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 Faker (noun) – a person who shows or pretends to feel emotions that are not sincere, or to be something that he or she is not.

There are many names that we could use to describe the phenomenon I am focused on. Scammer, grifter, con artist are among the more straightforward, with many less kind terms also frequently used.

I choose faker, however, because I believe that the fear of being scammed, conned, or grifted is downstream of the thing we’re actually really afraid of: that someone is only pretending.

Our community is aboundingly and deeply afraid that there are people who say they care about this thing we love when, in fact, they are not. Indeed, more than just not being “into” feedism, we are afraid that they hate this kink, they hate us, and secretly or not-so-secretly, they have a laugh at us and what weird, disgusting, hurtful people we are for being into all of this. 

Two things are true for me at once as I reflect on this:

Firstly, while I don’t believe there are that many of them, these people do exist. It’s painful to be on the receiving end of derision or disgust, as our community so often is, and I wish these people would just mind their own business.

Secondly, for the vast majority of cases, the answer as to whether someone is, or is not, a faker, is much, much more complicated than yes or no.

What makes a faker?

There’s a profound binary thinking that underlies the fear of the faker. You’re either in, or you’re out. And if you are in, we the audience demand proof of the commitment to the kink – something it should be said carries a profound power imbalance towards us the headless, nameless audience. We the audience, who ask creators to bare it all and change their bodies to prove to us just how serious they are, risk nothing and expect endless rewards. 

But there are some immediate problems in this binary conceptualization – you’re in, or out – and how we would actually recognise the fakers from the true believers. Here are some archetypes and issues where I see some people quick to shout “fake!” when I think the reality is much more complex:

Window Shoppers and Vacationers

We’ve all seen a thread or a post on Reddit, Curvage, Feabie, or somewhere else where someone shares some photos and asks some version of “this is me, do you find me attractive?” 

These can be both really beautiful and a little nerve-wracking interactions to watch take shape. Almost invariably this is a woman who has been fat or nearly-fat for a long time, or someone who has recently put on weight, and is looking for validation. The community rushes in to supply this by the bushel, using every synonym for beautiful they can think of to hit home that this person is not only gorgeous as they are, but should they want to get bigger, this is a community that will not just welcome, but raucously celebrate them. 

For someone who is just encountering feedism for the first time, I think of them as window shoppers: they’re trying on aspects of feedism and see if any of them fit or feel good. Over time, they will find the version and intensity of feedism that works for them, if any. 

Some people, after doing this exploration, become what I think of as vacationers: they come back and forth into the feedist community with some frequency, maybe posting in our spaces or occasionally creating feedist content, but never really diving all the way in. They’re fine to engage, sometimes even quite playfully, but they know – and they may or may not communicate – that they’re never going to move into feedism full time.

Performance and Role Playing 

All consensual kink inherently involves some degree of fantasy. Sometimes this is profoundly obvious and playful, like alien impregnation, and sometimes it’s much more subtle. You may be physically tied up and told you’re never getting released, but you know that your captor has to at some point, even if only for legal reasons. 

Feedism naturally involves fantasy, too, but I think in some ways it's even more complex:

When you’re primarily or significantly attracted to the idea of someone’s body changing – for some people, that’s the entire point of the kink – when that body doesn’t change, it can be easy to begin questioning their sincerity.

This is one of the single stickiest aspects of our kink. We need to be honest that for many of us, myself included, being able to at least pretend that someone’s body is changing is hardcoded into our sexuality. Without at least the whiff of transformation present, it’s going to be difficult for me to truly feel sexually and erotically fulfilled. 

There’s a fundamental question here: does a body have to change for people to be considered real feedists? 

My answer is no. 

You’re allowed to have a kink that’s primarily a fantasy you never act out in the real world. You are allowed to, in other words, perform. I think people are quick to see performance or role playing as somehow synonymous with lying, but I think the truth is much more complex. 

Every aspect of the feedist experience can be role played, with a partner, or performed for a larger audience, but it’s not a binary that each aspect must all be “true” or just a fantasy at the same time.

Think about it: 

If someone buys small clothing and puts it on as a display of how big their body is, or how much it has grown. Is someone not a real feedist because they didn’t specifically outgrow clothing they already owned? 

If someone stuffs frequently, using tools like gainer powders and shakes, but has an especially stubborn metabolism and doesn’t gain quickly, are they not a feedist? 

For myself,I’ve hand-fed lovers and weighed them, but never made a concerted effort to help them gain, or even really truly stuff. 

Am I still a feedist? 

Of course.

When we see people claiming a feedist identity (especially gainer), and we demand that they show up in a certain way to us, we’re using an all-or-nothing test to validate their commitment to think kink, when in reality, in different moments different aspects are more or less true.

Beyond consent and respect, we don’t owe anyone a particular way of how we play with our kinks for ourselves. (I’ll say more on the responsibility we have to the community later).

Para-sociality and Sara-Pociality 

There’s no way to verify this, but I think that feedism is probably one of the most online kinks in existence – and one that therefore comes with a tremendous amount of parasociality. 

If you haven’t heard the term before, para- (“beside” or “alongside”) social relationships are ones that are uniquely one-sided in their level of familiarity and intimacy. You may know a weird amount about someone famous, but they know nothing about you. Sometimes, as in the case of a fictional character, they can’t know anything about you, because they’re not real. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with parasocial relationships, but in the age of the influencer, where people purposefully, and with phenomenal skill, aim to create an intimacy with their audience members that is profound, there can be massive consequences for all involved.

While we often talk about the relationship between creator and audience, Hank Green and Britney Broski (aka “Kombucha Sip Girl”) have spoken about the responsibility that they feel as creators toward their audience. They feel responsibility to show up in a certain (good) way for the people who watch and trust them. I am grateful that people like them exist, but it is, as Green says, a lot to carry, as well.

Kink creators, whether professional or amateur, both create (parasocial), and experience themselves (sarapocial), these same push and pulls of intimacy and influence. If we assume that they have some sort of sincere commitment to the kink, then the level of pressure that they feel to show up a certain way, either in how they talk or how their body looks, can be immense. 

My read on many creators, again, both professional and amateur, is that they feel an intense and at times debilitating push and pull between their sincere desires and the complex, teeming mass of us – their all at once intimate, sometimes hostile, deeply caring, and ever-hungry audience.

Both as an audience and as a creator, how do you tell what’s “real” in that kind of context?

Why do we hate fakers so much?

There are many complications as to whether or not someone is faking being a feedist, but I think the reason why it enrages feedists so much is simple: shame. 

Feedists operate in a context of phenomenal amounts of shame. 

I speak from experience. 

I’ve been in therapy for five years to heal the hateful things I have said to myself and find ways to combine the care I feel towards others generally with the things that I find horny. Every positive experience I have makes this feel more possible, but twenty years of pain doesn’t disappear overnight. 

Feedist shame is particularly cruel because of its two-fold nature:

We’re firstly told to feel shame because we’re weird kinksters. Although things are thankfully changing and our society is gradually opening more and more to types of kink, most people are just wrapping their heads around the idea of spanking and some light bondage. Funnels and pig-play are going to take more time. 

As if that wasn’t enough, though, then we run headlong into societal anti-fatness. The people we’re attracted to are told to “be careful” about someone who is attracted to their body – fat people can’t just be desired outrightly, the people who do (us) are damaged or predatory in some way. If you’ve dated fat women before, you’re familiar with a profile that reads something like “I don’t want to be fetishized – I just want someone who wants me for me.”

So, if you’re a feedist, you’re someone with a weird kink where the people who you’re naturally attracted to often fear you because society says being attracted to them makes you dangerous.

I feel a deep and painful understanding of this shame. As much as I have done a lot of work to let it go, I still have pangs of it almost daily – some people would rather be dead than live in the body I find most attractive. That doesn’t just make me feel shame, that breaks my fucking heart. People have called us, and by extension me, freaks, predators, murderers for what we enjoy. 

Let’s be clear: they’re profoundly, stubbornly, oppressively wrong. But we’re human and fuck if it doesn’t hurt.

But as much as I understand why we feel this way, I am almost equally abhorred at what some of us do in response.

Feedist Purity Culture 

It’s almost funny to me that some of the most harmful things that feedist (and specifically those of us on the non-gaining side of the slash) come from a place of what I, perhaps optimistically, believe is care, both for ourselves and, sometimes at least, care for others.

We want to know that someone really does like what we like and, left unsaid, that we’re people who belong and share something with others. We’re not alone – we have people who tell us that what we want is not only morally okay, but is something they enjoy and get off to. We are not alone.

But the desire for safety and connectivity can have a shadow side. Even though they’re trying to protect us, these shadows can cause tremendous harm.

The more fearful we are and the less sure we are that we and our desires are okay, the more likely our demands are to be intense, even punitive. And in a kink centred on the body, talk is cheap. The only real proof will be found in the take-out receipts, in the stretch-marks, and on the scale.

“You keep saying that you’re into gaining, but you’ve only put on ten pounds this year. Do you actually want to do this?”

“I get that it’s harder to find clothes, or furniture, but that’s part of it all – if you’re not into this part, what else are you hiding?”

Fundamentally, I think this manifests as a black or white, all-or-nothing mindset. We surveil, at times microscopically, testing to see if someone’s commitment is “real.” We become, at our worst, a grotesque caricature of the diet culture we loathe so much; watching someone’s every bite and pound and roll, looking as much for genuine commitment as we do for insincerity. 

What adds another layer to this is that authenticity is a moving target. Social media feeds the novelty-seeking part of our brains and social dynamics pit creators and communities against one another. Escalation can be the result, as the moving goal posts of what it means to be real can subtly and intensively demand ever-more of people to prove that they’re really “in it.”

At its worst, this can lead to outright dehumanization, as the practical realities of something like gaining become forgotten when we viewers only see small windows into the lives of the people we lust after – particularly if we’re paying them. 

The Other Kind of Pay Pig

Up until this point I’ve purposely avoided talking much about the financial dynamics between audiences and creators. 

This is because one of the most prevalent places I see the biggest fears about insincerity and faking are on Tumblr, Reddit, and various forums, where I’m pretty sure most people are freely consuming someone’s content. And yet they still fear that they’re being taken advantage of. People can be selfish, entitled, misogynist, but when someone is afraid afraid that that a content creator giving them something for free is “faking it,” I think the larger, unspoken drive there is fear and shame.

But there’s another, equally important part of the story: feedism is fucking expensive.

The United States isn’t a fully representative example, but just to give a sense of the dynamics: the poorest quarter of Americans spend almost 35% of their income on food; the second and middle brackets spend between 16-13% of their income on food. 

If that amount of spending (roughly $1080 a month) keeps you at your base weight, then you need to add calories, and money, to the equation in order to grow. If you don’t want to be utterly miserable and have some variety and flavour in what you add, consider this: 

One restaurant meal in the US is, on average, $31. If you go once a week, that adds 11% to your monthly food bill.

Now throw in a couple Big Macs per week: add another 3.7%

How about two large bottles of coke a week? 1.6% (27% more than it would have cost in 2020).

And we’ll throw in a couple of bags of chips once a week, too. Another 5%.

So even if you’re only quite modestly increasing how much you eat per month, you’ve increased your monthly food bill by 21.3%. 

Now ask yourself: does someone eating out once a week, getting a couple of Big Macs, some chips, and a few bottles of Coke every month sound like a hard-core gainer to you? 

Imagine really trying to “go for it.” 

How much do you think you’d actually need to spend? 

And we haven’t even talked about clothing, furniture, or transportation yet. 

While I have no way to prove this, I suspect that feedism has one of the highest rates of content-selling of any kink. And the above stats make it pretty clear why: unless you’re already quite high-income, it’s unlikely you have the means to actually pursue feedism “seriously” without the financial support of others. 

Pound-for-pound, it’s probably one of the most expensive kinks there is. 

So even a creator who is entirely sincere about pursuing this kink, without some form of additional support, is going to be at a caloric and financial disadvantage. The ways in which that would impact how they show up in the kink that is, for all intents and purposes, pay to play, are myriad and profound. 

I could write another entire essay about the ways we (poorly) treat online direct and indirect sex work, but books like Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith, The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, and Future Sex by Emily Witt cover this better than I ever could and with tremendous depth. 

Beyond Fakers 

Communities with purity tests rarely survive long. You can always go the cult route, but I don’t recommend it. Being a community that is primarily online, too, makes cohesion and connection even more difficult. A crappy church can use in-person social pressure to keep people engaged; we have no way to make someone do, much less, believe in our kink.

I said at the beginning that I think there are some people who are genuinely grifters, looking to profit off a few “suckers” who happen to find them attractive, despite their own self-hatred. These people actually make me very sad, because you have to really hate yourself to believe people are stupid, or worse, disgusting, for finding you attractive. 

But I worry much more about the former-feedists. People who, because of the ever-present purity testing, feel frustrated and exhausted. People who love this kink, but who still have real struggles with the world and their bodies and who feel like they’re not allowed to be human. These are people who can leave the community with hatred and sadness, who talk about us as abusers. 

And don’t forget: people are allowed to change their minds. You can “hang up the gloves,” as one person I know on Feabie says, but still love the kink for what it is. People are complex and nuanced and beautiful. Not every change in someone’s body is a reflection on how they have felt about this community “all along.” Sometimes, for good and for ill, things change, and that needs to be OK, too. 

So where does that leave us? 

I have no easy “three easy steps to a better community” I can leave you with, but I do think certain principles that guide how we act can make this a safer and – I want to stress this – more fun (and therefore horny) community to be in.

People in BDSM know this much better than feedists do: creating safety isn’t just some “woke bullshit,” as some might be quick to describe it. It’s about a social contract that, though you lose some things in it (e.g., the ability to go really fast), you gain much, much more. 

Here are some principles that I try to live by:

Remember our shared humanity. People are often scared, shameful, and simply looking for safety. The more we can create that safety, the better off – and the hornier! – we can all be.

Get to know your shadows. De-shaming yourself, especially when it comes to the beliefs you have about fatness, is the only way you can ever fully enjoy this beautiful kink we have. The more shame you have, the more fear can drive you to hurt yourself and others. The only answer to shame is love. 

Be clear. When we’re chasing a fantasy, it’s easy to want to leave anything “real world” behind, but the clearer we can be with what we want (“just exploring feedism”) the more we can keep our boundaries, and help others understand what it is we’re working towards.

Go slow. I think this particularly applies to people dipping their feet into the water as feedees. People want to see you succeed and have fun, but if you over commit, you run the risk of hurting yourself (physically or psychologically) and creating uncertainty and fear with the people who watch you. For those of us not gaining, I think it’s helpful for us to counsel slowness while someone figures out what kind of feedist they really want to be (if at all). 

Pay what you can, and don’t be a jerk about it. Even people who choose to share their feedee journey freely still take on considerable financial burdens in doing so. If you enjoy what someone creates, tip them, offer to sponsor a stuffing, shoot them a giftcard. $5 here or there probably won’t break you, but that could be another 250 calories for their day, and that’s never a bad thing.

I can never stress this enough, but we have to remember that we can never separate finding people hot from being good to them. This is profoundly true for those of us who are feeders or fat admirers, but I think even applies to many feedees who do not fully embrace a politics of fat liberation. To maximize the horny fun of a kink, it needs to be safe. That’s as true for hardcore death feedism as it is to those who enjoy the occasional gentle stuffing; the more we can know and trust one another, the more space we have to play in fun and creative ways.