Good Vibrations Magazine

One of the most toxic things to ever rear up and smack me in the sex life was a simple sentence. “How do you have sex with a fat chick?” I overheard one boorish teenaged guy in my high school ask another. “Pick a fold and fuck it!” the other cackled back, and both of them burst into gales of laughter, secure both in their skinny superiority and in the power of their penises to fuck whatever they wished. I froze, horrified, the words “pick a fold and fuck it” ringing in my ears.

I don’t know whether the exchange was held with the intent of my overhearing it, but I certainly did hear it, and it stuck. Not only was the phrase stuck, but so was I. That little phrase seemed to encapsulate every horrific image I had of my own body. Instead of the “normal” proportions of smooth and curved, flatness and fullness of the “attractive” girls and women, I was obviously nothing more than a walking mass of undifferentiated rolls and crevices, so alien and malformed that not only might one not be able to tell the difference between my genitals and any other crease on my body, but that it didn’t even matter. If you could just “pick a fold and fuck it,” then I, as a fat girl, was basically nothing more than a huge (and, it was implied, totally available) penis receptacle.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t already been terrorized into believing that no one would ever find me attractive or want me because I wasn’t thin. But the “pick a fold and fuck it” phrase seemed to encapsulate the absolute worst of what I had ever imagined my own sex life could be: a sex life where the most I could ever expect was to end up being used, casually, flippantly, carelessly, as a masturbation accessory, where it didn’t even matter whether or not it was my genitals that were involved or whether what happened was sex for me. I felt violated, scared, and, scariest of all, helpless to do anything about it.

I had the same reaction when I first encountered the idea of fat frottage — the sexual practice of rubbing the genitals (average anatomical topology means that this is usually the penis, since it’s an outie, though I do know of a few folks who aren’t penis people who engage in this too) against or between a fat person’s rolls or swells of flesh. I felt instant revulsion, humiliation, panic, feelings of paralysis. It took several years of thinking about it and finally gingerly experimenting with it before I was able to countenance the activity without a gut-level wash of sheer horrified disgust that left me too overwhelmed to react.

It wasn’t that the notion of fat frottage didn’t make objective sense. It’s practical and appealing to want to make use of the materials at hand in terms of what our bodies give us to create physical sensations. It never seemed odd to me that someone might want to slide his penis between a lover’s closed thighs, rub it between pushed-together breasts, or slip it between someone’s buns like a Chicago redhot into a freshly-steamed roll. But between the folds of skin and fat and flesh on a fat person’s belly? Or underneath the “apron” of fat that folds down, in some fat people, over the lower pelvis? How disgusting. How humiliating. How flat-out sick. What a horrible thing to imagine happening, let alone happening to me.

Obviously, not all flesh is created equal. In our minds if not necessarily in actual physical fact, there are vast leagues of difference between a woman’s breasts and her fat belly. If a man wants to stick his dick between the former it seems normal enough, but if he wants to do the same to an equally accessible fold between deposits of fat anywhere else on her body it is at the very least a serious fetish, possibly exploitive, intentionally humiliating to the woman, maybe even abusive. It took me a long time to begin to be able to really articulate, even to myself, why the two things were so different despite the fact that the action involved was more or less the same. The action, yes, the body parts, no. Our culture, and we individually, construct for our body parts a variety of meanings that we can’t simply dismiss. Breasts, particularly breasts big enough to form cleavage, are sexy, displayable, desired, something to be proud of, but fat rolls, particularly fat rolls big enough to form cleavage, are unsexy, to be hidden, undesirable, something to be ashamed of.

Never mind that breasts are mostly made up of fat, never mind that neither tit-fucking nor fat frottage tends to be overwhelmingly physically pleasurable for the person being rubbed against, or that, to judge from what I’ve been told by people who’ve enjoyed both tit-fucking and fat frottage as rubbers rather than rubbees, breasts and fat rolls feel physically pretty much the same around or against the penis or clitoris. The parts simply aren’t interchangeable. What they mean, what they suggest, what we’re taught to see in them and think of them — these things are not the same, nowhere near equal. The cultural weight of the difference between fat rolls and other body parts, between fatter bodies and thinner bodies, is still shocking, profound, life-altering. It is the difference between learning to expect that you will be excluded, sometimes vehemently, from active sexuality and learning to expect that you will be included, even enthusiastically coaxed to participate.

The trick is learning that the difference is only as authoritative as you are willing to let it be, that the seeming dictator is nothing but a “Wizard of Oz”-style projection of expectation and presumption. Being fat doesn’t automatically render one helpless, voiceless, or choiceless when it comes to sexuality or to the desirability of one’s own body.

Let me say this again, because it’s important: there is no direct causality between fatness and being sexually neutral, asexual, or sexually dependent on the whims of others. None at all.

Fat people can choose to acknowledge the fuckability of their fat specifically as well as their bodies and selves generally. This doesn’t neutralize the volatility of the idea of sexual activity involving a fat person: as long as fatness is volatile in our culture, so will sexuality that includes it be volatile, just as interracial sexuality will remain volatile as long as racial difference is volatile. But it does offer the prospect of ownership, of control, of having the option to exercise or not exercise the sexual potentiality of a fat body.

Accepting the potential desirability of your body, no matter what it looks like or feels like, is the key to that ownership. This does not mean that you have to find your own body desirable: your opinion, in this instance, is actually irrelevant. It means that you must accept that, at some point in your life, your body is likely to be desirable to someone else.

If you cannot accept that others are likely to find your body sexually desirable, then you are highly likely to be overwhelmed when that fact confronts you. This is where so much of the feeling of exposure comes from, the feelings of panic, painful vulnerability, helplessness. If the very notion that someone might take sexual interest in your body, or in a part of your body that you cannot yourself imagine as desirable, is enough to stop you wide-eyed like the proverbial deer in the headlights, then you are almost guaranteed to be at a loss for what to do when it happens. You may not know whether to say yes or no, not know what you want and don’t want, not have any inkling of what will make you feel cherished or what will make you feel violated, because the rules have been broken in a direction you never anticipated and for which you are utterly unprepared.

This is the situation in which many fat people — women more than men, but men are hardly exempt — find themselves, not only in regard to fat-specific sexual acts like fat frottage, but in regard to having anyone express physical sexual interest in them at all. Being wanted for your body has never been the exclusive province of Playboy Bunnies, supermodels, and chiseled-featured Adonises. Certainly fat people are not the only people who have found that being wanted sexually for their bodies alone, or for specific parts or aspects of their bodies, can be confusing, conflict-ridden, even insulting, and can leave a skinned knee in your soul where subsequent encounters only pick off the scab, ensuring a thick scar.

This is why the best way to wring the poison out of “pick a fold and fuck it” is to enter those folds, if you will, and stipulate, even just for an instant, that someone else wants to do so too. Reject your own rejection long enough to acknowledge the possibility that you will be sexually desired and you create the possibility of being able to react if — and honestly, if experience is any guide I should say when, not if — it happens.

How you react, of course, is up to you. Perhaps you will want to explore what it feels like to knowingly be a sex object. Perhaps you’ll find it intoxicating that you can do something that you and other fat people are taught is beyond the realm of possibility for us, and you’ll get a charge out of teasing and titillating someone with the body or body parts they find so overwhelmingly magnetic. Perhaps you’ll slap the person across the face and indignantly inform him or her that you’re more than just a piece of meat. Perhaps you’ll look that person up and down and say, “Sorry, no thanks, I don’t go for your physical type.” Perhaps you’ll find something about that person as lust-inducing as they find you, drag that person into your bedroom, find your biggest bottle of lube, and go to town for a week.

And perhaps — or so I sincerely hope — you will never have to feel the ashamed paralysis, the panicked helplessness and wide-open vulnerability of discovering that, despite all you may have been taught and all you may think, your body can be desired. Believe it. For your health, for your well-being, for your safety, for your sex life, for your ability to see a curve ball coming, believe it. It makes all the difference in the world.