Fat: Just As Sexy

I sometimes write erotica. It usually comes in the form of poems, but recently I've been writing more short stories. In poetry, I don't usually do much description of the bodies of the people in question: for me, it's really more about what you do with them. When I started trying to write a sex scene with the visual clarity of good prose, though, I suddenly stumbled. I was picturing two women having gorgeous sex in a fierce little house by the sea; they also happened to be fat, like lots of people are. This didn’t seem like a particularly central point, except that when I thought about it I had a strong suspicion that if I didn't specify their size, my readers would picture normatively thin people – because that's what we're lead to expect. In fact, I realised that that's what I do when I read erotica, and I'm a feminist, and I think seriously about these things, and I'm kind of fat myself. Because there is so much media and culture that centres around thin people (and it's an even greater proportion if you just count things which depict sex), the default setting on imagination is usually “thin”.

I really didn't want my characters to be defined by their fatness, but I didn't want it to disappear either: positive fat visibility is an important part of battling the damaging prejudices around body image that have made me and pretty much every other woman I know struggle with our bodies at some point. I had to find a way to make my characters come out of the closet as fat. This meant that I needed to describe their bodies in some sexy fat terms. The problem is, there are very few nice words for fat people. For thin people, there are words like slender, svelte, lithe, lean, lissome, slight, slim – although the point is that they’re not needed, because we're constantly presented with images saying that sexy equals thin. To describe fat people, there is much less choice. With the help of my Facebook friends I came up with a short and unsatisfying list, including Rubenesque (which translates as “you would have been sexy if you were born 450 years ago”), curvaceous (which doesn't really mean fat), and voluptuous (which just sounds a bit cheesy, really). All of them seemed to be skirting the issue of actual fatness being actually sexy. I didn't want to fetishise it, and I didn't want to talk around it. I just wanted to celebrate ordinary fat sexy bodies.

The truth is, though, that it's not really the words that are the problem. Fat is just a descriptor, like tall or brown-eyed. The problem is that because being fat is seen as a bad thing, its descriptors become loaded with negative meaning, to the point that they stop being used in positive contexts at all. I have often had conversations that go something like this: “and I've put on a bit of weight recently, so –” [interrupts] “Oh, no, you're not fat!” While I know that kind of comment is well-meant, it’s pretty annoying. I'm not being self-deprecating; I'm stating a fact. I know if I've put on weight, because it's my body. Yet people feel the need to refute it, like it's a terrible thing. Even mentioning it in passing to make some other point, it suddenly becomes the focus. How, then, do you write erotic fiction with all that ridiculous baggage? The answer that my friends and I came to (with the help of some wonderful fat activist writing) is to just go for it – to use words like fat unapologetically in positive contexts. That is, to do what queers and other outcasts have always done: to reclaim it. To just drop the baggage by making it clear that it doesn't have to be there. To use it in passing as if it were no big deal, since it shouldn't be. To use it in erotica as if it's totally sexy, because it is just as sexy as any other body shape.