more sex! still right here!
Apr. 27th, 2006 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryx... continued from a few hours ago
I suspect that the biggest impact Fat has on sex is in distancing people from bodies. That seems to affect everyone, regardless of size, thus its bigness of impact.
Most of our culture's images of sexiness are of thinner people. Most people actually look a lot different from those images. Tada! Complexes for everyone! I think we put ourselves in that position for a lot of complex cultural reasons that I'm not likely to be able to summarize in a paragraph. Anyhow, actual people bear very little resemblance to images of sexiness. But I think most of us would like to, cause ya know, we have hormones, and we want to be whatever sexy is (though sure, there are loads of reasons why you wouldn't, so 'snot universal).
But sexy's also vague and amorphous.
As it turns out, so is Fat. It seems simple enough. You know, not thin? But there's all that weird value-judgement stuff attached to it that we can't really put our fingers on - all the stuff we mean when we Feel Fat. And oh, by the way, UNsexy is almost always part of Fat, isn't it?
The thing is, fat people have sex. People have sex with fat people. I'd hazard a guess that most of them like at, or they wouldn't keep doing it. So here's actual reality: people have fat sex all the time, and it's fun - versus imaginaryland: being Fat is UNsexy and subhuman and fat people are either just voracious objects for manipulation or totally asexual as a result. [Isn't it intriguing how we desex and hypersex otherness? Think of all those disturbing stereotypes of black women. Why do we do that? That is, by the way, one of the ways I think things like Fat Girl are in fact potent political art.]
I have been a thinner (awkward and post-adolescent) person and I have been a fat person, having sex in both bodies. I really discovered sexuality, as mentioned before, in a less-fat body. So I don't think I understand what it's like to be a fat teenager looking for action; I got to discover being sexy in a body that was, though far from images of sexy and certainly Fat in my mind, not fat in others' perception. I still perceived others as thinking I was Fat, was embarrassed by my ass, my breasts, my whatevah, but I didn't have to stand up to that wall of sexed and unsexed fat stereotypes just to be able to kiss someone.
I think that must suck, though. I think it's full-on shitty that all people don't get to choose at this exact moment whether to be perceived as sexy or not, but I am particularly pissed off that fat bodies get filtered through all these lenses.
And then I went from being only Fat (in my mind, and yes, not as thin as ideal, but curvily average, I think) to being actually fat. With the dieting thing, particularly, I mostly got fatter and fatter over time while developing a sense of being further and further from my body. And that's what fat hate does to everyone, really. Certainly to a large number of women and fat folk. Also, I believe, to anyone who finds a little or a lot of flesh on another body beautiful. I don't know if that's the reason why, for instance, young men do ridiculous and demeaning things like that "sweathogging" thing where they go looking for fat chicks to have sex with, but I suspect it's part of why we're so enrapt/horrified by those reports - we both want to deride the grotesque Other and are fascinated by it; it is other, and also - because we're most of us convinced we're Fat anyhow - it is a part of ourselves that we fear and embrace. Breasts and asses are fat. We like them.
The weird thing is, I've had this whole cognitive dissonance thing right in front of me all along. I have almost always been easily attracted to other fat people (even to other women who looked very, very much like me), and for the longest time unable to see my own fatness (real or perceived) as hot, beautiful, whatever. And it's not that I have to feel beautiful 100% of the time, but it's a choice I'd like to have available. I'd love, for instance, to get out of "cuteness" (which I think is part of the jollification of fat), to be able to think of that flappy bit under my belly (which, by the way, actually gets more obvious if you happen to shrink slightly) as attractive and not embarassing. So far I can't. I've never seen anyone do it in a way that isn't fetishizing, and I just don't have a good example. Making your own examples is - well, hard.
Now I am a fat single queer woman after having been a not-single not obviously queer woman who vacillated all over the size spectrum for yearsandyearsandyears. It's strange. I feel a lot more aware of sexual identity after having it be something I mostly contained with one person for so long (those of you who haven't known me for years haven't experienced the full force of my reticence and restraint). And I find myself hyperconcerned about what others think of my body. All others, too. Not just people to whom I have some attraction. I have also become way more comfortable in my body/self as a) integrated and b) functional. Eating and movement are pleasurable acts. The body/self are loci of pleasure. That applies to sex, too.
But this is, I think, a radical way of thinking of the body. It's a way that works for me, one I think would work for others, but we think first of appearance, maybe second of tactile sense, and only later of what we can do. Obviously, I believe that's the (or at least an) approach that people in general should take to physicality, to refigure the body as tactile and sensual. I still struggle with it for myself, and I'm beginning to see that I'll have to struggle with it on behalf of the other gorgeous amazing people I'd like to have sex with. 'Snot just my problem.
And refiguring the body - well, that's not something you can just wake up and decide to do one morning. It's been a personal project for me since I discovered fat activists maybe 6, 7 years ago. I am at least encouraged that I could turn my own perspective so much in that time by shifting focus - in my case, stopping all dieting & starting a hell of a lot of interesting movement. I'm pretty stubborn. If movement could talk me out of the godawful relationship between my self/body & scale, it might just be the answer.
I suspect that the biggest impact Fat has on sex is in distancing people from bodies. That seems to affect everyone, regardless of size, thus its bigness of impact.
Most of our culture's images of sexiness are of thinner people. Most people actually look a lot different from those images. Tada! Complexes for everyone! I think we put ourselves in that position for a lot of complex cultural reasons that I'm not likely to be able to summarize in a paragraph. Anyhow, actual people bear very little resemblance to images of sexiness. But I think most of us would like to, cause ya know, we have hormones, and we want to be whatever sexy is (though sure, there are loads of reasons why you wouldn't, so 'snot universal).
But sexy's also vague and amorphous.
As it turns out, so is Fat. It seems simple enough. You know, not thin? But there's all that weird value-judgement stuff attached to it that we can't really put our fingers on - all the stuff we mean when we Feel Fat. And oh, by the way, UNsexy is almost always part of Fat, isn't it?
The thing is, fat people have sex. People have sex with fat people. I'd hazard a guess that most of them like at, or they wouldn't keep doing it. So here's actual reality: people have fat sex all the time, and it's fun - versus imaginaryland: being Fat is UNsexy and subhuman and fat people are either just voracious objects for manipulation or totally asexual as a result. [Isn't it intriguing how we desex and hypersex otherness? Think of all those disturbing stereotypes of black women. Why do we do that? That is, by the way, one of the ways I think things like Fat Girl are in fact potent political art.]
I have been a thinner (awkward and post-adolescent) person and I have been a fat person, having sex in both bodies. I really discovered sexuality, as mentioned before, in a less-fat body. So I don't think I understand what it's like to be a fat teenager looking for action; I got to discover being sexy in a body that was, though far from images of sexy and certainly Fat in my mind, not fat in others' perception. I still perceived others as thinking I was Fat, was embarrassed by my ass, my breasts, my whatevah, but I didn't have to stand up to that wall of sexed and unsexed fat stereotypes just to be able to kiss someone.
I think that must suck, though. I think it's full-on shitty that all people don't get to choose at this exact moment whether to be perceived as sexy or not, but I am particularly pissed off that fat bodies get filtered through all these lenses.
And then I went from being only Fat (in my mind, and yes, not as thin as ideal, but curvily average, I think) to being actually fat. With the dieting thing, particularly, I mostly got fatter and fatter over time while developing a sense of being further and further from my body. And that's what fat hate does to everyone, really. Certainly to a large number of women and fat folk. Also, I believe, to anyone who finds a little or a lot of flesh on another body beautiful. I don't know if that's the reason why, for instance, young men do ridiculous and demeaning things like that "sweathogging" thing where they go looking for fat chicks to have sex with, but I suspect it's part of why we're so enrapt/horrified by those reports - we both want to deride the grotesque Other and are fascinated by it; it is other, and also - because we're most of us convinced we're Fat anyhow - it is a part of ourselves that we fear and embrace. Breasts and asses are fat. We like them.
The weird thing is, I've had this whole cognitive dissonance thing right in front of me all along. I have almost always been easily attracted to other fat people (even to other women who looked very, very much like me), and for the longest time unable to see my own fatness (real or perceived) as hot, beautiful, whatever. And it's not that I have to feel beautiful 100% of the time, but it's a choice I'd like to have available. I'd love, for instance, to get out of "cuteness" (which I think is part of the jollification of fat), to be able to think of that flappy bit under my belly (which, by the way, actually gets more obvious if you happen to shrink slightly) as attractive and not embarassing. So far I can't. I've never seen anyone do it in a way that isn't fetishizing, and I just don't have a good example. Making your own examples is - well, hard.
Now I am a fat single queer woman after having been a not-single not obviously queer woman who vacillated all over the size spectrum for yearsandyearsandyears. It's strange. I feel a lot more aware of sexual identity after having it be something I mostly contained with one person for so long (those of you who haven't known me for years haven't experienced the full force of my reticence and restraint). And I find myself hyperconcerned about what others think of my body. All others, too. Not just people to whom I have some attraction. I have also become way more comfortable in my body/self as a) integrated and b) functional. Eating and movement are pleasurable acts. The body/self are loci of pleasure. That applies to sex, too.
But this is, I think, a radical way of thinking of the body. It's a way that works for me, one I think would work for others, but we think first of appearance, maybe second of tactile sense, and only later of what we can do. Obviously, I believe that's the (or at least an) approach that people in general should take to physicality, to refigure the body as tactile and sensual. I still struggle with it for myself, and I'm beginning to see that I'll have to struggle with it on behalf of the other gorgeous amazing people I'd like to have sex with. 'Snot just my problem.
And refiguring the body - well, that's not something you can just wake up and decide to do one morning. It's been a personal project for me since I discovered fat activists maybe 6, 7 years ago. I am at least encouraged that I could turn my own perspective so much in that time by shifting focus - in my case, stopping all dieting & starting a hell of a lot of interesting movement. I'm pretty stubborn. If movement could talk me out of the godawful relationship between my self/body & scale, it might just be the answer.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-27 11:52 pm (UTC)That actually addresses some of the issues I've been having with my own body, and something you touched on in the second to last paragraph; my body is a machine that I depend on to live, and I don't mean that in the eat-sleep-breath way. I think when you are a manual laborer, your body is literally like another tool you use; in my case, my body is a car, a dishwasher, a hammer, a vise, a lift, etc for a minimum of six hours a day, every day. It creates another wierd disconnect that isn't there when I'm doing other things for money, like, say, tutoring English students on their crappy papers. Some people take good care of their tools, but honestly, they're just tools. They can be thrown away, yanno? It's not so good.
I'm not sure how that ties in with everything else you said, just something I've been thinking about. Again, it's about 3 am, I have to eat some dinner and pass out, so the ole brain ain twerkin like it should be.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-01 02:54 pm (UTC)And I'd imagine that would be a strange dissociation. I'd like to hear more when you have time.