Sometimes There's No Sex: 5 Realities Of Making BBW Porn

"Several fetishes can play into an attraction to BBW," Eliza says, dutifully listing them off for us: "Ass worship, big breast worship, smothering and facesitting -- which are better with a bigger ass so it's harder to breathe -- or the giantess fetish, where I am a big, strong Amazon and the men are small and weak ... I would say about half of the BBW porn stars I know shoot femdom or fetish videos."

Ten years ago or so, that was pretty much the only type of work that women like Eliza could get in mainstream porn. Kitty Stryker (NSFW) had to turn to indie porn to find work where her stomach wouldn't get top billing. "I did a lot of queer indie porn, where the fact that I was a fat femme wasn't tokenized or played up," she says. "I wanted to steer clear of language and personas that feed into stereotypes like 'fat girls eat all the time.'"

But things have changed since then, thanks to performers like April Flores (NSFW), who got into porn simply because her husband thought she was hot and wanted everyone to know it. "In the very beginning of my career, I starred in regular porn that just included a larger person, which was usually me, and didn't fetishize the larger body ... I think that's why I made a really big impact on the industry -- because I was doing something different."

That doesn't mean fans don't like April for her size, but the difference between the two BBW subgenres is like the difference between, say, being attracted to redheads and only being able to climax by imagining Christina Hendricks getting railed by Ron Howard.

You might have noticed that some of those fetishes Eliza rattled off don't involve doing anything inherently sexual. Marley (NSFW) doesn't even consider her videos to be porn. "My favorite video by far was a remake of Hansel And Gretel, but instead it was Hannah And Greta. We had been captured by a slutty witch (because duh) and Greta was being forced to fatten Hannah (me) up. I was in a large dog cage naked, and Greta was naked except for a tiny maid apron."

To be clear, at no point does anyone in the video have sex or even masturbate. It's basically no different than a community theater play with less clothing. And yet there is no question that Hannah And Greta was made with the explicit purpose of helping someone choke the yogurt out of their lil' Spartan.

"Eating in general is a fetish," Eliza explains. "The fans love it. A big part of an eating fetish is the girl touching her body like she is turned on." Her fans sometimes even buy her food just so they can watch her eat it. "I cam often, and buy pizzas to eat whole, and they tip me to cover the costs as well as take me into private chat."

Eliza also runs a blog where she weighs herself for her fans' pleasure because "the weigh-in is like the cumshot for a feeder who likes gaining models. It is the number on the scale that gets them excited."

In fact, the first videos Marley starred in weren't much different from something you might find on YouTube. All she did was weigh herself and then comment on gaining weight, and maybe tell a short story about finding chairs for her to fit into. Others were quite similar to a typical night in: "I also do a lot of stuff like stuffing my face and eating too much until I'm TOO full," she says. "I once had to pretend to eat an entire box of donuts, all slow and sexy, and then talk about how my belly just felt so full."

We never thought we could be porn stars ... until today.

According to PornHub, between 2013 and 2015, their searches for BBW porn went up 47 percent (NSFW). The internet clearly likes big butts, and it cannot lie. But is this a recent development? Why wasn't it always this way? Well, back in the days when the amount of porn in the world was limited to what you could cram into a seedy "book shop," it was a risky bet for studios to cast outside the mainstream tanned blondes with their suspiciously dilated pupils.

"But since 2010, the industry really had to change because of free tube sites, etc." April says. "They forced the old companies to reevaluate what makes money and explore other genres." Kitty explains, "Porn studios, noting how successful plus-size performers can be when they have their own clip sites, are discovering that claiming we're 'not marketable' isn't true." Like every other type of media, internet piracy has changed the game. It's not surprising, really -- where there are pirates, there's usually booty.

"Now is a very exciting time for my niche," Eliza says. "Companies like Hustler or Evil Angel are shooting BBW regularly. I was just in Hustler magazine for their first serious article on BBW. In the past, the magazine had used small tongue-in-cheek articles about fat women as a joke. Now they are marketing and selling us to their mainstream customers as a serious niche."

In 2015, Hustler put out their first fat porn series, and before that, in 2014, the AVN "Porn Oscars" added a brand new BBW category to their awards -- which, by the way, April won. No big deal.

Many fans of fat women are "in the closet," because people can't comprehend being attracted to anyone outside the definition of conventional beauty or, you know, mind their own goddamn business.

"Being fat has a very deep running stigma attached to it," Marley says, "and lots of people are still under the impression that being fat automatically makes you unhealthy, and being attracted to something unhealthy is considered wrong by many."

Surprisingly, a lot of this stigma is coming from other fat women. "Most big women, or women in general, hate their bodies, so they get upset with their partners who are attracted to them physically," Eliza says. "They feel fetishized, instead of realizing that it's their partner's preference."

Damn men, appreciating their partners the way they are. Pigs, all of them.

"Fat" isn't a one-size-fits-all deal, no matter what leggings manufacturers might believe. "I think performers, regardless of their weight, try to maintain a specific look," April says.

When the number on the scale is your entire business model, you can't let it drift too much in either direction. Like all great things in life, it all comes down to branding and social media bullshit. "I think that many try to stay at the weight when they first gained their fans because it's all about the brand," April say. "When I started out 10 years ago, branding wasn't really talked about, but now brand is a very prevalent thing -- not only in BBW porn, but every other business. You have to build your brand, and your look is a part of it. Us bigger girls, we all try to stay conscious of that."

That's why April can't lazily lounge around the house all day eating Crisco by the spoonful (well, unless that's what she's getting paid to do). In her off hours, she watches her diet and stays active because her very specific look is her meal ticket.

And that meal ticket involves a surprising number of salads.

Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a Cracked columnist, interviewer, and editor. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com.

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