Good Vibrations Magazine

Take a look at any neighborhood porn video rental section, and you’ll find an alien rainbow of genres and tastes. Big-budget couples’ fare, low-budget bisexual features, tapes that specialize by sex act: anal, oral, double, facial, interracial… And sometimes you’ll find sections for what pornographers consider the deviant stuff; fetishes like shaving, “messy girls,” urination, older women, disabilities, and fat people.

Even though the majority of Americans are overweight, disabled, have nonstandard genders, get old… we consider sex with these folks “deviant.” However, attractions to other kinds of populations or things — same-sex attractions, attractions to athletic women (which would’ve been deviant 100 years ago for sure!), foot and clothing fetishes, bisexuality, etc. are now taken pretty much in stride by a large part of the population. And those folks who take the latter in stride often still consider the former group “deviant” in ways they find unstomachable.

Fat sex isn’t just ghettoized in pornography; it’s also a deviance in mainstream and Hollywood film. But what’s most interesting is what kinds of truly standard sexual object deviations we take in stride as relatively “normal” versus ones we don’t, as a culture. What’s popularly considered normal and sexy onscreen these days is actually the result of constant meetings with a surgeon’s knife (and liposuction tube).

Female pornstars and their Hollywood counterparts undergo elective plastic surgery on an average of every six to eight months. It is a widely held belief that the process begins because the actress sees her body as flawed, breasts undesirable (they’re “not big enough”) and she wants to make more money — and in the business of mainstream porn, bigger tits are equated with bigger bucks. After one saved for, long-awaited session under the knife, she finds other things that need to be fixed. Everything is broken. And by both industry’s standards, she is sexier now that she is more like the others — now that she has opened her body up in what is truly the most intimate of ways. For her, it is now absolutely necessary to be touched in this manner, and the process has become as normal as getting her nails done. Erotic attraction and regular intervals with a surgeon have now become one and the same: intact, sagging unaltered flesh is bizarre. Hence, the professional patient replaces the bombshell.

It is a rare thing to find an adult or Hollywood film free of surgical enhancement, whether it’s a boob job or the more popular procedure of liposuction. A standard breast augmentation costs around $6000 and the surgery usually requires removal of the nipples, an incision down the center of the underside of the breast and another slice across the bottom fold. The surgeon then inserts his hands into the cavities, nestling the implants beneath the skin. In liposuction, a $2000-$3000 procedure, the area of undesire is first drawn on with pens, exactly how it’s done in butcher shops. A toxin is injected into the fatty tissues to begin the melting process, and into a small cunt of an incision a stainless steel vacuum tube is forcibly penetrated — it requires a great deal of strength and stamina on the part of the surgeon to work the vacuum back and forth under the skin, and is a violent thing to watch. It is a macabre thing, indeed, to consider masturbating to the visible chronicle of these intimate episodes in the surgical theatre.

Dysmorphophobia has become the real fetish purveyed by the porn and entertainment industries, yet perhaps the ones really getting off are the actors and surgeons as they pursue the pleasures of reshaping seductively wet organs. It seems like all the girls want to get opened by plastic surgeons, and not just once. In their glued-together flesh onscreen, we get a glimpse of deep incisions, oozing fluids, the violent opening of a human body with a knife and a subject who eagerly anticipates the experience.

Lolo Ferrari, the infamous French porn star, died from mysterious causes at the age of 30. Lolo Ferrari, who was born Eve Valois, was billed as “the woman with the biggest breasts in the world” and had a 71-inch silicone-enhanced bust. She underwent a mind-boggling amount of cosmetic surgery to attain the industry’s standard sex bomb look and had 22 operations to create her huge breasts. The result was a bleach-blonde, thick-lipped, almond-eyed, humongous-chested wonder of modern science — far beyond the modern primitive pale. Lolo (derived from ‘les lolos’ which is French slang for breasts) made several porn and softcore adult films in her short career. Lolo Ferrari told an interviewer, “I adore being operated on. I feel wonderful in clinics. I love the feeling of a general anaesthetic — falling into this black hole and knowing I’m being altered as I sleep.” Perhaps we should simply see the scars for what they really are — that perfect moment of subject and object-of-desire in fusion. Before she expired, she had recently told a French newspaper reporter: “I really hate reality. I want to be wholly artificial.”

It’s curious what standards we hold the terms “normal” and “attractive” to, and in this light, the idea of fat sex being deviant is a wholly bizarre one. As a culture, we must be forced to examine where our priorities are if we buy it lock, stock, and barrel — especially if it influences our notion of ideal sex partners. In this reality, a “perfect body” is actually the most extreme fetish of all.