Fetish guide: More Fetishes
Growth
The drama of watching something grow larger and larger in front of your very eyes is the core erotic drama of a whole category of fetishes. Macrophile fantasies revolve around the idea of being tiny in a world of giants, or being dominated by a gigantic person. Macrophiles imagine themselves at the mercy of their gigantic lovers. Within the world of Fat Admiration, there are those who have erotic fantasies of their lovers or themselves growing even fatter. Body Inflation fans masturbate to stories or images of body parts suddenly growing impossibly huge. Inflation and growth are also key dramas in the Balloon Fetish.
Growth is both a metaphor for sexual arousal itself as well as a metaphor for power exchange. It’s at once magical, awesome and terrifying. To imagine something growing also evokes the feeling of our own bodies shrinking — we become smaller and smaller, regressing to the size we were when we were tiny children.
Macrophiles
Macrophiles have sexual fantasies of being tiny and at the mercy of a gigantic human. Some get off simply from seeing a person grow, others from being eaten, suffocated or crushed under the giant’s feet. Those who imagine being stomped are usually foot fetishists who have elaborated their base into a dramatic narrative of power, sacrifice and annihilation.
Some macros bring their fantasies to life by getting their lovers to play with miniature sets or dolls. Others have people walk on them or sit on them while pretending to be giants (this is sometimes called a “trample fetish.” Macro fantasies are not focused on “real” giants and giantesses (i.e. people who have acromegaly) — they are not big enough.
Crush Freaks
Crush freaks commonly imagine themselves as a tiny bug, worm or mouse crushed under a giant human foot. The moment of greatest pressure from the foot is often the climatic moment in this sexual fantasy. Crush is thus primarily a subset of the foot fetish. Although most crush freaks are satisfied with keeping this scenario in the realm of fantasy or role-play – by having their lovers walk on them in “trample” sessions, some prefer to see actual living creatures stomped as substitutes for themselves in a form of ritual animal sacrifice. Although there have been crush movies since at least the 1950s, this practice remained an underground phenomenon until animal rights activists stumbled upon internet sites advertising crush videos in the late 1990s.
Fat Admirers and Feeders
Fat admiration is a prime example of the cultural relativity of deviance. While Arab and African cultures consider fat to be the height of hotness, white, puritanical American culture reviles fat. We seem to feel threatened by fat as a symbol of uncontrolled sensuality and femininity. Media culture tends to represent fat people — and fat women in particular — as stupid and lower class. We blame fat women for their failure to conform to our current body ideals. And we consider anyone who actually desires fat bodies, who gets aroused by the thought of all of that flesh, to be a pervert.
In some ways, a preference for fat sexual partners is simply that — just as one person might prefer blondes. Yet the people who call themselves fat admirers (or FA’s) experience a deep sexual thrill from seeing and feeling the fat itself. In the gay male community, FA’s are known as “chubby chasers” or simply “chasers.” FA’s and chasers get off on the details: the double chins, the cellulite, the stomach rolls. To many FA’s, the height of eroticism is to have their lover sit or lie on top of them. They want to be squashed and engulfed in their lover’s ample squishy flesh.
In many ways, an attraction to fat is only natural. When we were tiny babes suckling at our mother’s breast, she must have seemed like a mountain of luscious fat. Fat in itself is a perfect fetish substance — its texture and smell can be deeply comforting. Ned Sonntag, an FA illustrator married to writer and former sideshow fat lady Katy Dierlam, explains that truly fat women have breast-like areas all over their bodies.
For hard-core FA’s, the biggest sexual turn-ons are weighing and measuring their lovers and watching their lovers eat. Weight gain fantasies are an extremely controversial issue in the fat acceptance community, and the most reviled and misunderstood FA’s are those who are suspected to be “feeders” who encourage their lovers to gain weight in reality.
There are horror stories of men who make their girlfriends gain so much weight that they become immobile, and then leave them when the medical problems begin. Certainly this kind of behavior is absolutely unacceptable, but it would be wrong to presume that all weight gain fantasies and practices are undertaken non-consensually or without respect for health limits. As with BDSM, it is essential to maintain an awareness of one’s own limits, and to keep erotic practices “safe, sane and consensual.”
Weight gain and feeding fantasies are not only one-way: Plenty of women and men themselves find the fantasy of gaining weight — growing fuller, tighter and more fecund — to be deeply erotic.
Body Inflation
Body inflation is the stuff of Disney films and old Benny Hill comedies. A woman’s breasts suddenly inflate to monstrous size, preferably making a whooshing noise in the process. A man’s butt suddenly pops out of his trousers, growing to immense proportions and ripping the fabric in the process. This isn’t about gals with boob jobs — the meat reality of medical procedures is not enticing to body inflation fans — but about sudden, magical transformation. The process of inflation offers a perfect metaphor for sexual arousal: surprise, pressure, tension, fear and excitement all rolled into one.
