I slept with a good friend several years ago. It was recreational and a little reckless, but the hows and whys and breakdowns aren’t important. I want to tell you about what he said to me, after we’d spent several blissful, hilarious hours together being naked and happy. We lay there, chilling out and smiling up at the ceiling in silence.
“I’ve never been with a girl… like you,” he said in a friendly but hesitant voice. “You see big people, but… I guess I just didn’t… I mean, you feel really good. I guess you just never know what’s under people’s clothes.”
It has taken me a long time to figure out exactly what he was trying to tell me. In the moment, I turned away so he couldn’t see my burning cheeks, muttered some vague agreement, and did the old fat shame shuffle as quickly and efficiently as I could. Us fat kids know the dance step well. You’re busy being you, and then somebody reminds you that you’re not “you.” You’re “fat you.” You remember that fat is a bad thing, you let the shame well up inside you… and then you push the shame down and continue with whatever it was you were doing with your life.
I think my friend’s unprecedented trip to Fat!Sex Land blew his mind in a good way. At the time, he was trying to put this sexy paradigm shift into words; he was starting to realize the very thing that I knew intellectually at the time, but couldn’t quite believe about myself and other fat people, that we are sexual, that our bodies are not wrong, and that we have the same right and access to pleasure and happiness as everyone else.
I work as a sex educator now. I help all sorts of people understand human sexuality. But every time I dispel someone’s misconceptions about the G Spot, female orgasms, vibrators, anal sex, or whatever mystery-shrouded topic they ask about, I experience this tiny feeling of frustration. I know there’s still a Big Sex Lie out there, messing with people’s heads and making them unhappy. I know it’s there, because I believed it for most of my life. Sometimes, for just a few terrible seconds here and there, I still believe it. It’s the idea that fat people don’t have sex. Or maybe we have sex, but it certainly isn’t sexy. We aren’t sexy.
It’s not true. I want to scream it from the rooftops, paint it on the side of my car, call in to Science Friday and beg Ira Flatow to tell all his listeners. Fat people have as much sex as everyone else, with all different kinds of partners. We have great sex, awkward sex, kinky sex. We make out, we strap on, we get head. Fat people fuck like crazy. Please believe me. I work at a sex toy store. I have helped hundreds and hundreds of customers, and they come in all sizes.
One of the reasons I’m desperate to get this Fat Sex Fact out into the public consciousness is that I myself was unaware of it for so long. And if you want sex, but you’re convinced that you’re not the kind of person who gets to have sex, guess what? You won’t have very much. It’s a cruel, pointless self-fulfilling prophecy that only serves to make people feel unhappy, and it needs to end.
More big fat orgasms should be happening. That’s the goal. But for those folks who are stuck in a feedback loop of feeling unfuckable, it’s far easier said than done. No matter how fat you are or what society thinks about your BMI, having love and sex in your life takes preparation, mindfulness and self-care.
–Love your body.
If you love someone, you put up with their shortcomings and try to do things to make them happy. You care about their health and their safety, and their quality of life. Loving your body doesn’t mean that you have to think your body is perfect. It doesn’t even mean that you have to make peace with your body. But if you want to do sexy stuff, you and your body need to be on the same team. On some level you have to have goodwill towards your body; if you hate your flesh, you’ll probably find ways to punish or ignore it. You will never allow good things to happen to it.
There are some fat people out there for whom positive body image comes naturally, and others who have fought hard for years to shed the shackles of body negativity. Most of us still struggle with various degrees of body shame, denial of our physical selves, and/or hang-ups and insecurities about our appearance. All those emotional struggles are also common to people who don’t identify as fat, and they can be incredibly daunting battles for anyone.
The most useful thing I have learned about loving oneself and one’s body is to start small. Don’t try to brainwash yourself into suddenly adoring aspects of your appearance that you’ve disliked since the third grade. Instead, pick a simple, regularly repeated thing you can do for your body as a gesture of kindness or support. For example, drink an extra glass of water every morning. Take five minutes on your lunch break to breathe deeply and do some easy, low impact stretches. Or spend extra cash on a pleasurable meal that will nutritionally benefit your health. Don’t make it about losing weight, “fixing” your appearance, or changing your body. Just acknowledge your physical self, and give that self a little emotional fist bump of friendship. The more often you do this, the more normal it will feel and the easier it will be to grow from these small gestures into a larger, more comfortable sense of goodwill towards your body.
Grant your body permission to exist as it is.
–Be patient.
Not with everyone. The guy with the “No Fat Chicks” t-shirt? He can fuck off like Cats, Now And Forever. But being patient when it comes to your own life, your emotional processes, and the people around you can be incredibly helpful when it comes to enriching your sex life. Some fat folks have a long timeline of romantic disappointments and negative sexual experiences stretching behind them. Others have a happy history but aren’t pleased with the state of their sex life today.
Being patient means approaching things with calm understanding. This is another way that you can be kind to yourself.
–Be as queer as you can.
This is easy to do if you identify as some kind of queer already. It might be a totally weird idea for someone who identifies as straight, or for anyone who doesn’t like the word “queer” or understand its connotations.
To clarify, I’m using “queer” here to suggest a rejection of traditional definitions of sexuality and the human body. I don’t want to suggest that fatness itself should be queer, although it can be for some people. Rather, I’d like to tip the straight and otherwise un-queer world off to the advantages of queer thinking.
In the straightest of mainstream, cookie cutter, mass culture mindsets, there’s a sexual equation that is pretty much accepted as normal and “right.” Slim, athletic, masculine men and slim, curvaceous, feminine women belong together in fantastic sexy love. Everybody else is kinda freaky and should stay off tv and out of magazines.
Now think about the world you live in every day. Who among us looks like a movie star? Who can meet the mainstream standard? Who wants to waste their energy and emotions on pursuing it? And who has never desired another human being whose body did not match the Kim Kardashian/Kris Humphries boring celebrity paradigm? Nobody.
Any time we deviate from the tyranny of Body Laws set down by media, family, and our own unrealistic standards, we’re thinking like queers. Here’s an anecdote that sex scholar and fat activist Virgie Tovar shares on her webpage:
This brings me back to another conversation I recently had with a table of ex-pats over some delicious Szechuan in Beijing. We were talking about my favorite subject: fat. The British guy across the table (a secret human rights activist risking life and limb in China) said something like “women in queer community tend to be 15% fatter than their heterosexual counterparts.” It reminded me of the many times I’ve had women (often fat women) straightforwardly (and guilelessly) ask me: “Do you think fat women are likelier to be lesbians?” In these moments I try to remind myself that this is the internalized oppression talking. I gave the British guy some very academic answer to his implied query, but later I thought: people on the outside of the mainstream don’t feel the same pressure to adhere to mainstream ideals that people within it do. So, rather than fatness creating lesbianism, lesbianism perhaps creates freedom from desiring thin bodies exclusively.
As a big fat queer myself, I want to officially give straight folks the green light to appropriate some of the exhilarating, transcendent body freedom that queer living can afford. Try to imagine what it’s like to reject almost every guideline or rule you’ve ever heard about gendered attractiveness… and then explore your own ideas about what looks hot and what feels good.
It’s a big leap in reasoning and desire. It’s not for everyone. But even tiny acts of rebellion against mainstream body tyranny can give a person an enormous feeling of power and freedom. If you’ve always thought your fat arms should stay hidden in public, perhaps this summer is the time to question why you feel that way, and then buy some damn tank tops. Fat pride and queer pride are very different things, but fat folks can learn a lot by watching how queers handle themselves, their desires, and their bodies.
–Be prepared to blow your doctor’s mind.
A recent University of Chicago study found that only two thirds of OB-GYNs inquire about their patients’ sexual activity. Only 40% of those surveyed ask about sexual dysfunction, and even fewer than that ask about sexual satisfaction or confirm sexual orientation. Basically, a lot of doctors who are supposed to take care of sexual and reproductive health don’t actually want to talk about it with their patients. That means it’s often up to us sexually active humans to be proactive about our own health care and pursue information when doctors withhold or gloss over it.
Finding a sex positive doctor can be difficult. Finding a fat positive doctor is next to impossible. If you can find a doctor with good sexual politics, you may still find that they aren’t ready to acknowledge you as a sexually active fat person. Or they may be too focused on solving your big fat weight problem to devote their attention to your sexual health. That’s why it’s doubly important for fat people to take charge of their sexual and reproductive health.
I can’t encourage this enough: fat people have to cultivate a sense of ownership and confidence about their general health, nutrition and fitness before any appointment with a doctor. Walking in with a calm, self-assured attitude about your body and health can help you stay assertive and positive if a doctor tries to dismiss every symptom as being fat related, or answers every question you have by suggesting that you lose weight. If you enter a doctor’s appointment with a strong sense of yourself as a sexual being, you will be much more likely to assert yourself and ask questions about your sexual health in the event that your doctor decides to avoid the subject.
Doctors can be just as susceptible to fat phobia as other people. Treat them with as much politeness and patience as they deserve, but never let a doctor dismiss your concerns or questions or treat your body as something problematic or awkward. Fat people deserve the same quality of health care as everyone else.
–Be whoever you want to be.
If you want to be sexually active, be sexually active. Find a sex partner, or don’t. Masturbate like it’s going out of style. If you’re not interested in sex, be unabashedly celibate. If you feel like gender needs some messing with, get a new haircut and be a hot ass genderqueer fatso. For people who identify as BBW (big beautiful women) or BHM (big handsome men) their size may be tied directly to their sexual identity. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Because fat bodies are “other” than the norm, the world constantly tells us that being fat is who we are and what we are, all the time. But fat people can simply have SEX if they want to, just like tall people, white people, Canadians, and even slender people do.
Sexuality is about pleasure, consent, and discovery. It has nothing to do with being skinny or fat, and everything to do with being human and alive.
Rebecca has worked as a sex educator for several years, and has been a self-avowed geek scholar for over a decade. Before that, she was simply a young Midwestern girl who spent her days wishing that Blue Beetle and Booster Gold would make out.
I’m a fat heterosexual woman. Early on in my now 13-year relationship with my boyfriend we were making out in a car in the moonlight. He slipped his his hand under my shirt and I mentally tensed, willing his fingers to move away from my stomach. But then he murmured “soft” as he caressed my belly and I relaxed. It was such a balm to hear that one whispered word and feel his touch at the same time. Mmmm.
thank you so much for this article! i have struggled with self/body-hatred since i was an adolescent and have yo-yo dieted, taking off and putting back on 70 lbs. now, a married woman at age 30, i realize i have to find a more sustainable attitude/lifestyle, otherwise, it will harm my emotional/physical health, as well as my marriage.
my husband has loved the smaller me, as well as the current bigger-me. this has started to open my mind up about heavy people and deserving love and feeling sexy. you are so right, and any affirmation of self-acceptance and rebellion against the tyrannical norm can be so liberating. i’ve recently experienced that-i’m going to bear my big arms this summer in a tank top:)
i still have a long ways to as a far as self-acceptance goes, but i am on my way. and reading your article was affirming and empowering.
Thanks for your comment. I really like your idea about choosing to find a more sustainable way of living.
Rock that tank top. High fives.
What a wonderful column. As the husband of a pleansantly plump woman, I can tell you that you had me at your first paragraph. I will be re-reading this one again and again. Everyone should.
Fuck. This is so good and so hot.
As a fat person who has postponed living, loving & sex on account of what
I perceive as my body, Thank You for sharing your thoughts. Now all I need
is to believe and act as is.
Sherry, good luck in taking that step when you’re ready. Thanks for your comment.
…. oops – when I wrote “act as is,” instead I had meant “act as IF”
Thank you for this blog entry. It has given me the “ok” to feel good about myself. My husband thinks I am beautiful, but I can’t seem to wrap my head around it. I will work harder on loving me for who I am..not what society thinks I should be.
I can’t believe there aren’t more responses to this. This is awesome. Even if you’re not fat. “Fat” can be read as fat, or replaced with just about any other insecurity and applied the same way.
I didn’t realize how non-sexual I used to be because of my body. Let’s just say things have changed for the better.
I am married and happily so. I was never thin and was 200 lbs when I got married (I’m 5’2″ so it’s not like my weight can be hidden). I will be married this year for 18 years. I have gained 100 more lbs over the years and never once has that deterred my husband sexually. It’s important to go out and live your best life now. Accept who you are and what you bring to the world. I’m in the process of getting healthier but for me that’s not focused on losing weight but on walking to build the strength in my legs and pump blood to my heart and to keep my BP down and my blood sugar as I’ve been diagnosed with diabetes. I don’t know where this journey will end but I am doing more now then I ever allowed myself to do before when I used to punish myself for being fat. Now i say, fuck it, this is who I am and if you don’t like it, you’re not worth my time. I have a lot of living to do.
There’s an article in the journal of the american board of family medicine: http://www.jabfm.org/content/25/1/9.long which basically says that people who had two or more healthy lifestyle habits (exercise, quitting smoking, eating 5 fruits & vegetables, and moderate drinking), all had the the same longevity, regardless of the BMI they started with.
K.G., thanks for sharing your story. I think it’s super important for experiences like yours to be understood by more people, so that it’s harder and harder to view fatness and sexuality as mutually exclusive.
Thanks for such a wonderful article–I agree–more queering of the world. The tyranny of norms is exhausting.
I agree on the fat=sexy part, and about how the healthcare system deals with fat.
However, I am ambivalent on the idea of encouraging misfit heterosexual cis-people to appropriate queer identity in order to have a better romantic/sexual life.
I am a skinny, non-normatively masculine cis-man who is mostly attracted to femininity. I have tried the experiment of rejecting mainstream gendered attractiveness. This has worked well for me socially, but not so much romantically or sexually. And sometimes I wonder what it means to identify with a social scene that so strongly defines itself along lines of queer gender and sexuality, without actually sharing those qualities.
By intentionally queering one’s presentation and/or identity (in my case, dressing very femme for a cis-guy) without also having a queer or kinky sexual identity at one’s core, one runs the risk of often chasing the wrong people and never getting chased by the right people. One runs the larger risk of having to come out to friends, family, and co-workers as what essentially amounts to a person who cross-dresses, without actually *being* gay or trans.
When all’s said, it may be worth it because mainstream values about sexuality, bodies, and gender suck. But maybe the strategy should be to choose a middle ground and unabashedly present as who one is (fat, skinny, masculine, feminine) *and* straight, without affecting queer signifiers?
I’m still trying to work this out for myself, but I just want to caution that negotiating “queer heterosexual” territory takes a bit of work.
Hope, I totally hear you. Although I did use the word “appropriate” in my post, I think my advice for heterosexually identified people who want to reap the benefits of queer subversive identity is really better articulated as a “watch and learn” kind of directive. I agree, it could be really complicated and painful to pretend you’re someone other than your true self, just to gain sexual acceptance.
I do think it’s a good idea to observe the work that many queer and kinky folks do to create their own definitions of “beautiful” and “sexy.”
Thank you for a wonderful article. I have struggled with my weight most of my life and right now I’m at the heaviest I’ve ever been which causes all sorts of messages in my mind. Luckily in my past I was engaged to someone who would tell me I was beautiful and I would look at him like he was hallucinating. Finally he told me to stop looking that way because I *was* beautiful.The engagement didn’t last but I still carry his words with me.
I’ve had many partners since who agree with his assessment and have been told that fat women often are more fun in bed because we’re less inhibited. We enjoy it and revel in it.
I turn 50 soon and it’s causing some angst since I have yet to marry but I luckily have a fun man who keeps my sexual side happy. He’s got a great body and loves my many curves and valleys. Sometimes we just need to be open to different relationships while we continue to search for a complete fit.
Thanks for reminding us that we do deserve to have fun and sex no matter our weight!
What a great post! I’m so happy to see more sexy lingerie, but I wish the designers would creat more supportive bras in the clothing especially the kink leather. The is a need to make sexy play clothes that celebrate the big woman. When we feel sexy all worries about size disappear.
I am a big fan of hipsandcurves(dotcom) for well constructed plus size lingerie, and they have a pretty decent selection of leather stuff. It’s mostly corsets, but there are some other options including a bra, some skirts and other gear.
I am a fat, heterosexual, teenage woman. I’ve been so distorted by body hatred and media portrayals of relationships that I would never date a guy who was willing to date a fat woman. Why? Because someone who’s willing to date a fat person must be mentally unsound! I know it’s ridiculous, but at this rate I’m never going to have sex until my body looks different. It sucks, but why would someone date me when there are better looking girls all around? Forever celibate, I guess. :/
Claire, years ago I was the teenage heterosexual woman you are today. Please let go of the idea that there is anything wrong with you simply because you are fat. Your life WILL begin to get better as you take charge of it.
Cut yourself some slack. Be kind to yourself. Look in the mirror every day and tell yourself you like yourself. It sounds corny, but it will work if you keep doing it.
Hang around with good people – the kind who like you for who you are, not whether you fit into a certain size of jeans. If people judge you for how you look, dump them – those people aren’t your friends.
Believe you can do whatever you want then take the first step. After that, take another step. And another. Persevere.
Your life will get better as you begin to accept yourself just the way you are. You’re worth it! I wish you all good things.
Claire-
there are plenty of smart, open hearted people in the world for whom dating a fat woman is no big deal. I have met them. They exist. They are real. The odds of you encountering one of them will probably get better and better as the median age of your social circle rises. My advice is to work as much as you can on figuring out how to be kind to yourself. That way if you’re lucky enough to run into one of the smart, compassionate, sex positive people who appreciates your potential, they won’t seem so crazy.
Great article! I am an “almost 50 year old,” married for 27 years, mother of 2, who is experiencing a wonderful resurgence in my sexual self, now that we are almost “empty-nesters.” (one child is done with college and almost moved out, the other is in college and only home in the summer). While I was thin when my husband and I married 27 years ago, and even after the birth of my first child, since my second child and the last 19 years, I have had a difficult time keeping the weight down. My husband has been great, never complaining, it has been me that has not loved my self. Recently I have decided, life is too short, I have begun to eat better, walk more,and my husband and I have committed to having sex 5-7 times a week. And we are loving it! Off the tv is going, into the bedroom, with the door locked, and we are trying new positions, all kinds of stuff, that my younger self would have been way too self consious to try. Do I still have the extra weight, you bet, but I don’t care, and neither does my husband.
Love you now, if you wait, it may be too late.
Oh, “Rebecca”, there’s so much I could say about this, since size acceptance IS my soapbox and primary topic as a writer/performer…but here is my main conundrum, bafflement and source of pain…
I DO know that fat people have sex, that they find partners, that they can be just as loving or romantic or promiscuous or kinky as any other population – of course. Yes. And I’m glad to see that a lot of people who are fat have found partners. What I don’t understand is why *I* — I specifically — cannot find a partner. Why I can’t find anyone who perceives me as being desirable, f*ckable, a sexual being. Why, in all the searching I’ve done, in all the places I’ve turned to, in all the communities I’ve circulated in, I don’t ever, ever, evereverevereveferererrr find the men who are willing to accept my body as it is, and believe it’s worthy of engaging in sexual activity. I DON’T find those men who say “Oh, I love how soft you are”, or “Mmm, you’re hot – yes, yes you are, you are HOT RIGHT NOW, lady” , or even “Please don’t feel bad about your body. I love your body.” Instead, I’ve gotten cruel, demeaning, demoralizing messages from men I’ve been attracted to — messages that tell me that it would be embarrassing for them to stoop to being physical with a fat person; messages that tell me that the people I have feelings for and think are incredibly attractive can’t bring themselves to conjure up reciprocated feelings for me…or even if they DO feel something for me emotionally, my physical attributes are such a turnoff that it shuts them down…there is no chance they could “settle” for what my body brings to the table.
Most of the time, I’m invisible to men – like, they can’t even SEE me as being sexual. Men I like and am flirting with will start confiding in me about how crushed out they are on my best friend, or our co-worker — because I’m fat, I am the “buddy” — I couldn’t possibly be the love interest. Or, they’ll make sure they work into conversation right away that I’m not their type, or “We’re going to be great FRIENDS, right? You’re such a good FRIEND.” Making sure I know that this body isn’t suitable for romance – only sidekick status. When I do personal ads, I get a steady flow of “not interested”s. That’s the BEST it gets. The worst is so, so so much worse. Horrible, scathing insults. Enormous, rude rejections. Confirmations over and over that having sex with a fat person is nauseating. “Ugh, I don’t even want to PICTURE that! I think I might barf!” “How could I go down on you — you’d suffocate me between your thighs!” “Sorry, but I want a partner who weighs LESS than me. I want a girl I can pick up and swing around when I get home from work. I know already I couldn’t even lift you.”
And this doesn’t come from, you know, men who are fashion models, or GQ cover boys, or gym studs. This stuff comes from pale, gangly, sensitive goth boys…guitar-playing, socially conscious, warm-hearted vegan poets….bespectacled grad students…anxious, depressed, floppy-haired writer guys….slightly kooky, verbose, vintage-clothing-clad scientists….the men who are “my type”. The wonderfully imperfect men that have plenty wrong with them but that *I* find hugely worthy of love.
I know there are small pockets of populations where fat is pretty welcome – the fat admirers, obviously…and the con-attending sci-fi nerds and gamers…but there are issues with those subsets that I find challenging, sometimes, and they’re not what I’m organically drawn to on the whole (there are exceptions). I don’t want to try to SELL myself on hanging out with a community I’m not innately drawn to just because they’re okay with my body — that seems backwards; I want to feel attraction to whomever I truly feel it towards. I don’t want to fake interest in something I have no interest in. I want the people I LIKE to be okay with my body. But it almost never happens. I have gone enormous, enormous spans of time without having sex with another person. Lucky that I’m comfortable having sex with myself, and know that (ahem) I actually have some pretty good skills (blush) — no one else is ever going to know it, though. No one even wants to find out.
For all the decades of size activism I’ve done, and the amount of advocacy I’ve engaged in around body acceptance, I myself still elicit such rejection in the world of sex, dating and relationships…and I have to fight every minute of every day to believe I’m even allowed to be a sexual creature…to believe I’m a woman…sometimes, to believe I’m a human being, and not a monster.
Coming late to the article but it’s still relevant!
After leaving an abusive relationship, I went nearly a year without sex and decided that I had *NEEDS*. So I turned to Craigslist. The headline of my Casual Encounters post was “Obese White Woman Needs Orgasm”. I received over 300 replies! (large city)
You have no idea how much that boosted my self-esteem.
As a result of that post, I was also contacted by a woman who runs a local swinging group – - one that is especially for BBWs and the men who love them! Can you imagine what happens to your ego when you’re surrounded by men who genuinely find you attractive? They’re not wearing much so it is easy to tell that they’re, uh, eager to be with you and not just saying it.
As a result of being in that group I have been dating a man for about 10 months now. I am over 300 pounds. He’s always telling me how sexy I am.
Let people see my body – none of it is flawed! I refuse to accept the notion that any human body or part of the body is flawed. It’s wonderful. If you don’t like it, don’t touch it, look away, leave the room. I will not apologize for who I am.