I recently received a question about whether I’m turned on by the health problems associated with extreme obesity. I thought I’d take the opportunity to answer the question more fully since it’s an issue that often gets brushed aside all too easily or uncomfortably.
When we talk about being turned on by so-called unhealthy gaining, what we really mean is getting aroused by the distress of obesity. I use the word distress because the underlying drives and fears that we’re talking about are far broader than health concerns. Quite simply, the distress of obesity is—to some degree—erotic to all gainers and encouragers. In fact, it’s one of the things that separates us from bears, chasers, FAs, or others with normative sexualties. The only difference among us is the point at which a gainer or encourager taps out, so to speak. The point of “too much.”
I’m defining distress very broadly here, as being emotional or physical or both. It’s a vast spectrum from mild chagrin to moderate discomfort all the way to base ignominy or even death. Every gainer or encourager I have ever met falls somewhere along this spectrum, and this spectrum always impacts so-called health. (People have all sorts of fungible ideas about “being healthy.”) When a guy loses his abs under a pillow of new fat, he has lost some amount of privilege (psychological distress) but he is also thought of as less fit, even less healthy (physical distress). The distress is minor, perhaps, but gainers and encouragers relish it. What about stretch marks, the pulling apart of subcutaneous layers of skin that heal over and scar? Of course you might say, “Well, those are no big deal.” Perhaps, but I promise you that most normies would regard stretch marks on a growing belly as highly distressing. They would point to them as an obvious loss of health and physical prowess. And, what about your fatboy getting much fatter as he starts to waddle, perhaps growing so fat that he needs your help doing things or your understanding (even pride?) that he’s now incapable of certain activities entirely. You’re both turned on seeing how slowly he’s walking now or how he needs your help more than before. This type of distress is almost always labeled a “health issue.”
We gainers and encouragers see the distress of obesity not as a deterrent, but as an attraction. Where we differ is in how much distress we can physically tolerate, mentally handle, and morally justify. That’s why one gainer is horrified by stretch marks, and another is avericious for them… and he may even be the same gainer but at different points in his life. At 20 he sees them as a permanent physical indictment of his gluttony and obesity. At 30 he sees them as a sign of beauty and distinction precisely because they are a permanent indictment of his gluttony and obesity.
Many gainers and encouragers try to relegate the distress of obesity (be it major or minor) to merely a necessary evil, or the price of glory. However, I believe it is far more central and stems from the root of the kink itself. All kink is based in a cultural context, and one of the most prevalent today is healthism, the prejudice that people who are “healthy” are physically superior, and therefore morally and ethically superior as well. Healthism is behind phrases like “guilt-free potato chips,” “having a cheat day,” and “being good” when other people are eating dessert. Specific kinks invert specific cultural norms or prejudices. For example, most normies would consider popping a button in public to be distressing, causing a shooting pain of embarrassment. For the gainer, however, this embarrassment is a source of sexual arousal. All gainers and encouragers dream of the distress of obesity—whether physical or psychological. We differ only in the degree of distress we consider sexy, frightening, or disgusting.
As a gainer or encourager, you already occupy a place on this spectrum. But before you start judging the folks more extreme than where you are, consider this: No matter what point we’re at on this spectrum, we do not remain there. We move throughout our lives back and forth according to our values, experiences, and circumstances. Gainers who once vowed utter immolation by their own gluttony when they were 20, sometimes retreat in terror when their doctor gives them the news of diabetes at 30. But we see the opposite trek too. Gainers in their 30s who swore they would never let their gaining compromise their health find themselves with greater and greater tolerance (even eagerness) for taking medications so they can keep getting fatter and fatter. Of course, the same is true for encouragers and where we draw our lines in the sand.
Every one of us has had the experience of being turned on by something we used to consider “too extreme” or maybe even disgusting. The nature of the ego is to maintain the illusion that who we are now is who we’ve always been. The function of an identity is to create ourselves as a static object in a world of other objects so we can move among them. But a moment’s reflection on our past belies this comforting permanence. A tree will always be a tree, and you will always be a gainer or encourager. A person who’s never seen an acorn might not believe that it’s simply a younger form of a mighty oak. But not only are the two the same plant, the tree is becoming more and more itself every year as it metamorphoses from acorn to leafy tree. The same is true of us.
Pursuing the distress of obesity (and it’s concomitant ecstasy) comes in many different forms. Certainly we all know gainers who are not satisfied with being merely full. They must be so full it hurts even to breathe. To cite an extreme case, I know a gainer who was never consciously turned on by the distress of “unhealthy gaining” until he developed gout. Gout is an extremely painful condition, but he avoids taking his medication because he likes how his gout feels; every stabbing pain thrills him as a reminder of how fat he’s gotten. Of course, we are not all turned on by pain. Physical pain is simply one form of distress. What I am saying is that we gainers and encouragers have the capacity to eroticize any aspect of obesity, any distress, no matter how trivial or disgusting or painful it might be to someone else. This is our superpower, you might say. But though we all have this innate capacity, we differ in what we find horrific, desirable, or practical. That’s why one gainer might find immobility grotesque and miserable, while another finds it to be his life’s calling, while a third finds it extremely erotic but so impractical as to be undesirable. It also explains how these people might change their opinions later on in life: The wiring of the kink in the parasympathetic nervous system is the same for all of us who are gainers or encouragers, but our different values, judgments, and fears make something erotic for one person and anathema for another. Values or priorities or beliefs can change over time. The wiring of our kink cannot.
Perhaps the most useful thing I can say about all this is that whatever your horrors or erotic fantasies about obesity, none of them mean anything about you as a person or about your life. We don’t have to manifest every thought we think. It’s perfectly fine to confine certain desires to fantasy. We have a say about our lives, and about how we want our body to move through our life. That also includes manifesting those seductive horrors if we so choose. Too often, however, choice is not involved. Only fear. Where there is fear, there is no authentic choice. Someone who is too afraid of diabetes to gain a single pound is not making a choice. They are simply reacting to a fear. In fact, to stop himself from gaining for fear of diabetes is to live as if he already has the disease—he lives within a constraint that the disease dictates without actually having the disease. The point is not whether or not the person gets diabetes. They are living as if they already have it. They live in their fear of it rather than in the reality they might get it, or that they might treat it.
Our eroticism of obesity is directly linked to the distress of obesity. Not all of it. Not all the time. But the same way that stepping on the gas pedal is directly linked to the drive train, it would be foolish to try to deny the connection. This may seem ludicrous from the point of view of a normie, but for a gainer or encourager, it is precisely these things we find distressing that are our greatest ecstasies, and we cannot have one without the other. This torments many of us, but there is no way around it. We rarely get to pick and choose: We want to be 600lbs and in perfect health, or we want to have a gluttonous 600lb boyfriend but not be judged by our friends or coworkers. What you can or can’t live with is up to you, but you are wired to enjoy all of it. It just may not seem so in the present moment. Again, think back to something you used to abhor which you now jerk off to.
Freedom comes from choice, with designing and embracing a life that includes our sexuality. For us, the ecstasy and distress of obesity are in a dance with each other. They are like partners moving together in a single dance of our sexuality. As time goes on, we become different people with different values and priorities and the dance changes, but the partners do not. What we fear becomes what we desire, and what we desire becomes what we fear. That’s the dance.