“In the skewed, through-the-looking glass world of Feeders, a woman can never be too fat. For the men who admire them, obesity is next to godliness. Their goal is to feed them. And feed them. And feed them.”
Introductory blurb to “The Feeders,” by Lynn Snowden Picket, Gear, May 2001 When I first heard that Gear magazine (one of those lifestyle periodicals for young men with lotsa discretionary income) was doing an article on “feeders,” I felt some trepidation. The world of Gear, after all, is far removed from size acceptance - it is a place where the only ideal of beauty is a buff bod; where smoking is okay because, after all, it helps to keep your weight down; where liquor companies vie with overpriced athletic shoe ads for revenue space and nobody seems to notice the contradiction. It's a world, I suspect, that views the very concept of size acceptance as freakish, let alone something so controversial as feederism.
Turns out my misgivings were justified. Not only does Gear's recent piece exaggerate the sensationalistic aspects of its topic, it completely blurs the distinction between fat admirer and feeder. I'm temperamentally suspicious of attempts to generalize human behavior on the basis of particulars, but I'm out-and-out hostile when it's done for fat admiration.
Let's take the two most offensive aspects of the article and examine them through the Barberscope, eh? Aspect One is the blurring between fat admirer and feeder. Though article author Picket quotes some FA attendees at a Goddess dance as indicating that they weren't feeders, she quickly pooh-poohs this idea by hinting that since “feeder” is a word with heavy negative connotations in the size acceptance community, these guys naturally have to be lying, right? She then follows up by quoting Juggs editor Dian Hansen (“There aren't many men who are interested in 'super-sized' women who aren't feeders.”) and summarizing that simple statement by noting that in Hansen's view, FA and feeder are “virtually interchangeable.”
I've worked with Dian - found her to be a creative and intelligent woman, in fact. But if she really meant that the two terms are interchangeable, then I'd have to say she's full of it. I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, though, since by itself Hansen's collision of negatives doesn't really say what Picket indicates. For one, it presumes that all FAs are solely attracted to one body size, leaving out a sizable percentage of the FA community in the process. For another (and this is the second offensive aspect of the piece), it assumes that all feeders are “interchangeable.”
Again, that hasn't been my experience. The feeders described in Picket's article are those who pursue a course of feeding their loved-ones-slash-fetish-objects throughout their lives, feeding 'n' feeding until every feedee reaches immobility. It's an image that recurs in fanta-sizer fiction (indeed, even in some of my stories), but at the risk of stating the exceedingly obvious, there's an ultra-wide chasm between fantasy and reality.
I'm gonna pull out a word that I don't use very much in my fiction. It's a nice grown-up word, and I think it accounts for the way that most FAs actually live their adult lives. “Restraint.” Fat Admirers may fantasize about extreme physical growth, but to many FAs this remains in the realm of fantasy. And even those FAs who consider themselves feeders may display - shall I use that word again? - restraint when it comes to their day-to-day lifestyle. “Extreme” may be fine when you're trying to sell caffeinated soda, but few of us have the stamina to really live that way.
But restraint doesn't sell magazines.
So instead, we get an article focusing on artist Ned Sonntag and his wife - as cautionary examples of extreme feederism and as objects of the author's somewhat condescendingly crafted pity. Now Ned is an articulate examiner of the life that he has chosen to lead. But to hold him up as the sole exemplar of fat admiration-cum-feederism is a bit like using Warren Beatty as the paradigm for straight male behavior. It ain't the whole story.
Picket's article quotes other purported feeders (though only one fat woman, Katy Sonntag, gets a piece of the spotlight), but these are all younger males who presumably haven't yet the achieved the “inevitable” with their partners. The way the article is structured, it's clear where Picket thinks every one of these relationships is headed.
Since Gear's article appeared, there has been some discussion within the wired FA community on its merits. To some FAs who are into feederism or fanta-sizing the fact that a newsstand magazine even devoted space to the topic is cause for celebration; by acknowledging that the lifestyle exists there's a chance that some closeted types may feel less alone. Others argue that an article like “The Feeders” is designed to drive tentative FAs or feeders more deeply into the closet - by severely limiting what it means to be either or both. Myself, I think the article's main purpose is to reassure the core Gear readership that no matter how pathetic they may be, there are others in the world way more screwed up.
I suspect that the Gear piece is only the first of many that will be coming out in the mainstream media in the wake of Deviant Desires. Already there've been rumors of Inside Edition doing a tele-piece on the pheeder phenom.
Better start drafting your personal statements for friends 'n' family now.
May, 2001
Copyright 2001 - Oakhaus Designs