(I'm posting this as an edited screenshot because it mentioned a specific source and where to find it that I'm not going to spread around or bring into this community, but I didn't want to leave you hanging about the last part <3)
I'm sorry you're feeling hopeless. 🫂 But always remember - to quote Uncle Iroh - "hope is something you give yourself."
You might feel powerless to change what others think of you, and guess what: you're right. You don't have any control over what other people, think, feel, or believe about you or your fetish or our community. But that's not something to despair about - it's freeing!
Especially in this particular case: these are complete strangers who will likely never know you. What they think has 0 bearing on your life. If you never saw that video, it would not impact your daily life at all.
I'm not saying any of this to be dismissive, I'm saying it means that you can focus on the fact that you ARE in control - of YOUR life, thoughts, actions, beliefs, values, and so on. You can choose to connect and thrive within our community. You can live your life according to what you value and what fulfills you. And you can decide you don't give a shit about what other people's opinions are and do whatever the fuck you want.
Also, I wouldn't think of it as a "public strike against" feedism as if there's a tally we can balance out and win if we can beg for enough favor from the public. The situation is dire out there for fuckin vanilla sex, let alone feedism, whose reputation is already only above rock bottom because way more taboo things like race play and necrophilia are always gonna be taking up that spot for us. But it's been this way for decades. Society can't accept the fact that it's normal for one person to bring themselves to orgasm completely alone in their house. They can barely accept that a cis man and a cis woman can have penis-in-vagina sex for a reason other than reproduction. We are at LEAST a few good decades of genuine progress toward sex and fat liberation away from societal *neutrality* about feedism. Videos like these are not make-or-break-it for us. They suck, but they're a drop in the bucket.
Let me point out to you as well that all but a rare minority of us who had heard of feedism or fat fetishism before discovering this community were first introduced to feedism and fat fetishism by way of stories about abuse and harassment. I was, too, back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, and look at me now :) Some people hear negative stories about feedism and were already closed-minded about sex so they believed it, some people hear it and do their own critical thinking about how to incorporate it into their world view, some people are well educated about kink and can realize that these stories, while awful, are a direct result of living in a society of rape culture, fatphobia, and stigma about sex, and are likely not reflective of every person with these fetishes. And many of us who internalized generalizing stories as the truth in the past have since gained experience, knowledge, and critical thinking that has led us to change our mind. The same could happen to the people who watched the same video as you did yesterday.
But I've talked to people who were adults participating in the fat fetish community back when I was still in elementary school and the same tune was being sung about feedism back then, too. Feedism was the creepy cousin fat fetishists didn't want to be associated with.
Which seems strange now, right? Gaining & Encouraging, chub/chaser, fat fetishism, stuffing, and feedism are all under a wide and loose, but still shared, umbrella now. There's community with each other on a level that's literally never happened before.
We're having discussions about Risk-Aware Consensual Kink and consent and feedist etiquette in the past 5-7 years that I had heard from the BDSM communities 13-15 years ago when I joined this community but NEVER saw amongst the gaining community. People who were around in the 2000s have told me they hadn't heard of RACK concepts at all back in the day, and were just starting to have conversations as a community about the physical and mental realities of being a gainer/feedee/fat admiree rather than just fantasy and kink-focused interactions.
This community has come SO FAR, and it's been amazing and lovely and heartwarming and really empowering (!!) to see that growth happen in real time in the past 15 years.
THAT'S where we find hope. We can't control that some people think we're all sick abusers, but we can make sure that we do everything we can to educate and spread awareness among our own about how to recognize abuse and that abuse and harassment is not welcome here. And we've made an amazing start on that! Because of the huge weight of taboo and stigma around feedism and fat fetishism, we didn't have earlier generations or the wider BDSM fetish community to help teach us about safe and healthy kink, and people have suffered because of it. We've had to raise and parent ourselves as a fledgeling fetish community, which means it's a longer, bumpier ride than if we had more people to help pass on that generational kink education to us, but we've put in a lot of loving, dedicated work (especially sex workers, and esp women) and have made it such a long way!
And if we want to look outside our community, too, we can work on fat activism and sex-positive activism out in the world to help chip in so future generations won't have to deal with the stigma, shame, and isolation we've had to. But it's my opinion that it's a generational, incremental fight, like the fight against axes of oppression, because of how intertwined kink acceptance is with fatphobia, reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, misogyny, homophobia, and racism. We're in it for the long haul, so just because things are really quite ass right now doesn't mean we can't do anything and it doesn't mean no progress is happening.
I'm with you, though, I'm not immune to getting upset sometimes when I see people, especially fat liberationists who should know better, generalize specific abuse stories to all of us.
But, like, honestly, focusing on the wonderful and complex and weird reality of our community and working toward making it a better place makes all that really not matter to me at the end of the day.
I know you sent this like 20 hours ago but hope you're giving yourself some compassion and taking some time away from screens/social media and taking care of yourself and drinking plenty of water <3 And I hope one day you can also feel the fiery blaze of realizing you Don't Give A Shit about what other people think of you/us, bc it's really quite fun and peaceful :)
