused by thoughts and actions pertaining to weight gain either in themselves or in another person.” Encouragingly, Bestard concluded that her interviewees all expressed autonomy and pragmatism around both their fantasies and (often rare) real-world practices in feedist dynamics, especially as it related to weight gain.
The largest and most encompassing study of feedism is Kathy Charles’ and Michael Palkowski’s 2015 Feederism: Eating, Weight Gain, and Sexual Pleasure (summarized in a great interview). They interview 23 feedists of all orientations and focus on a series of questions that delve deeply and with care into the origins, experiences, and challenges of living as a feedist. To summarize the whole study would do it a disservice, but there are a few things worth noting:
Firstly, while weight gain is an essential element to almost every study participant, many respondents felt that they shared a broader sense of connectivity around the transgressiveness of attraction to, sex with, and the aesthetics around fat people and fatness.
Secondly, the researchers noted with surprise just how young many feedists earliest inclinations emerged in early childhood.
Thirdly, as the authors say: “the interviewees in this research presented a very different picture [than the one in popular culture] with agency at the heart of how they talked about themselves and feederism” and that the rejected binaries around feeders and feedees and “preferred subtle variations that eliminated the implied power dynamic.”
And lastly, and most importantly, both the authors identified the diversity of both people who identified as feedists and the ways in which they practiced (i.e., from the purely fantastical to the materially intense); this breadth, they said, is almost completely unrepresented in any other popular or academic representations.
In their conclusion the authors felt it was possible to be an ethical, healthy feedist, provided one practiced with what we might today call a risk-informed kink practice and with an awareness of individual health needs, physical, emotional, or otherwise. Despite its age, and its methodological limitations (e.g., 23 interviews), Charles’ and Palkowksi’s book remains one of the definitive texts on the community.
Subsequent research, limited though it has been, has largely tended to agree with this characterization, while still noting that kink-related safety, particularly for fat participants, remains problematically underdeveloped. Najarian and Knee’s recent work to de-stigmatize fat-related sexual behaviour is one of the most full-throatedly supportive academic works that even touches on feedism. Although almost a decade old now, Bestard's and the Charles-Palkowski studies remain some of the most encompassing and rigorous to date. The dearth of research on feedism, even within fat studies itself, continues to be a significant issue.
Feedism in its Own Terms
I cannot begin to speak for the feedist community in all of its breadth. As a member of that community, though, and one who situates myself firmly in relation to other movements like fat liberation and sex-positive feminism, I do think I can offer a little insight from my vantage point to start to clarify and cohere the rough terrain of feedism today.
Feedism (or, archaically, “feederism”) I define aa a field (rather than a unity) of kinky orientations, behaviours, practices, preferences, language, beliefs, and fantasies that all exist as part of, and yet also go beyond, the experience of fat admiration. Elements beyond fat admiration involve sexualization of aspects of the fat experience, including sometimes negative experiences (e.g., ill-suited clothes, furniture, etc.), food and eating, and bodily transformation.Any aspect of this field can take place with a partner or alone, and by and with fat and thin people, together or alone.
Note that I have and will consistently refer to feedism as a kink and not a fetish to mark the distinction between a desire (a kink) for this particular non-traditional sexual experience amongst feedists, and a non-negotiable, or sometimes pathological need (a fetish, or a paraphilia) for it, which exists for some, but certainly not all feedists.
While I believe all feedists are necessarily implicated in some sort of fat-forward sexuality, such as being a fat admirer, it is important to note that not every person with a fat-forward sexuality is necessarily a feedist.
Source: author.
From both my lived experience and reading the academic literature, I have come to see feedism as having four fundamental components that mix and mingle to produce innumerable individual experiences.
Source: author.
These components are very broad, and many feedists will only show up partially, and sometimes not at all, in different aspects, but collectively they represent the broad field that I concieve of as feedism, and necessarily each creates a sub-spectrum or spectrums within which feedist identities are formed.
Firstly, almost all feedists have some kind of overarching attraction to or with fatness, whether in themselves or others. Because feedists live in all types of bodies, some of the variations of attraction may run in one or multiple directions: someone may like their fatness to be attractive to others; some may like fat in general, including theirs; and some still may only be attracted to fatness in others. Each is as valid as any other. Sizes and shapes of attraction within the community vary immensely: some people may be attracted to a person, including themselves, with a stuffed, non-pregnant belly that’s comparatively thin, while others may prefer people as large as “inifini-fats.” The image of feedists only being attracted to people who are immobile is categorically wrong and harmful not just how feedist are perceived, but also ignores the beautiful diversity of experiences within this field of attraction.
Secondly, many feedists have a specific and sexual attraction to the imagery, noises, senses, smells, and feelings related to eating and food, often in large quantities. Some feedist blogs, for example, will intersperse images of fat people with GIFs of food being cooked, served, or eaten without any reference to a body at all. Furthermore, some feedists enjoy listening to and/or recording the sounds of food being digested, burps, or other bodily and/or social processes related to food and eating.
Thirdly, many feedists have a sexual attraction to the lived reality of, and/or fantasies related to, bodily transformation, especially weight gain, but also variously the enlargement of particular body parts (e.g., breast, ass, stomach, feet, etc. “expansion”). In this sense, feedism often overlaps with people who have “transformation” or “expansion” fetishes, such as those related to giants/esses, inflation, blueberries (yes, you read that right), breast expansion, transformations related to monsters or furries (e.g., werewolves), or otherwise. This range of attraction is important to characterize as having both an in-person and fantastical dimension: some feedists, whether because of internalized anti-fatness or otherwise, may choose never to engage with physical changes in their own or others’ bodies. In addition, some feedist's desires exist only in fantastical terms; there are lots of people in the community who enjoy fantasies of fatness on a cosmic scale, with people reaching the size of planets or galaxies. This is considerably less common, but insofar as it’s a fantasy that exists in writing and visual art, it’s mostly harmless. There’s a massive amount of breadth in this particular aspect of the kink, but the common touch-point here is that there’s generally a visual or narrative experience of someone experiencing something growing larger. Amusingly, the timeline of this can range from the instantaneous to things that occur over the course of decades or more.
Lastly, and perhaps most sensitively, many feedists have a specific attraction to particular aspects of the lived experiences of fat people. The aspects of this component of feedism are easily the most wide-ranging component of feedism. Elements of feedist attraction related to the fat experience could include things like:
Celebration of physical aspects of fatness, like stretch marks, that are often derided as negative;
Play, both negative and positive, with the real or fantasized needs of a person in a fat body, particularly related to the eroticisation of care, like being served food, helped with daily chores, bodily cleanliness, and so on;
Play, both negative and positive, with different aspects of how fat bodies interact with the world, like whether or not they fit furniture, clothing, or infrastructure;
Play, both positive and negative, with different elements of language related to fatness, such as affirmative pet names (“my little chubster”) or consensual degradation (“you’ve really let yourself go”). As with any kink, done consensually and in a risk-aware way, anything is possible to be played with, but meaningful kink- and fat liberation-education are essential to doing this in a way that can preserve safety and, ideally, open up opportunities for healing. On this last count, for example, for some people, language that could be considered obscene (“my fatty” / “my piggy”) may be considered deeply intimate and meaningful between consenting partners;
Play, both positive and negative, with symbols of the fat experience that are generally held against fat people, such as scales, weigh-ins, bodily changes, or otherwise.
Any kind of play with negative stereotypes, no matter how consensual and potentially liberating, will always stir challenging reactions from people who witness it without context, and especially if they have non-consensual lived experience with that stereotype. For fat folks in particular, generally used to life-long marginalization and social ostracisation, I don’t blame them in the slightest. Seeing a feedist engaging with fat people on the internet, especially women, in a way that either explicitly plays with fatphobic tropes or, as I have often seen, openly celebrates fatness too much, can create an incredibly negative and sometimes traumatic reaction for all involved, but especially for that fat person.
The important thing to communicate, both from the perspective of creating safety for those who might wish to play in feedist spaces, and for analytical rigour, is that feedism is a wide-ranging kink with innumerable facets, sub-communities, and personal ways that it shows up. That diversity, with the proper safety protocols in place, means there can be space for anyone who wants to dive in.
Feedist Dynamics
The above pillars of feedism are the most general conceptualization of the contours of someone’s sexual experience. You can almost think of them as breaking down the acronym of BDSM which, as we all know, only begins to crack the surface of what it means to be in the kink world. If you’re a feedist and you’re attracted to some aspect of the four pillars, this still says nothing about your role in a feedist dynamic. There are two key considerations here.
Source: author.
Firstly, feedism has a range of roles that people can take on and move between within scenes and relationships. There are four overarching roles, with many subtle nuances underneath -- each of these roles can be inhabited by a person of any gender or sexuality and multiple roles can be inhabited at the same time.
Feedees - feedees are people who enjoy the experience of being fed and/or gaining weight. They may remain thin or fat, or change to become fatter or thinner, over the course of a scene or relationship. Their size is not the determining factor in their identification - rather it is the role they wish to fulfill in a given context.
Feeders - feeders are people who enjoy feeding people and/or watching and helping them gain weight. As noted above but especially important with feeders, this role is not singular and may be inhabited with one or all of the others within the feedist pantheon.
Gainers - gainers is a term, firstly, often used amongst gay men to refer to those who wish to gain weight. In broader usage, however, it is sometimes used to distinguish feedees who enjoy being fed but do not wish to gain weight, from those who wish to gain weight, even if no one is actively feeding them. Someone who gains weight erotically if they do not have a partner may be called a ‘solo-gainer.’
Encouragers - an encourager is a loose term for someone who is a fat admirer and enjoys watching eroticised weight gain, but does not actively feed a partner.
Maintainer - a maintainer is another loose term for someone who has reached a particular size, perhaps after being a gainer and/or a feedee, and while likely (though not always) maintaining a relationship to that prior identity has now "arrived" at a particular point of weight or size and is maintaining that puporsefully - in some bodies, it is worth noting, this may take considerable work, so, a maintainer should not necessarily be perceived as a passive role.
Each of these roles is often highly dynamic over the course of a person’s life. Many feedees can develop feeder tendencies, and vice versa, and the body sizes of everyone involved in the kink can and often do change dramatically over the course of their normal lives. I’m more of an encourager myself and I have put on weight in relationships I have been in, even when my partner did not.
Everyone's bodies are changing all the time, but some of us have the good sense to eroticise that. Lucky us, huh?
Secondly, and returning to BDSM, each of these roles takes place within the context of a power dynamic. It’s important to say that in any relationship with a fat and thin partner, just like an interracial couple, there is an inherent social imbalance of power. But how we are treated in society doesn’t necessarily reflect the dynamic in the bedroom.
Increasingly in sex we talk about tops and bottoms, and, in kink communities, obviously, we think about domsDoms and subs, but it’s important to map out the distinctions here as a reminder of how they relate to the more specific instances of kink.
Tops and bottoms, specifically understood, refer to the physical roles that people play - i.e., are they generally on top, directing the sexual experience, on the bottom, in a position of receiving, or are they versatile?
Dominants and submissives are, as the name suggests, social roles about how we express dominance or submission, to whom, and in what contexts (which, if you’re a switch like me, will vary).
All can show up in a large variety of combinations, all of which can be quite fluid.
Souce: author
Imagine this example:
A fat femme is wearing a strapon and penetrating her thin male partner from behind. She’s eating a doughnut and telling her partner how much bigger she’s going to get than him with each thrust and what a pathetic little worm he is for being so small.
We’ve just witnessed a fat woman who’s a top, a feedee, a Domme, and it sounds like has a bit of a humiliation kink. There are plenty of these people in the world, but we don’t often let them take the spotlight (if you know any more, honestly, please send them my way). The diversity in any kink scene is always its greatest strength.
Risk Aware Consensual Kink in the Context of Feedism
This is both a very broad overview of feedism, and a fairly anodyne one. I’m not talking about the social imbalances between fat and non-fat partners that exist generally, and the many ways that people can get hurt in a feedist dynamic - just like in any kink-related context. Consent and prioritizing safety are key at every step of the way. Predators and malefactors, sadly, do exist and, to push back on a stereotype, they exist at every size and within every role in feedism, just like they do in any community.
There is sadly a complete dearth of risk aware consensual kink (RACK) materials that feedists can draw on, but its general principles can and should be adapted to inform feedist play and thinking. It’s worth going back and reading Gary Switch’s original writing on the origins of RACK out of the idea of “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” kink practices. The metaphors that Switch uses, too, of BDSM being like rock climbing - easy to create safety in, but never 100% danger-free - are readily applicable. In essence, embracing RACK in a feedist relationship means at a minimum:
Creating space for informed and ongoing consent in the relationship or dynamic, and each aspect of it;
Creating safety, both physical and emotional, for each of the partners in both scenes and beyond the bedroom - and while in the case of fatness, we may jump immediately to questions of health, the emotional needs of both partners are absolutely critical here, too.
Practicing aftercare during a scene and actively dialoguing as play partners, lovers, friends, or community members about fatphobia and how it impacts the different members of a scene or interaction.
Feedism as a Healing Kink
I’ve had the privilege over the past few years to finally ‘come out’ to partners and a few friends as a feedist. The experience has been truly life-changing. After years of being terrified of rejection by lovers and other people I care about, I’ve come to see that there is a small but mighty community of people who want to celebrate fat bodies (theirs or others), fight back against fatphobia, and have unique, beautiful erotic experiences while we do so. I’ve never been in a gaining dynamic with a partner and, given its real-world rarity, I have my doubts I ever will; but that doesn’t matter to me as much as you might think.
One of the reasons that it doesn’t is that I have been able to witness the truly transformative power of partners understanding that the changes in their body are not ones they ever have to be ashamed of around me. I had a partner recently who stepped on the scale for the first time in years and cried as I held them, knowing just that seeing the numbers was arousing to me and that whatever they said, they had nothing to fear about how much I was attracted to them. Other partners have played with unintentional weight gain and ill-fitted clothes - turning what might normally have been a mortifying and brutalizing experience into something fun and sexy. Sometimes we play with the language of fatness as a way to reclaim and desensitize what those words mean: when someone is my beautiful fat darling, it can help take some of the stings off of it.
Feedism, like BDSM, includes a massive range of things that people find attractive. Some of those will be quite disturbing to the more vanilla folks in the world - and especially to those who have not disentangled their own internalized fatphobia. But like all good kinks, the opportunity to de-stigmatize, to celebrate the unusual, and to be our weird, wonderful selves is the ultimate joy. Bon appetit.
🩷Hi, friendly PSA- having a feedist kink is extremely expensive (food, clothing, other things needed to live comfortably at a larger size in our day to day lives that you likely aren’t even considering) Please support content creators. Tip them. Without fat cuties sharing themselves, there would be no horny content to get off to. Don’t forget that🩷
