Talk:Fat fetishism

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[edit] Proposal to make weight gain fetish its own page, and not linked here

Should weight gain fetishism link here? Although they are related, and (most) people with a WG fetish also have a fat fetish, they're actually 2 different things. Not all people, some might even say a significant number, that have a fat fetish and/or are sexually attracted to fat partners get off on the idea of their partner (or themselves) getting fatter/gaining weight. Also, some people who are into WG fetish fantasize about skinny people gaining weight, and sometimes these amounts of weight aren't really enough to consider the partner fat. Weight gain fetish is strictly about the gaining of the weight, and not the end result, although I'd dare say most WG fetishists are also fat fetishists. C4bl3Fl4m3 13:43, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with this one mattbuck 21:36, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
As I said below. Feederism should be a seperate encyclopedia article, for sure. The article as it stands is a mess anyway with original research and references to non-notable people, websites and ideas.--h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 21:28, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cow?

I've _never_ heard of this term, ever, and I've been around the scene for nearly a decade now. MarkRose 02:42, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Likewise. It may be a nickname among a tight group of community friends, but idioms of an extreme minority have no place in an encyclopedia. Sketchvg 19:42, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposal to make fat admiration a separate page, and not a subsection

Primary argument: Fat admiration is a superclass, and fat fetishism is a subclass thereof. It makes little sense to bundle fat admiration as a subsection under fat fetishism.

Secondary argument: Fetishism implies...

a) Sexual exclusivity b) Sexual objectification (as opposed to the physical trait being a mere complimentary object)

... which most people, including many FAs, consider to be derogatory overtones. (sig added ->) Sketchvg 22:06, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Fat admiration was a separate page. I moved it here and created it as a section of fat fetishism because both preferences are based in sexual attraction to fat people. Sure, it's derogatory to want a person only for bodily attributes, and it seems that fat admirers are perhaps more loving and respectful in their affections, but clearly both fat fetishists and fat admirers would pick a fat partner over a skinny partner based purely on that person's fatness. Joie de Vivre 18:47, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Indeed, both preferences are based in a sexual attraction to fat people. But, as I explained in my primary argument, fet fetishism is a particular subset that adds qualifiers to simple sexual attraction. Those qualifiers are exclusivity and gross objectification. The backwards classification of a superset under a subset is reason enough to separate the pages even without any discussion of how this misrepresents the majority of FAs.
In addition, "Clearly ... fat admirers would pick a fat partner over a skinny partner based purely on that person's fatness" is in extreme dispute here, and it's exactly this misinterpretation that is being perpetuated, at the moment, by this fallacious Wikipedia page. It's akin to saying "Clearly, a man who prefers a thin woman would pick a thin partner over a chunky partner based purely on that person's thinness," or "Clearly, a woman who prefers red-haired men would pick a red-haired man over a brown-haired man based purely on that man's hair color." Notice how silly both sound, and you'll notice why most FAs abhor such an exclusive and objectifying stigma. It's both unfair and unjustified to label all FAs as fetishists. Sketchvg 22:06, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Look, I am open to civilly discussing this with you, so I would appreciate it if you would reduce the defensiveness in your tone.
That said, I think your descriptions of sexual preferences are pretty accurate. Certainly it's obvious that what I meant when I said "purely" is that the initial attraction is based on the person's fatness. The very definition of "physical preference" is "preferring one set of physical characteristics over another". It doesn't sound "silly" at all, when you consider that if a male FA saw a bunch of women at a party, he'd be more likely to hit on a fat woman than a thin woman.
Consider this: If a white guy has a sexual preference for Asian women, he might try to strike up a conversation with an Asian woman at a party. Granted, one guy might seek out Asian women because he has an "exclusive and objectifying" sexual fetish for Asian women. Another guy might prefer the way Asian women look, and he might aim to find one he can have a relationship with. But is the first guy a "Asian fetishist", and the second an "Asian admirer"? They both have a sexual preference for Asian women, based solely on the Asian woman's racial background (and often regardless of her cultural upbringing.)
Frankly, your argument is even less substantial than some of the justifications that a hypothetical "Asian admirer" might use -- that they supposedly appreciate "Asian culture" (whatever that is) or "history" or "traditions" -- because fat admirers are attracted to FAT PEOPLE, who are not part of some cultural group, but are simply physically bigger than average. Whether fat people all have some sort of shared experience would be entirely based on the cultural environment they were raised in, because otherwise they have nothing in common except being fat.
Like it or not, if a person is a fat admirer, they are "exclusive" and "objectifying" because that's what physical preferences do, they divide people based on looks. The FAs and the FFs are essentially the same in terms of the basic sexual attraction to fat people. Those "qualifiers" of "exclusive" and "objectifying", if brought to an extreme, might result in fetishism, but where do you draw the line? Is an FF just a socially maladjusted FA?
I don't think that quibbling over the distinction between a fetish and a -philia bears much merit in this instance, especially since the -philia of fatness has nothing like "an appreciation for the culture" to hide behind. It's convenient to demand that FAs be defined as "not FFs", but on what grounds? What is an FA, that an FF is not?
Do you have any attributable sources that clearly defines what an FA actually is -- other than "not an FF, they're bad"? Do you have any such sources that make a clear distinction between the two groups? Now would be a good time to share them. Joie de Vivre 23:44, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Frankly, I think the issue here is that FFs and FAs are in fact so similar that you want to try to distance the fat fetishists in an attempt to justify fat admiratione. I don't think that either preference needs justification. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a preference for a certain body type, even to the point where that body type is the only type you like. However, I think it's ridiculous to try to whitewash over the discriminatory aspect of picking someone based on looks that is inherent in "fat admiration". Joie de Vivre 23:51, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
You ask, in your Asian analogy, "But is the first guy an 'Asian fetishist,' and the second one [not]?" The answer is, unequivocally, "Yes." The first man grossly objectifies to the degree that sexual satisfaction is exclusively requisite on the fetish, whereas the second man does not. That's a crisp distinction, and any claim of the two being "so similar" is severely misguided.
I'll restate an earlier example: In many cultures, it's common for a heterosexual man to prefer a women with a moderately athletic build. Yet you'll find that many of these folks are completely sexually satisfied with partners who do not have such a trait. That's because their "fitness admiration" is not grossly objectifying to the point of exclusivity. A true fetishist cannot be sexually satisfied under those circumstances, unless he has an active imagination during intimacy.
That is the difference, and it's not only discrete as I hope I've shown, but also quite important. For one example, it's a social virtue to find satisfaction in "inner beauty," and to not be grossly preoccupied with outer objects. The latter is, according to most people, including most FAs, a character fault and an unhealthy fixation.
These culturally-authoritative web resources, though not formal attributions, explicitly make the same distinction I'm making:
My impetus is not justification for fat admiration -- it's insuring that FAs are accurately represented as mere trait admirers rather than misrepresented as people with an exclusive physical fixation.
Regardless of all this, however, you are glossing over my primary argument. The secondary argument (regarding the difference between admiration and fetishism) was just that -- a supplement. The primary argument, as I said before, should warrant a page division (or reorganization) completely regardless of the subsequently-mentioned issue. It is, again, that a subclass of a superclass should not be the parent article, with the superclass represented only as a subsection. It's as nonsensical as having a subsection called "Animals" in the scorpion entry. Sketchvg 01:44, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
Can you verify the factuality of your opinion that fat admiration is a superclass, containing fat fetishism? Urban Dictionary certainly doesn't meet WP:Attribution, and in my opinion, a magazine that started out as a newsletter put out by the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance isn't particularly neutral, either.
You might be interested to know that this young Asian woman doesn't make any distinction, "crisp" or otherwise, between the "fetish" or "admiration" expressed by men who are attracted to her based on her race. It's all the same to her. Joie de Vivre 16:36, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
As I said, my citation wasn't a formal attribution. But the Urban Dictionary entry clearly demonstrates that my definition has popular support.
Dimensions Magazine started out as an NAAFA spin-off newsletter, but that's where the ties to NAAFA end. Indeed, Dimensions is not neutral at all, but not in the way you imply. Instead, it's the opposite: it's fetishist tolerant. If you look elsewhere on the web site, you'll find a pornography subforum and even a vast library of feeder fiction (feederism is explicitly condemned by the NAAFA). As a site that caters to and accepts fetishists, they would be the least likely to unfairly conflate the two. The fact that they outline a distinction indicates that even among those completely tolerant of fetishists, who do not impute upon fetishism any derogatory overtones, a true distinction is understood.
Here's how classes work. The most general classes have the least constrictive qualifiers. Derived classes thereof have additional constrictive qualifiers that make them a particular "kind" of the superclass. It's is-a derivation. FAs constitute the most general population of folks who prefer fatter people over thinner people. The only constrictive qualifier is the sexual tendency toward a certain physical trait. Fat fetishists are FAs with more constrictive qualifiers: namely, gross objectification of fat (or implications thereof) to the degree that it becomes an exclusive and sexually-necessary fixation.
Subclassifying is-a relationships according to constrictive qualifiers is how every organizational hierarchy, from object-oriented software programming, to scientific classification, to encyclopedias, works. The class "fat admirers" is-a "people" with a qualifier that culls its master population. The class "fat fetishists" is-a "fat admirers" with a qualifier that culls its master population. If you tried to go in reverse, for instance claiming that "fat admirers" is-a "fat fetishists" with a qualifier (the qualifier being "they are not exclusive and grossly fixated"), you wouldn't be using a constrictive qualifier that culls the population -- instead, you'd be citing a qualifier that increases the population, which is indicative of a backwards hierarchy.
Sketchvg 19:35, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
What exactly do you want to happen here? Joie de Vivre 20:09, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm in favor of separating "fat fetishism" from "fat admiration" altogether. Sketchvg has already outlined the difference between a preference (such as brunettes versus blondes, or fatter versus slimmer partners) and a fetish. Qit el-Remel —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 12:55, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
  • I'm in favour of keeping these part of the same topic. They don't seem to have individual notability seperate from one another.--h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 21:33, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
There's not enough info on them to make them different articles, better to keep them together than have two stubs which will never be expanded. mattbuck 09:12, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] the opposite

Is there such a thing as thin fetishism, perhaps by another name, and does Wikipedia have a page on it? BrainyBabe 10:16, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Sure there is. I know a guy who weighs 100 kg at a height of 170 cm, yet would classify any girl who doesn't have A or B size breasts as 'fat'. Said anecdotal account perfectly demonstrates thin fetishism... It's not even that the bloke is opinionated, rude, or self-centered, but that thin fetishism is so prevalent that he doesn't even realize that if his own criteria were used to judge him, he would end up a lot further up on his own scale than just 'fat'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aadieu (talk • contribs) 21:00, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Hmm, I suppose it's possible - I've certainly read about anorexia via vomiting being a turn-on for some people. It's not listed in the paraphilia template though. mattbuck 10:28, 3 October 2007 (UTC)


I was just about to ask something similiar. Why is attraction to larger sexual partners classified as a fetish, while attraction to smaller ones not? Seems kind of reflective of our biased American culture, no? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.46.137.159 (talk) 01:04, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with anonymous. In our culture it's seen as against norms to find non-thin persons attractive. Since these days it's hard to say what fat is, when what is considered fat is an ever lowering weight amount. Like yesterday it was 300 pounds, now it's being over 190 pounds, ect.

Alot of FA people are upset about the concept of desiring someone fat being seen as a fetish, as in something against the norm. It's no more a fetish, as you have said, it is to be attracted to thin people. Only that our society sees fat people as undesirable, and thefore someone who would be with a fat person must have something off about them, therfore it's a fetish.

The idea behind FA is that there will be a day when being with someone fat, isn't considered something to be ashamed of. Nobody calls people who like thin people "thinny-chasers" but yet they call people attracted to fat people "chubby-chasers" A preference is a preference, it's like how anti-fat acceptance people say "You're telling us we have to be attracted to fat people, even if we aren't" For people who like plus-size people, they're being told that something is wrong because they're not attracted to thin people. Frankly, given the way most thin people have treated those who are plus-sized, it's not surprising that over time they'd seem less desirable. Violet yoshi (talk) 17:14, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Feederism should be a seperate article

I strongly believe that feederism should be a seperate article, perhaps with a summary here and a link to it in this article. Feederism is just a small part of fat fetishism.-h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 21:27, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

In fact, this whole page needs to be split up into seperate articles again. It was a bad idea to have merge all of these topics into the same page.--h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 07:20, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree that feederism should be a separate article. The way this has been incorporated could confuse people into thinking that all fat fetishists are feeders. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zyrcona (talk • contribs) 15:17, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Agree. Especially since the media-advertised superthin look has made the term 'fat' ambiguous to say the least. Preference for somewhat curvy women (say, 155cm/65kg, 165/73, or 180/80) or stockier builds has nothing whatsoever in common with psychologically dominating an already obese person into becoming morbidly obese to the point of health issues or loss of mobility. I used the example of women here simply because there seems to be much more discrimination against average-figured women than against men. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aadieu (talk • contribs) 20:55, 2 June 2008 (UTC)