People with feeder fetishes — both the gainers, who get sexual pleasure from being overfed to the point of significant, even massive weight gain; and their feeders or followers, who thrill at the bodily expansion — are usually playing a numbers game. Feedee Patty Sanchez once ate 13,000 calories a day to pack on 240 pounds. Reenaye Star eats 40 pieces of sushi for lunch. And dozens of feeder sites are filled with women who set specific weight goals online, linking them with a devoted community of men who send money, food and clothing to encourage and support every pound along the way.
But Flawless Melissa, a fetish model who performs in the “Gainer Girl” series at video site Clips4Sale, is an outlier in the community. Unlike most gainers, she’s not deliberately, actively gaining weight in the traditional sense. She doesn’t count calories, set weight goals or gorge regularly. Instead, Melissa uses her 25-pound pregnancy weight gain, a paltry total among most feedees (or pregnant women, for that matter), to expand her typical work in ass and foot fetishes, cuckolding and financial domination into the feeder fetish world.
“I don’t think most fetish workers venture into the [feeder] fetish, because it can affect your sales in other categories,” Melissa, 29, says by phone. “Unfortunately, putting on even 20 pounds makes a difference with your customers.”
Initially after becoming pregnant, Melissa kept working her usual multiple fetish angles. But a few weeks in, she received an email from a regular who shed light onto a rare corner of the earth where a woman can be financially rewarded and admired for being overweight. “He noticed I’d gained weight during the first month of my pregnancy and asked if I would eat a pizza for a custom clip,” she says. “I said, ‘You just want me to eat a pizza?’”
Clients pay $10 a minute for a custom clip at Clips4Sale, and Melissa figured it would take her about 15 minutes to consume a whole pizza. “So why not get paid $150 to eat an entire Little Caesar’s Pizza, especially when I love Little Caesar’s Pizza? I’m in a very body-conscious fetish industry that doesn’t allow me to say, ‘I just want to drown myself in grease today and it be okay.’ So I was like, ‘YES!’”
As more and more of her pregnancy showed, Melissa began making pregnancy fetish clips — in which she labors through some contractions on the toilet or oils her pregnant belly. She realized, though, childbirth would soon put an end to commodifying this phase of her body; at the same time, however, she now knew that there were numerous subcategories under the larger umbrella of feeder fetishes she could explore. She also knew that she loved eating, something she’d had to restrict during her seven years in the fetish world, which she entered in her early 20s weighing about 90 pounds.
Popular constellations of food fetishes include a wide array of non-nude porn that’s remarkable precisely because it doesn’t demand explicit nakedness, and involves detailing for a captive male audience what most women would consider exceedingly nonsexual, if not verboten for discussion: Talking about the experience of feeling gross and fat.
There’s bloated belly, for instance, which involves a woman showing or patting her bloated stomach after eating. There’s weight humiliation, which might include a woman just talking about feeling bad about her weight. Another crowd pleaser is the moment when a gainer steps on the scale to reveal her latest weight gain. Public eating, eating in the car or going to the bathroom after eating are all fair game, too, as is sitting on or crushing things, sometimes as part of sex.
“I thought, let’s look into these other feeder fetishes, like trying on pants after they no longer fit you, and you have a muffin top, and your ass is basically going to bust out of them,” Melissa explains.
Only now — after she gave birth — she had to make a choice: Hit the gym and lose the weight to maintain her previous body, or go deeper into her gainer-girl persona, possibly losing old clients who were lured by her fit bikini-clad body. She began making and testing out other clips that ran the gamut of the feeder fetish — from eating an ice cream sandwich seductively to attempting to work out, only to find out she can’t because she’s too out of shape (another customer request), all the while charting the various discomforts of weight gain.
In “My Body Changes,” Melissa sits cross-legged in a sports bra and jogging pants, wearing glasses and no makeup, eating a sub sandwich and going on a rant about how pointless it is to do anything but give into food cravings.
“I might as well eat this fucking sub,” she whines in the video as she unwraps it and bites off a hunk. “Full of roast beef, and fucking salami, and fucking peppers. I mean, fuck it.” Then she just eats and complains. “I already ate two pizzas today,” she says. “Why not just add to the calories?”
Next, Melissa details the reality of new motherhood, how the exhaustion means that you don’t want to “spend fucking 80 minutes fucking five times a day trying to cook pretty food. … My gut’s not going anywhere.” She complains about her “deflated tits” that filled up with milk and then “boom,” withered.
If there’s a money shot in “My Body Changes,” it’s when Melissa finishes off the roast beef sub, lights a cigarette, exhales and exclaims with post-meal contentedness, just as a small dog wanders through the shot, “It’s that few seconds after a meal like this, where I just gorged myself, and I can say that I truly enjoy a few minutes to myself (belch) to enjoy that stuffed, full feeling,” as she rubs her now-distended belly.
These types of clips are big sellers. Melissa says she earns a near six-figure salary from the work by keying into these feeder sweet spots in the descriptions and language of each clip, all organized around the eroticization of the most minor discomforts and shame surrounding weight gain. And it’s not as if she’s faking it. Though Melissa isn’t a feedee, she loves food, particularly miniature food — miniature cupcakes, in particular, or any dollhouse-sized replica. She has a particular affection for roast beef sandwiches and buffets, which is why they appear in so many of her clips. “It’s just my thing,” she says. “It always has been something I love and respect. I’ve always had a high metabolism. I’d have to down protein shakes to really gain weight, but this way, I can just eat what I’m craving, what I want anyway.”
In “My Biggest Meal — Part 2,” she sits next to a crumpled fast-food bag and super-sized soda, and lays it on thick: “You love that I have fed you all this food and although you are ready to burst right now, you hope that I can stuff you again in a little while, like a little piggy, wearing just your panties,” the description reads.
The majority of the work is bewilderingly simple. In one short clip, Melissa poses in a wedding dress before-and-after setup. “3 Years Ago TODAY I got Married in THIS DRESS,” it reads. “Lets see how it fits me today. Lets see my reaction to how my dress fits and all the weight I have gained in 3 years.”
In another, she appears to have returned from vacation to step on the scale and find she’s gained 10 pounds. “So much weight gained!!” the description proclaims. This is the stuff of middling lifestyle blogs. Melissa could be any woman who woke up, tried on some clothes and felt bad about it, and yet here she is, turning a profit for a willing, enthusiastic fanbase eager to hear that it’s hard living in what by all accounts is a perfectly normal female body, experiencing perfectly normal female body milestones.
That might be why she’s still surprised by the clips’ success. “I’ve been doing this for seven years and never made the Top 50 at Clips4Sale,” Melissa says of the scale video. “I was so scared to put the clip up. I thought, ‘I look horrible, I don’t have any makeup on, I haven’t plucked my eyebrows.’ And that scale clip went all the way to the Top Five. How does that happen? I’ve been trying so hard to do that in other fetish categories and never have.”
Melissa admits she finds the majority of the clips “hilarious” to make. She is continually amazed at not just how mundane the requests are, but how specific they get. But she loves eating, and she would much rather lean into it at a time when her body craves it. Plus, it frees her up from sweating the other work.
“I know my body is my money,” she explains. “Typically, most models would stick to a pregnancy fetish, and then work out after they have the baby. I thought, I’ll breastfeed, and I’ll work out, and I’ll go back to being skinny. I’ll snap back, like some of the other women around me who had babies at the same time.”
But she didn’t snap back: “I was like, I really, really love the buffet. And this kid keeps me up all the time, and I’m exhausted.”
Melissa realized that if she worked this angle right, she could make money off both streams, splicing every phase of her body into every possible way it might titillate. “You’re never confined to a fetish,” she explains. “It’s about what works for you and what you have going on with your life. I was pregnant, so I made pregnant clips. If you have braces, make braces clips. If you love shoes, shoe clips. I think every fetish can mold into another, or you can mix and match fetishes.”
Because Melissa has a cache of videos from throughout her seven years as a foot and ass fetish model, she can still maintain a Twitter account featuring Flawless Melissa — thin, fit, dolled up. Overeating never enters the discourse. Then there’s Gainer Girl on Clips4Sale, where she’s casual and bare-faced, happily embracing a larger body.
Maintaining both images did require a little maneuvering. She noticed that as her weight gaining clips took off on Clips4Sale, her earlier fetish work began to suffer. Men who wanted to see her ass fetish work in tight yoga pants were, she surmised, turned off by photos of her bulging out of tight clothing. This disrupted the fantasy, so she moved all her weight gain clips to one corner of Clips4Sale so they wouldn’t undermine her other work. “Now they’re doing better,” she says.
Ultimately, that dip in sales didn’t bother her. “I know women who make $20,000 a month [as feedees],” she says. “But it pays my bills, and I’m comfortable and happy where I am. I didn’t set out to stuff myself to make $90,000 a year. I simply saw my body changing and took advantage of it. In that way, it’s real life and the fetish crossing over. And very rarely do you get to pick something you actually enjoy in the industry. With a lot of other fetishes I’ve been a part of, it may not be full enjoyment for me.”
Not that it’s always easy. Even doing something you love can be a grind from time to time.
“I have to go get a pizza, wrangle all the dogs, take the kid away from the house, get my cam room set up and light the area,” she says. “I get three or four different types of food. Then you have to sit down and think about it. Do you eat the fries with the cheeseburger? Because if not, you might not be able to get the fries in. Do you drink pop or water, because the pop is gonna fill your stomach up. I love it, but it’s still work.”
Tracy Moore
Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.
