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
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.
Resources
Feedist Resources
Feedism & Fat Liberation Action Points | Feedists for Fat Liberation
Resource List - feedism and fat liberation | Cheeseburgers in Paradise, Tumblr
How do you feel about fat kinks? | RIOTS, NOT DIETS!, Tumblr
How Kink Helped Me to Learn to Love My Fat Body | Kinkly
6 Assumptions About Fat Fetishism I'd Love For Us to Reconsider | Everyday Feminism
Fat and Kink Resources
BBW Porn Encouraged Me to Have Better Sex | Vice
Being A Fat, Black Femme in Kink | Spectrum Journal
Plus Size Women Are Reclaiming Cow Print After Years Of Fatphobic Jokes | Refinery29
Personal Stories
“Such a pretty face”: What it’s like to date while fat | Vox
Take The Cake: Secret Relationships With Fat Women | Ravishly
Why Men Secretly Date Fat Women | Sanni Lark, Medium
Wow, wow, wow! This deserves so much more attention than it has gotten. I've never seen a more comprehensive breakdown of feedism and fat admiration. Absolutely brilliant 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻