The thread has been quick to establish what is unethical in real life and that there’s a division between violence in games and violence in real life. Media, culture, and behavior however cannot usually be distilled into simple causal relationships. These things are complex and you can rarely design experiments to empirically test for them. Media can affect us in more subtle ways than just “now I want to do GTA but real life”. Lots of critical analyses of games today are far more nuanced than they were a decade ago. GTA isn’t directly causing people to go out and commit crimes but perhaps an abundance of negative depictions of women in media should be given some thought even if one can’t point to and say x game caused y damage.
An interesting example of how kink is portrayed in mainstream is Dan Olson’s video on fifty shades of gray. The short of it is that the portrayal of BDSM in those books/films were generally insulting to the BDSM community even as it made discussion of the topic mainstream. It did this by conflating a BDSM kink with an abusive relationship. In mainstream and therefore in non-pornographic depictions of people into feederism only hardcore cases tend to get the spotlight. Furthermore the networks and audiences looking at these cases tend rationalize their existence by assuming that the relationship must be abusive because the thought of someone getting fat on their own terms willfully is not imaginable. As a result a lot of people with the kink can feel internalized self loathing because they feel pathologized for merely having a fetish. I do think the problem of abuse in the feederism community does exist as demonstrated by sex workers being harassed for losing weight, but I believe this is a specific manifestation of a larger problem which is that we live in a culture and society that devalues women and teaches men to feel entitled to women. Mainstream depictions of feederism tend to be harmful because they don’t show or care to discuss the wide range in which people engage with the kink and actually interrogate the relationship dynamics at hand. On a side note a sex worker who is not intrinsically into feederism should be careful when deciding to making eating videos a significant and regular part of their content. The community should be accepting of people changing their content and when appropriate be informative about the risks involved. Sometimes people find out that they are eating as an emotional coping mechanism and/or that the resulting weight gain is not for them. But hell when are these considerations ever discussed?
I still think that playing with the negative aspect of the fetish is okay in fantasy as it’s a useful tool for being able to experiment with power dynamics and learn about what things excite you. Heck even danger can be erotic since sex and danger can both place us in a heightened emotional state. I think there are numerous non-kink mainstream fictional stories that uncritically portray bad models for relationships. In the realm of erotica or porn I usually know what I’m going into and can suspend the ethics of a non consensual situation because I know it was not made to portray a healthy relationship. A mainstream movie showing the protagonist violating their sexual interest and glorifying them for it is a different context than a pornhub video.
There’s going to be blurry lines to walk at times. A purely self indulgent visual novel hentai game should know what it is and make that clear to it’s audience. A game that’s a slice of life about romantic encounters should probably place some consideration into not rewarding shitty behavior if it wants to be taken more seriously. Fantasy is great because it allows us to safely explore kinks and enter a heightened state of emotions without causing any direct harm to anybody. We should also assume that when we are creating games or stories we may end up reproducing bad aspects of our culture we weren’t even aware of, so if you’re not just creating indulgent porn it may be worth interrogating your work especially if you intend to be pulling in a broader audience. Generally I don’t see the problem with creating self indulgent porn and having a place to explore dark/weird kinks, but let’s also acknowledge that media influences us in complex ways and give some thought on that topic.
