Here is the abstract for the original research article (which you can purchase, if you care to). The report’s conclusion, a surprising result, makes it difficult whether to say there is really a correlation between BMI and sexual behavior or between BMI and volubility. In other words, are larger women more likely to have sex with a man? Or are they simply more likely to talk about it? Are big women bigger sluts? Or do they just have bigger mouths?

Interestingly, this result seems to be part of a larger “thin backlash.” There are still plenty of models with waists the size of an ice pick, but women — and, more influentially, advertisers — seem to be fixating less on thinness. Another team of researchers in the news has written a report showing that thin models actually discourage product sales. These scientists “found that images of super-thin models carry no edge in encouraging young women to buy and for the majority of adult women ads showing skinny girls actually discouraged sales. So-called plus-size models, on the other hand, actually encouraged them to buy.” Reasons for this range from the fact that most people simply aren’t ultra-thin to the possibility, suggested by some studies, that larger women are actually more fertile. Curiously enough, it makes you wonder if feederism, in which a fetishist encourages the morbid obesity of his partner, isn’t a sort of overcorrective reaction to what may be the perversion that has been lying in plain sight — thinness.

Currently the most-commented post here on PervScan is Fat Girls and Feeders. Clearly feederism and fat fetishism tap into a powerful undercurrent of contemporary society. There are more perverse perversions, and there are more blatantly harmful ones. But if you had to pick a representative perversion — a perversion for our times — you’d probably have to choose between pedophilia and feederism. Pedophilia is more common and invokes more outright hysteria, but feederism taps into the same murky forces that have resulted in a veritable “obesity epidemic” in Western countries. (And yes, there are doubtless weird conjunctions of pedophilia and feederism — pervs who, like an old-world grandmother, delight in fattening up little children.)

As this story rightly points out, most of the discussion surrounding feederism and fat fetishism has addressed men who lust after Big Beautiful Women. But naturally there are also women who prefer Big Handsome Men. The interesting thing is that these two are not mirror images of each other. Men who desire BBWs and women who desire BHMs appear to be looking for different things in their supersized desiderata. The women in this article are attracted by vulnerability (shown by obese men who aren’t “falling in line with societal standards”) and confidence (”If I suspect a man has a ‘woe is me, I’m fat’ attitude, I wouldn’t get involved.”) They like men who are both “tough and cuddly.” Read the comments on Fat Girls and Feeders and you’ll see that men appear to have darker motives for their interest in obese women.

This disparity raises some interesting questions. Did the reporter seek out women who simply had more benign (i.e. presentable for newspaper readers) interests in fat men? Are there evil broads out there who want to dominate a man by stuffing him till he’s a human sofa? Conversely, are there good guys out there who like obese women because they’re somehow more confident in their bodies? More generally, are there “good” and “bad” forms of fat fetishism?

There were actually two versions of the ad. The first shows the model seated, breasts visible. Presumably this racier version of the photo (My God! Tits!) was for the more tolerant European market. If you look at it long enough, though, you realize that the shocking thing is not the model’s deflated breasts but rather her face and her arms. The second version of the ad shows the model imitating the pose of Ingres’ famous odalisque. Ironically, it is difficult to call this version more “chaste” than the first one. Your eye wanders over her bony figure to rest on the psoriasis rash on her ass. Surely this should be considered more obscene than some bare boobs.

The model is a French woman named Isabelle Caro. Evidently she is a comedian, which adds a further touch of grotesquerie to the whole campaign. Are we supposed to laugh at her self-destruction? You can find her resume online, which includes a gallery of pictures showing her in a swimsuit. Ms. Caro maintains a blog (in French) where you can find even more pictures. And she used to maintain a blog specifically about her anorexia. For some reason it has gone offline, but you can still find a cache of it on Google. The title was “L’Anorexia ou le besoin de vivre” — Anorexia or the need to live. Evidently she equates the need to live with the need for attention, since she is an odd mixture of anorectic and exhibitionist. (”Odd” in the sense that the exhibitionism of anorectic models usually stops short of exhibiting anorexia itself.)

The avowed purpose of the ads is to raise awareness of anorexia. Many other commentators have dissected this intention and its potential for hypocrisy. You also have to wonder about its potential for perversity. One of the most active pages on PervScan concerns feederism, the fetish involving morbid obesity. If there are people who get off on Big Beautiful Women, must there not also be those who get off on the opposite? Yes, there are men who harbor a fetish for anorexia or, more properly, for girls suffering from anorexia. As is always the case in matters perverse, wherever there is something unusual, there is someone else who derives sexual excitement from it — which makes you wonder if Ms. Caro’s next occupation might be neither comedian nor fashion model but porn star.

Here is a picture of the victim, Manuel Cordero. Mr. Cordero was the living — now dead — embodiment of the stereotype that Hispanic men like women with big butts. According to various news stories, he had a serious trove of ass shots. “Cordero had a hobby of taking pictures of plus-sized women and their clothed behinds, police said. Residents in the neighborhood said Cordero would have women come in to the store to be photographed and he would also take random Polaroids of women walking down the street.” Probably he was the type to toss remarks like “the bigger the cushion, the better the pushin’” and “how ’bout some fries to go with that shake” at female passersby. But that doesn’t warrant a death sentence.

You would expect that, given his fetish, Mr. Cordero would have been murdered by a jealous rival who didn’t want to share his woman’s big ass with a pervert freak. The truth was much more desultory insofar as Mr. Cordero was murdered in the course of a botched robbery. The murderer ended up making off with a few hundred dollars and a credit card. Using the card was pretty stupid, since it helped get him arrested. A smart murderer would have left the plastic and taken the pictures. Scan those, register a domain name something like TheBiggerCushion.com, post the pictures, and the guy would have an on-going source of revenue — the booty that keeps on giving.

Here is a mug shot of Mr. Tweed, and here is another picture of him on the street. It’s no wonder he was a lifelong rapist, since he couldn’t have gotten many girls with a creepy face like that. He looks like an alcholic bachelor from the 1970s — the very decade in which he began to abuse his two victims. Perhaps he wanted to stop time somehow.

At any rate, two things about this case leap out at you. First, it’s hard to understand how any person could allow herself to be manipulated for decades. Imagine that — an adult woman still subject to a regime of rape that began in her childhood. It attests to precisely how powerful routines of coercion and control can be. A friend likes to tell how you can’t throw a frog into boiling water without it trying to jump out, but if you put a frog into a pot of lukewarm water and then slowly bring it to a boil, the frog will never try to save itself. Evidently this situation must have been the same. The abuse carried on for so long that the woman found herself in a boiling pot that she never would have tolerated as an adult.

The second interesting point about the case is the woman’s attempt to repel her abuser by making herself obese. It’s not an unusual strategy among people suffering from longterm abuse. They get fat, stop bathing, wear dirty clothes, make themselves ugly in every way they can in a desperate effort to rid themselves of their oppressor. It’s common enough — and knowing that, knowing that ugliness is sometimes a symptom of abuse, can certainly alter your perspective. When you find yourself on a crowded bus or airplane and a fat person is trying to squeeze his cellulite into the seat beside you, maybe you’ll reign in your contempt, your disgust, your internal comments about how that person should leave off with the french fries and cake. How do you know the person next to you isn’t ugly but rather attractive — too attractive — to someone he wishes he could disgust?

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

It certainly is true that contemporary society puts a lot of pressure on women to be fabulously thin. That being said, however, it is difficult to believe that any woman would be so anxious to lose weight that she would so completely lose her power of judgement as well. After all, it’s hard to make out a scientific argument that electronic stimulation of the vaginal labia is a good way to shed pounds. Sexual activity may indeed burn calories, but there’s nothing specific about vaginal stimulation that causes weight loss. What kind of con did the perp put on his victims? “Lady, when I attach the Slimtronic to your vagina, you will find yourself getting wet. However, this moisture is not the normal indicator of sexual excitement that you may sometimes experience. Instead, it is the cellulite melting away from your midriff and leaking out through your vagina like cooking grease.”

Uh, right. It’s hard to believe that anybody who would fall for a line like that is an unwilling “victim.” Yes, yes, it’s not right to blame the victim, and of course there is no excuse for rape — but you get the feeling that the real story here is that the women like these “weight-loss” treatments for reasons that have nothing to do with obesity. It would be like men saying they go to hookers for the exercise! The victim in this case only complained when the perp stuck his finger inside her, and you get the sense that that’s what it’s all about. It wasn’t the electronic gizmo but the fact that the perp crossed the line that upset her.

Confess! You know you’ve thought this before. You’ve been walking on the street or strolling along in a shopping mall. Suddenly you see two people — a man and a woman — but, you think, they’re less a couple than a triple or a quadruple. “Watch out,” you smirk. “Wide load!” And then that dirty little thought creeps through your head. You watch them waddle by and you think: How do they do it?

Even supposing that they find each other appealing — and you’re not sure how they can find such mountains of flesh attractive — how do they physically manage the act of fucking? Good God, they look like Weebles! Don’t their enormous bellies prevent any approach from the front? How can any penis be long enough to extend past that man’s enormous gut and find its way through those folds of fat to that woman’s hole? And even supposing that they manage to connect somehow, they’re so flabby and out of shape that it’s hard to imagine them sustaining an act of passionate lovemaking. Don’t they wheeze? Run out of breath? Don’t they risk massive coronaries?

It seems self-evident that fat people would have unsatisfactory sex lives. But at the same time, you can draw some pretty weird conclusions from this. For example: is allowing yourself to become fat a sign of contempt for sex? That’s weird, because sex is so intrinsically appealing that it’s hard to imagine why people would have such contempt for it. Wouldn’t the prospect of better orgasms encourage people to go to the gym? Wouldn’t you rather have a good lay than another piece of cake?

But obesity, some will retort, is not a matter of having a weak will. It’s a psychopathology. It’s a disease. It’s genetic… And yet, if that’s the case, then an even weirder conclusion ensues. If it’s a pathology of any sort, does that mean that sexual problems are nature’s way of trying to suppress it? Does evolution try to weed out the fat gene by making it difficult for fat people to fuck?

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

Not long ago PervScan featured a story called Fat Girls and Feeders, about men who fetishize obesity and encourage their partners to gorge themselves in a quest for more mass. And while it might shock some to think that sex appeal can lie in cellulite, there are enough practitioners of the fetish — not to mention enough fat women to satisfy them — that it has even come to be designated by its own shorthand code, BBW or Big Beautiful Women. If you google BBW you’ll be amazed by the results that come up, especially since the results aren’t all porn. There are support groups, dating services, online lingerie shops — all for BBWs and the people who love them.

That being said, it would be going too far to assert that whoever is strip-searching these adolescent tub o’lards is a fat fetishist. The article doesn’t say who is performing these searches — women? men? Then again, does it matter? There might well be lesbian BBW fetishists. What’s more, look at the case from a practical standpoint: if you were afraid a juvenile delinquent had concealed a pencil — a sharp, dangerous instrument — somewhere on her person, wouldn’t you feel obliged to have a look into her rolls of fat? And for that matter, why is it any more invasive to have your fat rolls searched than it is to have your ass or your vagina examined?

Given the evidence in the story, you can’t conclude that the strip searchers are fat fetishists. However, you do have to wonder about the guy who wrote the newspaper headline. The story has almost nothing to do with obesity and everything to do with the constitutionality of strip-searching minors. So why highlight fat rolls in the headline unless it titillates you to do it?

(Thanks to alanr for the link. Alanr also points out that there is some interesting background in the “About Feeder” section of this feeders web site.)

At first sight there is something deeply shocking about fat girls and feeders. It’s one thing to admire girls with Rubens-like figures, it’s another to want them to become human behemoths, mountains of flesh. Who could find that attractive? Is there something sexual about it? How do the feeder and the fat girl consummate their relationship? Do they have sex? How do you find an orifice hidden in those mounds of flesh? Or does the guy just jerk off in front of her, like a sculptor in love with his creation?

On reflection, though, the shock wears off. It is not as though this fetish is without parallel. It calls to mind Chinese foot-binding, in that it incapacitates a woman in order to fetishize her. It also calls to mind necrophilia and coprophilia, in that it finds beauty in something that most people find repellent. If people can get off on cadavers and fecal matter, why not extreme obesity?

What remains a little weird is the concept of feeding. This news story refers to a documentary that featured a couple named Mark and Gina. Mark was obsessed with the thought of creating the world’s fattest woman, so he set out to “grow” his wife. He managed to get her to 380 kilograms (Americans: over 800 lbs!) — but it practically killed her. She had to have surgery and currently she weighs a mere 190 kilograms (about 400 lbs). Mark now “mournfully observes Gina’s still-considerable bulk, struggling to accept her. ‘I miss the statistics,’ he says bleakly.”