ForeverFFA:
Does anyone else get at least mildly annoyed that people outside this community (in popular culture, opinion articles, and even some research papers) tend to implicitly and sometimes explicitly assume that FAs can only be male? And do people have any ideas about why that assumption is so strongly rooted?
It's very annoying. Every time I see an outsider talk about feedism, it's always "men getting off on fattening up women." The heteronormativity is strong.
In most media, men only want a fat woman because of control reasons. He's not attracted to her so much as he thinks a "lesser woman" is more willing to put up with his bullshit than a "conventional woman." Meanwhile, the media shows women going after fat men as gold diggers. After all, who'd want a fat man unless he was super rich or had some social capital?
The only exception to this thinking is if the people involved are a specific kind of POC, like a black person or Polynesian. The thinking there is, "Well, of course, they want a fatty. They're all lazy and gluttonous. It makes perfect sense." But that's less about kink and more about fatphobia having a strong racial component to it as well.
That said, I think the biggest reason why the media thinks the way it does hearkens back to an earlier time in the community. As bad as the female FA/feeder representation is now, it used to be a lot worse. The popular feedist spaces were male-dominated and adhered to very rigid gender roles. There wasn't even a lot of bhm content unless you went into gay spaces. There were some FFA/BHM spaces, but they were hardly as popular.
We as a community have done a piss poor job at improving the representation too. I remember coming across an interview earlier this year where a podcast interviewed a female feedee to get more insight into the community. And while it was an overall good interview, the feedee explicitly stated that men where feeders and women are feedees.
