Food, feeding and female sexual arousal

Abstract

Feederism is a fat fetish subculture that eroticizes eating, feeding, and gaining weight.

This thesis attempts to explain the practice of Feederism using an evolutionary approach.

Chapter one examines the historical and cross-cultural meaning of fat and its association

with fertility, health, and beauty. Chapter one also reviews the current literature on fat

admiration and Feederism, and introduces some possible explanations for what

Feederism is, and how it can be conceptualized. Chapter two describes a case study that

was conducted on a female member of the Feederism community. The results of this case

study add support to the hypothesis that Feederism is paraphilic. Chapter three describes

a psychophysiological study that tested how members of the general population respond

to and rate feeding stimuli. This study was conducted to determine whether Feederism is

an exaggeration of a more normative and functional mate selection strategy. The results

of this study demonstrate that males and females both respond to and rate feeding stimuli

similarly. No definitive conclusions were drawn with respect to the exaggeration

hypothesis, because, although participants did subjectively rate the feeding stimuli as

more sexually arousing than neutral stimuli, they did not genitally respond to the feeding

stimuli significantly more than to the neutral stimuli. Chapter four summarizes the results

of the two studies and discusses how these finding might inform future research on

paraphilias, courtship, and intimacy.