Immediately after taking our shoes off in the doorway, Gerry’s hand softly grabbed onto my roll of stomach fat that hangs over my jeans. I guess you can call it a muffin top if you’re trying to be cute. Rather than clenching my stomach and turning away, I stepped into it.
I like when you touch my fat parts.
Good, because I like touching them.
I like touching yours, too.
Despite the elementary language and the inherit triviality, it was a moment that stuck with me. Sometimes I question what I want this blog to be—- is it outfit posts, my life, my love? Yes, yes, and yes. But I also want to make my small contribution to the community in normalizing fat bodies in love.
chead: Talking about fat: I have sers issues with "gainers"
Chris and I have lots of interesting chats about these kind of extreme body modifications, in part because (like he said) he has a few himself, and also because ~Body Stuff~ is my major area of academic inquiry.
I don’t have a super nuanced understanding of gaining, but what I gather from mainstream media coverage of the practice (as well as popular porn sites like gainingbombshells.com), is that it is primarily about validation from the group of people (men and women) who fetishize fat. That said, I don’t want to discount the fact that for some (perhaps many?) there is legit sexual pleasure involved in gaining. Food and sexuality and large bodies… all these things have complex relationships with each other.
I mean it seems like one question you might be asking, Chris, is “where do you draw the line between someone preferring their body fat (even wishing it were fatter) and pathology?”
I am a strong advocate of accepting your body size the way it is now, if only because I think deferring acceptance until ‘x’ amount of pounds are lost or gained is not particularly beneficial to one’s emotional well-being.
I guess my question back to you is: why is it important to draw the line between a preference and a pathology? I’m not sure where my stance is on this question, and I feel, at best, ambivalent about gainers.
Let’s put aside the question of why food is sexy for now. I think you’re right when it comes to deferring self-acceptance (until x weight is lost or gained).
Is it possible to accept ones own body in the meantime, pre-modification? I don’t have a very good answer for this, even as someone with body modifications. I would err on the side of “no”, actually, but each modification that I’ve done has come from a deep desire, not a fleeting thought. Maybe not so much that I wouldn’t accept my body as-is, but that I wanted to change myself in some way, though not necessarily for the “better” (which is itself a problematic concept).
I don’t think making a determination between desire or preference and pathology is necessary, but I think it’s something that should be considered when discussing issues of embodiment. “Why [did someone do something]” can be just as important a question to ask as “what [did they do]”.
agreed
I’d love to chip in my $0.02 as a feederist, but unfortunately all my personal experience can offer is “it’s complicated”.
The OP wrote,
“On the other hand, I can’t help feeling that intentionally gaining a lot of weight may be a symptom of extreme body dysmorphia.” Some gainers I’ve talked to have framed it as “I’ve always wanted my body to be this size”. Some have been carried away by finding something arousing, plus the external validation they were given through Internet communities, and have second thoughts once their body begins to change. I’ve seen examples of gay gainers (bears) who carried out an exact plan to acheive a certain look after taking into consideration their new weight vs. muscle mass, effects on their social life, etc.
The extreme gains also get a lot of press. Not everyone in the feederist community is out to gain til they’re 400 lbs. (or any).
The OP continues, “The caveat here regarding manipulating one’s own body (especially in outward appearance), is that I can’t understand how it could be done without at least some critical thinking regarding validation (or likely, the opposite). No one is going to modify their body to be significantly larger without understanding the consequences of such an act. They’re very likely going to get negative feedback! Can negative feedback be construed somehow as validation? Or is negative attention in this case offset by the small community these women inhabit being so completely enamored with them?”
My entirely unscientific opinion is that, right now, there simply aren’t any decent guides to weight gain and it’s effects in the feederism community. As an ethical feeder (the person who dreams about changing other people’s bodies), I’ve looked. I don’t think a gainer can really make a fully-informed decision right now, because we don’t have the feederist version of Modblog, or even any really articulate feederist bloggers. It’s entirely possible for people to jump into this without realizing the full consequences, though I’d rather that weren’t the case.
You’re also leaving out a very important part of the equation: sex drive. People have been made to feel bad about wanking and yet have kept it up for centuries. If your orgasm is tied to over-indulgence, you might just find yourself in the loop of getting negative feedback from the outside world if you gain weight, but keeping up your stuffing habits in private. There’s a lot of I-wish-I-didn’t-do-this-but-I-have-to in the Fantasy Feeder forums. I myself can’t get off at all unless I’m thinking about it, though I’ve tried other methods during the past two years.
I have no clue what the moral of this story is at all (seriously… I had some expectations and have no idea where I stand in relation to those expectations after watching), but it’s pretty cute.
Obviously if Shannon didn’t know what kind of opinion to have on something, I HAD to see it. (Ha!)
This animation is visually very very pretty. According to the website for the film (called “Slimtime”), it is winning animation awards on the festival circuit.
The only information I could find about the plot is what is listed on vimeo, youtube, and their site:
While his wife is undergoing slimming treatment, André goes on a discovery tour of this very unusual center… / Pendant la cure d’amincissement de sa femme, André part à la découverte de ce centre pas comme les autres…
I’m with everyone else on the “WTF” re: what we are supposed to take away from this film. BUT it is cute nonetheless, seems to have some sort of body acceptance message at the end(??) and features some really hot animated babes.
More than anything, this proves to me that fat female bodies CAN be depicted via computer animation in cute, not totally demoralizing, ways. Basically: I want more fat babes in animation, plz.
And to echo a sentiment on the film’s youtube page:
Seconded. The fat ladies’ buns are adorbs. :)
(Source: sits-on-you)
Crystal Renn Loses Weight, Violet Blue Misses Point?
Crystal Renn for Tush Summer 2011 by Ellen von Unwerth
I don’t know how to react to this commentary by sex blogger Violet Blue on Crystal Renn’s changing look. She recaps the January 2010 magazine fad for featuring plus size models, comparing them to the photos linked above:
“I now see that in Tush Magazine’s Summer 2011 edition, Crystal Renn is featured in a shoot by Ellen von Unwerth, and she’s lost the weight that many of you found erotic. She dropped several sizes not long after the controversy, but this set really shows the difference. And, I find it undeniably sexy.
“I’m really curious: what do you think? Did we lose something here?”
I feel like Violet Blue has missed the point entirely here: it’s not whether she finds Renn sexy at a smaller size, it’s about the difference Renn tried to make in the modeling industry as a plus-sized woman. Isn’t that what Renn’s book, Hungry, was all about? (Caveat: I haven’t yet read it.) Hell yeah, we’ve lost something: one less person to challenge the mainstream ideal of beauty, one less reason to try and make fashion accessible to people over a certain size.
Surprisingly, as of now none of the comments left on Blue’s article are even sarcastic. One of the commentators left a link to this interview with Renn, where she’s asked,
“Does the bashing you described–people angry over the fact that you are not “plus size” etc.,–ever get to you?
“[Renn answers:] The thing is, I was recovering from anorexia. My body’s going to do some things that I don’t expect. It’s a learning process for me. The problem is when we start bashing and saying ‘Oh i think she’s not as pretty when she’s this thin’ or I even read a comment where it said I was emaciated. I’ve been called fat a million times but when someone called me emaciated, I’ve got to be honest, I got really really angry. I am not emaciated. It’s funny because if I, for instance gained the weight because I was listening to them, I’d be doing the very same thing I was doing when I started out in this industry. I was listening to others to decide where my weight should be and who I should be in general. And I refuse to do that again. It would be more hypocritical.”
So I need help here, fat acceptance peeps. Was my initial reaction too harsh? I still feel like what Violet Blue personally finds sexy isn’t the real issue here (and it sounds like Renn is reacting to similar subjective judgements in the interview quote). Does the fat-o-sphere have room to be disappointed here, or should we aim the conversation elsewhere because it concerns changes in her body/looks? And yet, how else can we have a conversation about modeling and the people in it? Can we only talk about modeling as a whole and the body types most often seen in it, not individuals?
Or to ask the same thing (possibly) more clearly:
How can we say anything about whether Crystal Renn has gained or lost weight and still be “super rad political fatties”? Her body is no one’s business but her own!
But there were already so few “plus size” people in mainstream fashion! How can this be good?
Do you believe in rock and roll?: If I want to be thin, that's my fucking choice.
I think there’s shaming coming from both sides of the argument, and therefore I’m not going to get involved with either.
We’re all beautiful, regardless of size. And we have the right to be whatever size we want to be. True beauty comes with living that desire.
…
Dialogue tends to break down most often at the extremes. I’m over here trying to argue that people should be allowed to get fatter if they want to, and fat acceptance tends towards saying you shouldn’t do anything to change your body at all.
And yet there’s that other clause: “Yes, you are an adult human being and you absolutely have the right to do whatever you want with or to your body. I am not arguing with that.”
The whole thing’s pretty messy, and reminds me of another argument that’s still going on to this day: female beauty. There’s lots of annoying things about the Western ideal of what women should look like: it’s supposed to be for the straight male gaze, and the marketing of many female beauty products hinges on making them feel insecure. But queer femmes took on many tropes of straight femininity and built them into something else (Queer Fat Femme is one of my favorite examples). In some cases, they smash the ideal, and in others, they perform the same actions with different intent.
Can we do the same thing with our own bodies? Make an idea of body modification that “doesn’t hurt”? For example, I am interested in weight training to build muscle, and that will most likely change how I look in some way. I’m honestly not sure how my body will react, but I don’t expect to come out looking like this. I would instead probably still have boobs and big thighs and chub, and I’m okay with that. Does that still mesh with fat/body acceptance? Can you remake yourself for artistic reasons, like Genesis Breyer P-Porridge?
I think that for the vast majority of people, not actively trying to mess with their weight is probably the healthiest choice. But actually, I wouldn’t consider feederism to be mutually exclusive with HAES, because sexual health is part of overall health. If overeating/gaining weight is the only way for someone to get off, or if it’s a major part of their sexuality that they can’t (or don’t want to) give up, I’d say that balancing that need into their lifestyle can be part of HAES. I realize that’s kind of a weird opinion within FA/SA but I can’t see any other logical options here.
Re: body modification: I’m actually not against body modification in general. Like, at all. I don’t really care what other people do with or to their bodies. BUT there’s this whole culture built around dieting/weight loss/trying to make people not be fat anymore. If that didn’t exist, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. But that culture does exist, and it’s literally killing people.
I am very much against that culture because it gave me an eating disorder that almost killed me and that same culture has almost killed some very dear friends of mine. And I think that working against that culture IS working towards “an idea of body modification that doesn’t hurt” as you so beautifully put it. If there were no shame in being fat, then trying to be thin would be just another choice (albeit a somewhat ill-advised one, considering the long-term failure rates of weight loss programs), not an obligation that everyone needs to live up to. But fat people are shamed, and being thin is an obligation, and an awful one because it’s nearly impossible for a segment of the population to live up to. And as long as people are making this “choice” out of fear and shame and misinformation, I think that someone trying to lose weight in a way that “doesn’t hurt” is in for a doubly-hard battle: fighting their own body, and fighting the culture that says they must feel a certain way about their endeavor. In light of that, I’m not sure that it would be possible at all at this point.
(Bolding is mine—MR)
I think more and more of my blogging is going to be pushing ideas in fat acceptance past what the movement probably isn’t ready for yet—but I’m always for trying to live as if you already had the freedoms you desire.