Sex and the Fat Girl

This column has come to an end! I hope what we discussed helped you learn to love yourself a bit more. And, of course, I hope it made you think a bit and challenge assumptions about fat sexuality and societal beauty standards. My goal is to enlighten and deconstruct, to help fat women empower themselves and take their body image and sexuality into their own hands. So if anyone started on the road to self-acceptance because of this column, I’m happy.

I feel like talking loudly about fat sexuality is important, and I hope you’re interested in keeping this dialogue going, whether with other fat women or just with yourself. I want to work towards changing societal beauty standards and then eliminate them. I want society, or at the very least the FA community, to recognize that choosing to be fat is as valid as the claims of innocence. I want fat women everywhere to enjoy their bodies and learn what pleasure they can bring. I want to untangle fat from health. And I want you to do it with me.

It’s doubtful that this column alone will be revolutionary, of course. It’s just one voice. But if all fat people, not just women, start singing the same song, I think we can move mountains. And not just mountains of flesh. With time and persistence, eventually the revolution will come, whether or not it’s in my lifetime. But I hope I get to see the day when being fat is just as valid as being thin, when fat sex is not met with “eww, keep it indoors,” and when our paragons of beauty come in all shapes and sizes.

If you’re interested in reading more, you can check out my blog, also called Sex and the Fat Girl. You can find me on Twitter as @thefiercestgirl and on Facebook. Also, if you’d like you can check out the archives of my old blog at Red Vinyl Shoes.

Keep in touch, and thank you for supporting this column. Much love.

On Facebook today, Marilyn Wann shared an article on CNN.com about the health benefits of touch. She added “If being fat makes a person ‘untouchable,’ then that’s a powerful confounding variable for claims about weight and health.” I definitely agree, and of course media don’t present fat people as worthy of physical contact particularly of a sexual nature. However, I think we do need to recognize that sometimes we shield ourselves from anticipated rejection by shunning the desire for touch, which is in and of itself unhealthy. It’s not always that no one wants to feel the tactile pleasures of your body. We have to open ourselves up to receiving the sensory experience of intimate touch, which requires us to feel safe not only with a partner but with ourselves. Unfortunately, society doesn’t make this an easy job.

Reading the article, you can see that it’s not just sexual touch that’s beneficial, which to me offers hope that you can begin to appreciate how it feels to let that touching in without having to immediately immerse yourself in a situation that you find uncomfortable. When you’ve used the defense mechanism of bottling up the desire to be touched for so long, it takes time to reintroduce yourself to it. It doesn’t matter if you’re partnered or not, things like getting a neck rub from a friend, hugging family members or petting a dog can clearly be done without the need of a romantic relationship. Since this column focuses on sex, I want to point out that in the article, the author mentions that solo sex is beneficial as well, which is my number one way of connecting with my body.

I suggest that any fat girl get down with masturbation. Not only do you connect in a tactile way with the pleasure centers of your body, but the endorphins and other chemicals released make you feel so damn good, it’s impossible not to eventually come to find pleasure in your body automatically. It teaches you what you like and what you don’t, which is enormously beneficial when you have sex with a partner. You know exactly which spots do what, what fantasies enhance the experience, and you learn how to exist as a sexual being. Honestly, I was a lights-out only girl before I started regularly masturbating, and now I’m totally comfortable with the lights on because, basically, I’ve seen that shit before. And when you find pleasure in your own body you care less about what negative things the person you’re about to have sex with is thinking about your body.

Masturbation is not a cure-all for your body image issues. It’s part of a healthy self-esteem diet that includes other more cerebral aspects of fat acceptance. It’s important to note that the defense mechanism of avoiding touch isn’t an invalid coping method, but it’s one that ultimately harms us. It’s an insidious consequence of our fat-negative society, and when we recognize that, we can work toward changing our attitudes towards touch.

Many of the ways we’ve talked about to combat dominant societal beauty standards and, in the process, boost your self-esteem/self-image, are subjective in nature. They involve presenting in a certain way to elicit the desired results: a new way of looking at fat sexuality. There’s nothing particularly wrong with subjectivity in this sense, but when you take subjectivity to the personal level, the one-on-one level, it presents a problem. One commenter pointed this out in a roundabout way by complaining about women who say things like “Well, my boyfriend finds me attractive so that’s good enough for me.” Whether or not that attitude is annoying, it is certainly dangerous. Using perceived attractiveness (to a partner or potential partner) as a means to maintain your positive self-image is cheating on doing the work necessary to promote self-love.

I’m sure we all know a fat girl who feels like crap about her size until she receives some positive sexual attention from someone. Unfortunately, healthy self-esteem is not built on the slippery slope that is random affection from potential partners. If you only feel good about yourself when you’re with a partner to validate your attractiveness, once that partner has moved on (and they most certainly will when they figure out your feelings about yourself are inextricably tied to them), you’re back in the same, leaky, no-self-esteem boat. And by making statements like “I know I’m attractive because my partner finds me attractive,” you’re basically inferring that if you’re not partnered up, you need to take a seat and think about what’s wrong with you that YOU don’t have a partner to tell you you’re attractive. That’s not going to earn you many brownie points with people, honestly.

There’s nothing wrong with reveling in the desire of your partner for you. But I hear so many fat girls lament that they’re not sure if this person finds them attractive, that they worry about getting naked because a new sex partner may or may not be disgusted by them, that they are starting to feel good about themselves because they got a boyfriend, etc. The desire of a partner for you should be the icing on your self-image cake. (Mmm, cake.) Feeling good about yourself starts with feeling good about yourself, it doesn’t start when someone else starts feeling good about you. As I’ve said, self-love is a journey–and a solitary one at that. If you haven’t done any internal work (and I’m not saying that you have to be completely free of negative thoughts about yourself), starting a relationship may only serve as a distraction if you don’t recognize that your self-image is slowly being wound up in their feelings for you. Of course, this kind of thing happens to smaller girls as well, but for fat girls who are already so marginalized sexually, it’s especially important not to fall into that trap.

So in formulating your master plan for the journey towards self-love, just as you would ignore what society thinks about your attractiveness, you also have to ignore what individuals think about your attractiveness. Let a partner be a complement to your positive self-image, and not the key.

I recently noticed that two commenters on my “Too Fat to F*ck” post expressed dismay at the idea of seeing ANYONE displaying sexual affection in public, not just fat people. I want to address this because that was not the point of the post. When I talk about bringing fat sexuality out in the open, I’m not talking about encouraging fat people to go have sex in a crowded parking lot. However fun that might be, it’s not really effecting change to just have mass displays of public fat sex. I’m talking about not excluding fat people’s sexuality in discussions about and representations of human sexuality. I’m saying the sexuality of fat people should neither be reviled nor ignored.

You can’t say that the media doesn’t sell us sex and sexuality 24/7. We’re exposed to it in every form of pop culture. In the post I previously referenced I mentioned the show “Mike and Molly” and Marie Claire columnist Maura Kelly’s disgust over the show’s display of two fat people kissing. Positive representations of fat sexuality are few and far between in the media, and when we try to include them, we get responses like Ms. Kelly’s. Talking openly and often about fat sex destigmatizes it and opposes the idea that fat sexuality either does not exist or is disgusting as compared to the sexuality of “normal weight” people. It’s confrontational, and a form of resistance. In that sense I think it’s more important to promote the display of fat sexuality—maybe not buck naked in public, but at least in our media. We need to get to the point where seeing fat people kissing is not cause for alarm.

Just as queer folks fight for their right to express their particular sexuality, fat folks need to fight to not have their sexuality erased by the dehumanization fat people are subject to on a daily basis. This is more than bombarding the world with excessive PDA. Demanding equal representation in discussions and displays of popular sexuality is one of the keys to fat acceptance and body love.

In so many questions submitted to Ask a Fat Girl, I was asked how to start loving your body. I gave many suggestions, but I want to touch on something that I think is integral to truly loving your fat body—taking responsibility for it. What I mean by taking responsibility is not denying culpability in your fatness to ward off judgment. You can’t love your body and at the same time view it as being outside your control. I recognize that a main party line of many in the fat acceptance movement is often that fatness is not a choice. And I also recognize that when you’re oppressed, it’s easier to take the path of least resistance, which in this case would be the denial of culpability. To enjoy sex you must LIVE in your body, and living in your body means accepting the state it is in and the choices you make that affect it.

Although outside the fat acceptance community it is not popularly accepted that fat people may not be fat by choice, within the fat acceptance community it is a cherished tenet. Of course many, many fat people are fat despite their best efforts. But there are also many fat people who are fat because they choose to be, who may be able to lose weight but simply choose not to attempt it. I am one of those people. I believe my fat body is beautiful, that I deserve love and pleasure no matter what my size and my self-esteem is high—yet I choose to count fast food as a major part of my diet and am perfectly happy to admit it. Many fat activists claim that if you love your body, you’ll “treat it right” by adjusting your eating and exercising habits or practicing Health at Every Size. Our worth as fat women should not rest on our doing “all the right things.” Many of the women who espouse the innocence line would be the first to give me the side eye should I start practicing HAES and lose weight. My love for my body doesn’t falter as the scale fluctuates, nor does it waver when I eat nothing but McDonalds all day and move very little. This has everything to do with your mental health and little to do with physical health. You can love your body when you’re physically healthy and when you’re not. But you can’t love and accept your body if you’re preoccupied with your perceived lack of agency over it.

Likewise, a preoccupation with control over your body through dieting prohibits you from experiencing true self-love and acceptance. When you’re constantly dieting you are existing in a state in which your self-image and ability to exert control over your body are fluid. You never truly inhabit your body because you’re constantly seeking to change it. Yet some say the feeling of self-love and dieting are in a way not necessarily mutually exclusive. Some women may diet because they love themselves/feel beautiful and misguidedly seek to have their external appearance be validated by society in the same way it is validated by themselves. This is the old “skinny girl in a fat body” trope often executed in film and TV. I would argue that believing you’re beautiful “on the inside” and that your true beauty can only be expressed by shedding the “shell” of fatness is not a belief consistent with true self-love. What your body looks like at this instant is what’s important, not an idealized vision of yourself that you feel is hiding under layers of fat. In this sense, control over your body becomes something you perceive yourself as having too much of rather than something you innately lack. Same trap, different way to spring it.

When agency over our body becomes something we willingly surrender in an attempt to shield ourselves from persecution, we’re not gaining ground. There’s no way to create a viable self-image based on body politics that encourage resignation over celebration. Coming to terms with that lays a foundation for the cultivation of healthy self-esteem and true body acceptance, and in turn starts you down the road toward total self-love.