Hillary Eaton

Even as size-acceptance movements continue to grow in the Western world, people still fear fat. They worry about becoming fat themselves or criticize it in others, often under the troll-like guise of caring for a stranger’s health. But that is not the case when it comes to feederism: a multifaceted community of people with a fetish for eating and weight gain.

Barring a few eye-opening pieces from members of the feederism community themselves, the portrait most people get of feederism is one of extremes—stories of the world’s fattest men and women or think pieces that question whether the feeder-feedee relationship is abusive.

In order to get a more complete understanding of what it actually means to be part of the feederism community, I headed to Fantasy Feeder, an online hub where those who “want to be fat or to fatten” come together to chat about everything from recipes and lifestyle tips to weight gain and BDSM.

For many of those who are into feederism, an interest in weight and fatness came at a young age. “I was always attracted to fat people,” explains Patch Lumpkin, a longstanding feedee and gainer within the community. “I loved the way their body looked and I loved seeing them eat. When I was a kid, I would stuff my clothes with pillows and pretend to be super-fat. I also loved playing in the mud and being messy with food. It gave me a thrill even before I knew it was sexual.”

Mutual gainer Martin Silva reflects: “It started pretty young—I’d say, like, age 14. I liked the idea of girls getting fatter. I would think about what they would look like with 20 extra pounds, then 40, etc., and found that very erotic,” he tells me. “At the same time, I found gaining weight myself to be a turn-on—being fed by a female feeder. So I finally settled on mutual gaining, as both arouse me.”

Gaining is something that many feedees do on their own in the beginning, perhaps with some encouragement from people in the online feeder community. But more often than not, the feeder-feedee relationship isn’t there from the beginning in any direct way.

“[My gaining] is mostly personal, but I do get encouragement from feeders on Kik,” says feedee Kyle Chessner.  A direct or indirect feeder partner isn’t always necessary for feedees to enjoy the pleasure that comes from a love of fatness and feeling themselves get bigger, or the playful and sometimes not-so-playful humiliation at their gains.

For some, the act of feeding can be as simple as eating throughout the day. “I eat carbs, and a lot of them,” says Chessner. “I eat almost constantly and am rarely seen without food. I love waking up in the morning and examining my body in the mirror and trying to visually track my gain.”

For others, feeding can range from a weekly indulgence to planning something that’s more of a production: “Basically, food with foreplay,” Silva says.

“Sometimes the hottest [feeding sessions] are in public, where you have to try to not look so turned on,” says Lumpkin. “In private, you can get wild and mix sex directly with feeding. I enjoy being encouraged to eat with sexual pleasure. Like, if I’m eating, I get a reward with stimulation, or spanked/pegged if I don’t eat like a good piggy. I love being teased about how fat I am and how fat I will become—being measured, weighed, made to wear clothes that are too tight, so as I eat the buttons pop.”

While stuffing can be incredibly erotic for some feedees, huge amounts of weight gain are rarely the goal. “Only a small number ever take it to those levels of extreme obesity,” Silva notes. “I find a female going from 120 [pounds] to maybe 165 ideal.  Others might say 165 is just a starting point, and say 200, etc.”

Lumpkin agrees. “Each body is different. If you are experiencing health issues due to weight, most feedees will drop pounds until they get to a safe weight. Like BDSM—safe, sane, consensual,” he adds. “Some of us may fantasize about being immobile [due to weight] but in reality we still want active lives.”

The feeder-feedee relationship is most often one of a dominant and a submissive, sharing certain characteristics with BDSM culture. But as with any BDSM relationship, the erotic transaction must be mutual—both parties have to enjoy the weight gain. And as with BDSM, responsible feeders and feedees take their roles very seriously, and are careful to practice in safe ways that respect their partners’ boundaries.

But that isn’t always the case. On the extreme end of the feedee spectrum are people like Donna Simpson, the New Jersey woman and feedee cam-girl who once famously strove to reach 1,000 pounds with the encouragement of her then-fiancé, Philippe Gouamba. Simpson has since turned away from the life of eating in front of a webcam, moved back to Ohio, and dropped from 600 pounds to 470 in order to take better care of her two children.

“All [Philippe] could see was my belly, my figure—not that I had a brain or that I should be going to school,” Simpson tells me. “I guess you could say the same about the other side as well—when women look exactly like [they do] in Vogue magazine and men only see you for your body like that.”

While Simpson may have given up her extreme goals, she’s still not entirely turned off by the idea of a feeder-feedee relationship. “If I was with a guy who thinks it’s kind of cute to feed and likes if you gain a little bit of weight, then I wouldn’t mind that,” she says. “Like, ‘I think it’s kind of cool if you eat another slice of pizza’ or ‘I’ll bring you home a box of seven donuts.’ But the whole extreme thing is too much.”

Indeed, her relationship unraveled because the realities of such weight gain often clashed with her partner’s fantasy. “Philippe always wanted me to eat and gain and eat and gain, but then would get angry with me because I wasn’t able to vacuum the floor,” Simpson says. “You can’t want someone to be immobile but then get mad when they can’t go walk in the park with you. It becomes a form of abuse when it’s to that extreme. You have to be really selfish, to be an intensely hardcore feeder, to not want your partner to be able to walk around and enjoy life.”

As Simpson’s experience demonstrates, feeding is not inherently abusive, but it can be exploited by abusive people.

“Philippe was a bona fide sociopath. He once told me there was this woman who had no arms and no legs, and her husband carries her around like that in a box,” Simpson tells me. “And he thought that sounded like the perfect woman.”

Lumpkin concedes that while most people in feeder-feedee relationships are perfectly well adjusted, the accepting nature of the community can be enticing to those who are not. “There is an attraction to this lifestyle by the enabler and victim,” he says. “It’s a safe place to hide in an all-accepting community and family that will unconditionally love you. People like that need help and to be in their right mind before they make modification to their body with full understanding, full control.”

It’s the sensationalized cases of extreme gaining and abuse that gives feederism a bad name, keeping many (but not all) feeders and feedees from being fully open about their lifestyle. As Lumpkin puts it, “There are challenges to living this lifestyle, no doubt. We wear our fetish.”

Modern children are an entirely different breed of human. They use iPhones better than most adults before their fifth birthday, don’t remember the archaic time when one could openly smoke in restaurants, and will listen to songs like “Wiggle” twenty years from now and become filled with nostalgia for childhood. Hipster baby names have gotten out of control, but now there’s a revolution of young children who are full-on, hardcore vegans and vegetarians. My six-year-old brother, William, is one of them.

Vegetarian since birth (due to my parent’s vegetarianism) William’s diet is something that I have silently, and sometimes not so silently, had problems with my whole life. He’s six and, even though I have spent zero time studying nutrition, I’ve always thought he couldn’t possibly be getting the nutrients he needs to grow properly—like many of us carnivores do—without meat. But William is a happy, healthy little kid who’s indecipherable from the rest his age, minus his affinity for tofu hot dogs and his ability to draw out the I’m trying not to look shocked face from waiters when we’re out for dinner and he says “I’m vegetarian” to the suggestion of pepperoni pizza.

One of the best parts about a vegetarian child is their reason for going meatless, which tends to either be adorably decided or a strange regurgitation of their parent’s rationale. “I just don’t like it, I don’t want to kill the creatures,” says William, sounding like my step-dad, “It’s weird because they kill animals just to eat the meat, not to use the bones or anything. If you’re going to hurt the animal you shouldn’t waste the bones.” Apparently “bone wasting” is a big concern for vegetarian children.

If you ask my parents why they chose to raise my brother vegetarian, their answers are a bit more in depth, “to be vegetarian is to be compassionate and have a respect for and love for all life, and then there are the obvious health benefits as well. Beans and rice provide amino acids, and dairy and plant proteins can substitute meat proteins and plant based iron coupled with citrus high in vitamin C allows for better absorption providing adequate iron levels,” says my mother. And even though those are things I’ve been hearing my whole life and rolled my eyes to often, I can’t deny that what they are saying is well informed considering my step dad’s degree in nutritional science and lifelong work in the health food industry. That coupled with my mother’s obsession with researching ways to stay healthy while being vegetarian is part of the reason why I can respect my parents’ decision to raise William to be vegetarian, even if it’s something that I wouldn’t do myself. “If he really wanted to eat meat, of course we would let him, he just doesn’t want to,” my mother insists. Sure, I think to myself, not yet, he doesn’t.

But it’s not just me. While there are an estimated 1.4 million vegetarian kids in the US and the culture of vegetarianism is more common than it was 50 years ago, the idea of a child or infant being vegetarian or vegan is still one that concerns many people when it comes to growth and health. Consider the tragic story of Sarah Anne Markam, the vegan mother who was arrested this week for not taking her infant to the hospital after being advised by a pediatrician that the infant’s vegan diet was putting the child’s like at risk.

As terribly sad as that is, what people might not realize is that for every vegan and vegetarian child who has suffered injury or death due to the diet their parents have chosen for them, there is another child who has suffered the same or equally terrible fate who wasn’t vegetarian or vegan. Children who are fed dairy and meat also die or suffer from diet induced medical disorders every year, from obesity to developing diabetes to suffering from vitamin deficiencies that effect their growth and internal organs. Some people are just fucking idiots or evil bastards that should not have children.

“A vegetarian child’s diet can be absolutely healthy, but you have to know what you’re doing,” says dietician Nina Hirvi about vegetarian children. “Of course there are risks if you are limiting certain foods, but the ones you want to watch out for are calcium, iron, and protein.” The average toddler only needs about 16 grams of protein a day—much of which can come from dairy, beans, and legumes. Many fruits and vegetables are iron-rich, and calcium can be obtained from milk. The only children that are at any real risk are picky eaters who also happen to be vegetarian.

“If you’re a picky kid who doesn’t like beans or tofu or nuts, you’re probably going to end up eating too many carbohydrates. We know that a vegetarian diet is healthier. But if you end up eating too much white refined carbohydrates and starch to substitute for lean chicken breast and beans, it’s not a healthy diet and can lead to the child becoming overweight,” explains Hirvi. If you’re going to have a vegetarian child, you may have to become more vigilant at cracking the whip, “If you’re vegan, you’re going to need to take a supplement of B12, because it is only found in animal foods and is also a good source of iron,” suggests Hirvi.

When the vast majority of problems that come about from a kid being vegetarian or vegan are results of not properly educating yourself on what exactly your vegetarian kid needs in order to survive, making them eat things they don’t want to, or not giving them a B12 vitamin, I think it’s time to stop blaming the diet itself and point the finger at inadequate parents. If you are making the decision to feed your child a vegetarian or vegan diet you damn well better at least read a book about it, or talk to a nutritionist, but get your shit together and make sure that kid is getting all of the nutrients that they need in order to be healthy.