I thought it was an interesting article, if not more than a little exaggerated in how popular it is:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/pumping-gay-men-dangerous-fad-death-758192/The gist of it though is that some gay men apparently are having things injected into them by unlicensed and unknown people they find so that they look bigger. I had some thoughts after reading it...not sure if it's anything worth discussing, but I thought I'd at least express them.
1) I'm a member of Grommr, the website the article implies egged on at least one person who ultimately died from having 'silicon' injected into his body. I joined it because I'm a bigger guy (that came naturally, I never tried to gain), and watching guys get bigger and grow their bellies turns me on. I'll admit I'm not the most active member, but I've never seen any discussions on there about using injections to look bigger. All the gaining talk I've seen has just involved people stuffing their faces with food, lol. The site has closed registrations to protect the community from any response from the article, and I think it sucks the article doesn't tell people that pumping is nowhere near part of the mainstream gainer community.
2) One thing that was interesting to me was how some people try to point out how dubious having unlicensed random people inject who knows what into your body, and they're accused of kink-shaming. Recently on here I was accused of slut-shaming for pointing out that the culture of sex among gay men, hookups and unsafe sex lead to much higher rates of STDs in men who have sex with men. People are entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Some things are just riskier, and if we're going to partake in them, we should at least acknowledge the fact that they are riskier things and do them in a way that doesn't harm other people. Pointing that out isn't shaming anyone.
3) I had actually never heard of this 'pumping' thing until last week, and then I discovered it accidentally. I used a tool that Dylan Hafertepen (mentioned in the article) created called Tumblr Originals, which allowed you to only view original posts from someone's tumblr and skip the reblogs. When I tried to use it last week, it redirected to a memoral for his boyfriend who died from silicon traveling to his lungs (also mentioned in the article). Not really a point of debate, it was just interesting to me how that happened and then it was part of the article. I notice the link to the tool now gives a 403 Forbidden error, so maybe he took it down in response to the article.
