I saw and shared an exchange on Tumblr a little while ago in which a young woman reblogged a dominant’s fantasy guide for training submissives into eating disorders to keep them thin.

Cue the outcry: “Girls, don’t fuck up your health,” “Don’t fuck with the heads of impressionable teens,” etc:

Don’t you love how he manages righteous indignation while blithely (and crudely) espousing the ridiculous beauty standards that are driving her fantasy? He talks so loud because the cognitive dissonance is so deafening…

Now, for most of us, I assume the idea of controlling another person’s diet at all would be seen as the stuff of abusive relationships. Doing so with the deliberate goal of causing physical and psychological harm? That’s absolutely something we respond to with social opprobrium, and that’s a good thing!

But context is everything. This conversation was occurring on a Tumblr devoted to extreme female submission themes, at the request of a woman whose fantasies center around being trained and changed into a mindless sexual object, and whose readers seem to love the hell out of that idea. Until, somehow, it involves unhealthy eating habits.

Which, like…guys, you’re sitting there holding your dicks and cheering when she does the whole “tee hee, I should be studying for class but I’m just sitting here watching porn and edging my wet little pussy” thing, but suddenly “OMG I want to be starved thin” is too much for you?

It’s the same fantasy. It’s the same idea. Same stuff as the bleached hair/bolt-on tits “look what a bimbo I’ve become for you” schtick; the “fuck me rough until I think abusive sex is normal” posts. This is someone who gets off on the idea of deliberately making “unhealthy” choices and prioritizing sexual gratification over other life goals to an exaggerated extreme (and who clearly likes having an audience for that process).

Not exactly an uncommon subject in erotica, I assure you.

And you know what? It’s okay to find that stuff hot! A lot of people get off on the idea of extreme transformations, mental and physical, and the idea that the person being transformed somehow can’t help themselves — either because it’s forced through bondage, law, or brainwashing, or because they’re just such a natural inferior that they’re helpless to resist social conditioning — is often a big part of that fantasy. And yes, some people do live it out, in greater or smaller ways, by altering their appearance or their behavior or their lifestyle to more closely match their fantasies.

I would encourage anyone who looks at sexual fantasies or discussions and thinks “that’s a bridge too far!” to very closely examine what they think isn’t a bridge too far, and see if it’s actually all that different. Because in this case (and in many I’ve seen) it’s less a matter of separating the “good” fantasies from the “bad” fantasies, and more of not realizing that the “bad” fantasy is just a slightly more extreme version of shit you get off on, taken to a logical extension.

I don’t love the idea of an eating disorder fantasy. But I do see how it ties into the same theme of prioritizing your looks/sexualization over what we think of as mainstream “healthy” goals, and that’s a very common fantasy for both men and women (the men usually observing/controlling the transformation; the women usually undergoing it). If you like the idea of training your slutty slut-slut to wear high heels and giggle a lot, you probably don’t have a lot of moral high ground for shying away when she talks about puking herself thin so she’s a twiggier fuckstick. Same fantasy; crazier exaggeration.

TLDR: Stroke happy, children, and don’t hate on others for doing it too.