Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (14 page)

Misconception #2: Fat Admirers pursue fat women because they are vulnerable prey.

“People seem to think we’re like, ‘I’m going to go after the weak zebra in the herd, the one that’s limping along sad and pathetically in the back, and I’m going to exert one-third of the energy to get what I need.’ First of all—” Lawrence hesitates awhile. “I was going to say that it’s not easier for guys. That’s a lie. It is.” It’s a fact that there’s less competition. “That’s unfortunate. But that has nothing to do with the impetus or the attraction.”

Misconception #3: Guys who are sexually attracted to fat chicks are sexually attracted to all fat chicks.

“People often conflate bigness with beauty—being big is not what makes you beautiful, it’s being both simultaneously,” says Lawrence. “All the other normal benchmarks of attractiveness are in place. Proportions, symmetry, everything else, from tone of voice to texture of skin. That is exactly the same. It’s just that you’re talking about a different scale.” (As Janssen McCormick, a 20-something FA from Massachusetts, puts it, “People send me links to articles about giant toothless women who get arrested for shoplifting turkeys under their boobs, and they’re like, ‘Hey, isn’t that your type of gal? ’” He sighs. “No, I don’t find giant toothless ladies who steal turkeys under their boobs from Walmart hot.”)

Misconception #4: Sex with a 110-pound woman is preferable to celibacy.

Not true. Lawrence says, “It’s like, ‘What, are you just going to go out and have sex with skinny women until you find a bigger one you like?’ No, you’re not. You’re just going to stay home.” (As Dan Weiss wrote on
Ask a Guy Who Likes Fat Chicks,
“With a sex life devoid of fat asses, I reckon I’d start coveting everyone I see leaving an Ashley Stewart or Walmart.”)

Misconception #5: It’s easy to pick up a fat chick.

Lawrence shakes his head. “A big girl at a bar tends to feel like there must be some sort of joke going on,” he says. This is partly because the double-chinned woman in the hip-hiding shrug is so used to being ignored; partly because the specter of “hogging,” the frat-boy prank practice of nailing a fat chick on a bro dare, casts a pall even on innocent flirting. “It’s hard to be smooth when you’re trying to convince someone that you’re not playing a trick,” Lawrence says. He’s only met women out in a bar successfully once or twice. “Generally speaking, the odds are very much against you.” (One 300-pound 30-something woman counters, “You have to be defensive because there are guys who are hogging, there are guys who are going to humiliate you. Also, it’s internalized self-hatred, because you’re like, ‘If you like me, you must be a freak—why else would you like somebody who is fat?’”)

Misconception #6: You’ve got to be kidding, right?

Nope. Lawrence, who sometimes fantasizes about a 550-pound wife, thinks the smallest he could go would be 180 pounds, though that veers into bisizualism. “Ideally, no. But you’d want to meet the girl’s mother. If she’s in her early twenties, and she’s a hundred and eighty pounds, check out where it’s going. You might be pleasantly surprised. You walk in and see her mom, and she’s, like, really big, and you’re, like, ‘YES!’ You’re stoked. The genes don’t lie.” But she shouldn’t be sloppy. “If the mom is in the muumuu, and she’s just given up in life, you’re like, ‘Oh, shit.’ You don’t want that.”

So where do Guys Who Like Fat Chicks meet them? Online, of course.

“The attention I’ll get online is so much more frequent than what I experience in real life,” says Jennifer Kronika, a 27-year-old 400-pound redhead living in Jacksonville, Florida. The men she’s met and dated haven’t been creeps. “These aren’t weird guys. These aren’t creepy 60-year-old guys with big bellies and fapping away behind their computers. These are totally normal guys.”

“This is a community for people who feel differently,” says Lawrence about FA-friendly forums like Dimensions or Curvage or various size-acceptance Facebook-group spin-offs. “These are communities that have become gathering places for those who have sort of shrugged off the yoke of self-loathing. You have to go to these safe areas where everyone has sort of been checked. ‘Are you OK with yourself?’ ‘Are you OK with yourself?’ OK, come on in.”

Dear Askaguywholikesfatchicks:

What is the biggest/heaviest woman you have been with and did you have difficulty making love to her?

—Kelly Kyle

She was over 500 pounds and I don’t recall any difficulty. I’ve had difficulty with women smaller than that, though. [ June 24, 2010]

If you were at the Junior’s Cheesecake in Times Square on the last Friday in March, say during the lunch rush between 1:30 and 3:00, and you happened to notice the 480ish-pound woman in a thin cardigan, halter top, and Internet-purchased pants presiding over a plate of corned beef and pastrami on rye with steak fries (which she didn’t finish, but had wrapped), your first thought probably wasn’t, Wow, I bet lots of men are into her. If you later witnessed the bespectacled girl coyly photograph her slice of strawberr y-shortcake cheesecake to “make her friend Randy extremely jealous” or coquettishly rate the dessert as “not quite better than sex, but almost,” you probably wouldn’t have thought she’d have the opportunity to compare the two as soon as that night. If, after the check was paid, you saw her out front, sweetly struggling to climb into the SUV taxi, you probably didn’t assume that she was heading back to the hotel to gussy herself up for a man who came from Europe to the United States specifically to be with her. “I just don’t think people look at me at a restaurant and think, ‘That girl has a really awesome dating life.’”

Yet that’s the backstory on Charlotte, a 32-year-old from the South introduced as “five hundred pounds, but walking” who “gets hit on all the time.” (She’s employed by her Southern state government, and asked to be identified under a pseudonym.) In fact, the reason she is in New York for three nights, staying at the Candlewood Suites on West 39th, is a date. Several dates, actually—primarily with a 40-something immigration lawyer from Spain. But she also had a date last night, as it serendipitously turns out, with Lawrence, whom Charlotte has had a bit of a crush on for a while. She’s looking for a longer-term commitment, though, and Lawrence honestly isn’t, so “for me, he’d just be a really fun weekend,” she says. Nothing transpired last night, though he did ask her to call him tomorrow if things didn’t work out with the lawyer.

That would be Spanish Guy. Charlotte stutters, and certain words make the stammering worse, as does exhaustion, so “Spanish Guy” is easier to enunciate than her paramour’s real name, even though she’s bilingual. They’ve been flirting online regularly for five years. He has professed his love, but she’s understandably wary since they’d never met in person until last night—after she went out with Lawrence. Their first encounter was awkward, she confesses. “He was just very nervous.” The evening ended in her hotel room, but strictly under conversational pretenses; tired, she sent him off. “He starts walking toward the door, and then he turns, and gets bright red, and he’s like, ‘You don’t like me as anything more than friends, do you? ’ And I just kind of looked at him. He was really serious. So I just yanked him over to me and kissed him.” Then she sent him away. Tonight, they’re going to MOMA (“He’s really into art”) and then a jazz club.

“There aren’t many fat girls in Spain,” reports Charlotte, who spent six months as an exchange student there in 2006. Back then, she weighed 425, and she claims that the department organizers at her Northeastern women’s college tried to dissuade her from going abroad because she was “too big.” She balked and went anyway, though she admits European daily life was far more taxing: The public bathrooms were “itty-bitty,” the online clothes retailers she frequents didn’t service Spain (Lane Bryant’s sizes are too small for her), and walking was the primary method of transportation. “Anytime I would walk down the street, people would stare at me like I was a circus sideshow. Here, people kind of, like, glance out of the corner of their eye, but there people would stop and stare as I walked by.”

One time in Spain, an old woman spotted Charlotte in public, stopped abruptly, and crossed herself. “Like I was Satan.”

After walking four miles a day overseas, Charlotte lost 75 pounds, which she gained back upon return. And then some. Roller-coaster weight spikes and dips have steered her life since she was a small child. Her folks split when she was a “normal little healthy” two-year-old girl with dimples and Shirley Temple curls; she and her mother moved in with her grandparents. “Grandma always had body issues. She was probably about 225 or so and she always hated herself and was trying to lose weight and gaining it back,” Charlotte says, apologizing for drawing the conversation into such solemn territory. “My mom worked really long hours, so Grandma was basically raising me. She put me on this diet and made me so small that my pediatrician said something to her. And then she would start feeding me what they ate, which was potatoes and junk food, until I got fat. Then she would put me on a diet again.”

Charlotte is pretty sure that all the yo-yo dieting of her adolescence screwed up her metabolism permanently. Her first long-term boyfriend was a 21-year-old with “a little bit of a potbelly going on” whom she’d met online gaming. But after more than a year of having a 325-pound girlfriend, he caved to frat-boy peer pressure. “His friends couldn’t stand the thought of one of their friends dating someone as fat as me,” she confides matter-of-factly. “Finally, he said, ‘You’re going to have to lose weight, or we’re going to have to break up.’ And I loved him—I really loved him—so I really tried. I tried to lose weight, I tried dieting, I tried, and as with every diet I’ve ever been on, I ended up seventy-five pounds heavier than when I started. So that took me to four hundred twenty-five. And he broke up with me.”

She’s moved on, and in rather spectacular fashion. Scouring the Internet for plus-size clothes, she discovered BBW chat rooms when she was 18, and subsequently, a community of Fat Admirers who were rabidly attracted to her. Naturally, she explored this inverse reality, when it came time. “I had a rep—” she pauses to get the word out, “reputation for a little while. I did! I totally did! As a slut! I’ve been with seven people in my life. I do not feel that’s excessive. I am extraordinarily picky, but I am not one of those women who plays games. If I want to sleep with a guy, I don’t necessarily make him wait until the third date. We’re adults!”

At the moment, she’s not sure if she likes Spanish Guy “like that” or not. He’s already called three times during lunch—his photo pops up when he rings, and the man pictured is a conventionally attractive man—but it was an hour earlier than she told him to call, so she shut off her phone. “What really pisses me off is the attitude that, like, that guy is dating below his league just because the girl he’s dating is fat. And in fact, I may well be above his league,” she says, laughing. “You can’t know that, unless you know who I am.”

Particularly infamous among the fat community is a
CSI
episode about a fat woman who has sex on top and kills her partner. “She was only two hundred fifty or three hundred pounds, or something like that,” says Charlotte. “I have been five hundred pounds, and I would like to say that on top is my favorite position ! I have not killed anybody yet.” She smirks. “It’s just interesting the way that society sees fat sexuality,” she says. “It doesn’t exist, or it kills you.”

Dear Askaguywholikesfatchicks:

Is this because you think you can’t do any better?
—BBB
Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking.

“It’s like one big boob.” That’s Dan Weiss’s shorthand explanation for what it’s like to be with fat women, what their bodies feel like naked, and the physical attributes he’s found himself attracted to his entire life. If it sounds vulgar, well, that’s the best way he can explain his fat attraction to other straight guys who express befuddlement and disgust. “It’s the same property: men like fondling soft breasts, and I don’t get why that doesn’t apply to the whole body.”

In many, many Western minds, it doesn’t. Even the author of the 20th century’s premier anthem to big ass doesn’t like fat chicks. You know the one—“Baby Got Back,” the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot hip-hop classic that blasts, proudly, defiantly: “I Like. Big. Butts! And I cannot lie!” Sure, the Seattle rapper addresses his desire to a woman with an “itty-bitty” waist planted atop a “real thick and juicy” backside, the provenance of Shakira wannabes and
King
magazine. But many Fat Admirers have adopted the anthem as their own. A rap-metal cover of the track appears, as part of a nether-region salute with a version of Ted Nugent’s “Thunder Thighs,” on last year’s BBW-friendly compilation
WHOLE LOTTA LOVE: An All-Star Salute to Fat Chicks
.

According to Sir Mix-a-Lot himself (born Anthony Ray), fatall-over is not what he meant. “I’m talking about the dumbbell shape. The Coke bottle,” he clarifies over the phone from Atlanta. “I’ve seen girls that look like me and been like, ‘Ohhhhh, I’m Baby’s Got Back!’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ It wasn’t ‘Baby Got Back and Center, and Middle, and Front.’” He does understand, though, why some of these FA fellows might get confused. “Obviously, more white people like the song than black. Black people kind of view ‘Baby Got Back’ as like, ‘Oh, yeah, we already knew that.’ It’s not even an issue to them. They wouldn’t even think to sing about it. Whereas white guys are kind of like, ‘Yeah, finally!’”

Maybe so. Yet the cultural stigma of fat is spreading globally. Rapidly. Arizona State University researchers asked a group of subjects with an average body mass index (BMI) of 25 who reside in 10 countries including American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and Mexico—places where both fat and thin bodies have traditionally been seen as attractive—to assign true or false beliefs to cultural statements such as: “People should be proud of their big bodies” (false in every country surveyed but Tanzania) and “A big woman is a beautiful woman” (deemed false in every country). The standard medical response is that nearly all people with a BMI over 30 would be healthier at a lower weight. Alexandra Brewis, executive director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, who oversaw the April 2011 study, says, “Fifteen years ago in American Samoa, fat bodies didn’t have a negative salience, and that’s shifted.” She attributes this to the spread of American media and the moral implications of the War on Obesity. “A lot of people who didn’t realize that they should be ashamed of their bodies are now probably learning to be.”