Sex, Sexuality, And the Fat Girl

I decided to participate in a little blog carnival that Alas and Vegan Kid have got going on. I thought if there's anything in the world I could write about, is what life is like as a Fat girl who needs sex like she needs water but who couldn't get a sip to save her life. This post comes from a personal space of great debate, pain, and longing. I've had the opportunity to delve into this subject in the real world due to some current dating situations. Every time I meet someone new, I get nervous and spend inordinate amounts of time wondering if and why they find me attractive. It's fascinating to face my fears and try to overcome them. I hope this post helps me on my journey to happiness.

There’s Always A But(t) In There Somewhere: You Have Such A Pretty Face...

Rarely does someone finish that sentence and be completely honest with me. But it’s okay, I know what they mean. I am and have been for some time, the victim of the “pretty face” syndrome. Over the last several years many people have commented that I have an attractive face and so why do I hide it behind all that fat? The implication is such that if I were to lose weight, I’d be a very attractive woman and my sexuality would be restored. I would be the kind of desirable person that people fantasize about when they have sex or want to have sex. And I have such mixed feelings about all that. (Do I want to be objectified? Am I substituting one kind of objectification for another by staying in a body that repulses me and others?)

I’ll tell you now (in case you were hoping for a really juicy post) that I do not define sex as simply the act, because there’s so much more to it then that (so now you don’t have to go looking for something perverted here). When I think of the word woman or love or passion or curves, I think of sex. Sex is an expression. Sex is supposedly my gender, my hips, lips and tits. Sex is the color that seeps from between my thighs each month. It is a way of life. It is a look, a smell, a touch- even the most innocent in each category can turn into an interpretation of sex in some way. Sex defines every part of me. It is the swaying of my hips to really excellent Turkish music. It is the way he ogles me when I know I’ve captured his complete attention. It is the box I check whenever I fill out a personal form. It is what I was assigned from birth. It is who I am and always will be.

And still, I am not considered a sexual being because of one thing- the bloody number on the scale.

Most women can agree that beauty confines us, liberates us, and torments us at every stage of our lives from every external source imaginable. Sex is beauty and beauty is sex to me. But I haven’t felt beautiful beyond the age of six, so in my mind, I haven’t ever felt like a sexual being. I haven’t even really ever felt like a woman. The two items that have given me the most validation in terms of femininity have been my hair and my breasts. Boobs are a fat girl’s consolation prize. Seriously. We don’t garner much positive attention from the opposite sex but at least we’ve got massive twins to compete against all the stick figure A-cups out there. It’s not really a fair fight but it is something, I suppose (One problem I find myself facing every so often is how much of my chest should I emphasize? ‘Cause I can do the full on tight sweater, low v-neck, white mounds of flesh popping out thing but then I feel a little cold and more than a little slutty. I don’t really want to be known for my cup size, just as many of the skinny girls don’t want to either).

But simply put, my boobs = my sex.


One thing that’s constant throughout my life is my long hair-even when I was at my highest weight (as you can see). I had one former crush actually say to me that I hide myself behind my hair. And I’d agree with that. I hide behind the one major thing that designates my sex to the outside world. It’s the one feature that’s made me feel feminine when I’m stuck in a body that seemed to lose any resemblance to being female. I am not comfortable with short hair. Too much of my self-image is wrapped up in those chemically tortured locks of mine. I need to make sure that I’m still recognizable as a girl, even if it’s an ugly girl. My hair is my sex, no doubt about it. And as I thumb thru a Newport News catalog left in my cubicle, I can pretty much surmise that long hair equals sex and it is the epitome of sexy for the ideal American woman (please don’t get on me about the word ideal. Ideally, there would be no ideals. Okay, people?).

As a rule of thumb (or perhaps more appropriately, of thigh), when a woman is fat, she is nonexistent in public. Other people most often ignore her, except in the cases where she is ruthlessly made fun of for not conforming to this society’s ideals, and she is generally treated as a subhuman. How do I know this? I’ve been treated that way for some 17 years. I’ve been shoved aside, had doors slammed into my face by people who did not think enough of me to leave them open as I walked through, been sneered, jeered and leered at, have had people look right through me as if I didn’t exist, been subjected to comments that make me sound like a cow in need of butcher cuts, had my stomach touched inappropriately, and have been called everything possible under the sun in relation to my weight:










(You’d think by now people would get a little more original with their metaphors!)

A woman cannot be sexy and fat at the same time. We are denied our sexuality on a minute by minute basis. We do not serve any sexual function, we simply take up space *snort*. We are the butt of every joke, the ones whispered about when people think we’re deaf in addition to being overweight. We are the people that skinny people fear. “I don’t ever want to look like that” (sometimes they can’t even assign us a gender because it’s just another sexual reminder of what we could actually be). For the life of me, I can’t figure it out. What is it about me that scares other people so much? They say it’s my lack of self control. They say it’s that I’m not beautiful to them. Is it really that? Or is the reason that my body scares others perhaps have something to do with an ever present reminder of who potentially could have more power, if only she realizes it? I certainly feel powerful when I walk down the hallway in my size 9 pumps with a tall and proud walk with my hips swinging. I do weigh more than you—I should be able to break you like a twig if you don't get out of my damn way. And sweetie, my Amazon ancestors probably did just that. Every time I turn on the TV and get a glimpse at the latest tiny actress or stupid bulimic girl in a video, I have to stop and remind myself that they are not women. I am the woman. I am the one with the calves that can withstand 10 mile walks. I am the one with the hips that can give enough room for life to be created and developed and born without killing me. I am the woman (ROAR!!). They are the little girls. And it kills me that this is our standard of beauty. I was a little girl once. It wasn’t all that empowering or fun or rewarding. I was something that needed protection and daily baths and ribbons and dresses and coddling.

I can’t tell you when I first realized I was a girl. But I can tell you when I realized I was turning into an unattractive FAT girl because people simply do not let you forget when you’re a former pretty baby (I won a baby contest and a week’s worth of groceries when I was two). It seemed to be a very gradual change from age seven and nine. I developed into a geeky package that consisted of huge pink coke-bottle glasses I had to wear to see absolutely anything farther than 3 feet away, braces cemented onto my teeth in fourth grade, (I didn’t have an open mouth smile in any class picture until they came off after freshman year), the Puma Velcro shoes that wouldn’t be cool for a mere 20 more years, garage sale clothes straight from the seventies (nowadays I’d kill for a retro look), and the Dorothy Hamill haircut (that looked fabulous on her but made me look like an ugly boy). But above all else, was the combination of a sedentary lifestyle and the genetic predisposition to grow outwards faster then I grew upwards which made for one chunky little monkey. And trust me, as funny as you think it would be to see some of the pictures from this stage in my life that haven’t been “mysteriously” lost over the years, they are truly a horrible sight to see.

People began to treat me differently when I hit puberty and couldn’t figure out how to stay the pretty girl. There were fewer smiles and more frowns. Strangers didn’t coo over me any longer. They looked down at me and whispered to their own children that this is what happens when kids eat too many Twinkies and not enough broccoli. I wasn’t freakishly fat; I was modestly fat with an unfortunately high number of unattractive features. I wasn’t outgoing. Instead, my personality most closely resembled that of the quintessential wallflower. I liked to read and I found it easy to escape the awkwardness of my childhood through books (I’d say literature but when you consider my favorite author was V.C. Andrews and I devoured all of her books written {by her and not the subsequent ghost writers} by the time I was 10, it’s a stretch to call it literature I was reading or even time well spent). Children around me began to act crueler and their taunts and insults intensified once I entered middle school and could no longer hide the fact that I was much fatter than everyone else. I couldn’t understand the rules of popularity. I wasn’t popular, pretty, athletic, smart or even funny. I was an oddity. And no one around me was gonna let me forget that my weight was the weirdest thing about me.

I look back now to my childhood and define it as a series of 3 major stages. Stage one is birth to six when I was an adorable and feminine little girl that wore dresses, practiced her wedding day with white tablecloths for veils, and enjoyed the carefree summers on her banana bike. Stage two starts when my beautiful hair is cut and doesn’t end until boyfriend #1 enters the picture some 12 years later. This unbearable stage is filled with many afternoons spent in front of the television, fearful of both the outside world and the changes that were taking place to my body. My fatness was proportioned in such a way that I seemed to start puberty early- and was very much unprepared for it. School was a nightmare and I lost the eagerness to learn and to succeed. I didn’t want to raise my hand in class and call attention to myself. I didn’t want to join any activities that involved other people who judged me. At a time when most children are learning about themselves and who they will be, I was too busy hiding from myself and the rest of the world that I inhabited to figure out that life wouldn’t always be like this. Stage three starts when the first boy to truly love me enters from stage left. And his first assignment was telling me how sexy he found me to be. Poor thing really had his work cut out for him. He began the daunting task of slowly peeling back the layers of self-hatred that had hardened around my soul. He was very good to me and very good for me. I am eternally grateful to him.

Suspicion of the Opposite Sex:
This Little Piggy Would Rather Go Wee-Wee-Wee All the Way Home


It’s true. I have never actually heard of this sport before stumbling on it while blogging. And it’s sick, really sick. After reading the whole article from the Cleveland-based Scene and finding a more in-depth research paper on the subject (“Knocking off a Fat Girl:” an Exploration of Hogging, Male Sexuality, and Neutralizations .... let me know if you'd like a copy), I can’t help but wonder who the real pigs are?!? I’m a pig because I have some fat rolls but the average man interviewed in the article is supposedly some stud because he’s skinny? I’d give up a serious number of Ding-Dongs just to get a good look at these guys (and no people, I don’t actually eat Ding-Dongs. I’m avoiding high fructose corn syrup as much as possible. But skinny people just assume Hostess products are a part of a Fat girl’s daily consumption).
These men make cavemen seem like Harvard graduates. And I just don’t understand. Its one thing to admit that you’re not attracted to a fat person, but it’s a whole other thing to actively seek out the object of your disliking and degrade them repeatedly. I don’t seek out the incredibly shallow and egotistical, material possessions coveting, drink-beer-simply-to-get-drunk drunks, highly insecure in their masculinity, more likely than not to be the owners of little wee-wee’s... and make them feel inferior for not having a single positive contribution to society (stereotyping just a little? I’m angry so you can just get bent if you don’t like it). So why must they come after me?

“Sometimes you just say, 'Fuck it, let's get a pig.’” It’s not that they prefer fat women, they say. It's just easier…

Many guys claim the hog should be, and often is, grateful for their attentions. "Fat chicks never get laid, because no one wants to see 'em naked," Scott explains. "They feel appreciative just because a guy will let them give him a blow job," adds his friend Justin. "They understand their place," Rick says. "They know they're pigs. They don't get it like a normal girl could. They're desperate."

"Perfect hogging is big fat tits, fat thighs, but a good-looking face," Rick explains. "The hogs don't think they're hogs, ever," Mark says.”

It’s been suggested (and mostly confirmed for now) that I’m one of those fat chicks with good-looking faces which makes for a more coveted prize, depending on the rules and who’s playing. So now the $64,000 question is: How Desperate am I? Guess what you jackasses, I’m not. Ha! I may know my place, as the fattest girl everywhere that I go to and I may have extremely low self-esteem, but that doesn’t mean I’m going down on you, dickhead.

One of my ex-boyfriend’s friends, when asked what he thought of me, said I was “doable.” “Yeah, she’s doable… I’d do her.” WTF?!! I wonder if he ever stopped to question whether I’d do him?!? Maybe if he let that little thought roll around in his little brain he may have come up with the honest truth that I wouldn’t get within 10 feet of him and his dick. I’m fat, bitch. That single fact does not make me a slut.

Until I read the articles and research about hogging, I only had a hunch that something like this existed. I’d certainly felt enough glaring stares, heard enough rude comments, had numerous inappropriate advances from tactless men over the years to “know my place” on the sexual food chain. I’m fat, bitch, not clueless. There’s a big difference. But coming face to face with such a brazen admission for such a misogynistic activity is still a shock to my system. As a consequence, I’m more distrustful now then ever before. I’ve always had trouble recognizing when a good man is flirting with me. I had a very attractive fellow student flirting with me recently and it took me more than a half an hour to realize it. When it finally dawned on me, I just assumed I was on Candid Camera or something because I couldn’t understand why anyone would give me that kind of attention unless it was a joke. He was extremely attractive, the right age for me, very athletic and very smart. He had bonus points in all categories and I just couldn’t figure out why he was being so nice to me. The automatic thoughts that flood my brain are always the same:

“This isn’t really happening. I must be imagining things.”

“There must be something wrong with him.”

“He needs to try his skills out on me because he’s bored or feeling rejected. I’m just practice for the real thing.”

“I must look like a slut today if he’s paying attention to me.”

“Is there a nipple hanging out or something?”
(Never mind that most men probably couldn’t talk, let alone actively flirt, if a wardrobe malfunction actually occurs)

“Where is the punch line?”

“What does he want with me??”

It’s simply inconceivable that anyone would relate to me as if I was a sexual being. It doesn’t match the previous encounters that have shaped my self perceptions. Because of my weight, I believe that just about every possible date is out of my league. Never mind the fact that this same man asked me out a few weeks later and with no hesitation I said yes. Never mind the fact that one minute I’m on cloud nine around him and the next I’m wondering when I’ll turn back into the pumpkin because it’s simply too good to be true. It’s all coming down to trust. And I just don’t know if I can trust potential skinny partners- especially in the bedroom. I’m struggling a great deal to overcome my phobia of skinny people (yes, you heard it here first). And I don’t always win the battle. I recognize that there are a thousand different attitudes out there and a thousand different ways to see beauty. I have to keep telling myself that every time I look in a mirror and obsess over all of the flaws.

Before I met a fellow blogger in person, I worried incessantly about how he would react to my appearance. I obsessed all summer long. I lost nearly 20 pounds in the process but I wasn’t satisfied because I wasn’t to my goal weight or even my half way mark. I knew he was skinny and I knew I couldn’t hide the fact that I wasn’t. I could flirt with him over email and be at ease in my comfort zone, but the minute he said it was time to meet, I sent him one of those “I Really Am Fat” emails:

Ah, this plays real well into the email that I just received from you. It’s time
for me to admit something cause I’m working on being wholly honest. I make jokes
about you being some ax murderer or predator but I’m just hiding behind all
that. The real reason I’m afraid to meet is that I really don’t think you’ll
like me. All of me. I don’t like my appearance right now. I’m in the middle of
some major changes and of course I never feel like it’s enough. I’ve lost (and
kept off) more than 50 pounds in the last year. I’m learning to like myself no
matter what I look like or how I act but it’s a slow process. And I feel like
I’m transparent when it comes to that sort of thing. People have the intuition
to see when someone doesn’t like themselves.

And here is an excerpt of his response to me:


I know. I know you're worried about that, and so I really treasure that you either have developed enough trust in me, or like me enough and want to meet me bad enough (or both) that you're willing to risk it. I have the same issues and insecurities. You once said I looked "handsome" in my pictures. Thank you--that makes me feel all warm inside. But I get a compliment like that and I want to frame it and hang it on the wall inside my head, but it doesn't match the decor. I find it hard to believe anyone could find me handsome. One thing is that I'm only about 5'8" tall. Women always say, "tall, dark, and handsome." I only got one out of three, and that's just because of my mom's Hispanic blood.


I stuck his picture up for the entire world to see because um, quite frankly, I don’t think he should worry about his appearance, AT ALL. Most people who’ve seen this picture don’t think any less of him. In fact, the most common reaction is one of some serious drooling. But I guess it just goes to show that we all have nutty insecurities about ourselves that don’t fully make sense through the eyes of others. As a budding photographer and long time self-hater, sometimes I wonder if I should make it a goal to seek out people who have horrible misconceptions about their bodies and photograph them to show how beautiful they truly can be. I wouldn’t ever run out of clients, at least not in our current culture! This woman is certainly doing a good job.

How Many Licks Does it Take to get to the Center: Reclaiming What’s Rightfully Mine


(psst... that's me. It's an interesting look, don't you think? :)

So the question now after all of that is: How do I reclaim my sexuality? How does any Fat girl do it? And unfortunately there are no easy answers. I (and my lovers) must constantly try to undo the damage inflicted on my psyche. I’ll recap some of the ways that I've found some level of success so that it may be of some benefit to others out there.

• I love it when someone compliments my body. I love to hear that my butt looks delectable in my jeans or that a sexy raised eyebrow is getting someone’s undivided attention. I also love it when someone I’m with continues to compliment me. I have a zillion different incidences throughout my life where I’ve built up the core belief that my beauty is based on the number that the needle hovers over on the scale. It helps when a lover doesn’t take it personally if I don’t believe them the first time or the 10th time or even the 75th time that they say “You’re beautiful!” It takes years of conditioning to believe something that should be automatic.

• I find that dressing up for no reason at all is extremely therapeutic. In some parts of the country, they might call it “getting all gussied up.” And it makes me feel sexy, powerful, and attractive when I wear tights with little designs on them or a shirt that hugs my curves. Heels are nice- thick ones that support my ankles and don’t make me wonder whether my next step will be my last. I do enjoy the lift that nice shoes give to my lovely legs.

• I like to be touched in all sorts of places and complimented for things I never thought were even remotely sexy. I had rock hard calves last summer with all my walking. I didn’t think it was attractive but someone else sure did.

• I love role playing in the bedroom (admittedly outside of the bedroom is kinda fun too *giggle*). There's something to be said for leather boots, black lace panties, and a couple of really good whips or ropes. It's nice to skirt the dominant and submissive roles now and then to give a Fat girl a taste of just how powerful she could (and should) be.

• Dancing is the bomb. Belly dancing is the nuclear bomb. I love to shake my hips and whip my hair around. For the last few years, I've only had enough guts to do it at home. Recently, I went out dancing several weekends in a row and there is something so liberating about getting on the dance floor and just letting loose. It makes me feel like my entire body is a lighting rod for sexual energy.
  

• I like to walk down the street and notice a fellow Fat girl who also has got it going on. When a woman is in her zone and has the most confident stride to her legs and look across her face, I can't but be in awe. I always try to remember to tell another thick woman just how gorgeous she is. Pay it forward, know what I'm saying?
  

Finally, I must say that it’s encouraging to type “Plus Size” into Yahoo and see sexually provocative. images listed first. I think that’s somewhat hopeful… although it then begs further questions like, what is considered sexy? Why do we define sexuality in such a way? If we’ve been marginalized pretty much our whole lives, do us Fat girls really want to fit into a larger version of this culture’s sexy mold? I’d like to explore these questions further on down the line when I have more time to ponder it in my daily life.

For now, I'll leave you with this thought: All women are sexual. Whether they are skinny or thick or blond or brunette, all women have an aura about them that makes them beautiful. If you are a Fat girl, know that I'm giving you a silent thumbs up from here for every time you stand up tall and demand what's yours- your sexuality and the freedom to explore & express that sexuality every single moment that you are breathing. You know you deserve it. And so do I.