General

You're not entirely wrong, but you are not entirely right either.

We'll never get those simpler times back, but that doesn't mean it's all doom and gloom. Community is what you make of it.

I remember how unsafe and unwelcome I felt when I first started being active on here. Sure, there were nice people, but I got harrassed a lot for being a woman, being black, being Jewish, not being a feedee, etc. I'd say the community was overrun by a special kind of asshole back then.

Yeah, I'd report people, but there were so many people like that it felt like wack a mole. One day I had enough and started publically standing up for myself and others. It was scary, but I couidn't live with myself if I backed down.

Well, it turns out I wasn't the only one that hated the status quo. Turns out, I was dealing with a very loud minority. They were so loud that everyone else thought the nice people were in the minority.

When I plucked up the courage to stand up to such people, others started doing it too. That vocal minority got quieter. It's more peaceful these day, and people are nicer.

There's a whole personal ads section if you scroll down, but I think it's great if new folks spend some time lurking and reading and getting a feel for how things work here before they dive right into posting personals. You might get better results that way. This definitely isn't the thread for it, though.

Gonna make a separate post because this one has a lot of words.

I feel that you have missed the point I was trying to make. I am not saying that men do not face discrimination. I am saying that women are uniquely vulnerable to discrimination.

Legitimate concerns like the increasing commercialization of our fetish with the rise of Only Fans and the TikTok invasion a while back flattened into "All women are money-hungry gold diggers." "Don't give your money to internet strangers" flattened into "Never give a female feedee money because they are all scammers."

Things have gotten better in this regard, but it is still a prevalent thought. And it is a dangerous thought, too, because often, a specific flavor of men will publicly blast a woman for being a "scammer" only because she rejected his advances. This can severely damage that woman's reputation and open her up to harassment.

Thankfully, more people are asking questions and not taking these accusations at face value. But it happens all the same.

Maybe it is too early to speak about solutions to problems, we have not yet identified clearly (i think what has been mentioned so far is somewhat surface-level observations) but, i think this should be also mentioned, an element that is missing is a lack of intentionality in the conversations that have to do with the betterment of our communities.

In general, people want to fix what annoys them, not problems, necesarily. And the rarely go on a theoretical analysis to identify their problems correctly (or at least, to not confuse symptoms as their problems). For example most people have a sentiment against comercialization, they will identify it as a problem and if the space allows them, they will try to push back on it. Thats one thing. It is another thing entierly to actually build community.

I've tried to do a few things with, more or less, the intend to improve FF in fundamental ways (for example i have asked Hiccupx to create a forum-like space, but one in which people will engage in a hegelian dialectic when in it, i dont know what's going on with that request. I could try to share this somewhere though!) but it seems that each time i end in bigger and bigger trouble.

And on that note i want to ask for advice. I do want to see a better community and i do want to participate in community building. What can i do? (meaning, what can a person do to at least faciliate this process of community building?)

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