I am thinking about fucking.
how fucking has become a political word…how I, who have never been fucked, use this word.Every day when I leave my house with my breasts out and my clothes tight…I say fuck you to this fat phobic culture. When I demand to be heard I say fuck you to those who silence me because I am fat, female, poor.
Fuck is political like Obama…divorced from an actual body, so much larger than an individual….a movement.
Lilly allen wrote a song about it…fuck you….not about fucking at all….about giving the finger to politicians against gay marriage.
I talk about how fucked up the world is daily…but I rarely talk about fucking people.Perhaps these words are incompatible in my fat existence. In my work as a fat activist I constantly hear about size discrimination, hatred…I experience hatred on a daily basis because of my body. Putting on my fuck you armor is work. It is a daily process of hardening myself…reminding myself my body is fabulous and the world around me is miserable and, most likely, starving after a breakfast of jogging and Starbucks. In fighting to be treated as human I often lose sight of my sexuality. My life becomes me against the world. Us fatties against the skinny bitches. A fat phobic world against fat me.
I love my body. I won’t stand for discrimination…but thinking of my body as a attractive to other people is a concept that is hard for me…statistically it is not attractive to the average person. Men don’t look at me with desire in their eyes on the street. I dance in clubs with abandon because I know most people there only see a tragic fat body. I love my body but I don’t expect or ask others to. I only ask to be treated as human. You can demand civil rights but can you demand to be desired? In the step by step process of fat equality…I have always been more concerned with people losing their jobs than not having a sex life.
I find myself in a dissonant place. I want my body to be viewed as something sexy and attractive…yet I want to be attractive because of all the other qualities I possess. I once went out with a man who was only into fat women. He talked about his love for large breasts, for pillowy bodies, his erotic response to mounds of flesh. I was horrified. It was not me but my body he was into. It was not my mind or spirit he wanted…it was my fat body. Is this what skinny women go through? We had an incredibly awkward conversation where he moved in for a makeout session and I scooted further and further away from him before concocting a story to get him out of my house.
He was nothing I wanted in a partner…out of touch with his emotions, academic in a pretentious way….but there are days when I still wonder if I should have had fucked him.
I am an emotional old fashioned woman. Perhaps it is my Christian upbringing, but I still view fucking as more than bodies intertwined. There is a giving of one’s self in sex that I am not ready for. Yet, in this institute on sexuality, there is such confusion over my decision.
I work twenty hours a week teaching. I work thirty plus hours a week on various non-profits. I write, I research, I pull grades I am proud of. Fucking takes time and emotion. I don’t have it to give in the bedroom.
My fucking is political. Fucking with a system. Fucking with those in power. Fucking with the academy. Just not fucking in my bedroom.
