Quote:
Originally Posted by sunflowergirl68
Some fetishes are relatively harmless, but wanting to stuff your woman or man's face with food can be dangerous.
And kaplods, what you described sounds pretty dangerous to me. And very patriarchal. And you're right about the thin line with fetishes... I think that being attracted to big women is fine, different strokes for different folks, but for me, when the feeding comes in, that's when a line is crossed. And you're spot-on (do you have a degree in psych or something? ;-) ), fetishes can become out of control.
Yes, I have a bachelor's degree in behavioral psych and a masters in psych. I do want to make clear that I believe that when a feeding fetish results in weight gain or a repetitive cycle of gain and loss (or the feeding behavior otherwise risks the health) of the feedee just as when any fetish results in physical or emotional harm to one or both partners, it's crossed the line into dysfunction. I think most hardcore porn and fetish porn and sometimes even soft porn can be the very picture of dysfunctional, and appeals to people with more severe degrees of fetish-related dysfunction.
The "food scene" in the movie 9 1/2 Weeks might be an example of a harmless form of the fetish (assuming a couple isn't risking either's health imitating the scene).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7exc8b4nzOo
As for the guy who says he has "respect" for the women he is "feeding," I suspect that HE believes it. Either because he would be ashamed to admit even to himself that he's so sick that he doesn't care about his partner's well-being - or because on some level he believes that "respect" for these women make what he's doing "ok."
People rationalize bad and dysfunctional behavior all the time, and sometimes there's even a grain of truth in it. I think especially on "the spectrum" of fetishes, the early stages are easy to justify, and as a person gets in deeper and deeper, it only makes the need to justify (at least to themselves) that much greater.
"We're not hurting anybody," is an excuse that people have made for eons.
I've also had my share of fetish attention, and I have to say I've been very lucky that the men were always very obvious about it in the first date or two, so it was a "no-brainer, deal-breaker." With the man who would become my husband, after a few weeks of dating, I started to be concerned that he had a "white knight complex," (a rescuer fetish). His previous girl friends tended to be women who needed rescuing. It put me on the alert to make sure he was "just a nice guy," and not a guy addicted to women in distress.
Actually, it turned out he's really somewhere in the middle. I wouldn't call it a fetish, because it's not a sexual need, he's just a very generous guy who does want to help people in need, and sometimes he takes the need to be needed too far. He's the kind of guy that will give his friends (and anyone he's talked to for more than ten minutes might fall under the category of friend) the shirt off his back. Sometimes I feel like the bad guy for having to reign in his generosity.
I don't know that most people go into a relationship with their eyes as open as I did. Because of my psych background, I was LOOKING for signs of weirdness, and when I found them I looked even more closely to make sure his weirdnesses were ones I could live with. I think a lot of people with true fetishes (until they're very severe) hide them until they get someone into a relationship. Once the person is "hooked," only then do they bring out the fetish. When a fetish gets too severe to hide, that's when people go looking for a subculture that allows them to put the fetish right out there in the open so as not to waste time going through the motions of developing a normal relationship.
The fetish clubs and social groups allow a person to keep up the illusion of the fetish being "normal," because in their subculture it is. Even when the behavior is so extreme, that most people would call it harmful, you're going to find a lot of feeders AND feedees who aren't willing to admit that to themselves or each other.
It's not far different from "generic" S&M, in that when it crosses the line into harmful, that's when the people engaged in it are the most defensive of it. People who are just into it "a little," tend to feel that they're playing with something dangerous. It's the people who say "it's perfectly safe and harmless," that I most suspect are taking it to the point that it isn't.