Yes, fat people can expect to be sexually celebrated, worshiped & adored

By Virgie Tovar

Fatphobia, a pervasive form of bigotry against fat people, is a beast—a soul-sucking, poopy, lying beast. When you’re fat like I am, fatphobia makes you believe all kinds of things that are untrue and deeply harmful. Like, for example, the idea that thin bodies deserve to be worshiped while fat bodies deserve to be tolerated—especially when it comes to sex.

I know I believed that for a very long time.

Growing up, I was taught by boys at my school that I was unlovable and, frankly, gross. I grew to feel ashamed of my body, hating my double chin, my thick thighs, and my chubby arms. When I received criticism about my body from sexual and romantic partners later on, it didn’t set off any alarms or red flags because I already felt worthless.

“Are you sure you should be wearing that?” was something I heard frequently from one of my first serious boyfriends. I was nineteen. He was, like, 1000 years older than me, but still had the nerve to remind me that the thong panties I’d bought to turn him on weren’t designed for people with my body type—while I was wearing them!

Even when I was in my late twenties, I remember getting ready for a date with someone I’d met online. He brought up sex, and then went onto explain that there were certain things that he only did with thin women—like oral sex. This hurt, but it didn’t shock me even a little. I was no stranger to the idea that I should take what I could get.

No one ever sat me down and said outright, “Virgie, there are two types of women in the world, the kind who are thin and have 100% access to sexual desirability, and the kind who are fat and who get access to, like, 5% of that.” But I can remember moments where that message became clear.

For example, one of my favorite movies when I was a kid was the 1988 film License to Drive, starring none other than Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. There’s a scene where the Coreys were picking out different girls at their high school and deciding what kind of car each one would lose her virginity in. They were attempting to humiliate most of the girls by naming off less expensive, less trendy cars. When they got to a fat girl, though, they said “dump truck.”

Dump truck. Garbage. Dirty. Dispensable. Worthless. I knew that I was like that girl.

Because the Coreys were famous and were the heroes of the film, it made all the stuff that they were saying seem true. Instead of seeing their behavior as a disgusting and unacceptable manifestation of misogyny and seeing them as gross and unappealing, we see those girls through their eyes. They’re presented not as people, but as objects to make fun of and embarrass.

The truth is, if someone believes that different sized people deserve different sexual attention, they suck. Do not date them. Try really hard not to sleep with them (and if you do end up sleeping with one because you’re in a drought—been there!—then give them the most minimal effort possible, lose their number, and absolutely do not follow them on SnapChat). Nothing is wrong with you. Something is very, very wrong with how they see the world. And you don’t need to be around that.

There. Are. Better. People. Out. There.

It took a long time to learn that lesson, but once I did I started to refuse to engage with people who even hinted at fatphobic behavior. I began to ask questions about my potential partners’ beliefs around body worthiness and sex. I adopted a zero tolerance policy around body-shaming comments: no matter how long we’d been seeing each other, if they said one single negative thing about my body they were gone. Cold turkey.

I began to expect my partners to express overt enthusiasm for my body with their words, touch and actions. I went from being a person who felt that my best case scenario was a partner who would tolerate my body to being a person who expected sexual adoration. The more deeply I held onto my boundaries, the easier it was to spot fatphobes from a mile away and the easier it was to spot and nurture connections with body positive partners.

At the end of the day, we all deserve more than feeling tolerated. We all deserve to feel celebrated and desired in the body we have right now. You can stop settling. Right now.

Author and activist Virgie Tovar started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight and is the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat (August 2018). In 2018 she was named as one of the top 50 most influential feminists by Bitch Magazine. She holds a Master’s degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender, and has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, Al Jazeera, and NPR.