How Common are Fantasies About Eating (or Being Eaten by) Someone Else?

A reader asked:

“How common are vorarephilia fantasies?”

For those who aren’t familiar, vorarephilia (also known as vore for short) refers to a sexual interest that revolves around consuming or being consumed by other persons or creatures. Very little research exists on this subject, save for a study I blogged about here, which suggests that, for people who have these fantasies, they often begin around the time of puberty. They also tend to have pretty big elements of BDSM to them, especially dominance-submission and sadomasochism.

In terms of their prevalence, I’m not aware of any studies that have specifically attempted to explore what percentage of the population has ever had a vorarephilia fantasy. However, in the survey of 4,175 Americans’ sexual fantasies that I conducted for my book Tell Me What You Want, I was able to go back and look at how many people said that vore was their favorite fantasy of all time.

What I found was that just 10 people characterized their favorite fantasy as either “vore” or “vorarephilia.” In other words, about two-tenths of one percent of my participants explicitly described a fantasy along these lines, which would make it pretty uncommon relative to other types of fantasies.

Unfortunately, I did not explicitly ask participants whether they had ever had a fantasy about consuming or being consumed by someone else, so it’s certainly possible (and likely) that a greater number of people have ever had this fantasy, even if it isn’t their favorite fantasy. Even so, I would expect the number to be relatively low because, in general, fantasies that appeared infrequently among participants’ favorite fantasies tended to be things that only a small number of people had ever fantasized about—conversely, the more people who described a given fantasy as their favorite, the more that other people reported having ever fantasized about it.

For example, when you look at something like necrophilia fantasies (i.e., sex with a corpse), just one participant described this as their favorite fantasy of all time, and less than one-half of one percent of participants said they had ever fantasized about it (this was the rarest fantasy on my survey). By contrast, about one-third of participants described their favorite fantasy of all time as group sex and more than 90% had fantasized about group sex before (this was the most common fantasy on my survey).

With that said, what does a vorarephilia fantasy look like? Here are a few examples from my survey participants who described it as their favorite all-time fantasy:

“I have a recurring fantasy of my current boyfriend (who is about 350 lbs.) pinning me underneath him with his belly so that I can’t move or resist (definitely a power play sort of thing) and telling me that I look delicious or some other vore-esque dialogue. Sometimes he’ll ‘taste’ me just by licking over my face while I’m pinned. I’m a vorarephile, so the idea of being swallowed whole by another person is something I find very sexually arousing. My boyfriend shares this interest, so a lot of my fantasies regarding it surround him.” – Young adult who identifies as male and gay

“I’m into the giantess vore fetish. I find the female mouth extremely erotic, especially her tongue. I know it’s impossible, but if there were a virtual reality game where I could be licked and swallowed by a towering, beautiful woman and feel everything, I would play it in a heartbeat. Just imagining the possibilities with a giantess is very sexy. I could be used for her pleasure. She could suck me off—all of me and not just my penis. I could be caught in the mouths of two giantesses during a French kiss, or one who is eating the other out and I go back and forth between tongue, mouth, and inside a vagina. Or I could just lay on her soft belly. I just love every inch of a woman’s body, whether in real life or in a crazy fantasy. I would simply love to see more of it in almost every way and be used by it for her pleasure.”  – Young adult who identifies as male and straight

“My favorite and most occurring sexual fantasy has been the idea of me getting eaten by a creature unwillingly. I get picked up by the creature unexpectedly in their mouth and rolled about on their tongue and sucked on a bit like a piece of candy. Then I’m swallowed down whole and alive. Afterwards they usually eat something like pudding, which then makes me even more icky. At some point after struggling in their stomach, I pass out and get digested.” – Young adult who identifies as male and bisexual

“A large dog is introduced to a cat. The cat tries to establish itself as ‘boss’ but the dog responds with mounting. Eventually, the dog has sex with the cat, and his penis is around half the size of the cat’s body. Afterwards, the dog eats the cat.” – Young adult who identifies as genderqueer and asexual

“Basically, I fantasize about being swallowed by a women and being digested—for the most part—alive. This would be accomplished in the same manner as a snake or a frog consumes their meals, physics be damned. After that, there’s this fantasy that she carries my remains for a week or so with her bowels masticating them into nutrients and gaining something like 25 lbs. before returning to normal…In the relationships I have had, this is clearly impractical. It’s all in the foreplay. The girls I’ve been with suck at dirty talk, but biting and licking and scratching is all it really takes to actualize this fantasy.” – Middle-aged adult who identifies as male and heterosexual

As you can see from these sample fantasies, vorarephilia can take a lot of different forms. However, based on my limited data, it seems to be primarily male-identified persons who fantasize about being consumed by other persons or creatures in a scenario that features a lot of domination-submission themes, consistent with other research on this subject.

Certainly, more research is needed, but the available data suggests that vorarephilia is probably a fairly uncommon sexual interest; however, at its core, it may simply be a unique variant on BDSM, which is an extraordinarily popular sexual fantasy.

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Image Source:
123RF/Andrey Alyukhin

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