CW: Unhealthy body image, Sizeism, Liberal use of the word “fat”

Fat. I want to say the word over and over again and wear it out until it loses all its sharp edges and dissolves into a million pieces. If you had no paradigm for “fat” and you read the statements below, what meaning would you make of the word?

Things I’ve heard guys say: “Fat girls are great in bed because they’re so grateful to be getting fucked, they’ll do anything.” “You can fuck fat girls, just don’t tell your friends.” “You can fuck fat girls, just keep the lights off.” “She probably gives great head; you know how I know? Because she’s fat.”

By god, who are fat girls? Am I? How do we sort ourselves and where is the line? All of us feel fat sometimes, but what does it mean to feel fat?

I’m having my first PMS in two years and yesterday the scale crossed my self imposed maximum acceptable weight. Red. fucking. alert. This is a serious situation. There will be the wearing of ugly clothes, there will be fasting, and most of all there will be ruthless self-loathing. Everytime I pass a mirror naked I will pinch the fat on my tummy to remind myself. And I will not have sex.

To feel fat is to feel out of control and sex compounds that feeling. And if I have sex while feeling fat, I’m subject to all the awful unwritten rules about so-called ‘fat girls’: be grateful, focus on them, be invisible. To feel fat is to feel unworthy of pleasure. If I can just fast and restrict for a week or two and I don’t have sex or socialize much until I’m back below my maximum acceptable weight, then it’s like my fatness didn’t even happen. Right?

But daring to live fully while feeling fat breaks the rules. What if I become officially fat? Self-acceptance while feeling fat feels dangerous. It feels like a slippery slope. Feeling fat is an invisible line and many of us live life on the razors edge. Feeling fat feels unsafe. Feeling fat is a deeply shameful state of feeling worthless. And fascinatingly, for myself and many others, feeling fat is often non-concordant with weight.

To read the rest of this blog, go to my substack at https://trysexual.substack.com/p/who-deserves-pleasure.