Fetish porn as social justice

Feeders, Fat Lovers and Fortunes

Since entering into the world of feminist politics, I have tried to avoid, as much as possible, taking a deep dive into issues of, fetish porn, because research into pornography is hard going.  Unfortunately, I broke my own general rule and watched Feeders, Fat Lovers and Fortunes on Stan. 

The program, that is listed as a documentary, but is presented in the style of voyeuristic infotainment, explores the world of niche porn production for men who have a “fat fetish”. More disturbing than the visuals in the two-part documentary, is the way the program uses social justice cues to frame an obviously harmful industry for women and girls as a bastion of inclusivity, pride and liberation.

To save you from having to watch the program, I can explain it briefly. There is group of men who have a sexual fetish for very fat women, and this has spawned a category of porn where extremely overweight women perform peculiar pornographic acts and post them on websites and apps for purchase. 

The pornographic acts performed include eating high calorie food naked or in lingerie, masturbating while dressed as a pig or a cow and something called “squashing”, where skinny people are sat on while the fat person makes orgasm noises.

The men who purchase this strange brand of porn are called “feeders”. Feeders enjoy feeding women to the point where they gain increasingly dangerous amounts of weight, all while pretending to find the process immensely arousing.

Among feeder porn content, you can find large women performing “stuffing videos” where they eat high calorie food and make sexual noises. The customer will often buy the food and specify what food he wants to be eaten. The going price for these videos are US 8 per minute clothed and AUD 12 nude. One UK content created said that she sold her private show for 2 GBP per minute.

The most popular feeder porn performers are “gainers”, that is, women who are verifiable gaining weight to fulfil the customer’s fetish.  Gainer content creators do a weekly weigh-in video to demonstrate that they have gained weight.  One feeder content creator interviewed on the program, claimed that her best videos are the weigh-ins.

One of the gainers highlighted in the documentary, had a special series of sexual performances wearing a fake oxygen tube in her nose and a hospital gown, to give the appearance that she was so disabled from being fat that she needed to be in an assisted care facility.

Feeder content creators charge for video clips by the minute and take donations from a “community” of fat fetishists who pay extra for one-on-one performances.  Some customers purchase in person performances where they can be sat on or wrestled with, sometimes resulting in cracked ribs or burst blood vessels.

In the documentary, we are introduced to one of the most dedicated consumers of feeder porn, self-confessed “chubby chaser”, Liam.  Liam has greasy hair that is too long to be short and not long enough to be hipster, he sports a brown, unkept beard, dirty fingernails, and NHS teeth.  We get a back story for Liam, that he has been attracted to larger women since he was eight or nine years old.  This important confession sets up the latter claim that this brand of fetishism is innate, like a sexuality. 

Liam explains how the sexual noises large women make while they eat is “kinda hot” and as the camera zooms in on him while he is watching a fat lady eat a large sandwich, an awkward moment is avoided when Liam looks away from the screen just in time to avoid showing his aroused face. Liam latter explains that he has no reason to be ashamed as a consumer of this weird niche porn, he explains that “no one would say being gay is a fetish or being a lesbian is a fetish. It’s a sexual preference”.

When I grew up in a Brisbane public housing estate in the 70s and 80s, homosexuals were literally being hunted in the street by homophobic gangs.  My cousin Kevin was being regularly bashed, my mother said it was because he had a big mouth. He was not being bashed because he had a big mouth but because he was homosexual.  Kevin committed suicide in 1988 when he was 25 years old.

Liam is not an oppressed sexual minority because he gains sexual pleasure from feeding women to death. The Stan documentary didn’t have the idea to present creepy Liam as a sexual minority all by themselves.  Documentary makers have access to the same flavour of advice available to all media players, usually in the form of a former gay rights organisations charging a fee for ready made queer theory narratives of fat acceptance, kink celebration and sex work as an employment growth industry for women. 

Feeders, Fat Lovers and Fortunes portrays morbidly obese porn performers as being empowered through the production and consumption of feeder pornography.  We hear back stories about how the women were fat children and struggled to accept themselves, finally finding liberation as the object of desire for the feeder porn consumers.

It is clear from doing a little maths, that the work the porn performers do is not only degrading, difficult and disastrous to their bodies, it’s not that profitable.

In the two-part program, we meet Caiti Dee from LA, who has been creating feederism content for 10 years and is considered one of the stars of the industry.

The show boasts that Caiti earned 90,000 USD last year.  We hear Caiti’s weekly food bill is $600, if we consider this a cost of business, that takes $31,200 from her gross turnover. From the remaining, 58,800, Caiti has to fund the IT for 3 clip sites, a membership site, 2 phone texting apps and 4 social media profiles, all requiring constant fresh engagement. After her IT costs, Caiti will have rent, studio operation costs and taxation to deal with. One would think that health insurance would be expensive and difficult to access when the product Caiti sells is her own weight gain.  Caiti’s goal weight is 500lbs (227 kgs).

Caiti doesn’t see herself ageing out of the industry, saying she could go another 30 years. You don’t need to be a cardiologist to see the obvious flaw in Caiti’s plan.  Feeder porn is on an inevitable collision course with chronic organ failure because of the escalating nature of sexual fetishes.

Homosexuals have sought the expansion of social sexual boundaries because social taboos around homosexuality endangers homosexuals and prevents them from living a normal life. Fetishism on the other hand exists in the crossing of acceptable cultural and sexual boundaries. 

The removal of boundaries of social shame around homosexuality enables same sex attracted people to participate as full citizens. Conversely if we remove the forbidden element of a fetish, if we normalise it, the fetishist has to go further to cross the cultural boundary, because the boundary is part of the fetish.  Removing cultural boundaries pushes the fetish further and causes more harm to the object of the fetish, which is almost always women and children.

In the case of feeder fetishists, content creators have to perform increasingly degrading acts and further destroy their body in order to meet the advancing demands of the market to transgress the next boundary. Caiti admitted that “you have to engage more and more and more and present yourself as accessible”. In other words, she has to pander to all her customers sexual whims while not making the customer feel like the creepy perve he so obviously is.

Feeders, Fat Lovers and Fortunes concludes without even a hint of the health dangers of this diabolical section of the porn industry, instead it claims that feederism “has allowed an increasing number of women to take control of their bodies and their incomes”, the visual on that line is one fat lady wobbling another fat lady’s massive stomach on the side of the pool, while both pretend to gain sexual pleasure from the bizarre activity.  

The reality for porn producer Cati Dee, who is eloquent and chirpy and clearly business savy, is that she is killing herself to cater to men’s sexual fetishes. What is presented on Feeders, Fat Lovers and Fortunes is an unintentional expose on the exploitation of mostly poor women in an industry that has no value for the bodies of women or the messages that are being sent to girls through the “queer acceptance” and “healthy at any size” narratives. 

We could write to the documentary makers or Stan to complain about this documentary, but we will almost certainly find that someone has sought equity consultation, and for a small fee, purchased narratives to exonerate them from any social justice infractions.  We would receive a carefully crafted email in reply, listing the LGBTQ organisation from whom indulgences had been purchased.  The website of the LGBTQ organisation will be laden with progress flags and feminist iconography to indicate they have permission to sell the stolen political capital of women and homosexuals to exonerate perverts of social shame and to wash the porn industry of the stench of the exploitation of women and children.