I’m going to share some personal thoughts and my inner conflicts about chubby kink. I’m nervous to post this because I worry discussion of health consequences of weight gain will be offensive. Please remember I think chubby people are beautiful and wonderful– and thin people are, too.
(And, um, I hope that’s blatantly obvious in my fics. If it’s not, I’m definitely doing something wrong.)
Anyways, I just saw a post about an author getting comments on a fic that were judgmental about weight issues, using arguments about health, etc.
I haven’t gotten any comments like that yet, but I don’t doubt that I will. And it makes me sad.
The thing is, I’m in healthcare. Sometimes I counsel patients about weight and healthy food choices. And I’ve treated some pretty shitty consequences of being overweight.
But I also see lots of patients who are overweight and are perfectly healthy.
We live in a world where there’s fat stigma. And we live in a world where, for some people, there are real consequences of gaining weight. But sometimes (often) they get twisted together and confused.
And, as far as I’m concerned,
I go into work and I encourage patients to cut out sodas and fast food and chips and eat more vegetables and fruits. Exercise and stay active.
And then at home I curl up with my ipad and read fics about characters eating whole pizzas and gaining 50 pounds and it’s freaking hot. I mean, I’ve been fantasizing about weight gain since I was six years old. I’m into unintentional weight gain and body positivity and gratuitously detailed descriptions of bellies, but I love a lot of the feeding kink I’ve read, too.
But then I’m at work again and I walk into the provider workroom. We discuss patients and we’re so freaking judgmental about their weight.
So, yeah, I struggle to reconcile all this. I haven’t reconciled it.
This is going to get looooong and rambly, but bear with me!! I just have a lot of thoughts and I’ve done a lot of fat acceptance exploration haha. Don’t think that any of this is me assuming your opinions about things I’m just speaking generally to explain my thought process…
Ok so I’m not an expert by any means but a lot of the reading I’ve done suggests that the fat=unhealthy stigma is a bold faced lie and all the diseases which we associate with fatness are actually just associated, and correlation doesn’t equal causation. I don’t wanna say like, I’m absolutely right about this, but that’s what I’ve read (from studies not performed by people in the health/diet industry). I was gonna link a couple posts about this just to have it here in the discussion but my xkit archive doesn’t seem to be opening rn so maybe later lol.
Also there is virtually no evidence that suggests weight loss (just weight loss, not eating/exercising better which can happen independently of weight loss) is actually going to fix most issues, perhaps w the exception of things like arthritis/joint pain, just because there would be less weight on the joints. But you could also do strength training/exercise to combat that afaik? And still doctors recommend weight loss as the #1 solution to any fat person’s problems like why? This is slightly off topic…
So ok when it comes to eating unhealthily, like sure, it’s unhealthy. But so are m a n y other things that aren’t so stigmatized. Our society just has this massive OBSESSION with thinness and ~health specifically in terms of whether or not someone is fat and (not to sound like a conspiracy theorist but) it was all basically engineered by corporations. Like fatness is not this terrible epidemic they make it out to be, and being fat isn’t a problem that needs fixing.
And honestly, there’s no difference between a thin person eating pizza and a fat person doing it, it’s just society’s perception of it is… more negative, to say the least. Like you know, people will be like this fatty is EATING FRIES oh no they must eat healthy ALWAYS because they’re GONNA DIE, right? We’ve all seen this shit lol. But then no one gives a fuck if a thin person does the same unhealthy shit/not exercising bc they’re automatically presumed to be healthy. I mean obviously you can’t know someone’s health just from looking at their weight.
Eating healthy/exercise is different, and that’s good stuff, not saying it isn’t. BUT ALSO, I don’t think anyone owes you their health for any reason, or has to constantly perform healthy behaviors to be considered a “good fatty” who doesn’t conform to the unhealthy fatty narrative. Not having health or not doing everything in your power to obtain it doesn’t make you a bad person. There’s no morality attached, it just is.
It doesn’t bother me if people eat unhealthily because it’s… just not my business I guess. Which is probably a different view than you have being in healthcare haha, but that’s how I feel about it. They don’t owe anyone anything. It’s not as if, by now, people don’t KNOW salad with a light vinaigrette or whatever is healthier than pizza, and people can make their own choices.
SO to get back to the actual topic at hand, in terms of writing, I have those characters make ~unhealthy choices like eating a whole pizza in one sitting lol. They’re not making those choices for themselves, but I mean. They’re not real. It’s not real. They’re not ever going to develop a heart condition because I won’t write it. It’s just hot to think about people eating a lot of fatty foods idk I…. just don’t really feel bad about it in a fictional sense. I can see why it might give you guilt if you’re constantly thinking of health risks in conjunction with the smut, but I guess it’s easy for me to detach myself from that.
This is all abstract, and I know it’s different on a personal level. I do worry about my own health with some frequency, and obviously I want the people I love to live long and prosper too, but idk. It is complicated… But I do think it varies person to person in what they’re comfortable with and what they want out of the kink and out of their life. You can definitely practice chub kink while keeping health in mind if you want.
But in general I feel like… Food is good, and a little indulgence is probably not going to be a huge detriment to most people’s lives, idk. Bad shit happens to everyone at some point or another for many different reasons and… I don’t super want to spend my life worrying about shit that MIGHT happen because of xyz constantly. (but I probably will because anxiety lmao).
Eddie seems the sort to get so immersed in his work that he forgets to eat (he obviously forgets to shower and iron his clothes). So I’m imagining Venom taking up cooking to A: stave off boredom and B: make sure they stay fed. Waking Eddie up with a cup of coffee (they moved the coffee machine into the bedroom); huge stack of chocolate-chip pancakes and sausage for breakfast; like 6 roast beef sandwiches and UNBURNT tater tots with a chocolate milkshake for lunch; an entire ham plus 3 fully-loaded baked potatoes and an entire stalk of broccoli for dinner; top it all off with a 3-layer chocolate mousse cake.
Okay so, venom was just fantastic and was absolutely a great gay rom com too, but like I’ve seen no one mention that while it didn’t have a polyamorous relationship the end game very clearly is, both Eddie and venom want Anne with them and even Stan Lee addresses this fact and tells them to keep trying. Even Anne’s new bf dan wouldn’t have to be left out, he’s a legitimately good guy and is fully willing to trust and help Eddie. So yeah it’s great that it’s a superhero gay rom com but can we not ignore the polyamorous implications? Like I want it out right said too but given the plot in makes sense to have it built up first.