Why is vore arousing to some people?

@Anonycat
 
One could say that fetish is quite vore-ing
 

boo!

@SocDev  
NOT NOW CARLOS!

Some people don’t like it but just can’t stop looking at it 0.0

You can’t explain fetishes dude. Scientists and psychologists have long tried to understand fetishes, but for the most part they are unexplainable. The most that can be explained about them are “theories” that correlate what we know about psychology and sexuality.
 
As for myself, I’ve been into vore as far back as I can remember, when I was a toddler. Back when it was completely non-sexual. I always felt weird and more creeped out than usual when it came to anything involving vore, which surprisingly…is in a lot of things. A simple children’s story like Hansel and Gretel would terrify me. I remember a short story from a book called, “Little Girl Sandwich,” or something like that, in which this girl takes in this giant to her home, and unbeknownst to her, he’s preparing all these large slices of bread and condiments, and is fully intent on eating her, but when the time comes and he makes his intentions known, she cries, explaining how much her family will miss her and all that. After pleading, the giant decides not to eat her, tries something else that he likes better, and they become friends. The end.
 
Looking back on it, that’s one FUCKED UP STORY, and I’m sure there’s some deeper meaning to it that I overlooked as a child (I have no idea, I haven’t read it since then), but I was PROFOUNDLY impacted by the emotional turmoil surrounding the situation. Once again, this was way before any kind of sexual desires became known, so what attracted me to the story was something related to the emotions behind the finality of it all. It was intriguing because it was a different look on death. Here’s a creature that needs food to survive, but it feels sorry and deeply troubled with the idea of taking a sentient being’s life for the sake of nourishment, the ultimate realization that this girl has her entire life ahead of her, and that doesn’t sit okay with it. A disturbing, yet ultimately very profound philosophical argument can be based on that concept.
 
As I got older and went through puberty, these feelings became sexualized, likely because they are based on emotions. The idea of prey being naked became a major turn-on, likely because it’s a very vulnerable condition.
 
I both love and hate having a vore fetish. On one hand, I find it erotic, terrifying, and exciting all at the same time, and on the other hand, I feel completely disgusted at the entire concept. I constantly switch between predator and prey (more often than not prey), but I also enjoy just being an uninvolved 3rd party. I very much enjoy my life and would not ever consider placing myself in an actual position of being eaten, nor if placed in the position of being a predator would I ever consider doing that to a sentient, living being. It’s strictly fantasy.
 
That about sums it up. There really is no explanation, and everybody’s personal experience is different, but for the majority of us who are into vore, the beginnings of the story are pretty consistent, with most of us having developed a fascination with it from as early an age as we can remember. I can’t pinpoint any singular situation that “triggered,” this whole thing off. It’s just the way my neurons linked as my mind developed as far as I’m concerned.

I have a tounge and a dominance fetish, both of those go hand in hand with vore so yeah

I did a tag search and this is what I find for the subject. Sigh. Its gonna be a long one because I fully intend to just point back at this post every time someone asks on an image. TL;DR pre-summary; people like different kinds of vore for pretty much every reason you can have a fetish. This is just a ‘normie’-friendly explanation of some of the more mainstream answers.
 
Preface: All this stems as someone who’s been interested in the subject for a solid decade at this point. I can safely say that as many reasons as I give it still won’t be a conclusive list, and individuals’ reasons can change over time, or just depending on what mood they’re in at the time.
 
So to start; the underlying theme in the majority of vore is some flavor of either power, dominance or trust. How this works depends on the scenario, and which side of the equation you’re on. You generally have up to three roles directly involved in vore, the main two being predators and prey. Optionally, you can have feeders, and occasionally indirectly involved voyeurs of some sort.
 
So for determining appeal, the main point I’d personally start with if I was asking a fellow vorephile how they like their stuff is willing/unwilling. Again, power/domination/trust. You can have all kinds of combinations, whether everyone’s into it, or neither pred nor prey want anything to do with it (where feeders of some kind are generally mandatory, unless you’re into the pred just not being aware of the prey) or some combo thereof. Most of the time, you have a willing pred and either a willing or unwilling prey.
 
The second main branch within vore is how it ends. Well, I guess also how it starts if you’re into hard vore, but I’ll address that towards the end; Safe to say, a VAST majority of people who like vore like soft vore, with the prey being alive and typically unharmed by the actual act of swallowing/stuffing/etc. But yeah.  
Digestion, you may be shocked to hear if you’re not familiar with the fetish, is not a universal thing, and even for those who like it, fatality is not always guaranteed, whether the prey is absorbed and stored in some manner within the pred, restored to life through magic and/or sufficiently advanced technology, or if the ending is just basically ignored because they’re not interested in that.
 
The third split (which is third mostly because I forgot to distinguish it as a potential fetish dealbreaker for some people) is whether they like it same size or macro/micro. Same size, unless snakes of some sort are involved, inherently will be where anyone who isn’t capable of embracing the ‘fantasy’ part of the fetish will be left behind. Basically, yes. We know. Its not physically possible. You can’t fit anything in anywhere near those sizes. They should suffocate. It would kill them to try it. Bluh bluh. Seriously. We know. We’ve heard it to death. We don’t care. Most of us left realism biting the curb back when we involved talking animals in the situation.  
Macro/Micro is its own entire fetish, and its not really something that appeals a whole lot to me though I can get into it sometimes, so I’ll leave that pondering to those who do. Typically anything that involves one person being at least half as big or small as the other person/their surroundings but typically several times more.
 
 
Vore that doesn’t involve any kind of digestion is sometimes referred to as endosomatophilia which is the technical term for what ‘vore’ really is, encapsulation of one person by another person through unspecified means. This is very likely to involve both parties being willing and has the most widespread appeal of any kind of vore.  
-It involves full trust in your partner to keep you safe  
-The two people involved are as close as they physically can be. Extremely intimate, appealing for all sorts of vore but especially this one.  
-Since people tend to think of unbirthing as generally being very safe (the womb being vaguely intended for holding other people safely and not being part of the digestive system) it is very likely to be this.
 
Digestion tends to play into dominance when its not permanent, and goes along with fatality when it is. Why people potentially find death sexy is kind of morbid and not something I tend to dwell on much myself so I’ll leave that to those who are. I’d presume they probably have trouble articulating why themselves.
 
And all that doesn’t bring up whether or not you want it to involve sex with all its own potential kinks, because it doesn’t have to be an explicitly sexual fetish!
 
 
Across all combinations of vore, these are fairly universal.  
For Predators:  
-Dominance. Like, I really don’t know what can possibly compare to being so utterly in control over your partner, aside from mind control or whatnot, but especially for the digestive and fatal sorts. Especially when mixed with humiliation. (Warning; I get kinda morbid.) You take another person and you reduce them to potentially nothing more than fat on your ass. And a load in the bowl if you’re into post-vore. Or a filled condom/splatter on the floor if you’re into cockvore. Some predators make sure their meals know that. Some are so utterly in control and on top they don’t even care, you don’t matter beyond temporarily sating their hunger/lust.  
-People who find having large bellies or fat attractive. May also have or stem from the same place as just a general feeding fetish. Weight gain likewise overlaps a lot.  
-Sometimes they just like being/getting bigger in general; lots tend to be into macro/micro and size-changing stuff.  
-People who love the feeling of being full. The satisfaction you feel from a delicious and filling meal, extrapolated into over the top fetishy delight.  
-People who just have a craving. They want to be full. They want to eat. They want to be filled. They just want. Its a very carnal feeling that easily blends with sexual lust. Combine a raging boner with a feeding frenzy.
 
 
For Prey:  
-Submission. Goes hand in hand with how the pred’s dom streak runs. Whether it be innocently putting all your trust that your parter will keep you safe, let you out or bring you back. Take it a step further with fatality and you have prey that thrill at the idea of becoming part of their pred, being nothing more than food, and so on. That total loss of agency and control and sometimes existence.  
-I don’t really know how to describe it beyond ‘likes being prey’ but the act itself typically puts you into a situation where your body is being massaged from every conceivable angle by hot, wet, squishy, fleshy, muscle, fat, etc. Basically its like sex, but over your entire body. Maximum unf.
 
 
Oral vore is so common it’s generally assumed that unless specified otherwise, vore means regular swallowing whole. Why some people find it appealing tends to gravitate towards things like “its another primal biological urge” and broader oral fixations.  
~~Swallowing being regarded as a sexual act shouldn’t need to be explained. If it does, why are you reading a thread titled “why is [fetish] arousing” if you don’t understand vanilla kinks :V  
-I find slow, big, lusty swallows unbelievably boner-inducing. Can’t get any more ‘that’ than with same-size vore. Snakes are naturally designed for this shit so they can get involved either directly or as nagas/lamias or the like.  
-Its not a perfect womb metaphor but the thought of being inside someone, listening to their breathing and heartbeat and stuff all around you, there’s some overlap there. Potentially super relaxing. Mellows me right the fuck out to the point where I’ve often fallen asleep shortly afterwards for real.  
-Stomachs. Bellies. If you’re into them chances are you’re going to see a lot of crossover with the vore crowds. Everything from the taut and squirming to the jiggly and amorphous.  
-Relatedly, bellyrubs. I desperately want to see more people do stuff with feeders involved because I wanna see those big, squirming bellies get showered with attention.  
-It can be gassy, if you’re into that. Belches are especially popular.  
-I’d probably rate this one highest when it comes to potential appeal from a dom/sub angle. Again, ‘nothing but food’ and whatnot.
 
 
The rest are kinda NSFW due to which entrances they use, so spoilering them for those who get linked from relatively tame images.
 
[spoiler]Anal vore can be a touchy subject because it involves butts, and therefore can involve scat. It doesn’t have to. I think we’ve thoroughly established that vore doesn’t give a damn about realistic biology at this point. It is all to your personal preferences. So yeah. People getting stuck up butts. I wanna say its probably the second most common? But that’s probably a lie and all three of the other main choices are pretty much even.  
~~BUUUUUUTTS. Ass-worship, ass-play, booty weight gain, or just loving being railed up the backside. Size-queens encouraged. Large insertions don’t get much larger.  
-Embrace the fetishy madness as your partner applies direct attention to your prostate in whatever way you find sexiest if you like male/futa/etc preds to push them over the edge.  
-Scat. Again, optional, but its a choice, and if you’re into it, it can very directly and intensely appeal to it.  
-Humiliation, undisputed champion. But(t) again, optional. Perfectly possible to have an amicable, willing and respectful trip up someone’s booty, if you wanna play it that way.[/spoiler]
 
 
Unbirthing is unquestionably the most widely appealing sort of vore, with the prey often going no further than just being used as a living dildo. I’ve had many long conversations with people who are convinced that unbirthing doesn’t really count as vore just because they like it but not any other kinds.  
-Intensely sexual. Directly involves vagina. It is the most ‘sex’ sex you can possibly have short of climaxing inside and getting them pregnant. Which again is an option for those who dig it. Potentially combine with being kept in the womb and transformation, likewise.  
-Like normal soft vore but less metaphorical. You are literally returning to the womb. Sometimes age regression and can be involved, either before or after. Being carried to term afterwards is a very common long-term ending for this sort, actually.  
-Transformation is likewise its own separate fetish and being unbirthed and kept to re-develop in the womb is one of those things that kinda makes sense as long as you don’t think about it too hard as a way to facilitate it.
 
 
Cockvore. If you cannot crank your fantasy fetish dial to 11, you’re not gonna make it. Its super ridiculousness is super sexual. Can you mentally process the idea that people can fantasize being able to stuff someone down their dick (If it helps, most of the time you’re dealing with crazy hyper sized dicks) while flipping the double bird to the idea that such acts would be at all uncomfortable and focusing entirely at the direct stimulation to the naughty bits? Okay. How about if I told you that a shockingly large amount of cockvore, compared to all the types of vore, involves digestion? In the orifice of the list that is least realistically capable of it? :P  
-Dicks. Especially hyper-sized super-dicks. I mean, what else are you going to do with them? Crazy abdomen-stretching huge insertions which also tend to appeal to people into vore? :V  
-Cum transformation, like I said, is very common. Transformation fetish!  
-The result is potentially gallons of spooge, which the appeal of seems pretty straightforwards and its own fetish.  
-Even if the prey’s totally unaffected, they can still be spooged out. Potentially into another sort of vore. Vorish snowballing. Fuck yeah.
 
 
There’s tons of other kinds, most notably absorption (gooey predators typically involved) tail vore (think Cell from DBZ. Also, blame him. That one scene probably got thousands of people into vore.) and breast vore (competing with CV for least realistic vore type) but there’s really no limit beyond what you can possibly fantasize. See; the fact that we have a horn vore tag with four non-joke entries.
 

 
So; a solid 3+ screens of text trying to list all the ways vore can be arousing or appealing to people and that’s not even close to comprehensively why. There are dozens if not hundreds of combinations of willing/unwilling, pred/prey, vore type, and so on, each one having its own specific scenarios, fantasies and related fetishes. So really the question isn’t so much the reason why people like vore, but which reasons do they personally like it. I like soft, trusting, innocent vore when I’m feeling cuddly. I like aggressive, dominant, sexual vore when I’m feeling naughty. Sometimes I curl up with my special someone safe and snug, sleeping secure inside of me, sometimes I’m just the closest snack within reach of a hungry alpha who doesn’t give a fuck and will reduce me to a layer of pudge. Vore is whatever you want it to be, because its not bound by the limits of fetishes you can actually do.
 
Edit: haha, that ending bit reminds me that I didn’t point out that people are all over a spectrum from pure pred to pure prey with a side-tangent for the potentially neither. I’m a total switch myself, including feeder tendencies.
 
Edit 2: Oh yeah, and even when its not a sexual thing you can still have orientational preferences for vore. Some people only like lady preds, for example. (Hi, Eka’s Portal. Notorious for giving it preferential treatment.) Some people are into vorish combinations they wouldn’t go for sexually. (eg, you can be a sexually straight guy but still want to get in on some male/male vore despite it being considered a fetish; you’re just not interested in getting/providing some tender slurps to places on the way down.)

@Keith Mowz  
Well dam…that sums it very very well…yup this discussions over

Different people have different reasons and/or rationalisations, like with any other fetish.
 
For every preference anyone has about anything you can just keep asking “why” until you get to either trivial facts or anecdotes, or to a point where the answer just isn’t known.
 
I suspect that often when people give an “explanation” for why they have a particular fetish that it’s basically an attempt to find an excuse for it rather than an unbiased attempt to understand it. I think that my interest in vore might have come from interest in the biology of digestion, but I could list four or five other potential factors which were involved in my early interest in vore, and I don’t know the relative significance of these factors, or even if they’re all simply irrelevant. It may be that the emergence of sexual preferences is more analogous to something like preferred foods rather than affinity to symbolism or conditioning - we know that we experience some foods as tasting nicer than others, and most people have similar taste receptors, but there are physical differences which lead to different preferences. It’s possible (likely, even) that hormonal and neurological differences between people determine their fetishes/paraphilias. We already know that these things can affect homosexuality vs heterosexuality, so why not other types of sexual attraction?
 
It’s pretty sad that despite knowing so much about science we don’t even understand the fundamentals of where sexual orientation comes from.

@Keith Mowz  
“~~Swallowing being regarded as a sexual act shouldn’t need to be explained. If it does, why are you reading a thread titled “why is [fetish] arousing” if you don’t understand vanilla kinks :V”
 
Surely “vanilla kinks” is an oxymoron?
 
And swallowing isn’t an inherently sexual act ~~ as far as my understanding goes, swallowing being regarded as a sexual act does need explaining. I certainly don’t fully understand any sort of kink, but I don’t believe that anyone else does either.
 
“I think we’ve thoroughly established that vore doesn’t give a damn about realistic biology at this point.”
 
Maybe your vore doesn’t, but mine is kind of a pretentious douchebag about physical plausability.

@Background Pony #275A  
Oral sex, man. Its technically a kink because it isn’t vaginal sex but its something that the majority of people wouldn’t object to receiving, if not giving. The mouth comes into play with many sexual situations, with kissing, licking, sucking, all generally being romantic or lewd actions.

I don’t know. It’s the weirdest thing to fap, honestly. I mean, there’s often times no genitals, no boobies. IT AROUSES ME SO, BUT WHAT THE HELL AM I FAPPING TO?!

@Keith Mowz  
Wow. That’s a fantastic breakdown.
 
Even though I like both, I’ve always been marginally of the opinion that unbirthing was fundamentally different from vore. I can see where the overlap lies for other people, but to me they feel like separate fetishes. Though, that may be mostly because I’m not someone who is overly attracted to the “intimacy” aspect of vore, leaning more towards the “power” side of the spectrum.
 
‘Course, I’m not about to argue that anyone else is “wrong” about lumping them together. I recognize that I’m a bit of an outlier anyway: I never self-identify as either ‘pred’ or ‘prey’, I prefer permanent vore (either fatal or where prey is ‘alive’ but reduced to an irreversible state of non-personhood) and my favorite stuff is where one or (preferably) both pred. and prey are unwilling participants (e.g. the Rarity/Spike vore in “Trixie’s Wrath” by Homage over @Eka’s).
 
…all of which, for the record, I find extremely horrifying when looked at outside the safe confines of fantasy. I find most of my fetishes are things I would never want to explore in real life.
 
@Keith Mowz  

 
You’re right- I have absolutely no way to articulate why I find any of that stuff sexy to begin with. Fetishes are weird, dude. Heck, even though I like stuff that results in death (or fate-worse-than-death), I find necrophilia itself to be generally a turn-off. There’s just no accounting for how the human brain can end up getting its wires crossed.

Even as someone who doesn’t typically like situations where people aren’t enjoying themselves, unwilling pred with unwilling prey can be incredibly hot. Especially if they’re enjoying it physically in spite of themselves and there’s a very eager and turned-on feeder facilitating this situation.

You wanna know what I don’t understand? Scat/slob/baby fetishes. Because I’m curious, at what point did someone see a huge peice of filth, was treated like a baby, or saw some crap and thought “oh man. I find this really arousing! I gotta fap to this.”

@Keith Mowz  
That was a lot of info to swallow!
 

@Anonycat  
Dammit Carlos

@newsketches  
As someone said before its basically just an extreme form of humiliation.

Welp, time to say something…
 
I like the kind of vore where nobody dies.

@Dave33333  
You mean soft vore?

@Pizzamovies  
A very specific sort of soft vore. Soft vore just means that the prey is swallowed whole. Endosomatophilia (or for brevity, endo) is when it specifically/explicitly does not involve digestion, just containment.

@Keith Mowz  
Oh ok so just a more “Oral” Bondage. Hm seems kinky almost

@Pizzamovies  
Pretty much.

@Maskarade  
i dont know exactly but i think its the fact that someone going in you its like a big BJ… maybe :/

@ParagonCommander  
Interesting o..o