Hogging or sweat hogging refers to the practice of groups of men who target

overweight Being overweight is having more body fat than is optimally healthy. Being overweight is especially common where food supplies are plentiful and lifestyles are sedentary. , excess weight reached epidemic proportions globally, with more than ...

obese Obesity is a medical condition, considered by multiple organizations to be a disease, in which excess body fat has accumulated to such an extent that it can potentially have negative effects on health. People are classified as obese when ...

women, typically for sexual encounters. Unlike fat fetishists, men who participate in hogging are not necessarily sexually attracted to obese women's bodies; they aim to manipulate a female's emotional state or to derive amusement for themselves and their friends by engaging in sexual activities with women who are overweight.

Practice

Individuals or groups have used hogging against women. Hogging often includes excessive

alcohol consumption Drinks containing alcohol (drug), alcohol are typically divided into three classes—beers, wines, and Distilled beverage, spirits—with alcohol content typically between 3% and 50%. Drinks with less than 0.5% are sometimes considered Non-al ...

and

emotional detachment In psychology, emotional detachment, also known as emotional blunting, is a condition or state in which a person lacks emotional connectivity to others, whether due to an unwanted circumstance or as a positive means to coping, cope with anxiet ...

. Hogging does not always include

sexual intercourse Sexual intercourse (also coitus or copulation) is a sexual activity typically involving the insertion of the Erection, erect male Human penis, penis inside the female vagina and followed by Pelvic thrust, thrusting motions for sexual pleasure ...

, and often other sexual activities are the end goal. Participation sometimes includes making bets among male peers, as well as humiliating the woman involved. The practice has also been suggested as a manifestation of

hypermasculinity Hypermasculinity is a psychological and sociological term for the exaggeration of male stereotypical behavior, such as an emphasis on physical strength, aggression, and human male sexuality. In the field of clinical psychology, this term has be ...

, in which men who do not fit into normative expectations of manhood exhibit insecurity, defensiveness, and sexual aggression to make up for their incapacity to meet masculine standards. In this manner, hogging is described as a form of

sexual predation A sexual predator is a person seen as obtaining or trying to obtain sexual contact with another person in a metaphorically "predatory" or abusive manner. Analogous to how a predator hunts down its prey, so the sexual predator is thought to "hunt" ...

in which sex is an act of conquest, not intimacy.

In society

In 2005, the Journal of Deviant Behaviour published a study of men's accounts of the practice. Writing in

Inside Higher Ed ''Inside Higher Ed'' is an American online publication of news, opinion, resources, events and jobs in the higher education sphere. In 2022, Quad Partners, a private equity firm, sold it to Times Higher Education, itself owned by Inflexion Priv ...

the study's author claimed that its interviewers did not ask its interviewees if they had heard of the term, instead the author claimed "We simply asked them whether they had ever heard of a practice where men try to pick up women they deem fat or unattractive as part of a bet or for sex, and they responded, ‘Yeah, hogging.’”

Practice

In society

References

Further reading