I picked up a mostly laughable magazine in the break room at work yesterday and read this fat-hating blather.  Which was not laughable.  It enraged me, as a matter of fact. Which, yeah, is a bit of an overreaction to an end-page blurb in the most atrociously stereotypical gay rag I’ve ever seen. But it set me off because so very many people think like that.  And because society/media/culture tells us we should think like this.  “Fat people are hideously ugly, unsexual, repellant, barely-human creatures.  Get it?  Fat people are ugly and you are not allowed to be attracted to them!  If you are attracted to them, you’re even more of a freak than they are and you shall be ridiculed and shamed until you subsume yourself into the One True Way.  Assmilate!”  Sounds like I’m overreacting, I know.  But at the core, it is precisely the message we’re all being fed.

I used to chat with a particular guy who loved fat women.  To him, we were the height of beauty and desirability.  But he dated skinny girls.  Because his friends and some family members made fun of him when he even hinted at his true attractions.  And he’s not the only one like that I’ve talked to.  I would bet a lot of money that there are a lot of guys like that in this country.  Even MJ, who has a textbook fetish for fat women and weight gain, used to pretend that her interests lay in mainstream beauties.  I know that she even made disparaging comments with her male friends about her ex-girlfriend’s size, when they were still dating.

That kind of shit breaks my heart and pisses me off at the same time.  Pusillanimous fools!  I want to scream at them.  I want to shake them and slap them and tell them exactly how damaging those kind of actions are to the very people they won’t let themselves love.  As well as to themselves.  Not to mention that letting other people dictate something as personal and intimate as your love- and sex-life is just stupid and a recipe for misery.

But I begin to digress.  Here’s the offensive excerpt from that ridiculous editorial (emphases mine):

Jack Sprat would eat no fat; his wife would eat no lean.

     Remember that little gem from childhood? I don’t recall the entire poem, or the message it was trying to conjure, if there indeed was one. Those ditties generally told a story with a moral attached and often contained lines that have been forever etched into the cultural psyche of more than one generation.
     I don’t even know who wrote it.
     But somehow that phrase sits in the back of my cavernous cerebrum and makes its way to the front every time I see a fat woman with a skinny guy. My internal curiosity machine kicks in and I wonder certain things that are usually considered off-limits, such as “how” and “why”?
     I realize our touchy-feely society has put the kibosh on any frank discussion of reality, which might be a classic example of the impulse behind The Emperor’s New Clothes. We’re not supposed to notice—much less mention—the obvious. If anything, our current mores demand we deny it. But sometimes you just plain can’t.
     If you accept the proposition that men are lustful, visually-motivated pigs that wish to spread their pollen to every dainty flower in the garden, you must ask: “He’s not really screwing her, is he?”
     That question becomes even more pertinent when both parties are fat. What about the logistics? How does a schwanz that’s hiding under a barrel make its way into a coochie that’s buried between mounds of cottage cheese? Do they have to hire professional movers? A heavy equipment operator?
     And what’s going through their minds as this is happening, assuming it can?
     Please don’t try to tell me these people are in the throes of deep sexual passion, so enamored that they simply must tear off one another’s clothes and bang until the cows come home, to use a disgustingly appropriate metaphor. And if they’re not, why are they together?
     Call me a shallow, superficial queen if you must, but I have a feeling most of these couples have little sex. They’re in it for companionship, or perhaps more likely, emotional and financial support. As a friend put it, they’re like two brooms (or perhaps two Bissells) leaning up against one another. If one falls, so goes the other.
     This may sound bitterly cynical, but it illustrates a deeper message. Or should I say, a wider perspective. 
        […blah blah blah, somehow segueing into a brief diatribe on why gays shouldn’t want legal marriage rights..  “If  you get married, you may as well be one of those horrid, sexless fat people!”  ..to paraphrase slightly.]
  

That kind of shit is why a part of me is fiercely proud to sport high-school-esque hickeys, why I make a point to be affectionate to my lovers in public.  Why I talk unapologetically about sex and display my decolletage with head held high. 

Because raging to myself and getting all knotted up inside about pop culture’s all too pervasive negativity towards fat people will never do any good.  Because living well is the best revenge, as they say.  I like the hickeys and the public affection, because they feel good of course, but also because a militant part of me needs to shove it in the world’s face that fat people are attractive, and sexual, and I am living proof, and I refuse to believe shit notions that try to proclaim otherwise.  And I won’t let anyone else get away with it either.  Open your eyes, sheep of the world.

We are fucking beautiful.  We are fucking!  And we are beautiful.  Maybe not to you individually, and that’s fine.  But do not expect the rest of the world to share those narrow ideals.  Allow for the possibility that the chubby girl in front of you in the checkout line is a sensual, lust-inspiring goddess to someone.  Probably many, if they let themselves see it.