General

As for solutions, I really don't think there is one. The community's attitude towards itself swings with culture shifts. In the anything goes days of the old internet it was just people who were genuinely curious. Paysites became more common as pornhub and OF emerged. Social media and dating sites connected more people to more kinks than ever, and drew in more unpleasant types. I think now that we've been through the pandemic economic crash that made the community the go to free money stop, we survived the #MeToo era that sought to demonize anything and everything not womancentric (though I acknowledge #MeToo also did a lot of good), we have lost Roe vs. Wade and a great deal of female bodiy autonomy, and we have dealt with the sexual harassment suit that determined a former president was civilly liable for rape, and we're now in the midst of a massive multifaceted controversy centering on the largest youtube channel ever, we are in a different, far more cynical, place. Which is to say nothing about the influx of once disgraced sexual predators returning to youtube without consequence. The majority of the country sees that the status quo is unfair and against the kink population. We can't really do much within the kink space itself, but we can fight against apathy and closed mindedness.

All the social issues I mentioned revolve around entitlement to see or touch another person in one way or another. And it's my observation that our community is getting burnt out. We can't all exclusively do missionary forever, and a whole lot of younger people are starting to see that. #dontkinkshame was trending for a while some time ago before X. All we can do is ride it out. Sex and sexuality will always be victims of current social biases.

My best advice is to actively support movements that focus on bodily autonomy. Because that's the biggest factor. As a society we have a way of allowing strangers to make medical decisions on our behalf. There are many many examples, like insurance refusing to cover something life saving, or social pressure for plastic surgery, or the one and only acceptable model body type. I really believe rejecting these narrow attitudes and simply living outside the confines of the opinions of others is the way to go. At one point early on Mochii was harassed by one guy in the fitness community who believed he had the right to humiliate and judge her for decisions she made about her own body. I found it appalling. Fighting against those types by pointing out that it's not their right to demand another person change, and that different people are allowed to life different lifestyles regardless of a stranger's approval, are good ways to stand up to them. On an individual level it would go far to defend the rights of an adult to engage with their kink.

On a societal level though...I still say all we can do is ride it out. This community will never be free of its toxic elements, and those more sensationalized stories will always be the media's focus. Maybe one day a filmmaker will feature a nonvillian fat fetishist (Deadpool doesn't count). Until then...well, I'm not holding my breath.

This is a really good thread and a really valuable discussion—valuable enough for me to stop lurking and make a post.

Like others, I have also been around for awhile, mainly as a veteran lurker. I think I had my first FF account in 2002 or 2003. I think I missed the heyday of Dimensions but I have fond memories of the story archive. Still talk to a guy I met through Bellybuilders a long time ago when I was first exploring my interest in fat men (as an admirer and feedee). I can't say I've "seen it all" but I have seen enough over a long enough period of time to notice some trends.

I think the broad thrust of the OP's point is true—lots of things are getting worse as far as interpersonal entitlement and exploitation go, increasingly extreme and reckless content, etc. And I think Munchies makes a lot of excellent points that this reflects not only the perils of patriarchal heterosexism in sexualized spaces but also broader sociopolitical trends. Material conditions are deteriorating, the world is on fire, and at a collective level we're going through a mental health crisis exacerbated by the trauma of the pandemic and the isolating and commodifying dynamics of digitizing every aspect of our lives.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of the increasing prevalence of overt 'death feedist' content. This is really something I've only seen emerge in the last few years—I think 2017 is when I first started really noticing it on Tumblr (one of the better feedist spaces online if you are queer or at all thoughtful about kink... and don't mind wading through a lot of garbage accounts and terrible site design to curate a good dashboard).

Obviously the extreme, sadomasochistic edge of the kink has always been around, but definitely never as openly as it is at present. This is admittedly speculative on my part but I think there are several reasons for this:

a) the generalized nihilism borne from the whole "world is on fire" thing as it manifests for feedists—no future! who cares! gorge recklessly!;

to the extent that kink often works as a way of metabolizing shame, taboo, and trauma, it represents the way the unhinged fatphobia of "obesity epidemic" discourse is incorporated into sadomasochistic fantasy for people impacted by it during their psychosexually formative years;

c) the nature of sexual desire generally and pornography in particular is that its satisfaction is always bound to novelty and excess... which means it can never be fully satisfied, and given the imperative of instant (and endless) gratification it can only ever escalate.

In feedist circles this manifests in bigger bodies, faster gains, extreme stuffings, sexualizing health problems, etc, but I think this trend is can be observed in other niches too: progressively 'harder' scenes are required to get off. (IMO David Cronenberg's "Crash" [1996]—about a group of people who fetishize car accidents—is the best depiction of this dynamic put to film.)

I mention all this because I think it underscores that there is something endogenous to human sexuality that drives it towards finding and smashing limits. Negotiating the tension between sexual fantasy and reality is the work of a lifetime and requires a lot of maturity. This is true even for more 'conventional' sexuality but especially for anything unconventional, where most of us are still so bound by shame that we can barely articulate our desires to ourselves—let alone share them with others—so we have to learn the hard way about separating fantasy from reality and not treating human beings as sexual objects. This is also complicated by the proliferation and accessibility of pornography, and the parasocial relationships people form to content creators—which is probably the only medium a lot of (lonely, poorly socialized, etc etc) young people have for expressing or satisfying their authentic sexuality. Throw in the additional layer of cisheterosexist fatphobia on top of all this and I think it explains a lot of the really toxic behaviour we see in the community these days.

But I don't necessarily think it's uniformly getting worse. For instance, I also see a lot more really thoughtful discussions of these issues in the community from a fat liberation lens, particularly among Millennial and Gen Z queer and trans feedists on Tumblr. Even the quality of discussion in the FF forums lately is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was a few years ago. In a lot of ways I think the problems we are noting here represent the inevitable growing pains of a community finding increased visibility (if not acceptance) as body positivity becomes more mainstream. And we're all here because we love growth, ya?

There has always been a tension between people who see feedism as just a way to get off (and/or make money) and people who see it as a lifestyle—a way of orienting existence in the world. We're seeing that play out now in the cultural conditions of the

You make a lot of salient points, Food Enjoyer. It's a shame we are only now interacting, but oh well.

I hadn't considered the death feedist situation, but now that I have, I see that you have a point.

There aren't a lot of true death feedists out and about, but I've noticed an uptick in people flirting with the idea. I won't call these people suicidal, but I've noticed a sense of dispair.

To paraphrase one person I talked to about the situation, it's less about wanting to day and more about wanting to take the fetish to the upper limit without any regard to the consequences. Another person said something to the effect of "Life sucks, and I am going to die anyway. Might as well go out doing what I love."

Another thing I've noticed is that these people either do not stay in the community long or backpedal after the first serious health scare.

A lot of people will throw themselves into kink as a form of escapism. And that's all well and good up until it clashes with reality in ways you didn't sign up for.

I would actually be really interested to see a chart of the weight of all the people on this site who are actively gaining. And if the chart was updated year by year I wonder if it would trend upward as people gain, or if it would stagnate from extreme gainers/feedees deciding to maintain/lose weight and from new people joining the community. I guess really what I would want to know is what percentage of people who claim they want to be extremely obese bordering on/being immobile actually achieve that

I don't have the numbers, but based on the thousands of people I've spoken to over the years, I'd imagine that number to be quite low. There are several reasons:

1. Lack of resources
2. Lack of a feeder/caretaker
3. Responsibilities getting in the way
4. Fear of getting fat(ter)
5. Reality being drastically different from fantasy

I think that last one is the biggest reason most never become immobile. I've seen a lot of feedees start strong. They will eat as much as they can stand as often as possible. They eat high-calorie, low-nutrition slop, are as sedentary as possible, and do nothing but think about their fetish 24/7.

Suddenly, they start feeling bad all the time. Some start here. Some keep going.

When money starts getting tight, some stop, some pick up extra shifts for additional jobs, and some become content creators or e-begging.

Their health starts to decline. Most stop here. A lot of feedees either think they will avoid health issues or, at the very least, they won't be so bad. But when your body betrays you and (especially in America) those medical bills pimp slap you across the face, you reevaluate your life choices.

Mobility loss is the final hurdle that stops most people from becoming immobile. The constant pain, boredom, dwindling freedom, and feeling like a burden take a toll on people. Most settle for limited mobility or lose enough weight to regain it.

I've gotten a lot of flak over the years from people wanting to be immobile or at least extremely fat when I inject reality into their fantastical plans. Without fail, I'll see them lose the weight to reverse the damage they did or hit me up to get my advice.

Often without so much as an apology.

But hey? What can you do except ignore them?

Oh I agree people really have no idea what they're getting themselves into when gaining that amount of weight, hell I question if I even know what I'm doing half the time. I'm more or less interested in what the median weight of feedees is and what the cut off is. I wonder if there is a specific cut off weight where people tend stop or if it has more of a gradual drop off. I also want to know if there's a consensus on an "ideal weight" for most people. Like beyond x weight too many issues start to arise so this would be the perfect cut off

From what I've seen, if you are thin starting out, 200 - 250 seems to be when most either stop or reverse course. This is the fattest they can get without negatively impacting their everyday lives. This number is smaller if you are short (160 - 180).


If you were chubby or "small fat," most stop in the 350 - 500 lbs range. This is around the size people experience moderate to major health issues.

Well—better late than never!

I think the number of people deliberately eating themselves to death for erotic purposes is probably small. But the proliferation of overt fantasy material about it is definitely interesting, and I think you're right that more often what is going on is fantasizing about prioritizing gaining and indulgence above any consequences rather than, say, the direct eroticization of literal self-destruction. Maybe in some cases the kink can help people arrive at a sense of existential peace about living and dying on their own terms but I think that is also probably more rare than people stopping and reevaluating when they first run into serious health problems. I know that was the case for me.

Then again, confronting that reality didn't change my sexuality or my attraction to fat and gaining in any meaningful way; the allure is still there alongside a better appreciation for the cost. (And maybe a little added seductive appeal to the fantasy of self-destruction.) Moth to a flame, etc.

I think the escapism of it all is an important point. It drives a lot of reckless behaviour and probably a fair amount of the entitlement. When a model (or anyone) eases off gaining it shatters the fantasy, and lots of people aren't emotionally equipped for that experience. Hence the OP's description of people decrying models who lose weight as "traitors" etc. Our fantasies have a way of organizing our realities and many of us are very attached to our illusions.

This might be the one area where BMI is sort of useful; not as a health metric, obviously, but as a way of benchmarking relative size and body composition. The "ideal weight" varies a lot both in terms of subjective experience and how it's moderated by a person's height.

So for example, my "ideal" size in a partner is somewhere between 40 and 50 BMI. This looks like 230-250 on someone who is 5'4" but is closer to 275-300 for someone 5'10". (I imagine this is also the ideal range for myself, but because of my height I'd have to be 350 at a minimum... so I really don't know.)

Beyond 40 problems become more likely, but it's not a hard and fast rule (because BMI is a useless health metric). People also run into different problems at different sizes for different reasons. When I was 26 I had a diabetes scare when I was barely 280 (so mid-30s BMI iirc) while my partner at the time hit 350 (50+ BMI) without ever being flagged as pre-diabetic, even into her 30s with a pretty reckless diet. The human body is mysterious.

Ultimately the cutoff varies from person to person. But now that you mention it, I would definitely be interested in collating the data from other gainers for the sake of objectivity. Dreaming of an empirical science of feeding....

That's definitely true, I still have a fair amount of muscle so I look smaller for how much I weigh. So even just going off weight isn't a perfect measure but that's probably only a bigger deal in lower weight classes rather than higher ones