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 the streaming service Stan.

The program, listed as a documentary but 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 a group of men who have a sexual fetish for very fat women, and this has spawned a category of adult entertainment where extremely overweight women perform peculiar acts and post them on websites and apps for purchase.

The men who purchase this content are called ‘feeders’. Feeders enjoy feeding women to the point where they gain increasingly dangerous amounts of weight. The ‘adult’ part of the performance consists of the women pretending to find the process of weight gain immensely arousing.

The most popular feeder performers are ‘gainers’, that is, women who are verifiably gaining weight. Gainer content creators do a weekly weigh-in video to demonstrate that they have gained weight.

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.

In the documentary, we are introduced to one of the most dedicated consumers of feeder porn, a man who is a self-confessed ‘chubby chaser’. He has greasy hair that is too long to be short and not long enough to be hipster. He also sports an unkempt beard, dirty fingernails, and NHS teeth. We get a backstory that he has been attracted to larger women since he was eight or nine years old. This important confession sets up the later claim that this brand of fetishism is innate, like sexuality.

This man explains how the 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. He later explains that he has no reason to be ashamed as a consumer of this weird niche adult content, and says 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 being hunted in the street by homophobic gangs. My cousin Kevin was being regularly bashed and 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.

‘Feeders’ are not an oppressed sexual minority, they have a sexual fetish. The Stan documentary didn’t have the idea to present this corner of the internet 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 former gay rights organisations charging a fee for 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 adult 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’ consumers.

In my opinion it is clear from doing a little maths that the work the adult performers do is not only degrading, difficult, and disastrous to their bodies, it’s not that profitable. In the two-part program, we meet one woman who has been creating feederism content for 10 years and is considered one of the stars of the industry.

The show boasts that she earned 90,000 USD last year. We hear her weekly food bill is $600. If we consider food, a cost of business, that takes $31,200 from her gross turnover. From the remaining, 58,800 she 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, she 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 she sells is her own weight gain. Her goal weight is 500lbs (227 kgs).

This woman 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 her 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 endanger homosexuals and prevent 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.

In the case of feeder fetishists, content creators have to perform increasingly degrading acts and further destroy their bodies in order to meet the advancing demands of the market to transgress the next boundary. This star of the industry has 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 a creepy perv.

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 reality for the porn producer featured, who is eloquent and chirpy and clearly business savvy, is that she is harming 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.

This is an abridged version of Fetish Porn as Social Justice posted on Edie Wyatt’s Substack ‘Culture and State’.

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