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When Bitch magazine wrote about the subculture in 2009, it defined the fetish as "a 'feeder' (usually male) encourages the 'feedee' (usually female) to gain weight." A year later, the Guardian wrote a piece on " the women who want to be obese," explaining: "There are lots of men on, but it is the images of female gainers that catch the eye. The subculture appeared separately in episodes of TLC's Strange Sex and National Geographic's Taboo, both of which showed women trying to gain weight ( Strange Sex featured Donna Simpson, who appeared in numerous documentaries at the time). The same themes and reinforced gender constructs appeared in most, if not all, of the media discussing feederism. Again and again, studies coded gaining as a feminine activity and feeding as masculine a sexuality textbook from 2006 went so far as to suggest that the subculture was appealing because for women, eating is "as sensual as having an orgasm."
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What they found was a startlingly narrow, gendered view of the feederism community. So Charles and Michael Palkowski-her colleague and co-author-started looking at the academic research. "We wanted to see why people would do this, and why they would get involved in this kind of relationship." In 2007, Simpson launched a website where fans could watch her eat in real time at her heaviest, she tipped the scale to 602 pounds.Ĭharles was intrigued. She saw stories of women like Donna Simpson, who grew famous in the mid 2000s for wanting to be the fattest woman in the world. "There were a couple of documentaries about feederism-specifically, about women being fed until they were immobile-showing feederism as something dangerous," Charles tells me. Kathy Charles, a psychologist at Edinburgh Napier University, who is co-authoring the first academic book about feederism, to be published later this year. The role of women in the feederism community caught the eye of Dr. There is hardly a trace of the female feeder in anything written about the fetish if you weren't entrenched in the subculture, you'd hardly know that female feeders exist. But Gabriela's story, like other female feeders, is not the one represented in the academic research, the media, or even in the mainstream feederism community that exists online.