Science Questions About Fat Fetishism

[Sons of Windsor]

I would like to ask some questions that have been on my mind recently, that some people may or may not know on here. Here goes:

 

1. What is the evolutionary basis for feeder/feedee sexual behaviour? If it is prevalent all over the world, then does this not mean it is a behaviour that is selected for by Natural Selection for some purpose? 
    
2. Imagine we grew up at any point in time before now. That is, before the age of cheap, processed; high-calorie and sugary foods. Basically anytime before the 1950s. Would we still be fat admirers if we lived in a world where almost every woman was malnourished, and underweight? Would we fantasise about these women being larger -- despite having no media references to compare them to? If every woman was very thin and athletic -- like they would have been in hunter gatherer times -- would we even have the mental capacity to imagine them being SSBBWs?
    
3. I remember seeing a great picture of three naked ladies, one was medically obese, the second overweight, and the third a 'healthy' weight -- and being shocked by how skinny the 'healthy' woman looked. (If anyone has that image, please share it here.) Now that obesity has been normalised, and we have a growing body positivity movement, will that create more fat admirers as it becomes more common? I see plenty of women in my daily life that would be classified as obese with male partners -- are they all fat admirers? Or have they 'learned' to be attracted to them, as there are more overweight and obese women than 'normal' women in the mating pool?
    
4. I've self-diagnosed myself with something that I believe is called escalation. Basically, I've always been into fat, chubby, or overweight women. But I remember masturbating to just chubby women when I first discovered porn. Actually, I bought Score magazine, which featured women with ludicrously over-sized breasts, and focused on personalities like Chelsea Charms. I believe that was an early manifestation of the 'feeder' instincts that I have. But it has since progressed. I then started on chubby women, but now I seem to have hit a plateau on USSBBWs. I tend to gravitate to the Juicy Jackie, or Jae types. Really, massively obese women that you don't tend to see often in real life. But I've often wondered if I'm really attracted to these USSBBWs. In real life whenever I see a woman that comes close to that size, I don't tend to be that attracted to them. I prefer much smaller women, like the chubby women I first started off masturbating to. There now appears to be a disconnect though. I'll see an attractive slim woman, and that'll put me in the mood to masturbate. But when I get home I automatically put on a USSBBW video. I then finish feeling unsatisfied, like my urge was for the slimmer woman, but out of habit, I put on the USSBBW video. It's almost like my brain is lazy and just thinks fat = sexy, therefore more fat = sexier. Does anyone else feel like this or know what I'm talking about?
    

If you have any scientific further reading, please recommend it to me!

[Guest Mtax]

On 2/1/2020 at 8:01 PM, Sons of Windsor said:

What is the evolutionary basis for feeder/feedee sexual behaviour? If it is prevalent all over the world, then does this not mean it is a behaviour that is selected for by Natural Selection for some purpose? 

Same as general fetishism. You'd need to look that one up. 

[extra_m13]

i'll try to put in my grain of sand on the topics that you mention.

evolutionary basis... i am not sure (i think no one can be) but the act of eating - being fed - feeding it is a strong one in nature. from the importance of eating to the pleasure of doing it to the fact that mothers - and dads - tend to their offspring in need and help grow. just an idea but it would make sense to find some link in that area.

difficult to gain... i think there have always been fa's with capacity to imagine fat ladies for sure. i do not think we are that different 50-60 years later. grabbing the chub has always been a nice experience. probably even more when it was more difficult to achieve an obese status. 

normalizing fatness and relationships... this is somewhat of a mistery to me and i must refer to stats to get to my point. i think as... there are unsatisfied fa there must be (considering the number of overweight ladies) plenty of males and females not precisely happy with their loved one overweight and lazyness. for example, i do not think that every fat lady is with an FA and therefore not precisely happy husband who wished her lady was thinner , etc. that is just go it goes. at least from my point of view. 

escalating... totally get you on this one. at first i was looking at any girl with even a small roll. i remember melissa joan hart , beyonce , even shakira in her curvier days. then i went on to bigger ladies because they were there. cherries. who was barely chubby at the beginning. and then somehow i ended up with candygodiva totally amazed by her gaining force. impressive. scalator !

 

thanks for sharing,

[Joliat]

On the "historical" question - societies have always been able to "imagine" SSBBWs. Consider those ancient sculptures of the fertility goddesses. In societies where malnutrition is always a real possibility, obesity is, I'd imagine, more likely to be associated with prosperity and security and therefore to be attractive. Relatedly, I think FAs have always been around. I remember a scene out of One Hundred Years of Solitude where an "eatist" comes to town. She is huge, and lays out tons of food, and the villagers watch her consume it all. The respectfully pay her and honour her skills. That's not the same thing as finding her sexy, but if this is based on a real phenomenon, then it is impossible to believe that absolutely no one in the crowd felt any stirrings of desire. I can imagine a kid or pre-teen watching that and feeling the sexual shoe drop.

Or look at Sumo: obese warriors deeply rooted in traditional Japanese culture, and considered incredibly hot by ladies.

That said, I doubt that "fat positivity" and the normalization of obesity will make FA-dom more common. It might even go in the opposite direction. This is a complicated question.

As for "escalation," what has escalated? Your own taste in fat women, or your acceptance of it? I ask because my own experience was similar to the OP's in that I initially lusted after "plump" or "chubby" women and only gradually came to SSBBWs. But in retrospect I see that the reason for this was a sort of shame in my FAdom, a sort of desire not to be too abnormal. So I negotiated with myself: "I like them big, but not that big. So I'm not THAT weird." What happened was not that my tastes changed per se, but that I gradually came to discover and accept that my "ceiling" was a lot higher than I first wanted to admit to myself. That being said, I still have a ceiling. And I'm quite confident now, after years and years of exploring this preference, that this is a real ceiling.

 

[AcesDJD]

On 2/2/2020 at 3:01 AM, Sons of Windsor said:

I would like to ask some questions that have been on my mind recently, that some people may or may not know on here. Here goes:

 

1. What is the evolutionary basis for feeder/feedee sexual behaviour? If it is prevalent all over the world, then does this not mean it is a behaviour that is selected for by Natural Selection for some purpose? 
    
2. Imagine we grew up at any point in time before now. That is, before the age of cheap, processed; high-calorie and sugary foods. Basically anytime before the 1950s. Would we still be fat admirers if we lived in a world where almost every woman was malnourished, and underweight? Would we fantasise about these women being larger -- despite having no media references to compare them to? If every woman was very thin and athletic -- like they would have been in hunter gatherer times -- would we even have the mental capacity to imagine them being SSBBWs?
    
3. I remember seeing a great picture of three naked ladies, one was medically obese, the second overweight, and the third a 'healthy' weight -- and being shocked by how skinny the 'healthy' woman looked. (If anyone has that image, please share it here.) Now that obesity has been normalised, and we have a growing body positivity movement, will that create more fat admirers as it becomes more common? I see plenty of women in my daily life that would be classified as obese with male partners -- are they all fat admirers? Or have they 'learned' to be attracted to them, as there are more overweight and obese women than 'normal' women in the mating pool?
    
4. I've self-diagnosed myself with something that I believe is called escalation. Basically, I've always been into fat, chubby, or overweight women. But I remember masturbating to just chubby women when I first discovered porn. Actually, I bought Score magazine, which featured women with ludicrously over-sized breasts, and focused on personalities like Chelsea Charms. I believe that was an early manifestation of the 'feeder' instincts that I have. But it has since progressed. I then started on chubby women, but now I seem to have hit a plateau on USSBBWs. I tend to gravitate to the Juicy Jackie, or Jae types. Really, massively obese women that you don't tend to see often in real life. But I've often wondered if I'm really attracted to these USSBBWs. In real life whenever I see a woman that comes close to that size, I don't tend to be that attracted to them. I prefer much smaller women, like the chubby women I first started off masturbating to. There now appears to be a disconnect though. I'll see an attractive slim woman, and that'll put me in the mood to masturbate. But when I get home I automatically put on a USSBBW video. I then finish feeling unsatisfied, like my urge was for the slimmer woman, but out of habit, I put on the USSBBW video. It's almost like my brain is lazy and just thinks fat = sexy, therefore more fat = sexier. Does anyone else feel like this or know what I'm talking about?
    

If you have any scientific further reading, please recommend it to me!

As to escalation I think it is real. Reminds me of a Christopher Lee movie, Taste the Blood of Dracula or something like that. These 19th century aristocratic gents have set up some kind of a sex club and they walk in on like 5 well endowed (for skinny women) naked women with a snake apparently ready for action. The leader sighs, like "I've seen this all before" and they decide to buy some Satanic objects which will really take things to another level. A silly fictional movie, but I think the premise was right after awhile we always want more and at some point we have to be satisfied with what we have. 

Scientific evidence? There have been venuses found of women from varying dates up to tens of thousands of years ago. My guesstimate would be they represent women in the 300-350 pound range. We don't know what they were for and the statues that have been found are separated by thousands of years. One theory is they were early porn. Another theory is that early human society was matriarchal and a fat female chieftain may have been worshipped as a goddess. 

[allgrownup]

1. Reasoning back from evolution, a person with a fat reserve has a better chance of survival in the wild than one without or with less. So natural selection would disfavor very skinny people, and every trait favoring fat accumulation would be increasingly selected. Wanting more fat, and making a partner more fat, makes sense in that context.

To this day we can see how extreme nature optimized for fat; the body's defenese mechanisms against weight loss are phenomenal.

The selection for heavier is still ongoing, with men and women weighing 20 lbs more than we used to in the 1960's https://www.livescience.com/49-decade-study-americans-taller-fatter.html

2. The 1950's themselves are an outlier with men and women weighing less than they did earlier or later (https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/IND43861419/PDF). Since then the trend has been going up (see 1), so basically because you say "go back in time" we already know how this scenario plays out. We optimize for fat.

3. I think that as something becomes more common, it becomes less of a "hang up." Back in the beginning of the 1980's it was not common for women to shave their sex; seeing a shaven sex really was something. Now it's the other way around. 
You see more obese women (and men) because of 1 & 2: evolution (still) optimizes for it. These obese people have partners BECAUSE that is why evoltuion optimized for it: more fat = better chance of long term survival = a good thing = desirable.
Male attraction to breasts basically falls in the very same fat/fertility/survival camp.

4. Fantasy <> real life. That simple. Example, women search for violent porn at twice the rate men do (https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/bm9w7v/why-are-so-many-women-searching-for-ultra-violent-porn), but in real life these women wouldn't want to be violated.

[Guest Mtax]

On 2/1/2020 at 8:01 PM, Sons of Windsor said:

What is the evolutionary basis for feeder/feedee sexual behaviour? If it is prevalent all over the world, then does this not mean it is a behaviour that is selected for by Natural Selection for some purpose? 

It's not prevalent. It is very rare, of about the same or lesser rate of occurring than exclusive male homosexuality. 1-2%. 

It's claimed there were societies where it was fashionable, at least among the elites, at times. Probably true, but they were also rare. 

There isn't any 'evolutionary' basis to this, beyond whatever brain mechanism causes fetishism. Sure there is some basis to that one. 

[hiro]

Behaviors do not always have a genetic basis. Behavioral tendencies that prevent you from reproducing will be bred out, but most behaviors have very little impact on survival. It is the tendency to develop fetishes that must have been selected for, not the specific fetishes themselves. On the level of the gene, the gene must have some advantageous result, and feederism is just a secondary result that doesn't prevent the gene from being passed on.

I believe that most men like chubby women on an instinctive level, but culture teaches them to seek whatever is in fashion.

[Guest Mtax]

On 2/17/2020 at 8:06 PM, allgrownup said:

The selection for heavier is still ongoing, with men and women weighing 20 lbs more than we used to in the 1960's https://www.livescience.com/49-decade-study-americans-taller-fatter.html

 

 

[Guest Qadzu]

On your second point, many traditional societies socialize their members to prefer overweight or obese women as partners, for example Polynesian societies or the Mauritanians.

I don't think natural selection can account for extremes behaviours in feederism any more than it can account for latex fetishism or any other fetish. That said, given that our homonin ancestors struggled to survive, I would assume that it is more "natural" to be drawn to the overweight and the obese that many extreme fetishes.

[Kinky John Fowler]

On 2/1/2020 at 7:01 PM, Sons of Windsor said:

 

1. What is the evolutionary basis for feeder/feedee sexual behaviour? If it is prevalent all over the world, then does this not mean it is a behaviour that is selected for by Natural Selection for some purpose? 

 

You could only say that it had been “selected for” if it were a dominant trait, which it is not. Rather, it’s a comparatively rare sexual behaviour. The fact that a rare trait is present cross-culturally suggests it is noise in the data, if genetic, or that it has some other cause entirely. I suspect it’s unlikely to be substantially genetic in origin, since feedism does not appear to be inherited from parents.

[Kinky John Fowler]

On 3/23/2020 at 7:36 AM, Guest Qadzu said:

On your second point, many traditional societies socialize their members to prefer overweight or obese women as partners, for example Polynesian societies or the Mauritanians.

 

Not many. Very few, in fact.

[Hirsch von Bork]

12 hours ago, Kinky John Fowler said:

Not many. Very few, in fact.

It's a common exaggeration to think that tradicional societies valued overweight or even obesity as something positive. Food was indeed scarcy and most people coun't eat as much as they wanted ( or as they needed) and therefore obesity only was posible amobg the rich. But the ideal weight, if that existed, would the an average size, not too thick, not too thin. 

Only in a few countries and cultures, like in Mauritania and other African countries, is obesity seen as an ideal.

[Kinky John Fowler]

We must also be wary of terms such as “traditional societies”, since the term is relative and subjective. All societies are traditional, in one way or another, but this term is generally used clumsily to describe conservative societies with traditions that the speaker deems idiosyncratic and antiquated and that often originate in frankly arbitrary historical moments of cultural fortification.

[Guest FeederDave]

evo psych’s will say men are attracted to full size women because it signals to men sexual maturity and post puberty.

[Kinky John Fowler]

1 hour ago, FeederDave said:

evo psych’s will say men are attracted to full size women because it signals to men sexual maturity and post puberty.

Have you asked one?

[Guest FeederDave]

31 minutes ago, Kinky John Fowler said:

Have you asked one?

I asked the #Lindy man himself. 

[Kinky John Fowler]

19 minutes ago, FeederDave said:

I asked the #Lindy man himself. 

You’re on fire, tonight, mate. Absolute gold.

[bluetech]

I would hypothesize that fa/feedism in particular isn't selected for evolutionarily per se, but rather a tendency for diverse sexual interests across the population is. We probably have an innate tendency to develop a specific attraction to some aspect of people that is not universal but also not unheard of. This would serve the evolutionary purpose of ensuring that the gene pool was well mixed. The particular sexual interests a person develops as they sexually mature are probably more guided by society and environment, though. Food is a key aspect of culture in all societies, and obesity is just taboo enough that affection for it has a bit of a naughty feel, so it is not surprising to me that it is a kink that exists. 

Fat fetishism probably exists simply because evolution causes fetishes to exist, and rule 34 exists. It can exist so it does exist. 

[Tom Aquet]

Does anybody have some scientific estimates on the prevalence of feederism? I do not mean preference for chubbier partners, which is impossible to measure (as of what BMI would you count as "chubby"?), but the fetish of being turned on by weight gain, being fed or feeding is something that could, in principle be counted. But how many per 1M people would count as such? 1? 10? 100? 1000? (probably less than 1%, but how much less?)

[bishop2g4]

Here's a fun one.

The Long-Term Effects of Stress on Partner Weight Characteristics

 

[Tom Aquet]

Trying to answer my own question – “what percentage of people is an FA?” I found no scientific studies answering just that. Yet, the following is an interesting one: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013010#pone-0013010-t001. It studies the preferences of 100 French (!) straight couples on their preference for their partner. Amongst the 100 men, there seems to be not one FA (although, mind you, this is in France). Interestingly, many ladies wish their husband/boyfriend to be heavier (up to obese). Almost half of them wish so, while roughly the other half would go for a skinnier partner. Quite a striking difference between girls and guys.

[coucou3005]

Thanks for the data, especially as I am French.

I think there is two bias fot the study. First of all the sample seems not enough.

The second is that it's done only in South of France where the social pressure to be thin is more important than in North.

And also maybe girls want men to be more muscular too so with higher BMI.

I've always thought that there was more FA boys then girls.

[Guest LuvsAFatGirl]

We are attracted to Big Breasts and Wide Hips because these are indicators that she is ready for Child Rearing. 

Men are under unseen unprecedented stress. 
 

Our society doesn’t value what’s conclusive towards the breeding process in our species. 
 

I believe we are at a evolutionary bottleneck and basically, Men who are attracted to Fat Women are ahead of the curve. Men’s Stress would short-circuit culturation https://abcnews.go.com/Health/stressed-men-prefer-heavier-women-study/story?id=16950542

Feederism is just taking this to an extreme. 

[Tom Aquet]

6 hours ago, coucou3005 said:

Thanks for the data, especially as I am French.

I think there is two bias fot the study. First of all the sample seems not enough.

The second is that it's done only in South of France where the social pressure to be thin is more important than in North.

And also maybe girls want men to be more muscular too so with higher BMI.

I've always thought that there was more FA boys then girls.

Completely agree with all the arguments. I would be curious to know whether a similar (and preferably larger) study was done in the US or in Latin America. It would also be very interesting to compare with some African countries, most notably South Africa.