Sex & The Curvy Girl

by Liz Funk

This discrimination, Wendy thinks, is what drives curvy women to settle: “You can only be a strong-willed woman… for so long,” she’s written. “How many times can you be turned down because you’re a fat chick? If someone doesn’t push you down because of your weight, you’re just like, ‘Oh, thank God.’ Do you live your whole life without your sexy time, or do you just go with this person?”

Hardly surprisingly, many women take the rejection to heart. Says AJ, who is currently dieting, “It’s one thing if a guy rejects you because your personalities don’t match or you have a habit he doesn’t care for, but those are all things you can’t do anything about—that’s your personality, that’s you. But when a guy rejects you because of how you look, it hurts more, because it’s something you can change and it’s something you can’t change fast enough to please him.”

But are the stereotypes true? Does male approval really rest on a certain waist-to-hip ratio? “I think the stigma is based on that idea that women are supposed to be smaller and non-threatening and attractive for men,” says Wendy McClure, author of I’m Not the New Me, a memoir of her experiences with dieting—and eventually coming to terms with her size. “I really think it’s there to keep women in their place. It’s hard not to feel filtered out [of the dating scene] because your weight is over a certain level.” Dr. Stacey Rosenfeld, a New York-based psychologist, echoes her sentiments: “It might come from men who are indoctrinated with this belief that someone they’re dating needs to be thin because that person is of value and will look better and will give men more clout in society,” she says.

Arguably, the media can make the romantic landscape more perilous for overweight women. Even though there are more overweight women than ever before, there is great cultural stigma surrounding fat women wanting love, or worse, sex. The stereotype that overweight women would (and should?) be lonely is so culturally understood that the motif has been woven into commercials for national companies like Weight Watchers and Subway. Recent movies like Shallow Hal and Norbit are intended to disgust viewers with the concept of overweight women’s sexuality. But, ironically, getting sex isn’t always a problem for overweight women.

“The one thing I like about fat girls is that they’ll always [sleep with] you,” is what Rhiannon* heard a guy say when walking near a strip of bars popular among the college crowd in her city. “I personally had a good six months of being a total tramp in my early 20s,” she says. “I see these bigger girls out at clubs or at coffee shops, and they’ll just throw themselves at anyone who looks their way.” Says Wendy Wimmer, “It goes back to this whole idea of settling, this theory that fat girls are easy because they haven’t had any sex, so their ankles are up by their ears.”