All The Fat Women I’ve Loved, or It Was Me Not You

The thing I miss most about being religious is needless beauty, the shared belief in creating places so beautiful they transcended the lowly materials they were made from. The Parthenon, Persepolis, the Sistine Chapel–all are impossible to imagine without a sailing faith in the need to please the Great Lebowski above us. Today it’s impossible to imagine any collective effort to build a public space with no higher purpose than shared sanctuary, a womb of perfect arithmetic. It’s not that we don’t have collective works anymore. Paul Allen convinced the city of Seattle to spend more than $400 million to build a football stadium. The city of Los Angeles spent $110 million to build a parking garage next to the phantasmagoric Walt Disney  Concert Hall.

Rather than beauty, the modern collectivism strives for a corrupt version of prudence. Spend a decade building a concrete behemoth because it will create jobs, attract new businesses investment, and help revive atrophying neighborhoods. We’ve traded the priest’s hallucinations of transcendence for the accountant’s. The results are hideously practical places, built with cheap materials and designed to communicate the mundanity of their lowest function. Work places and living spaces begin to merge. In the cities people commute from the cheap luxury of dry wall and tinted glass to austere high-rises of dry wall and tinted glass. In the suburbs people move from stucco-chic tract houses to stucco-drab office parks. Beauty has been privatized, cheapened, enfeebled.

I hate myself sometimes for not being attracted to fat women. I make a lot of rhetorical froth when describing what attracts me to a woman–intelligence, impulsiveness, insecurity, vulgarity etc. etc. etc.–but I have to admit all of those qualities have a precondition: body mass index. It’s the first thing I look for when my heart and penis take each other out for a stroll.

This is not to say I don’t sleep with fat women. I’ve been with as many big women as I have skinny women in my life. But I’ve never fallen in love with a fat woman. There is a special stigma to fatness here. We don’t just mean the soft layer of stored energy on a person’s body when we say the word. That’s an objective statement, like the length of someone’s hair or the color of the shirt they’re wearing. But fat has an inherent and negative meaning when we say it. It’s laziness, selfishness, greed, weakness, early death, and poor hygiene. Every one of those assumptions are axiomatically untrue, or at least co-equally true of all people irrespective of body fat, yet they’re superstitiously attached to the word “fat,” and thus it has become a taboo to both describe someone as fat and, even worse, to love a fat person with the same infatuated beauty as a slender person.

I once dated a woman who weighed more than me, someone who could fairly be described as fat. I remember walking home after the first time we’d had sex and repeating in my head over and over again, “I have a fat girlfriend,” a sort of hail mary to rid myself of all the negative presumptions I kept making against my conscious will. It was a painful thought to have because it was mostly formed by insecurity.

I assumed that there would be no public admiration when I walked around the block with a woman bigger than I was. I wouldn’t be able to outsource my self-esteem to the aggregate weight of other people’s admiring stares. We would have to be in our relationship alone, my attraction to her couldn’t find cover in some transcendent physical ideal parroted by magazine covers and tampon commercials. There would be no extrinsic model to refer to, no axiomatic expression of her worth that spared me from having to look deeper into myself. It was my weakness that made it easier to accept the standards of desirability set by the collective, even when my body and brain were pushing against that ideal.

My roommate Kate hates these conversations. I was talking with a friend about the heaviest women we’ve been with a while ago and I could see the scorn sharpening in her face. “What the fuck are you talking about?!” she half-yelled at me. “You have no idea how offensive you’re being.” I live with Kate and her sister Beth, who I befriended when we were in Peace Corps together. I’d never lived with women before I moved in with them. They’re strange women, both shameless about their bodies. In the summer they’ll sit around the living room in their underwear–or naked even–though when I come home they jump up to cover themselves in robes or baggy shirts. Their bodies are neither commodities of self-esteem, symbols of inner valor, nor perfected figures of arithmetic beauty. They are both beautiful women, but after two years it seems beside the point to trace any of that beauty to their bodies, whose shape and dimension are only indirectly in their control. The darkest and most inescapable irony of love is that the one thing we’re capable of loving most vigorously is the part of a person that says the least about them–the pinhole through which one glimpses a self in four dimensions, the bad translator trying trying to reshape the syllables from one language to another, filling the moments of uncertainty with meaningless placeholders, “ummmmm,” “ahhhhh.”

I remember having sex with the most physically beautiful woman I’ve ever been with. Her feet terrified me with their long tendons, curling toes, and nubby calluses on her knuckles. I held her legs up high and rested them on my shoulders as we had sex, her feet inches from my face. I tensed my jaw muscles and tried to keep my face turned towards hers. “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look,” I kept telling myself, knowing the claw-like terrors were hovering beside me

There is nowhere any body without repellent physical qualities. We are evolved to to be turned away by the essential functions of our body, the smell of another person’s sweat or shit warning against the dangers of swapping bacteria, risking invasion of microbial life your body might not be prepared for. The beauty myth connects to procreation, fatness a correlate to low procreative durability. This, I think, is a disfiguring presumption, a way of substituting efficiency and reliability for transcendence. Like 99.9% of all the other life that has been on earth and gone extinct, we will not survive. It is a delusion to think of beauty as the rounded underside of survivability. If we avoid extinction, we will eventually evolve into something other than what we are now, aliens to ourselves. Human beauty is the opposite of survivability, the embrasure of a moment that will extinguish itself, the interchangeable ellipsis of beginning and end. In that embrace a fat belly is as good as a skinny one.

And still I can’t let go of my fat anxiety. For all those words of love and embrasure, I discover in myself the rotting seed of competitive anxiety, a fear of accepting my own irrelevance, instead I subconsciously fight against it by wanting to accumulate as many outward symbols of valor and worth as possible, even at the terrible cost of needing a partner who looks a certain way, an austere body, lean and fit, ready for a future that will never come, secretly waiting for validation instead of giving it, subsisting on a transactional form of love that will never be more than a cryptic arrangement of numbers, the mysteries of proportion and bodily architecture left to stand in for the beautiful blank spots, now replaced with parking garages and the metal nightmares they stand beside.

*Images via Psych Ho’ and Ivan Mlaric