Gaining weight and feeding others is a harmless fetish to some; but society at large still sees it as a perversion
As a child, while his classmates were playing football in the playground, Pete would spend his breaks rolling up his coat and stuffing it up his jumper to simulate being fat.
“Ever since I can remember, I have been attracted to the process of becoming fat,” says Pete, now a 26-year-old student, living in Manchester. “I believe it’s something I was born with.”
It’s perhaps not surprising then that as an adult, Pete has become involved in feederism, a fetish (although some involved in it would dispute that label) whose devotees derive pleasure from overfeeding or intentionally fattening up either themselves or their partners.
A few years ago, individuals who held this proclivity might have kept it to themselves but the internet, which has enabled members of even the tiniest of minority groups to find one another, has changed all that. Now there are websites, blogs and innumerable YouTube videos all catering for people who get their kicks from either gaining weight (gainers/ feedees), or enabling someone else to gain weight (feeders). Fantasy Feeder, the website devoted to it, boasts over 10,000 members from all over the world.
“I think the numbers are growing,” says Helen, a 50-year-old academic from the North-West who is a “gainer” and also a moderator on the site. “That’s partly because the site is getting better known, but also because younger people are joining who are more likely to be open about their sexuality, at least within the community.”
Outside of the feeder/gainer community, however, the scene tends to provoke outrage, largely because it goes against everything we hold most dear about size aspirations, health doctrines and ideals of what is and isn’t attractive.
In a culture that promotes both the quest for size zero and the message that being fat will seriously damage your health, anyone choosing to become overweight or, just as heinously, finding overweight people positively attractive, is considered alarmingly subversive. Witness the furore surrounding the 43- stone American Donna Simpson’s publicly declared goal to become the fattest woman in the world. Feeding and gaining it seems, is a fetish too far.
“Feederism is the most overblown, oversensationalised issue there is about fat and sex,” says the historian Hanne Blank, author of Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them (due to be reissued by Ten Speed Press in 2011). “It’s a tiny niche. Yes, I get it that this pushes people’s buttons like mad. Yes, I get it that feeding fetishes take our culture’s stereotypes about fatness and jump up and down on them. This is, I would also note, often also why it works as a fetish: it is strongly taboo. There is huge emotional intensity in it. When that emotional intensity gets eroticised, it is potent stuff.”
One of the commonest criticisms levelled at feederism is that its devotees are risking their health. Yet we’ll watch our best friends binge-drinking, cheer on Jeremy Clarkson and co racing at 150mph on a rain-drenched track, and to a large extent accept bondage and S&M as something that happens behind closed doors. It’s a double standard that people like Pete are all too familiar with, and one of the reasons no one featured in this article wanted to be identified.
“I’ve never discussed any aspect of feederism to any friends or family,” says Pete, who describes himself as a feedee, and is actively trying to gain weight despite being naturally athletic. “It’s far too embarrassing, controversial and personal. But many people are born with desires that jeopardise their safety. I would tell critics to preach to smokers before having a go at us.”
Pete’s sense of his feederist activities as something unspeakable has meant that they are mostly limited to the internet. “I meet female feeders online who encourage me to gain weight and get fatter, usually via webcam where they watch me eat until I am stuffed. These ‘feeding sessions’ usually climax in masturbation. Offline, I deliberately overeat regularly and drink the occasional weight-gain shake in order to feel as big, bloated and fat as possible.”
Pete is the opposite to the feeder stereotype held outside of the community — that of an obese woman with low self- esteem locked in an abusive relationship with a “normal-sized” man who overfeeds her as a means of exerting control.
Also bucking the stereotype is Ella, 27, a feeder who is attracted to big men who would like to get even bigger. “People who say it’s exploitative assume that we the feeders pray on poor insecure fatties who will do anything to please. Purleeeeease! I’m not turned on by suffering, pain or immobility — I like feedees who get off on it as much as I do. We are all adults and all know the risk. Gaining purely to please someone else is very much frowned on in the sites I visit. Ultimately a person’s body is their own to do what they will with. ”
Though Ella, who works in a clothes shop in Brighton, acknowledges that many feedees and feeders do find extreme weight gain a turn-on, she believes that it’s mostly fantasy. “Very few I’ve spoken to aim for it in real life. For me, feederism is all about hedonism, indulgence, naughtiness and nurturing. Exploitation and poor health don’t fit well with those feelings for me.”
While Ella is of slim build herself, she looks for something different in a sexual partner. “I’m into guys who are chubby, around 20 stone or so. My friends just think it’s my type, they don’t know that I actively get off on the feeding side of things. To me, rubbing a man’s belly after he’s just eaten and is almost drunk on food is incredibly erotic. I’ve had a few stuffing sessions with men. I see it as foreplay. Some people like whips and chains, I like a pudgy guy with a good appetite.”
With no long-term partner, Ella is active on the feederism scene and has got to know many people on the Fat Feeder website. attending special parties and get-togethers organised online. “I have one friend who is actively trying to reach 700lb. He has this fantasy about being housebound. He knows exactly how many calories you have to consume to gain a pound. At the moment he’s eating around 5,000 calories a day. To me, 700lb is way too big. But I’m not going to judge anyone.”
Like Pete, Ella can’t pinpoint exactly when or where her fetish started, but remembers having a dream as a young child about watching the kids in the dining hall eating sausages with jam and enjoying seeing their bellies growing.
According to Professor Mark Griffiths from Nottingham Trent University, a psychologist who has studied sexual behaviour, feederism probably has its roots in childhood.
“Quite often fetishes develop when early sexual experiences become paired with unconnected events happening at the time. One well-known case involved a man who couldn’t get sexually aroused unless he was twiddling a gold wedding ring. It transpired that as a small child he used to sit on his babysitter’s lap, playing with her ring, and he’d become aroused, so he became conditioned to connect sex with rings. I suspect feederism is also a kind of maladaptive learning, where arousal has somehow become paired with exaggerated body size.”
Helen, a 50-year-old gainer, has always wondered if her lifelong attraction to weight gain stemmed from having a father who was fat. “All I know is that even at the age of 4 or 5, when I was playing with neighbourhood children and it was my turn to choose what make believe we should play, I wanted to play getting fatter and floating away.”
Without the internet, Helen struggled to make sense of her fantasies, something she now feels sad about. “Most of us spent our lives thinking we were alone with these weird ideas, so we missed out on a level of intimacy in our relationships.”
Although, when she looked at “before and after” weight loss photos, Helen always preferred the “before”, she threw herself into dieting, to the extent that she didn’t eat solid food for four months before her wedding. “There’s something terrible about torturing your body into a smaller size when what you want is exactly the opposite,” she says now.
It was years before she dared to tell her husband about her fantasies. Although he didn’t share them, he was accepting of them. But it was only when the internet put her in touch with others who shared the same broad interest that she started allowing herself to put on weight. Now 17½ stone, Helen would ideally like to be around five stone heavier.
“Physically I like the softness. It feels good to me. It’s a body I recognise. It’s more than a sexual thing, it’s part of my identity. In some unconscious way there’s something about taking up more space that appeals to me.”
Tom, 25, a 19-stone illustrator from the Midlands, completely understands how it feels not to be allowed to be the size you want. “I live with my parents and my mum is always on at me to lose weight, saying I’ll never get a girlfriend. I would never be able to tell her that I’d actually like to be bigger than I am. She’d be horrified.
“My ideal would be to be in a mutually gaining relationship with a woman who wanted to gain and would be happy for me to gain too. But I’d always make sure we ate healthily. I know one woman who wants to be so big she’d become immobile and her partner would have to do everything for her. She wanted to be completely looked after like a queen. I wouldn’t want to go that far.”
While there are people involved in feederism who fantasise about such extreme weight gain, there are many more who get irritated by the assumptions that indulging in their fetish means they are risking their health.
“Just because I am gaining weight does not mean that I have switched to an all-McDonald’s diet,” says Jenny, 25, who co-writes a blog called Feedee World (feedeeworld.wordpress.com). “I eat my daily recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, drink a lot of water and eat the same normal foods as everyone else, just a larger quantity.”
At 23½ stone and 5ft 9in, Jenny is a commanding presence. “As a child I felt quite small and mousy. So perhaps as an adult I find excitement in being so large that I can’t be overlooked.”
If her health ever became an issue, Jenny would stop gaining, but for now “being fat is a huge part of my identity. While feederism is certainly important to me, it’s really the icing on the cake”.
As a child, while his classmates were playing football in the playground, Pete would spend his breaks rolling up his coat and stuffing it up his jumper to simulate being fat.
“Ever since I can remember, I have been attracted to the process of becoming fat,” says Pete, now a 26-year-old student, living in Manchester. “I believe it’s something I was born with.”
It’s perhaps not surprising then that as an adult, Pete has become involved in feederism, a fetish (although some involved in it would dispute that label) whose devotees derive pleasure from overfeeding or intentionally fattening up either themselves or their partners.
A few years ago, individuals who held this proclivity might have kept it to themselves but the internet, which has enabled members of even the tiniest of minority groups to find one another, has changed all that. Now there are websites, blogs and innumerable YouTube videos all catering for people who get their kicks from either gaining weight (gainers/ feedees), or enabling someone else to gain weight (feeders). Fantasy Feeder, the website devoted to it, boasts over 10,000 members from all over the world.
“I think the numbers are growing,” says Helen, a 50-year-old academic from the North-West who is a “gainer” and also a moderator on the site. “That’s partly because the site is getting better known, but also because younger people are joining who are more likely to be open about their sexuality, at least within the community.”
Outside of the feeder/gainer community, however, the scene tends to provoke outrage, largely because it goes against everything we hold most dear about size aspirations, health doctrines and ideals of what is and isn’t attractive.
In a culture that promotes both the quest for size zero and the message that being fat will seriously damage your health, anyone choosing to become overweight or, just as heinously, finding overweight people positively attractive, is considered alarmingly subversive. Witness the furore surrounding the 43- stone American Donna Simpson’s publicly declared goal to become the fattest woman in the world. Feeding and gaining it seems, is a fetish too far.
“Feederism is the most overblown, oversensationalised issue there is about fat and sex,” says the historian Hanne Blank, author of Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them (due to be reissued by Ten Speed Press in 2011). “It’s a tiny niche. Yes, I get it that this pushes people’s buttons like mad. Yes, I get it that feeding fetishes take our culture’s stereotypes about fatness and jump up and down on them. This is, I would also note, often also why it works as a fetish: it is strongly taboo. There is huge emotional intensity in it. When that emotional intensity gets eroticised, it is potent stuff.”
One of the commonest criticisms levelled at feederism is that its devotees are risking their health. Yet we’ll watch our best friends binge-drinking, cheer on Jeremy Clarkson and co racing at 150mph on a rain-drenched track, and to a large extent accept bondage and S&M as something that happens behind closed doors. It’s a double standard that people like Pete are all too familiar with, and one of the reasons no one featured in this article wanted to be identified.
“I’ve never discussed any aspect of feederism to any friends or family,” says Pete, who describes himself as a feedee, and is actively trying to gain weight despite being naturally athletic. “It’s far too embarrassing, controversial and personal. But many people are born with desires that jeopardise their safety. I would tell critics to preach to smokers before having a go at us.”
Pete’s sense of his feederist activities as something unspeakable has meant that they are mostly limited to the internet. “I meet female feeders online who encourage me to gain weight and get fatter, usually via webcam where they watch me eat until I am stuffed. These ‘feeding sessions’ usually climax in masturbation. Offline, I deliberately overeat regularly and drink the occasional weight-gain shake in order to feel as big, bloated and fat as possible.”
Pete is the opposite to the feeder stereotype held outside of the community — that of an obese woman with low self- esteem locked in an abusive relationship with a “normal-sized” man who overfeeds her as a means of exerting control.
Also bucking the stereotype is Ella, 27, a feeder who is attracted to big men who would like to get even bigger. “People who say it’s exploitative assume that we the feeders pray on poor insecure fatties who will do anything to please. Purleeeeease! I’m not turned on by suffering, pain or immobility — I like feedees who get off on it as much as I do. We are all adults and all know the risk. Gaining purely to please someone else is very much frowned on in the sites I visit. Ultimately a person’s body is their own to do what they will with. ”
Though Ella, who works in a clothes shop in Brighton, acknowledges that many feedees and feeders do find extreme weight gain a turn-on, she believes that it’s mostly fantasy. “Very few I’ve spoken to aim for it in real life. For me, feederism is all about hedonism, indulgence, naughtiness and nurturing. Exploitation and poor health don’t fit well with those feelings for me.”
While Ella is of slim build herself, she looks for something different in a sexual partner. “I’m into guys who are chubby, around 20 stone or so. My friends just think it’s my type, they don’t know that I actively get off on the feeding side of things. To me, rubbing a man’s belly after he’s just eaten and is almost drunk on food is incredibly erotic. I’ve had a few stuffing sessions with men. I see it as foreplay. Some people like whips and chains, I like a pudgy guy with a good appetite.”
With no long-term partner, Ella is active on the feederism scene and has got to know many people on the Fat Feeder website. attending special parties and get-togethers organised online. “I have one friend who is actively trying to reach 700lb. He has this fantasy about being housebound. He knows exactly how many calories you have to consume to gain a pound. At the moment he’s eating around 5,000 calories a day. To me, 700lb is way too big. But I’m not going to judge anyone.”
Like Pete, Ella can’t pinpoint exactly when or where her fetish started, but remembers having a dream as a young child about watching the kids in the dining hall eating sausages with jam and enjoying seeing their bellies growing.
According to Professor Mark Griffiths from Nottingham Trent University, a psychologist who has studied sexual behaviour, feederism probably has its roots in childhood.
“Quite often fetishes develop when early sexual experiences become paired with unconnected events happening at the time. One well-known case involved a man who couldn’t get sexually aroused unless he was twiddling a gold wedding ring. It transpired that as a small child he used to sit on his babysitter’s lap, playing with her ring, and he’d become aroused, so he became conditioned to connect sex with rings. I suspect feederism is also a kind of maladaptive learning, where arousal has somehow become paired with exaggerated body size.”
Helen, a 50-year-old gainer, has always wondered if her lifelong attraction to weight gain stemmed from having a father who was fat. “All I know is that even at the age of 4 or 5, when I was playing with neighbourhood children and it was my turn to choose what make believe we should play, I wanted to play getting fatter and floating away.”
Without the internet, Helen struggled to make sense of her fantasies, something she now feels sad about. “Most of us spent our lives thinking we were alone with these weird ideas, so we missed out on a level of intimacy in our relationships.”
Although, when she looked at “before and after” weight loss photos, Helen always preferred the “before”, she threw herself into dieting, to the extent that she didn’t eat solid food for four months before her wedding. “There’s something terrible about torturing your body into a smaller size when what you want is exactly the opposite,” she says now.
It was years before she dared to tell her husband about her fantasies. Although he didn’t share them, he was accepting of them. But it was only when the internet put her in touch with others who shared the same broad interest that she started allowing herself to put on weight. Now 17½ stone, Helen would ideally like to be around five stone heavier.
“Physically I like the softness. It feels good to me. It’s a body I recognise. It’s more than a sexual thing, it’s part of my identity. In some unconscious way there’s something about taking up more space that appeals to me.”
Tom, 25, a 19-stone illustrator from the Midlands, completely understands how it feels not to be allowed to be the size you want. “I live with my parents and my mum is always on at me to lose weight, saying I’ll never get a girlfriend. I would never be able to tell her that I’d actually like to be bigger than I am. She’d be horrified.
“My ideal would be to be in a mutually gaining relationship with a woman who wanted to gain and would be happy for me to gain too. But I’d always make sure we ate healthily. I know one woman who wants to be so big she’d become immobile and her partner would have to do everything for her. She wanted to be completely looked after like a queen. I wouldn’t want to go that far.”
While there are people involved in feederism who fantasise about such extreme weight gain, there are many more who get irritated by the assumptions that indulging in their fetish means they are risking their health.
“Just because I am gaining weight does not mean that I have switched to an all-McDonald’s diet,” says Jenny, 25, who co-writes a blog called Feedee World (feedeeworld.wordpress.com). “I eat my daily recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, drink a lot of water and eat the same normal foods as everyone else, just a larger quantity.”
At 23½ stone and 5ft 9in, Jenny is a commanding presence. “As a child I felt quite small and mousy. So perhaps as an adult I find excitement in being so large that I can’t be overlooked.”
If her health ever became an issue, Jenny would stop gaining, but for now “being fat is a huge part of my identity. While feederism is certainly important to me, it’s really the icing on the cake”.
13 years
