Sunday, 05 April 2009

• Fat and Sex - Pleasure, Disgust and Cool

  I want to talk about something a little daring.
  
  S-E-X.
  
  Not really about sex, per se, but at least about how being a fat woman and being a sexual being has been navigated in my mind. And, for the most part, it's gone pretty well. But I have a hard time reconciling how well it's gone with how yucky having sex with fat people is supposed to be.
  
  I think that in terms of how comfortable I am with my body, sexually speaking, and how much pleasure I have -- I'm quite grateful. I know plenty of women not as abundantly-sized as me who have a harder time with all of that. I think a combination of how I'm wired, how I was raised, and just pure luck have meant that I don't feel estranged from my body or feel like the lights need to be turned off if I'm going to get naked.
  
  Having had the same partner for 18 years now helps, to some degree, with my comfort. Frankly, being aware of the existence of fat porn has helped. Early on, it was Laurie Toby Edison's book of nudes: Women En Large. Sometimes, it's The Adipositivity Project, in particular, photos showing righteously large bellies in their full glory. But for a very long time I know I've felt that feeling good about my body is something I deserve, have a right to. It's not only me I feel this way about -- really truly I feel that all people have a right to feel good about their bodies and find a sexual expression, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else, and consent is clear. But even when relating to our own bodies, even with no one else in the picture, I do feel we have a right to feel good about our bodies, to like them and derive pleasure from them.
  
  Where this gets complicated for me, well, where to start? Kate Harding's essay in Yes Means Yes! is one place -- the horrible twisted knot that fat women find themselves in between "unfuckable" and "lucky to be raped" -- and yet, we go on every day choosing to have sex with partners who find us sexy and making babies and/or managing to feel sexy on our own. I wish I had my copy of "Shadow on a Tightrope" with me to refer to and quote from -- it's with my other "fat studies" books at my parents' house over a thousand miles away.
  
  I love the things that Shannon at Nudemuse and Marianne at The Rotund have written about sex. A commenter at Shapely Prose (I think it was Richelle) brought up the whole construct of disgust and how it intersects with bigotry. When I think about all of this my mind starts whirling and wishing I were pursuing a PhD rather than simply trying to live a balanced life between working full-time and raising a child and being a partner and sister and daughter and friend and blogger and person in therapy and person with diabetes and, not at all last or least, a fat woman navigating her way through this fat-hating world.
  
  Marianne, writing about "Sex, Presidents, and Art," and in particular, a painter working her way through the presidents painting herself having sex with each of them and the "ick factor" coming into play with the idea of her with President Taft, our fattest president. Here's what she writes:
  
  

  This is where the waters get difficult to navigate sometimes with friends. Because one person’s preference isn’t the issue. No one has to want to have sex with me or think I’m sexually attractive. The problem is that not only is Taft ridiculed as an object of desire (and I will tell you straight up that I think he was a good looking dude) but so is the concept that ANYONE would find him sexually attractive.

  It isn’t just that person x is not attracted to me sexually, it’s that the implication is it’s gross for fat people to have sex across the board.
  

  Right, that's the implication that makes me uncomfortable/crazy/sad/angry/frustrated/rebellious. There's also the assumption made about the fat person's partner -- that they must either have some sort of fetish, or really care about "inner beauty," or be so in love they are able to "see past the fat." (Maybe there are other assumptions but those are the ones I could generate in the moment.)
  

  What Shannon has to say about the way that people can say that others' bodies are yucky in her post "Ruminating on the Body:"
  

  If you are really horrified and traumatized by seeing a naked ass that is not the kind of naked ass you like getting naked with, close the fucking window.

  Really.

  But I guess it's the privilege showing of those feeling "disgusted" to actually state that they are disgusted. There are things in this world that disgust me, but they have not to do with what human bodies look like, they have to do with how human being can treat others, animals and the world. I don't generally get grossed out when I think about people having sex, no matter who those people are, as long as we are talking about consent and freedom from harm. Just because when it comes to looking at bodies, I prefer to look at the type of bodies featured in Women En Large or Adipositivity. But that doesn't mean that men's bodies or thin women's bodies are yucky to me. Even if there was a body that I thought was yucky to look at, I would think that was my problem, not that body's problem.

  Even though I understand my values here, it's hard for me to reconcile the pleasure I take in my own body, and the pleasure that I share with my partner of 18 years, with how yucky it is supposed to be in the popular imagination. It seems like the truth that fat bodies are every bit as sexy and sexual as not-as-fat bodies is concealed. And the lie that only trim, toned bodies are sexy and sexual ones rarely gets challenged. There certainly are examples of the challenging of these thoughts in popular forms of media, but it's rare and still on the fringe. And, even though we have a token Beth Ditto here and a Hairspray there, being fat remains, for all it's edginess, uncool.

  I'm all about bringing coolness and fatness together. It's probably going to take a less geeky person than me to pull it off (there are all of the bloggers I've cited who can do it). But together, collectively, I believe we can.

  One ending note -- it's been 6 days since I last stepped on the scale. It's been hard, I've reached for it a couple of times, but I'm strong.

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