I
was born into a world where fat girls are outlaws, living on the
outskirts of society: a band of lawless revolutionaries, fighting
against myopic standards of beauty and archaic forms of femininity. A
world where we are like Thelma and Louise meets Che Guevara, the stuff
of fantasies and legend. We populate the masturbatory thoughts of
millions. We are corporeal anarchists. We are the sensualists, the plus
size queens. We are the flag-bearers in a turgidly anti-pleasure
society.
When
people talk about fat girls who are fat because they eat cake and drink
milkshakes, who refuse to cover up their cottage cheese and take up two
seats at the Broadway production of Rent, they’re talking about me.
When people talk about those brown girls who refuse to capitulate to our
“post-racial” political climate or those high femmes who love demanding
you take photos of them in various permutations of the same outfit or
those sluts whose cleavage makes more public appearances than Sarah
Palin, they’re talking about me. And, no, I’m not sorry.
I’m
a fat, smut-writing, high femme, Xicana fauxhemian with a breast fetish
and a story about Jesus’ cock you wouldn’t believe. And I need you to
know three things: first, despite everything you’ve been told about
260-pound women, people love eating my ass and thank me for the
privilege. That is, fat girls are definitely hot. Second, we fat girls
have a hard time closing our legs and that is the first on a list of
reasons that we are revolutionizing gender politics. And third, there’s
no wrong way to be a fatty.
I’ve
learned about the power of my fat from a lot of different people - some
radical cunt-loving baby dykes at UC Berkeley, the scores of people
I've had the pleasure of fucking, the old dudes at my parents' church,
that hateful bitch on MUNI, femmes, queens and burlesque startlets. I’ve
learned that my fat makes some people happy and others bewildered, some
people horny and others erupt into full-on, nostrils-flared,
carrot-waving rage. I’ve learned that my body is my yummy conduit to
pleasure and I’ve decided that I am going to love my body come rain or
shine, through the dick rivers and the cock famines, though the days
when I want to wear my ugly mint green terrycloth nightgown and the days
when I want to wear my cheetah print platform heels. Body love is the
most real kind of love. Like real love, I’ve got to
fight to keep it. Like real love, I’ve got to believe I deserve it.
Like real love, I fuck up over and over, but I forgive myself and I try
not to make the same mistakes again. I’ve decided that the world is a
strange and arbitrary place. But it’s also a place filled with flowers
and kittens, carnitas and Costco, glitter and cheese. And a world filled with these things isn’t hopeless.
Being
a fabulous fat girl is not easy. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever
decided to be. I am chastised for my role in spitting on the shiny,
brown loafer of the man. People are jealous and passive aggressive. They
whisper. They haterade. But I strut my ass through the world with the
knowledge that no one can touch the secret part of me that knows I’m a
mother-fucken queen.
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Virgie Tovar is a sex-educating, cupcake-eating Xicana high
femme iconoclast who lives in San Francisco. She doubles
as hitachi-wielding burlesque starlet Dulce de Lecherous. Crowning
achievements include Best Sex Writer (SF Bay Guardian, 2008), authoring
Destination DD: Adventures of a Breast Fetishist with 40DDs (Sexy
Advisors Press) and The Virgie Show on CBS Radio's 106.9 FM.
