Feederism History 101

Hello professor, as always your blog is a nice place where I can refresh my mind and learn about this community  now I'm bringing you another question more about our community by itself than me individually.

I know that the taste and admiration for the fat has been around since ancient times,and even if today our community still continues to grow, it has only recently begun to exist as such, then, although there has always been a taste for fat people and gaining weight (which may be  evidenced by history)the gainer community as we know it has a recent onset (or at least I guess), so when do you might consider the birth of the community itself?, when do we stopped just being a few people to form a real community?.

As you can see I'm interested about the community story, but well there is not much info about it!, so I hope you would help me a bit. Thanks for reading and keep doing your best as always who is really appreciated.

Truly yours:

H.

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Dear H,

It's very true fat admiration (in men as well as women) has been part of various human cultures throughout history, and it's probably more significant to ask why American and Western European cultures suddenly “switched” from appreciation of well fed people to feel as if “fat/bad” and “thin/good.”

Some believe it's related to the economy, where for most of human history, being larger meant you were more successful, and being big meant you had access to the resources to give you those curves. This was true across the world, and historically, among the Polynesian People, for example, nobility was expected to be very big, and some African traditional people had “fattening” ceremonies because a large man or woman fit their ideal of beauty.

Biologically speaking, the higher the body fat percentage of a female, the sooner she enters puberty, which is why in the United States, for example, we're seeing girls as young as ten years of age starting puberty. On the other hand, in communities where food is scarce and females have a very low body fat percentage, their puberty is “arrested” and won't happen until their late teens. We also see in certain female athletes (say long distance runners or competitive bodybuilders), when they maintain a body fat percentage under 7%, their menstrual cycles are irregular, and they will have a problem becoming pregnant. Just so, there is most likely a evolutionary imperative to have more fat than less.

Part of the current emphasis on being thin may be directly tied to the “Youth Culture,” where a great deal of money and medical science will focus on how to keep someone looking as young as possible for as long as possible, and being thin or lean is associated with being an adolescent or young adult. Also, especially in the United States, poor people tend to have a higher rate of obesity, so now many people associate fat with being poor, and lean with being rich enough to afford a personal trainer and chef.

When I was teaching at the Kinsey Institute, there was a very interesting collection of erotic art in many different forms, and the art from the late 1800s and before that will often show very rounded women, and men who definitely don't look like men you'd see on the cover of today's fitness magazines. 

First of all, people may have an interest in a particular “kink,” but historically will have a problem connecting with others who have a similar “kink,” particularly if it has a stigma attached to it. Also, up until around World War 2, at least in the United States, most people stayed in the area where they were born. That also limited exposure to others who might share the “kink,” or their sexual orientation. A popular British comedian has a routine about being “the only gay in the village.”

But by the mid-1940s-early 1950s, we see a major population shift from rural (agricultural) communities to urban (manufacturing) ones. Because of the War, a young man who might have never traveled 20 miles away from his home town in rural America, surrounded by corn fields, enters the army, get sent to a training center and was then shipped out to a war zone.

For many military men, their first sexual experience was either with another male in his platoon, for example, or with a prostitute (female or male) in a foreign port of call when they had some time off. When the War was over, many of these men returned to the United States, but didn't go “home,” but often stayed in the cities where they received training or shipped out. This might be, for example, San Francisco, San Diego, or New York City. These cities (and others) often became the birth sites of gay communities. It's a little more complicated, where, particularly in San Francisco, it was rather “wild” in the 1800s because of men on their own participating in the Gold Rush, and many “boom towns” immediately set up houses of prostitution because men wanted sex, they had money, and at the time, there was little law enforcement  The bottom line—you end up with what we call a “perfect storm,” of horny men, little supervision, and ample opportunity for sexual exploration.

If you were in your little hometown where everyone knows everyone else, you always know someone is watching you and people will gossip about you. But large cities mean you can be anonymous. For many, they won't even know the names of their closest neighbors. This encouraged gay communities (and neighborhoods) at a time when being gay was illegal.

How did people find each other? Gay bars, bathhouses, and what later became known as “personal ads.” As printing costs went down, people also used newsletters and self-printed magazines to make contact with others. In some cases, these were simple xerox copied (or mimeographs—a sort of very cheap printer) “magazines.”

In 1969, an organization was formed for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), which wasn't intended to deal with “fat kinks,” but that was an unintended consequence. A special interest group split off focusing on what later became known as BBW (Big Beautiful Women) and a number of magazines featuring them were published that would often be found in “Adult Book Stores.” 

Similar magazines (and again, many of these began as very amateur (which, btw, the original meaning of “amateur” has the root word of “love,” so while now it often has a derogatory meaning, it used to mean someone was doing something because he or she loved doing it, and not because it was an occupation.) featuring fat men also started being published to meet the needs of gay and bisexual men. There were also specialized gainer newsletters, most coming out in the 1980s. One of the first “slick” or “high gloss” magazines (these are “trade terms that refer to the paper stock used on the cover, where it costs more and looked like professional magazines you'd see, like say, Cosmopolitan or GQ these days. That was Bear magazine,and it was first published in 1987.

Remember, this was before the Internet was easily accessible to the general population. Organizations formed like Girth and Mirth Clubs in the 1970s that brought together large men and their admirers. Organizations like this started in other countries as well, and there are regular conferences, where such clubs or organizations meet together. One of these is called “Convergence” and the 2013 event will be in New Orleans: http://www.convergence2013.com/event/seminars.aspx

When the Internet became more popular, people interested in various “kinks” found each other through “newsgroups” designated as “alt.sex.” There were also something in those days called “Message Boards” that allowed people to connect via the Internet, but that was to really provide telephone contact between those with similar interest. One of the first specifically for gay gainers, for example, was the “Waka Waka” message board in Seattle, Washington. 

As the Internet became even more accessible, several sites “evolved” from the alt.sex groups into some sites that are no longer available (such as Gainerweb, or Gainrweb), and those like Bellybuilders.com, and BiggerCity.com, that are still very active. These begat newer ones, such as Beefyfrat.com, and now Grommr and Grommr's new “sibling site” with more of an emphasis on chasers as well as “the chased.”

Parallel to this have been sites primarily focused on BBW, which have in some cases, as with Fantasyfeeder.com, become more gay/bisexual friendly. Just in terms of sheer numbers, because there are more straight men than gay ones, BBW sites may be more financially supported because there are more straight men looking for women than there are gay men looking for other men.

And finally, this is also something I feel important to history. Remember we see that one of the first “professional” magazines for men who liked their men big—was Bear magazine in 1987. Do you know what else was a focus of the gay community at that time? AIDS. Do you know what AIDS was often called in Africa? “The Skinny Disease.” One characteristic of the disease was “wasting syndrome,” where back in the days before our current medical treatments changed HIV from a terminal disease to a “manageable one,” the way, say diabetes, is a “chronic and manageable  disease," it was easy to walk down the street in San Francisco and immediately identify someone who had AIDS, at least in the later stages.

This led to a (false, btw) assumption that if you weren't skinny, you didn't have HIV. This coincides with the “growth” of the Bear culture, which while not the same as the gaining community, obviously has a lot of overlap. One of the treatments for AIDS at that time was a doctor prescribing steroids to prevent the loss of muscle mass.

As a result, you can see two responses to “The Skinny Disease”: being fat (in those days, doctors would recommend to their “normal” sized patients to gain at least 15 or more pounds while they had no symptoms, because when they did get sick, their body would have more resources to “fight off” the opportunistic diseases that came with AIDS. In other words, guys who had been told by the gay culture at the time “We value someone with a 29 inch waist,” were told by their doctors, “A 29 inch waist means if you do get sick, you'll be more likely to die than if you are carrying extra weight.” Many of the AIDS related publications and brochures at that time actually carried recipes to help patients get fat(ter).

The other response was to get muscular, and many men who had never been really muscular, found that the steroids they had been prescribed allowed them to obtain bodies that, well, could only usually be obtained from the use of steroids.

On a related topic, if you look back at gay related ads as well as in straight publications before the 1980s, the “desired” image of a male was not a guy who spent time in the gym at all, but was fairly lean. Here are two men from 1960s ad, and one from the movie “Making Of A Male Model” from the 1970s.

After Stonewall, the early 1970s image of gay men switched from a focus on very thin and somewhat femme men to a much more stereotypical “masculine” one, often inspired by the artist, Tom of Finland, so you get what was derogatorily called the “gay clone” that usually included a large mustache and a sort of lumberjack look or like the Leatherman, from a popular gay music group known as the Village People. The steroid treatments allowed a lot of AIDS patients to achieve this look, at least for a certain amount of time.

A lot of the men you and many others admire, often reflect these “unusual roots” of the rebellion against the “femme” stereotypes before Stonewall and gay rights, by the embracing of a more hairy/”masculine” look, and an attempt to avoid looking like you had “The Skinny Disease” by carrying extra weight, or striving for a very muscular body.

And that brings us up to current times, where obesity rates are increasing across the population groups, gay or straight. That makes a bigger belly more of a "norm," where a lot  of people don't necessarily feel as much pressure to strive for the old 29 inch waist.  The Internet can instantly connect people with similar interests on a global level. For example, in the 1950s, you would have to work very hard to find someone with an erotic interest in gaining—such folks were out there—but they would be difficult to locate, especially if you lived in a rural (and homophobic) area. These days, I enter “Chubby Chaser” into Google, and in .19 seconds, I have 795,000 hits. You can locate guys who don't want to gain, but just want to bloat, or people who are “just” encouragers  or are specifically “chubs for chubs.” Again—it wasn't that people with these interests didn't exist before you were born. But we now live in a world where individuals with a specific kink are much easier to find. And finally, the Internet provides a certain level of “protection,” where if you find someone with a matching kink, and they end up not being someone you find of interest outside of the kink—another person is just a click away. Gay bars, by the way, are now declining in numbers because while in the “old days,” they were basically “community centers” and a safe place for gay and bisexual men to meet—many younger men have never even been to a gay bar, because the Internet, or a Grommr meet satisfies their needs.

And they all lived happily ever after. (Which is how I think most histories should end.)