What happens when desire collides with health, dignity, and mutual care?

Recently, a friend on Instagram sent me this post on @Queerty. Ask Jake is a reoccurring column by a licensed mental health professional. The writer of the letter, Bearly Shrinking, describes an all-too-familiar scene within the chub-chaser community. A chub is a fat gay man—often (but not always) within the bear or fat-affirming communities. A chaser¹, is someone, usually thin or straight-sized (i.e., not fat), who is attracted to fat men, particularly in a fetishistic and often times in an objectifying way.

Too often, fetish is treated as a dirty word—a deviation, a pathology, or worse, a moral failing. But at its root, fetish simply describes an intense erotic focus on something not traditionally coded as sexual: a body type, a texture, a gesture, a sensation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

What makes a fetish “deviant” or “taboo” has less to do with the act itself and more to do with which bodies are seen as deserving of desire and which aren’t. In a society shaped by European beauty standards—thinness, whiteness, able-bodiedness, and youth—attractions that deviate from the norm are easily pathologized. Meanwhile, thin people lusting after other thin people is called “preference,” not fetish.

When it comes to chubby chasers and the chub community, the problem is not the attraction to fat bodies; the problem emerges when that desire relies on control, objectification, or a refusal to see fat people as full human beings rather than props for someone else’s fantasy. In the “Ask Jake” letter, Bearly Shrinking has begun a weight-loss medication as a prerequisite for knee‐replacement surgery. His feeder-encourager² boyfriend is fixated on the resulting weight loss, has pulled back from intimacy, and may leave once the surgery is complete. Bearly Shrinking’s dilemma is common in chub-chaser and feeder-gainer circles, especially now that GLP-1 drugs are widely available. Jake’s advice is solid, but Jake is straight-sized, and the broader chub-chaser community needs to grapple with these dynamics on its own terms.

Full disclosure: I am a self-identified chub who uses Ozempic to manage diabetes. I have lost more than ninety pounds in the past eighteen months and, for reasons mostly unrelated to my weight loss, have stepped back from active participation in the chub-chaser scene. As both a fat-liberation activist and a chub, navigating unintended weight loss has forced me to clarify my own politics and priorities.

“But how can you take a ‘weight-loss drug’ without trying to lose weight?” When my primary-care physician suggested a GLP-1, the goal was blood-sugar control, not body shrinking. Anyone who knows me knows I push back hard against healthism and anti-fat medical bias in every clinical conversation. I chose the medication because it improves my glucose levels and offers other health benefits.

Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are lightning rods in fat-liberation spaces and, increasingly, in chub-chaser circles. Some activists and chasers deploy arguments that are more moralistic than scientific, casting GLP-1 users as traitors to fat community values. That stance tries to dictate what others do with their bodies, the opposite of bodily autonomy and liberation. It is no one’s business what decisions others make about their own bodies.

What is important is that we make decisions about our health and our bodies that are informed and center our own well-being. Healthism and anti-fat bias is rampant in the medical field. Anyone who is fat knows all too well the familiar experience of going to the doctor’s office complaining of a runny nose and being told to lose weight, which will magically cure every ill and ailment that a fat person has. It can be scary to advocate for oneself, but asking a medical provider to explain the benefits of treatments that avoid all mention of weigh loss or that are rooted in an anti-fat bias, is not asking too much. If they cannot do that, it may be time to look for a new provider.

Decisions about our bodies should be made for us, by us. If you are someone who seeks an intimate relationship or is in an intimate relationship with someone who is with you because of your fat body, ask yourself if you are making decisions about your health and your body for your well-being or for the well-being of others? For many chasers, fatness is a fetish, it is a requirement for sexual attraction, but as humans, our relationships and intimacy aren’t tied only to our sexual desires, we also have romantic attractions and interests.

For most of us, our romantic and sexual attractions are intimately tied together. Some of us cannot be sexually attracted to someone if we aren’t first emotionally and romantically attracted to the person. For others, romantic attraction is strongest when there is a strong sexual attraction. Yet, there are some where both types of attraction are completely separate. When it comes to relationships, for some people, sexual attraction and sexual compatibility is just as important as romantic attraction, for others it might be different. These are what make navigating relationships difficult, not just for couples where fetish is a large component.

There is a lot of blaming and shaming around weight loss in the chub-chaser community, but so rarely do people actually talk about the systems of anti-fatness and how they creep into the actual communities which purport to celebrate and affirm fat bodies. In other words, we indict mainstream culture for policing size yet rarely examine how those same anti-fat logics seep into our “safe” spaces, informing who gets praised, who gets fetishized, and who gets quietly ostracized the moment their body changes.

Attraction is a complex interplay of biological, psychological, and environmental factors. Hormones like dopamine, oxytocin, and testosterone play a role in the initial arousal and bonding process. Psychological factors such as perceived value, familiarity, and similarity also influence attraction. Furthermore, our past experiences, cultural influences, and even physical proximity can shape who and what we find attractive—these include negative systems of hegemony, like racism, sexism, sizeism, and ableism.

From my participation in the chub-chaser community, there are a few broad patterns that I’ve seen (purely anecdotal) for why many “chasers” eroticize fat bodies, which are not mutually exclusive.

1. Envy‐driven attraction. These men are often highly fitness-focused—think personal trainers or gym enthusiasts. They appear to project their own disciplined pursuit of leanness onto bigger bodies, sexualizing the very softness they’ve denied themselves.

2. “Fix-it” attraction. Some approach fat partners as projects. They view larger bodies as damaged or lacking and take pleasure in “helping” or “uplifting” someone they perceive as broken. This caretaker dynamic overlaps with attractions some people express toward disabled partners.

3. Comfort-seeking attraction. Some chasers may eroticize size and softness because a larger body feels physically and emotionally comforting and offers warmth, security, and a literal cushion against the world. Fatness is less a problem to fix or a goal to envy than a source of tactile and psychological ease. The partner’s body becomes a living weighted blanket that calms the nervous system, much like the proven soothing effects of affectionate touch in close relationships.

Fat bodies are heavily stigmatized, so any attraction to them often operates in the shadows of secrecy, fetish, and unequal power. In most chub-chaser spaces the structural power tilts toward chasers: they are typically read as “conventionally attractive,” face less public shame, and therefore enjoy a larger dating market. That tilt does not turn chubs into passive objects, but it does narrow their choices. A chub can accept, negotiate, or reject the role a chaser assigns, yet each option carries a cost, sometimes as concrete as a shrinking pool of potential partners.

The picture becomes more complicated when we look at chubs’ own preferences. Years of anti-fat bias can translate into an internalized belief that thin or muscular bodies are more desirable. Many chubs, especially those who don’t identify with chub-for-chub culture, mirror the very lookism that marginalizes them, seeking out lean or athletic partners and ignoring bigger men who don’t fit the “attractive” stereotype.

Body changes expose these double standards. If a chaser gains weight, does the erotic script dissolve? If a chub loses weight for health, surgery, or personal comfort, does the chaser’s interest fade? Such moments reveal whether the relationship was grounded in the person or in the role each body was asked to play.

Preference isn’t apolitical. The bodies, genders, and skin tones we claim to “just not be into” didn’t float to us on a neutral breeze; they were served up by centuries of advertising, colonial beauty hierarchies, and algorithm-driven swipe culture. Grindr’s infamous “No fats, no femmes, no Blacks, no Asians” header isn’t an outlier, it’s the overt version of biases most of us quietly carry. If attraction can be conditioned, it can also be de-conditioned. That doesn’t mean policing desire, it means tracing it back to the social factories that forged it and asking, Whose humanity gets erased when I call this a preference? Until we do that work, “type” will remain the polite face of discrimination, and every claim to personal taste will sit on a foundation of collective prejudice.

Desire is not the enemy; unexamined power is. If chub-chaser culture is to mature beyond secrecy and fetish-as-fixation, it must center bodily autonomy on both sides of the equation. That means chubs claiming the right to health decisions that serve their own well-being, whether that involves Ozempic, weight lifting, or doing nothing at all, without fear of abandonment or moral policing. It also means chasers confronting the social privileges they carry into every flirt, DM, and cuddle.

When attraction is met with transparency about motives, respect for shifting bodies, and an explicit practice of consent, the binary of “object” and “fixer” collapses. What remains is the possibility of erotic joy that neither exploits nor erases. The work, then, is ours: to build spaces where fat lives are celebrated, not curated for someone else’s fantasy, and where every body—changing, stable, soft, scarred—has room to choose, to negotiate, and to thrive on its own terms.