To start out, I’ve read that poor men prefer heavier women, hungry men prefer women with larger breasts, and working men prefer stronger women and that frequently means women with thick waists. I can’t say how true these statements are but they sure seem to apply to me. That I was touch-starved as a child probably has something to do with it as well — when my brother, sister, and I found out about the Soft Mother/Wire Mother experiments (look them up if you want to be depressed,) we started calling Mom ‘Wire Mother.’
I can’t remember ever having any response to fatness that took precedence over fascination. My first memory of fatness would date back to when I was three or four. The visuals of the memory tell me it took place outside Brennan’s seafood restaurant in Berkeley. I was with my mother and grandmother and as we crossed the street from the parking lot, I saw two fat women in miniskirts. This was back in the hippy days and if you don’t believe in fat hippies, look up Mama Cass.
Anyway, across the street. The legs emerging from the bright floral-print miniskirts were thick and smooth and pale and I wanted to run over and wrap my arms around one of those soft, generous thighs. I said, “Mom, why do those ladies have such thick legs?”
Mom, visibly flustered, hissed, “Don’t make personal remarks.”
I hadn’t intended anything but admiration. I hadn’t seen anyone like those two and I was — to repeat the word — fascinated. I kept my eyes peeled for any images of fat women I could find. Back in those days, fat people were very much in the. minority and images of them were taboo, thought to blight crops and cause hailstorms. You had the Guiness Books of World Records and that was it, until the publication of Very Special People. I didn’t know that when I had the library get a copy for me. I just knew it was about something extreme, something on the fringes of the human experience, about how people with strange bodies were placed on display. It was an odd book, attempting to compensate for its blatant exploitation by providing relatively sensitive and sympathetic biographical material.
It had a number of images of fat women in it and they made my chest tighten, my breathing shallow. One, Jolly Nelly, had a dark satin dress and white thighs even thicker than those of the women I’d seen outside Brennan’s. I can still see them in my mind’s eye; no doubt they informed the vision that led to my sexual awakening.
In speaking of that initial conscious experience, I use the word ‘vision’ in a specific sense. It was not a hallucination I believed I saw; rather, it was a scrambled combination of sounds, sights, and sensations all leading me to experience a gargantuan woman approaching my house in search of me. I heard her approach, I felt the street buckle and the sidewalk snap under her weight, I heard her puff and moan as she approached, drawing inexorably nearer until she towered over my house, focused on my bedroom, my bed, and then the roof was demolished, smashed, the frame of the house snapping apart as though made of toothpicks, and as the great breast burst through the ceiling and pinned me, helpless.
And when I came around, I thought, “Oh, that’s why grownups fuss so much about sex. Got it.” I’ve been attracted to women who weren’t fat but fatness possesses some fundamental, essential quality that goes right past the conscious mind and punches buttons that have been in place since the carving of the first Venus.
So I’ll say it again because what I tell you three times is true. I am fascinated by fat women because I have always been fascinated by fat women. The game of explanations can be fun but there is no real explanation for the primal.
2 months
