Who Fucks Whom? The Question of Agency in Feedism.
Almost ten years ago, a philosopher invented a new word to describe how sex works: circlusion. I think we can use that word to help us better understand feedism, too.
Essay, 4749 words, 20~ min read.
CW: this essay contains mention of sexual assault and, as part of strong criticisms of anti-fatness, engages with some difficult language around fat bodies.
Introduction
Circlusion is a concept and term coined by German communist thinker Bini Adamczak to create a new way of thinking about agency in sex and other domains by re-framing what it means for objects and holes to interact. The essay defining the term was first published in German-language Missy Magazine, and then popularized in English by its translator, feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, most recently in *Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family.*
The concept has inspired academic, artistic, and even political debates, all on the basis of its simple premise: penetration as a singular concept is not only oppressive as a singular way of understanding sex, it is not useful, empirically or politically; it requires an antonym.
Adamczak writes for us (via Lewis) then:
“Circlusion means pushing something––a ring or a tube––onto something else––a nipple or a shaft. The ring and the tube are rendered active. That’s all there is to it.”
Adamczak’s epistemic and political intentions here are profound within this tight economy of words. Circlusion, she says, “allows us to speak differently about certain form of sex.” This is important not only in opening up new understandings of how physical sex acts occur, but in giving the world a more inclusive imaginary of how a variety of processes occur, helping open up new horizons of social and political possibility.
Feedism, as a kink so often maligned by its critics for violations of consent, can benefit not only from a reframing the things we already do, but also in helping is chart a course for what we want our kink and the things that pertain to it to mean in the world. In this essay I’ll attempt to use the concept of circlusion to lay out how and where our critics get things wrong about us, offer a different reading of feedist dynamics, as well as what we still need to do yet as a community to realize our full liberatory potential.
Who Fucks Whom?
Much of my writing and thinking when it comes to kink is trying to organize a few things as they relate to my own experience.
Firstly, what are the collection of kinks, sexual predispositions, and predilections that have rooted and grown within my sexual system? How can they be defined, what boundaries can I draw around them (or remove), and as best I can identify, where might they have emerged from?
Secondly, what are the ways to both conceive of and practice my particular kink — feedism — in ways that are not only risk aware and consensual (i.e., RACK), but that support broader efforts of social justice (in this case, fat liberation)?
The interplay between definitions and practice can be a little heady for some people, but as I hope to explain, I have found, and hope to share, insights from a circlusive perspective that can directly answer this second question. Specifically, I think it helps push back against a perspective on feedism that has been largely created by external (and often bad faith) critics, which we in the community have unfortunately internalized.
I’m going to call it the “problem of passivity,” or, maybe more helpfully “who fucks whom?”
Against Fat Consent
“I need feminism because people tell me I should be thankful that my rapist wanted to have sex with me,” submission to Who Needs Feminism? (2011)
In the first-ever academic writing on feedism (at least that I am aware of), Samantha Murray wrote in 2004:
“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.”
Murray was the first, but there are many who came after her with not only a similar “understanding” of feedism, but equally, and often more, intensely negative reactions, often building on older critiques of second-wave, anti-sex feminists. (To learn more about this, check out Gayle Rubin’s fantastic lecture about the ‘feminist sex wars’ of the 1980s-1990s).
Like the anti-pornography and anti-sex work feminists before her, human rights lawyer Leyla-Denisa Obreja wrote in 2020 that “feederism” [sic] should be thought of as “coercive sexual control” and therefore a type of sexual abuse within the boundaries of legal prosecution. Within the small world of academic literature on feedism, pathologically negative perspectives were the origin point, as they were for BDSM and a range of other kinks that were considered not only deviant, but dangerous. Commonly speaking, these pathologizing writings (starting in the early 2000s and still occasionally still cropping up now), had and have reoccurring features worth noting:
They focused on a particular image of white, middle class fat women being abused by thin men — queer, lesbian, gay, and non-white (except in highly exociticised contexts) experiences are almost never mentioned in any writing that takes a straightforwardly negative perspective on feedism; furthermore, fat-for-fat attraction is non-existent in this literature.
They explicitly or implicitly deny the autonomy of fat people, and especially fat women, to make autonomous sexual decisions and that, by definition, to be in a feedist dynamic is to be coerced at best, and more than likely abused.
They reinforce this lack of autonomy by creating and enforcing narratives where, on the one hand, fat people (and especially fat women) must be grateful for any instance of positive attraction from another person (”beggars can’t be choosers”), while on the other hand messaging that attraction to them is safe only when it occurs in spite of and not because of their fatness — anything being fetishistic and therefore dangerous.
They consistently reinforce and reify every possible negative stereotype and belief about the health and lifestyle satisfaction of fat people (and anything or anyone who would disagree), and uniformly apply these ideas across both the entire size-range of fat bodies, as well as every socio-economic context that a fat person could live within — to be fat or become fatter is, by definition, to endanger oneself.
They never engage with or consider the impact of hegemonic anti-fatness as the overarching oppressive force on fat people — rather, many take as a given that fat marginalization is a normal, immutable social fact and that **anything that “promotes,” encourages, uplifts, or otherwise positively views fatness is unjust.
They never engage with the literature and ideas of fat liberation, especially in its most intersectional and radical forms.
This culminates in an outlook which explicitly or implicitly says that a fat person could never rationally, and certainly not morally, consent to a feedist dynamic of any kind, because to do so would be to either be sin qua non taken advantage of, and/or to be in a position of embracing radical physical and social marginalization.
In short, if you’re a feedist, you’re either abused / an abuser, or you’re fucking crazy, and probably (they say to themselves) both.
Actually Existing Feedism
It frightens me, frankly, how many feedists have internalized the criticisms of people who, whatever their positive intentions, are so waylaid by harmful assumptions and biases that they reinforce, and often worsen, the oppressions of a group of people they are supposedly looking to protect.
This is especially tragic because feedism needs more safety. The feedist community mirrors much of the same misogyny, not to mention misogynoir, toxic diet culture, and abuses of consent found in society at large, but, sadly, without the same framework of risk-aware consensual kink that the BDSM and other communities have. We need to do better, but we can’t do that if we’re taking on the assumptions of our critics.
The only way out is to embrace a sex-positive, trauma-informed framework of fat liberation. If we do this and seek respectful ways to ally with fat liberationists more generally, we can reposition our kink not only as something “safe, sane, and consensual,” but as something that contributes to the broader work of a healing a world permeated with anti-fatness.
This begins with understanding what it is we’re talking about; defining the boundaries, core experiences, and foundational values that define our kink. As I’ve written about on Tumblr before, I think feedism needs both a broad and nuanced definition.
Feedism is a sexual kink which includes, but goes far behind, the attraction to fat people. This can involve personal, private fantasy, or real-world, consensual sexualization of the following to varying degrees, and in varying combinations. 1. Fat bodies of all shapes, sizes, and abilities, and often fat-specific aspects (e.g, double-chins, bellies, rolls) of those bodies. 2. Aspects of the fat experience, both good and bad, including the relationship of someone's body to the physical environment (e.g., clothes or furniture), social structures (e.g., dieting, hedonism, worship, etc.), and otherwise. 3. Experiences, sensations, ideas related to food and eating. 4. Bodily transformation related to the growing and/or shrinking of a body or parts of a body over time in both linear or non-linear ways (e.g., yo-yo dieting).
When I wrote this, I was doing so without an eye to who is actually doing any of these things. This was very deliberate on my part, because I think most conceptualizations of feedism fixate on the narrowest possible (and therefore incorrect) understanding of who does what: a thin man does things to a fat woman.
As a direct attack on this non-agential view of fat people (and, as always, fat women), I wrote in my longer piece on feedism that you could have a situation where:
“a fat femme is wearing a strap-on 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.”
This vignette of a fat female top engaging in humilation-oriented domming was meant to undercut Murray’s original assertion of feedism being defined by “women who allow themselves to be submissively force-fed through a funnel by a dominant male master.” I aimed to attack, first, the viewpoint that when we were talking about feedism, we were, by definition, talking about predatory men and the (passive) women that they abuse; and, secondly, the political program that naturally grows out of such an understanding: that we should censure and attack feedism and feedists for their patriarchal, abusive behaviour.
But I don’t want to only push back against a 20-year old article written by, it should be said, a fat woman (and many other fearful women who followed her) from what I view as a place of fear, misunderstanding, and unexamined fatphobia. Building on the example above, I want to talk more about what does happen in feedism, and then explore what a circlusive analysis adds to our understanding of what these experiences are — and what they might yet be.
A Circlusive Analysis in Three Scenes
Adamczak’s concept isn’t just a linguistic trick of inversion, but should simply prompt a spirit of curiosity when we try to understand what is happening with the uses and activities related to holes in particular, and seemingly passive or submissive acts in general. I do not read her intent as to suddenly re-characterize every sexual act as necessarily one of circlusion, but rather to get us to ask, even if only to ourselves: who’s agency is assumed here?
To illustrate this more directly, I want to bring what I’ll call a “circlusive lens” in reviewing a few scenarios related to feedism. I’ll play with the ways in which those scenarios embody any kind of circlusive practice, not just in how holes engulf things (or vice versa), but how it can help reconceptualize instances we might consider “bottoming” in the feedist sense. Throughout all, I’ll be thinking of Adamczak’s enticement to consider everyday acts of circlusion like how “how a throat envelops food, or a hand encircles a bottle of beer,” these being instances with direct significant to feedism.
First, imagine:
She lays back on the couch, her belly extended outward in a drum-tight mass, red with fullness, while her arms lay flat at her sides, fingers covered in cake and weakly massaging herself. “I need your help,” she says, “I’m too tired to use my arms anymore, but I know I can still finish this.” He reaches back to the table, grabs another slice, and slowly brings it towards her icing-drenched mouth, tongue lolled out in eager, if wearied, anticipation. As the slice gently brushes her lips, she musters her strength and bites in heartily, welcoming each additional ounce into her mouth, chewing with determination, and then swallowing with effort. Her stomach rumbles audibly as she does so, confirming the extent of her existing consumption and what she has already accomplished.
Outsiders to feedism would probably jump to analyzing scene through the hands of the male character. But if we look closer, the distribution of agency can look considerably more lopsided toward the woman. Consider, for instance:
The woman here has consumed most of this hypothetical cake on her own, with her own hands, with likely only verbal encouragement and perhaps corollary assistance (e.g., belly rubs, water, repositioning of the food, etc.) from her partner.
The woman’s primary action, even after her partner “takes over” and begins to “feed her” the cake, is in the physical act of bringing the food into her mouth, using her teeth to consume it, swallowing the food without any assistance or input from her partner, and then allowing her body’s internal systems to digest the food.
The framing of this scene, as it is in many like it, centres around the explicitly vocalized hunger of the female partner. Even if this scene was to be rewritten with an explicitly dominant feeder, part of the eroticization of many scenes like this (though of course not all) is the inherent conceit that the person who eats is in fact hungry. Whatever kind of dominance gets the food to someone’s mouth, I think it’s safe to say that most feedists are drawn to the idea that the person they either want to feed, or at least watch eat, wants to eat the food that they’re consuming, even if the scene’s narrative doesn’t allow for that hunger to be freely expressed (e.g., in a situation of denial, etc.).
The scene does not identify the roles of the two players: is she “his” feedee? Or is he “her” feedeer? Is she a solo-gainer who has invited him into her autoerotic play? Was she eroticising eating to over-fullness prior to meeting him, or did he introduce her to the idea? Has this encounter been her idea or his? Questions of ownership and relationality hang unanswered, and, with assumption this is all consensual, it is unclear from within the scene who is actually “in control.”
Let’s try another scenario:
He grunts, his belly condenses more in his lap as he tries to bend over a little further. Just as he starts to feel strain in his wrist, his fingers make contact and then wrap around his slick shaft, already drooling at the feeling of his many rolls and folds interacting with one another. The underside of his belly pushes down heavily on his arm as he begins to stroke himself, muscles tensed from the top of his shoulder to the end of his pinky. This is a more recent change, the burgeoning expanse of his belly a result of his ever-increasing appetite. The downward pressure of his own body, not only from his belly on his arm, but even from his fupa on the base of his penis, makes the every motion of his hands on his body another move through the labyrinth of his own desire. He pictures the changes his body has undergone the past few months, clothes tightening and furniture creaking, while his fatter fingers grasp his cock with a newfound and deeply sensuous softness. As his arm and fingers begin to ache under the resistance of his own fatness, the collective weight of his desire and body meld — and bring him to completion.
This scenario paints a more explicit picture of how a fat body can be sexualized, in this case in a distinctly auto-erotic way. The character here is on his own, and so questions of agency are different, but do not disappear. Consider:
The male character here struggles to navigate his growing body to achieve orgasm, while eroticising every aspect of the struggle along the way. He is both fighting his body, and, with kinship to an orgasm denial scene within BDSM, taking tremendous erotic energy from this very act of a kind of secondary self-denial via the difficulty of navigating his body at an increased size.
The physicality of this auto-interaction is almost circlusive by its very nature, his penis being surrounded (circluded?) by the fat of his fupa, and his arms being guided into specific, constrained pathways to reach his genitals and achieve self-pleasure. This envelopment is clearly deliberate on the part of this character, with layers of self-consent and -denial at play at every moment.
There is a deeply rich and varied range of overlapping, and sometimes contradictory, desires within the character; this is conveyed firstly by the immediate push-and-pull that his body produces for him by constraining and shaping his physical ability to reach himself, and therefore orgasm. But beyond this, a feedist lens zooms in on the interactions between the various aspects of his appetite — physical, gastronomic, narrative — as the driving force in this scene. The honouring of an appetite for food, which in turn drives the expansion of his body, which increases his auto-erotic desire, also limits his ability to achieve self-pleasure, which in turn drives a greater level of desire, and so on.
In a profoundly queer way, there is a countervailing interplay between, on the one hand, his traditional, masculine virility, expressed by a hard penis, flowing with pre-cum, and, on the other hand, the challenges that he faces in reaching his own cock. The story here does not cast this through the lens of any kind of emasculation — though some can and do — but rather that reaching orgasm has become a kind of sexual puzzle, a fantastic distillation of Jack Morrin’s original thesis of the erotic as the interplay between desire and constraint.
Lastly, let’s consider another partnered context:
“I’m itchyyyy, can you reach my back for me?” They whined, their plush fingers squishing against my leg playfully. I’d grown used to their whines, the sound, sometimes delightfully interspersed chewing or burps, all at once melodious and menacing. I’d just returned from the kitchen with another round of food for them, their nest of colourful blankets and pillows on the couch too comfortable for them to heave themselves up and get their own dinner. I sighed and their big brown eyes looked at me pleadingly. Groaning louder than I needed to but feeling warmth between my legs, I walked behind the couch to see the expanse of their back. They were fat these days, the craggy landscape of their sides made up of fat rolls that piled and piled until they met their armpits, and then smoothed out into rolling hills of their upper back. I skritched and scratched lightly, careful not to let me my nails harm their delicate skin, while they cooed lightly at me. The book they’d been reading now sat face down in their immense lap while my fingers traced gentle circles and lines over their back-fat, becoming joyously engulfed whenever they strayed from the centre towards their many-rolled sides. After the happy noises subsided, I kissed them on the head and returned to my seat. Just as my legs touched the fabric of the couch, I heard a dainty, self-assured throat-clearing and: “Before you get settled, this drink is getting a little low…”
This scenario fits into a more domestic “soft feedism” setting, where a fat partner is relying on another partner (whose size is unmentioned) for a range of their needs, both kinky and non-kinky. From a circlusive perspective, several things stand out to me:
This couple is clearly enmeshed within a lifestyle kink, displaying feedism’s unique ability to eroticise the mundane aspects of care, in this case for a partner with a larger body — it’s unclear how much traditional sexual touch is present in the relationship. Whether we want to consider these interactions paraphilic, or simply a broader enactment of the erotic, this couple clearly has sexual desire that operates in myriad and fluid ways.
The power centre within this couple, from the point of view of the vignette, appears to be the fatter partner, and could even be read of as something approximating a master-servant dynamic. The fat character not only make several requests of their partner, mobilizing both faux-pleading and a more domineering statement of expectation, but also are explicitly thought of as having a sometimes “menacing” whine. This very common fantasy directly confronts Murray and others’ expectations of feedism as always a thin partner dominating a fat person.
Though the scene does engage in activity that is not — even by feedist standards — necessarily sexually explicit, the thinner partner’s finger motions through back-fat where their digits become “joyously” engulfed expresses an obvious, if small, direct instance of circlusion.
The overall flow of energy in the scene, particularly with the mention of a meal having just being served, and the implication that the thinner partner frequently provides these acts of service, suggests a wider lifestyle centred around the care and comfort of the fat partner. While the fat partner, per the previous scene, likely experiences a range of auto-circlusive interactions with their own body, whether with masturbation or daily activities, the thin partner is, in a sense, being engulfed in a lifestyle of service directed at their larger partner, whether fully needed or not (which is not made clear). This kind of “lifestyle circlusion” is expressive of a fundamental feedist form of desire: the eroticisation of fat experiences (including and especially care), and not only fat bodies.
Towards a Circlusive Feedism
None of the scenarios above are “real” in the sense that they draw from events that happened in the world and were recorded as read here, but rather are a melange of stories and experiences from across the feedist community that I have creatively stitched together. They do, however tell real truths: fat partners demand things of their partners, fat people eroticise their own bodies, and feedist dynamics include forms of power-exchange that are not obvious to the untrained eye.
Furthermore, and though by necessity contrived, I believe that these distilled scenes create an effective backdrop for the circlusive analysis above to be undertaken. Through each scene and its corresponding review, I think several insights emerge from using a circlusive lens, and allow us to make broader claims about the possibilities of feedism. This emphasis on possibilities is crucial: while each of the scenes represents amalgamations of true and fantastical feedist stories, the structures of desire and consent within them are clearly not hegemonic within the feedist community. To create a more just future for practicing feedists, and to support the broader work of a sex-positive, feminist, fat liberation, we need to learn from the precepts that guide these imaginary characters, who, in my view, offer clues to what a circlusive feedism could and might yet look like.
In this spirit, I want to suggest the following:
A circlusive study and practice of feedism does not assume a pre-determined view of, and nor does it create, control and dominance based solely on the the fatness of partners in a dynamic, particularly if they are mixed-weight. As the first and third scene express, not only does every scene and relationship involve myriad momentary exchanges of power (”He reaches” / “her stomach rumbles”), but there are innumerable and often profound ways in which fat people can be the dominating and, in varying ways, circluding partner within a mixed-weight couple. To view power relations solely through the lens of body-size is to miss, or ignore, what could be very different power dynamics in play, and, furthermore, to preclude any of the more emancipatory opportunities for a fat person to express their power consensually within a kink dynamic.
A circlusive practice of feedism invites a broad range of physical and non-physical experiences of circlusion on an auto-erotic, coupled, and mutli-partnered basis. This can range from being physically surrounded by a larger partner (e.g., as in “squashing”), to having body parts or genitals wrapped or engulfed by fat or fat parts, including ones’ own; to even broader experiences of what I’ve termed here “lifestyle circlusion,” where a dominant partner’s fatness becomes part of another partner’s practice of service towards them. Feedism can, in its most basic forms, offer opportunities for non-penetrative sexual experiences and therefore help contribute more broader toward liberation.
A circlusive study and practice of feedism acknowledges that, as Admczak says, circlusion and penetration happen at the same time, as when nuts and bolts are tightened onto one another. Beyond the acknowledgement of the physical reality of simultaneous circlusion and penetration, on a socio-political level: feedism exists within the context of an anti-fat society, and so as much as feedism represents, with consenting, introspective, and justice-oriented participants, circlusive potentialities, it still operates within a broader, oppressive, and one could say penetrative present. An ethical practice of not only feedism, but of sexuality more generally, acknowledges the dangers of the present, without being overwhelmed by them, as part of navigating towards a liberated future.
Adamczak’s work made me think about Andrea Dworkin’s profoundly controversial book *Intercourse.* Long maligned by not only misogynists, but even many feminists themselves, Dworkin’s work was misunderstood in claiming that every act of intercourse was **an act of rape. Rather, Dworkin, in admittedly complex ways, was saying that the structure of patriarchal injustice creates a context within which every act of intercourse operated under the threat of violence, whether from the world, or specific people. Dworkin, I think it can be fairly said, was still quite anti-sex in her overall outlook, but her point here is still well-taken.
One of the most difficult, but important, aspects of the book, was her discussion of possession. In an excellent summary, Giney Villar writes:
Women are being penetrated and thus conquered and dominated as objects. In so doing, men possess women but both experience the man being male. In the process, women essentially lose themselves when they are taken over by men. This is necessary for intercourse to be successful. Amazingly, men are not possessed even if they are literally enveloped by women during the sexual act. Women have been constructed by this type of sexuality. As [Dworkin] puts it, "This being marked by sexuality requires a cold capacity to use and a pitiful vulnerability that comes from having been used." And because of the social context, women have learned to equate sex with love and desire. Thus, male possession has become an affirmation of desirability, womanhood and existence.
This extrapolates with painful precision to the context of fat oppression and its relationship to feedism. Whatever the emancipatory intentions of thin feedists, our efforts will (at least for now) always operate in an anti-fat world. As I see it, this means not only seeking explicit, enthusiastic, and ongoing consent in a context where only one partner will be engaging with the physical and social experiences of fatness; but that a broader context must be constructed that enables a fat/fattening partner to consent in a fulsome way. Achieving this will take many forms, and for thin partners, it cannot be done in ways that would rob a fat partner of their agency — rape survivors, can, for example, still seek out consensual non-consent play — but it must be done with a thorough understanding of what anti-fatness is, and how it operates.
I want to be careful not to frame feedism as an already-existing form of circlusive sexual praxis. As a field of play and a community*,* it features all the same hurt and violence of any other kink — but under the dark cloud of violent, hegemonic anti-fatness. But at a conceptual level, feedism clearly contains possibilities for reimagining how different and differing bodies can fit together — lovingly, not only sexually — in ways that can help build a more just world.
Delicious.
