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Key points
- Fat fetishists have a strong sexual attraction toward obese people of the opposite sex. There is a small gay fat admiration community as well.
- Fat fetishism includes both "feederism" and "gaining," in which sexual arousal and gratification is stimulated through a person gaining bodyfat.
- Some speculate that the lack of research on fat fetishists is due to the belief that the preference is inconceivable or deviant.
Over the last few years, fat fetishism and fat admiration have come more into the public domain through national press and television documentaries. Fat fetishists — mostly heterosexual and sometimes colloquially referred to as "chubby chasers" — have an overwhelming (and often exclusive) sexual attraction towards very obese individuals of the opposite sex.
As a number of researchers point out, there is no widely held consensus in defining a fat admirer (FA), but the term is typically used in relation to individuals who find someone considered clinically overweight attractive. However, a 2005 paper by Lee Monaghan (in the journal Body and Society) also noted and described aspects of the small gay fat admiration community through the use of qualitative data he collected online.
Feederism and gaining
Fat fetishism also includes both "feederism" and "gaining" in which sexual arousal and gratification are stimulated through the person (referred to as the "feedee") gaining body fat. Feederism is a practice carried out by many fat admirers within the context of their sexual relationships and is where the individuals concerned obtain sexual gratification from the encouragement and gaining of body fat through excessive food eating.
Sexual gratification may also be facilitated and/or enhanced by the eating behavior itself, and/or from the feedee becoming fatter — known as "gaining" — where either one or both individuals in the sexual relationship participate in activities that result in the gaining of excess body fat. This may not only involve eating more food but also engaging in sedentary activities that leave the feedee immobile.
Some fat admirers may also derive pleasure from very specific parts of the body becoming fatter. A recent 2011 paper by Lesley Terry and Paul Vasey in the Archives of Sexual Behavior also claims that feedees are individuals who become sexually aroused by eating, being fed, and the idea or act of gaining weight.
Subcultures and body shape attractiveness
There has been a lot of psychological research showing that the attractiveness of women is related to both low body mass index (BMI) and low waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). However, there has been a great deal of debate on the universality of the findings and there is a lot of research that body shape attractiveness is determined by other factors including cross-cultural differences and gender-role stereotyping.
There has also been research on physical attractiveness among "subcultures" such as those people with eating disorders or in relation to sexual orientation. For instance, a 2006 study by Viren Swami and Martin Tovee (in Psychology of Women Quarterly) found that lesbians appear to idealize a heavier body weight in a potential partner than do heterosexual women or men.
One of these relatively unexplored "subcultures" is the FA community. A 2009 study by Viren Swami and Adrian Furnham, and published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, examined the bodyweight WHR preferences of 56 heterosexual "fat admirers." They claimed that the “relative scarcity of studies on the preferences of FAs can probably be traced back to the misperception that it is inconceivable that an individual could be attracted to obese others or that such a preference is somehow "deviant."
Unsurprisingly, their study — which was the first published on notions of attractiveness within the FA community — reported that FAs preferred heavyweight individuals and rated those individuals with high WHRs as the most attractive. The results predictably suggest that heterosexual male FAs hold very different ideals relating to attractiveness when compared with heterosexual men from the general population. Although some of the participants were fat themselves, there was no difference between these individuals and those FAs who were not overweight. The authors conclude that:
It seems plausible that male FA is paraphilic in the sense of it being a non-mainstream sexual practice without necessarily implying dysfunction or deviance. For instance, it may be that hunger or food was involved in the behavioral imprinting of a fat fetish in early childhood, a hypothesis favored by some psychoanalysts … A related theory also based on the principles of behavioral imprinting argues that when young men masturbate, the objects that are frequently nearby at the time of masturbation become objects of arousal in the future. The individual is thus associating the object with sexual orgasm, and this may include either eroticized images of overweight individuals, food, and so on.
It is also worth noting that in the Journal of Sex Research, Swami repeated the study comparing FAs with a control group of non-FAs and found the same results. Despite these studies, there is still little empirical research on fat admirers and feederism. The recent paper by Terry and Vasey reported the case study of a 30-year old female feedee ("Lisa").
At the time of the study, Lisa was 30 years of age, married and Caucasian. She was recruited by the researchers from a feederism website. By age 13 years (at 5 feet 11 inches tall) she was mildly preoccupied with her weight. She weighed 120-130 lbs and had a BMI of 16-18 (i.e., underweight). However. Like many girls, she viewed herself as fat and became self-conscious about her hips, thighs, and belly. She claimed to experience sexual thoughts about weight gain and fat from a very young age. Because of her sexual fantasies about fat women during adolescence, she experienced some confusion about her sexual orientation (but deemed herself heterosexual).
As an adult, Lisa said she was still sexually aroused in response to fat women but that it was limited to visual images found on the internet. Her ideal website would be where there were several pictures of the same woman getting fatter over time (and which she would masturbate over). Lisa also fantasized about being forced to gain weight by a dominant male who would become sexually aroused by making her gain weight. She also reported that all of her orgasms involve fantasizing about some form of feederism and that sometimes all she needs to reach orgasm is to fantasize about being a little bit heavier. Although she has actively engaged in weight gain for a four-month period in 2008, she has never been in a feedee/feeder relationship (as she doesn’t want the negative health consequences of becoming extremely overweight). She also reported her sexual arousal had significantly declined after the weight gain period.
In their discussion of Lisa’s case, Terry and Vasey made the point that as with many sexual paraphilias, her pattern of sexual arousal was characterized by intense and repetitive sexual urges, fantasies, and behaviours involving unusual activities (i.e., the intense focus on eroticizing body fat). Terry and Vasey also questioned whether Lisa’s behaviour represented a form of morphophilia (i.e., peak erotic focus on a particular body characteristic — in this case, body fat). They also speculated that some of the behaviour was sexually masochistic and that this supported their view that feederism had paraphilic elements (although Lisa reported that masochistic behaviours generally repulsed her). As with any case study, it may not be representative of the entire feederism community. Terry and Vasey also assert that more research needs to consider if, and how, feederism is taxonomically distinct from the various forms of morphophilia.
