| On My Fat Fetish |
[May. 1st, 2008|06:25 am] |
Sitting in one of my Firefox tabs, in nine simple lines of text, is a description of one of the most powerful forces in my life. That tab has sat open for months now, awaiting the day when I would write about it in my journal. Well, here we are.
I have mentioned often enough that, sexually speaking, I prefer fat females to thin ones. The fatter the better, in fact. No upper limit. I also prefer the same tendency in myself, because to a certain extent I am autosexual. In fact, only by the intercession of other priorities in life, along with my relative poverty, and a dose of hapless incompetence, have I managed to retain an average figure. Today I weigh 170 pounds, and am only marginally fat under the most generous of descriptions.
I don’t think of my preference for fatness as a “preference,” formally speaking Others in my position might call it that, and a few would insist upon the distinction, but I call it a fetish because that is what I feel it is…no different than other people’s irrational sexual fixation upon feet, fury animals, sharp teeth, or pregnant bellies. I call it a fetish rather than a preference because it is central to my sexuality—so important as to be a requirement—and also because I am aware of at least some of my “preferences” in females, such as tallness, muscularity, a pear shape, left-handedness, and so forth. Sexually, those are in an entirely different league from my fat fetish.
I write about this with a great deal of self-consciousness. I understand that practically no one is apt to want to read about it. Moreover, I understand that, where human sexuality is concerned, nobody ever looks good when discussing theirs. Sexuality is always, invariably, fucked up and grotesque. You just have to take it as a given. Lastly, I expect that discussing this aspect of myself is going to reduce my standing in the eyes of those who cannot properly grok it. I am not eager for that, but neither is it of terminal concern to me, for what does it even mean to be held in regard by someone simply because they do not understand me thoroughly enough?
Despite my reservations, and also a fair bit of embarrassment, I will write about it anyway, for two reasons: One, people really need to start exploring their own sexuality. American culture is way too puritanical to be healthy, and the degree of sexual repression in this society gives rise to all sorts of prejudices and dangers. If I can set a good example for others by being candid and inquisitive, then perhaps I can do some small service.
Secondly, it’s a fetish, after all! It’s on my mind a lot. I feel somewhat dishonest for not having written about it here yet.
Everything that follows may potentially be disgusting or even offensive, so bear that in mind as you continue. There will not, however, be any sexually explicit descriptions.
Some Like It Squishy
The nine lines are these:
I've got the whole fat/feederism thing going on, though some related areas also appeal, such as laziness and BDSM. There are three central themes in my fetishism: indulgence despite consequences; wrongness; and power exchange.
~ Phalloidium Hey, awesome self-analysis! Add me to the list of people who like the indulgence despite consequences thing. I probably have some variant of power exchange too, especially people doing things knowing it renders them less powerful.
My self label for my central drive is giving in to indulgence. That moment of knowing that what you want to do is pure indulgence, and will have some sort of consequences, and then choosing that indulgence anyway. Either for me, or for others.
~ edx This dialogue comes from a website called Dimensions, a place devoted to size-acceptance and a portal for something called fat admiration. From what I gather, Dimensions has been instrumental to many thousands of people who have a fat fetish, or who simply prefer fatness, as they have explored their sexual identity. I am one of those thousands.
In our fat-bashing culture, many people simply do not realize that their preference for fatness in their partners, in themselves, or in both parties, is relatively common and perfectly natural. Dimensions is a haven for those people, a place for the likeminded (and often oppressed, I should add) to congregate and share their ideas…and, for a while, be acceptable. There is an entire fat-loving community there, complete with its own slang, art forms, fat activism, dating scene, coffeehouse scene, philosophical debate, and various subcultures. Thousands of people use the Dimensions forums, and the other parts of the website are as diverse as you can imagine, with the one common theme among them being fat. Most people who are fond of fat have come through Dimensions at some point. It is the Ellis Island of fat admiration.
Now what is it about fat, anyway, that someone would find attractive to the point of fetishizing it? I can’t answer that. Fetishes are irrational. If you have one of your own, you understand that. The dazzling variety of sexual fetishes in human psychology, and the near-universal grotesqueness of any fetish to those who do not personally experience it, to me suggests that the origins of the fetish are very deep in the most ancient core of the human brain. While I have no scientific qualification whatsoever to say this, my deduction is that whatever it is that a fetish represents may simply be nonsensical to its very core…the outer brain’s attempt to make sense of the inner brain’s primitiveness by devising a very bizarre association, such as the fat fetish, or the classic foot fetish.
There are fetishes out there far, far worse than mine, including no few of dubious legality or physical lethality. I should consider myself fortunate in that mine is relatively benign, and doubly fortunate in that I even can act it out. Many fetishes do not permit that, such as vorarephilia, which is limited entirely to the imagination. Perhaps I could dare go so far as to say I am triply fortunate, because some fetishes, while neither deadly nor illegal, nor physically impossible, are still dangerous or harmful, such as the vomit fetish.
I am with you in confessing that I have no fucking clue what it is about feet, or pregnant bellies, or being eaten, or getting vomited on, that could possibly be sexually arousing to anybody. I don’t get those fetishes.
But fat…I grok that one. That’s my fetish. I don’t expect you to grok it, but perhaps you will learn something about it anyway—and, in so doing, better understand human sexuality.
The Fat Fetish
Not all fat fetishes are equal. Let me take you on a journey of forks in the road, or “forkfuls,” as I describe the exact nature of my own fetish.
Forkful 1: Some people are aroused by the state of being fat. Others, such as me, are aroused by the act of getting fat. Those are the two major branches of the fat fetish, and each has several variations.
Forkful 2: Of those who are aroused by the act of getting fat, some focus on the process of getting fat. Others, such as me, focus on the consequences of getting fat.
Forkful 3: Of those who are aroused by the consequences of getting fat, there are several common areas of focus.
Those nine lines I mentioned earlier, except for the bit about BDSM, are a very good description of the exact nature of my particular fetish.
There are three central themes in my fetishism: indulgence despite consequences; wrongness; and power exchange. The “indulgence” stands for a corruption of the body…the deliberate ruination of it for sexual gratification. Think of it as the falling of an angel.
The “consequences” refer to the ruination itself: extreme unhealthiness, loss of self-control, loss of other ambitions and thus the loss of one’s own self-worth, physical immobility, and even premature death.
The “wrongness” aspect might seem obvious, but it is very important in that it connotes the commission of an injustice, and thus implies the paying of a price. In other words, it stands for sacrifice, suffering, humiliation, and so forth.
Finally, the “power exchange” stands for two things. The “power” part represents what is lost in the corruption and ruination: independence, willpower, potential, self-determination, strength, integrity, honor, and indeed one’s own future. The “exchange” part refers to the axis of sadism-masochism. If the act is sadistic, it refers to stripping one’s partner of their “power” by helping them feed themselves into oblivion. If the act is masochistic, it refers to forfeiting one’s own “power” in pursuit of the same end. In any case, there is an exchange of power—not typically from one partner to the other (and indeed for some people the object is for both partners to gain weight), but instead from the weight-gaining person into the thin air. Call it a deal with the Devil, if you will. You get a few short years of unlimited gluttony, and afterward the Devil gets your soul forever.
It’s different for everybody, but I personally visualize an individual deliberately overeating and being fed by their partner, and slowly, over a period of years, growing into an immense human blob, unable to move, sweating, gasping for air, breaking wind, and then finally losing all self-control before ultimately collapsing into a depraved and untimely death. In the more common sadistic manifestation of this fetish, the person I visualize getting fatter is a generic female. In its masochistic form, the person getting fatter is me.
This is all rather extreme, but what it isn’t is rare. In some form or another, nearly all of us have both a sadistic and masochistic component to our sexuality. For some it is less pronounced; for others it is fiercely intense. And of course there are plenty of us in between.
I’m definitely something of a small-timer. As it is with most people who have fetishes, or who rate highly on their sadism or masochism stats generally, the more extreme parts of my obsession with fat remain largely in the realm of fantasy. The amount of weight I have thus far deliberately gained in my life is small potatoes even compared to the weight of the average American male, and I have never encouraged weight gain in a female partner—primarily because they tend to want nothing to do with it. =)
I have intense visualizations of the extremity of growing fat, but in my real life I do very little to make these visions a reality. The closest I ever came was eighteen straight months of overeating in 2006 and 2007, taking me thirty pounds higher than my previous highest weight ever. I had wanted to do that my whole life. Thirty pounds—it was actually fifty, because I had been below my previous high weight at the beginning—isn’t particularly healthy to gain in the space of eighteen months, and I admit that, but I also consider it a small price to pay considering how overwhelming the sex drive is to one’s general psychology.
Will I gain weight again in the future? I don’t know! Probably. Psychologically speaking, I don’t like losing weight—it makes me feel uncomfortable and incomplete—and at 170 pounds I can afford to gain a good deal more before any fat-bashing fascists start giving me the evil eye. But on the other hand, I do have other priorities in life, and none of them are served by me being fat. Indeed, some of my other passions are outright hindered, such as my fondness for bicycling, backpacking, and city walking. Thus, a small-timer I remain for the time being, and if a few extra pounds and a fondness for America’s commonest body type is all the baggage I carry with me from my fetish, then I am most fortunate indeed.
Will I ever encourage weight gain in a partner? Again, I don’t know! Certainly not with Kendra. She is adamantly opposed to being overweight let alone gaining it willfully, and, because I love her more than I love her fat, that is acceptable to me. Indeed, as I have told her, Kendra is something of a moderating influence on me. Without her steady discouragement, I’d probably eventually wind up taking things farther than I justifiably should. Raging libido aside, I don’t like the thought of drowning myself in fat, or of helping a partner to do the same to herself.
With fat, a little bit can go a long way…and too much is never enough.
The extent to which we indulge our sexual appetites is necessarily limited by the considerations of the other aspects of our lives. Many people who fantasize about weight gain “draw the line” at becoming physically immobile, and many of these (or their partners) never get anywhere near that fat anyway. Only the extremists will muster the amazing dedication required to go “all the way.” I say there is a meaningful difference between 200 and 300 pounds, but none whatsoever between 500 and 600. Once the body starts to grow formlessly obese, a person crosses a line of sorts, effectively declaring that sexual gratification is their primary ambition in life, rather than one of several competing ambitions. Weight gain becomes an obsession—more than obsession: It becomes a way of life.
Ethically, I cannot condone that anybody take their fetish to the extreme. Fantasizing is fine, but destroying a human body is altogether more serious. However, these sorts of decisions are ours to make on our own, and, of those who do decide to become profoundly fat…I can only say that I sympathize. I understand the pull.
Origins of the Fat Fetish
I had a fat fetish before I passed into sexual maturity. Even as a kid I desired to gain weight, fantasized about rolling around in my own lard, and made halfhearted attempts to overeat. (They all failed and I remained a regular-looking, perhaps slightly pudgy kid throughout my childhood.)
Back then, I didn’t know that my fat fetish was a sexual thing. I didn’t think in sexual terms yet, and I visualized only myself—never a female—becoming fat. Like many people, I had my first sexual experience completely by accident, and I did it by fantasizing about a desperately overweight Star Trek star. (I’ll leave you to guess which one she was.)
Throughout my childhood, I was always deeply embarrassed by my fixation with fat. I was very, very shy about people’s remarks that had anything to do with me and overeating or me and body fat. One time when I was little—probably not even ten years old—I was at a pool party potluck. I had just gotten two plates of food from the buffet line, one in each hand, when a friend’s mom came up and made some comment I don’t remember, about me having a big appetite. I was so mortified that I actually hit her…or perhaps I kicked her, since I didn’t have any hands available, and it would have been too horribly cute to fathom that I might have gone to the trouble of putting down one of my plates just to be able to hit her. (It wasn’t a malicious act, mind you—purely a defensive one.)
For the same reason, I always wore a shirt when I swam. I didn’t want anybody to see my belly. I’ve always had a small belly, despite never really being overweight. I’m just shaped that way. And I was very self-conscious about it. Even today, I don’t like other people to see my stomach—notwithstanding attractive females.
I don’t know where my fetish came from, but I do know that it was with me early in life. Once I remember my mom saying, offhand, that she’d rather I be fat than have rotten teeth—this was on a trip to the dentist—and I remember being terribly embarrassed about that. I probably wasn’t even seven at the time.
Perhaps the closest I can get to the origin of my fetish is this: When I was down in California a few weeks ago having Passover with the family, my mom told a story of something that I used to do constantly as a kid, but had completely forgotten about as a teenager and adult. Some kids suck their thumb, right? Well, when I was a baby and a very young boy, I used to stick my finger in my belly button. Constantly. In and out. Over and over. Sometimes left hand, sometimes right. I have no memory of this whatsoever, nor of the tantrums that I apparently threw when I wasn’t able to get access to my belly button—such as being blocked by inelastic jeans, which (as I know now) is why I never regularly wore jeans until middle school.
I can only surmise that, at some moment in my earliest past, something about a fat belly made its way into my mind, and blossomed from there into the fully-formed fetish I possess today.
How bizarre you are, how not of a kind, O human mind!
Sometimes we tend to forget, in our society of conformity and normalcy, just how weird humanity is.
Fat Sex
No, no graphic descriptions. What I want to talk about, briefly, is how I reconcile my fetish with the act of sex. A fetish, as you know, is all but required during sex in order to achieve completion. You might think that this requires that I or my partner be fat, but it turns out not to be strictly necessary.
I said earlier that a little bit of fat goes a long way, and this works out quite well with my mate Kendra—who is, after all, a little bit fat. That small amount of extra flesh on her body, together with the even smaller amount of extra flesh on my own, is sometimes more than enough to do the trick. I can’t tell you how erotic and satisfying it is to be brought to orgasm by the thought (and sight, and smell, and feel) of one’s own partner. It is something you will simply have to experience for yourself.
Other times, or when I am by myself, the amount of real fat available is not sufficient, and I can only finish up by fantasizing about real weight gain. Usually I picture the fattening of a generic female—or, on very rare occasions, the fattening of me—and this is where my fetish truly steps up to the forefront of my mind. These fantasies are highly extreme and involve the most morbid excesses of obesity you could imagine. Five, six, seven hundred pounds. Eight! And everything that goes with it.
People’s minds can work very differently during sex. For me, visualization is at the center of everything. There is no sex without visualizing something. To get my visuals, I have two options: I can either look at what I have available between myself and my partner, or I can imagine a fantasy sex scene. Either way I have to be seeing something, and, because I have a fat fetish, the something I have to be seeing is squishy female flesh. (Or, in those times when I visualize myself getting fat, my own flesh. In these cases my fantasy female partner is completely trim, because for me there is much arousal in contrasting the healthy, slim, dignified partner against the sweating, gasping, fatally corpulent one.)
Fat Fetishism and Feminism
One thing I don’t fantasize about, ever, is Kendra herself getting fatter. This is important because I see it as proof that I have the will to put some of my other concerns ahead of my fat fetish. The two most important of these concerns are my passion for sexual equality, and my respect for Kendra as a sovereign human being. Her incredible loathing for being fat has made it impossible—literally—for me to derive sexual satisfaction from visualizing her gaining weight. So instead I focus on her body as it is.
This is very important indeed, because it means that I prefer to respect her humanity rather than sexually objectify her. You see, the thing about fetishes and sexual fantasizing is that objectification is the rule of the day. Everybody I visualize is objectified—even me. Worse, these generic females I envision are not the empowered female equals that I so passionately crave in real life. They are sex objects, fattened into a young doom, dying in their own craven monument of female blubber. That’s quite the opposite of empowerment. To me, sitting here now in my rational frame of mind, it’s actually the most disgusting part of this entire affair.
Nevertheless, for me sexual fantasy is the place where sexuality and sexism necessarily overlap—as I suspect it is for a great many people. This is the one time when I perceive females in the animal sense, as objects of my desire…as partners for sex, and nothing more. Don’t care who her favorite author is. Don’t care what she majored in. Don’t care. Here in the realm of fantasy, during the act of sex or as a precursor to it, the females I visualize are sex partners and nothing else. I permit this perception of females in myself, during this one time, because I see it as sexist only circumstantially: If I were bisexual, my fantasies would include males too. In other words, it isn’t that they are females. It’s that I’m heterosexual.
When a human in is sex-mode, their partner becomes, if not an object per se, then an object of desire. That’s why so many people call sex the supreme act of intimacy: Carnal knowledge strips aside all of our higher awareness, and reduces us to something primitive and animalistic. Of course, most people don’t describe it as such: They use spiritual language, and speak of celestial spheres and true love. However you describe it, though, sex is an experience unlike anything else in a person’s entire life. It is unique. And, by any rational measure, it demeans the other partner, because the sexual thrill causes each participant to lose sight of everything about their partner(s) other than his or her (or their) sexual desirability. That’s why you have to step back and realize that it is a highly specific case of temporary insanity. There isn’t supposed to be a rhyme or a reason to it. It’s sex, and that’s all it is. It is the tale of two human beings coming together to participate in a primordial physical act which (I should hope) both (or all) of them greatly desire—not on a rational level, not on an emotional level, but on the carnal level…the genital level. Also known as “thinkin’ with your versplinken.” (Okay, so I made that up, but it has the advantage of being sex-neutral.)
What it comes to is this: In building my relationship with Kendra, I have proved to my own satisfaction that, by not fantasizing about her gaining weight, I truly do not see her as one of those generic female sex objects in my fantasies, but instead as the real Kendra…the same person who I know and love in the nonsexual parts of my life. Even though I greatly desire her body much of the time—including the fat parts of it in particular—the greater part of me loves her for something she possesses of far higher preciousness than her genitals: Her beautiful mind. I say this not to score points with her, but because I truly do mean it, and because it is very gratifying to me—like passing a test of character—to favor Kendra the Person over Kendra the Object…even during sex.
The Orgasm & Denouement
Again, no graphic descriptions. It is of high interest (to me) that, when I orgasm, my fetish disappears—instantly and totally. This, more than anything else, is what proves to me that it is a fetish. Much as I suspect the Devil would do, if there were such a character—which of course there is not—my fetish lures me into a fondness for severe misbehavior (i.e., weight gain) in the pursuit of sexual gratification, and then vanishes once I achieve it…leaving me with all of these proverbial extra pounds, now hanging onto me like so much dead weight.
In the moment of orgasm, I fantasize. I always do. I stop seeing whatever is actually in front of me. Instead I metaphorically recreate the event, in allegory: I see Ganondorf floating in the air and firing his balls of energy atop his high tower of stained glass. Or I see Silence taking her left hand and unleashing the incredible colorless beams of fire that can tear into another plane of existence. Or anything of that sort. It is intense and visceral. There is nothing civilized about it. It is animal. A few flecks of spit from my mouth are testament enough to that, for this is the one time when I might ever do something so gross, because I seem to have a drool-phobia and cannot stand it when people spit or drool or froth.
Afterwards, once I have calmed down, I get to experience one of the few reliable moments in my life where I can exist without a fat fetish. Oftentimes, if I have overindulged in food prior to sex, I will feel mortified, knowing that weight gain might gratify me sexually but is at odds with most of my other desires in life. Only here does the full strangeness of my fetish—and the ramifications of it—dawn upon me. This is the closest I ever come to feeling guilty about fat.
Mind you, I am not a fat-basher. Purely on academic grounds I support the size-acceptance movement, and, as I have written, I think our social hatred of fat is unwarranted and the health risks of it are overstated. Even so, the kind of extreme fatness I fantasize about is definitely beyond the realm of good human health, which humbles me in this time of denouement.
The Tenth Line
I consider it to be a mark of human judgment, and of our good character, if we can reconcile our competing interests in life in a way that satisfies us, or, at least, represents our best qualities and efforts. A sexual fetish is so often at odds with our other interests in life, and often can pose serious risks due to its bizarre nature. Even so, I do not condemn sexual fetishes. They are a part of human nature. Yes, they are weird and overwhelming and sometimes very frustrating, but, then again, so much of the human condition is like that. How easily we get too hot, or too cold. How dreadful it is to be hungry. How little else occupies our minds when we become sick. These “frustrations” are a part of the common experience we all share. They help give our lives definition, and I don’t resent my fetish one bit. Perhaps if I could erase it from my mind I would consider doing that, but, since I can’t, I am more than happy to live with what I am.
In the years to come, I will have only the strength of my judgment to guide me in deciding how important it is that I or a partner gain weight, and how much weight that might be. If I’m worth anything, I won’t give up any power that I’m not prepared to give up. But if I do find that some of my power is worth giving up, then it isn’t worth having anymore, and forsaking it would be the right thing to do.
I might add: Far from being a bogus deal, growing fatter does open up the individual to new kinds of power, chief of which is heightened sensuality. Having more body makes one more aware of oneself. So please don’t presume that I think getting fat is all bad outside of a sexual context. I don’t think that at all. Indeed, if my judgment is sound—and I am nothing if not competent in my abilities—then, whatever choice I make, I will be able to look back upon it and say, “I did what mattered to me.”
I expect I will eventually settle for a compromise: 200 pounds, or 250. Or, if Kendra and I eventually go our separate ways, I may look for a female partner who is that heavy, or even twice that heavy. I don’t know…and the future will not tell me. Perhaps I will lose every ounce of extra fat by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Or perhaps I’ll put on five hundred pounds and become confined to my own home. Perhaps my hypothetical next mate will be rail-thin, and feed me until they have to hoist me out on a forklift one day.
Whatever happens, I can only admit of my future this simple truth: Life is a curious tale after all, and many other things besides, but one thing life isn’t is safe, and we must do what we can, in the time we have, to act upon our desires, or else we will miss our one chance in this cosmos to achieve meaning, fulfillment, contentment, satisfaction, and perhaps even serenity.
It may be strange to equate those fine virtues with a horribly fat body, but didn’t I say it before: We tend to forget, in our society of conformity and normalcy, just how weird we really are. The goal is not necessarily to live long, but to live well…whatever that means to each of us, individually.
An Urgent Command to the World
May everyone who is fat and seeks to be thin, become thin.
May the bigotry against fat come to an end in our days.
May everyone who admires fat, affirm this to themselves and the world.
May those who love the delights of fat flesh be graced with its abundance.
May human beings seek to better understand their own sexuality, and prosper for it. |
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