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thehistoryofheaviness

Actress Angelina Duplisea looking spectacular in Miley Cyrus’s new video Mother’s Daughter … some idiots are criticizing the video for glorifying obesity

thehistoryofheaviness

Germany’s JRM Photography

theartofobesity

Ivory Coast artist Kady Sidibe

thehistoryofheaviness

La'Shaunae Steward Photographed by Ronan McKenzie

@luhshawnay

miniature-stigmata

people talking about your confidence is a fat girl thing, isn’t it?

i really can’t tell you how many times i get this in my inbox:

i love your confidence! your confidence is sexy! i envy your confidence!

and a thin girl recently told me: confidence is the most attractive thing a women can carry though, and that is only something you can control.

but i have never seen a thin girl be told it’s their confidence that makes them attractive. when i get these messages it really reads like: fat girls aren’t supposed to be confident and comfortable in their skin but you are!! and that’s kind of gross honestly.

miniature-stigmata

told yall

rapeculturerealities

Hint: It’s not because we don’t have them.

I was 15 years old, and a size 18, the first time a man told me he’d fantasized about raping me.

He told me that he longed to pin my hands behind my head, yearned to hear me tell him no. You’ll fight me off, but you’ll love every minute of it.

I was shaken, confused, disoriented. As he spoke, every breath drained from my waiting lungs, siphoned by his certainty that I’d be grateful for his violence. You’ll love every minute of it. The life in my veins seeped from my body into the ground I wished would swallow me whole.

Over time, men’s fantasies became part of the fabric of my experience. In the years that followed, more and more men would disclose their desire to assault me. When I told one to stop, in my mid-twenties, he was taken aback. I thought you were liberated. You should be grateful.

The menacing ghost of gratitude followed me everywhere. I was queer, which meant I was expected to be sexually flexible, unfettered by boundaries and unlikely to say no, available to be posed in any scene or position needed for men’s gratification. And I was fat, which meant I should be grateful for what I got. Even if it was violent. Even if I didn’t consent.

When I finally disclosed this pattern to thinner friends, I anticipated some knowing commiseration, some tools for survival. After all, we’d spent plenty of time developing shared strategies for creepy coworkers and lecherous neighbors. But to many of them, this ravenous violence was a foreign interaction, a reason to call police, run away, tell every woman I knew, do something drastic. Desperate measures.

For my thin friends, rape fantasies were an exception, the provenance of a particularly depraved kind of man. For me, they were the rule: so commonplace as to be routine. Around fat women, seemingly any man could be that particularly depraved kind.

More troubling were the reactions from thin acquaintances. A family friend and self-proclaimed feminist, upon hearing about this onslaught of fantasies, congratulated me. Isn’t it great to be wanted? And, more troublingly, there’s a lid for every pot. As if I had been disheartened about the selection of men who would take me. As if their violence were a sign of hope. As if it were just a misguided expression of attraction.

One friend asked why I hadn’t told anyone sooner. I was surprised by her question when the answer felt so plain. Like many women before me, when I share stories of harassment, catcalling, unwelcome advances, and violence, I am met with pushback. Unlike other women, that resistance comes as a question:

Who would want to rape you?

While thin women were free to talk about sexual assault as being somehow divorced from desire — rape is about power, not sex — I didn’t have that luxury. As a fat woman, my body was seen as inherently undesirable. Any sexual attention fat women receive is treated as a windfall worthy of congratulations, an erroneous impossibility, or an out-and-out lie. Fat women are expected to be grateful for any expressions that could be mistaken for want, including assault and harassment. We are exposed to an unvarnished kind of desire, its most violent self, because we are expected to hold and nurture whatever scraps of it we’re offered.

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