Essay: About Feederism

This essay deals primarily with the phenomenon of "feederism", that it´s a practice between a couple when there´s a "feeder", who has the task of feeding his or her partner (the feedie) with extremely caloric value food. The objective it´s see how your feedie grow and fat up. Alyshia D. Bestard (2008) says "feederism is a phenomenon that involves people who are sexually aroused by thoughts and actions having to do with weight gain. (...) This can be done in the form of verbal encouragement to eat more or certain foods or it can be accomplished through physical encouragement in terms of cooking food, buying food, or literally feeding their partner food". 

I wan´t to start with the fact that the good corporal image always been identified with a skinny body, so this sexual practice tend to be more criticized and seen as a mental illness, since you consider beautiful a body that is not healthy for most of people. It´s also seen as an attack on your partner because you make her or him get fat as much as possible, even reaching cases of morbid obesity. On the internet, there´s websites for feederism lovers, when people meet, like Feabie, a dating site for admirers of feederism, actually they had 117.810 members. This page says "It’s a site for all the guys who spent their childhoods stuffing pillows under their shirts and the girls who couldn’t stop staring at the beautiful chubby woman in the supermarket" (Feabie.com). 

There is a debate about this practice, if is like a fetishism or a harmful practice for health; On the one hand the National Association for the Advancement of the Acceptance of Fats (NAAFA) proposes feederism it´s a negative practice, that involve a person to transform their body, regardless of the multiple risks, such as the immobilization of food, their social isolation and completely dependent on other people to be able to live, without saying that extreme obesity leads to death (naafaoline.com).

Don Kulick (2005) makes a gender distinction, where in this case the woman, free of conventional stereotypes, paradoxically ends up feeling an exercise of submission. According to Feadie, most feeder members would correspond to men.

By way of conclusion and taking into account the surveys, feederism should be addressed by making gender distinctions, as Kulick has addressed it, but I believe that more should be invested in food education and risks of obesity by the government and, all, appeal to the food and advertising industry so that it doesn´t replicate incorrect messages about health, and the food industry always 

It shows us very caloric and harmful foods, without showing the consequences of their uncontrolled intake. About that, it´s a fact that the advertising industry always but always approached from a medical and not aesthetic perspective, since the latter can trigger eating disorders.

 



Bibliography:


Bestard, A. D. (2008). Feederism: An exploratory study into the stigma of erotic weight gain (Master's thesis, University of Waterloo).

https://www.feabie.com/

https://www.naafaonline.com/dev2/

Kulick, D., & Meneley, A. (2005). Fat: The anthropology of an obsession. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.