Objectification of Desire, an essay on fat fetishism

For issue one by Chloe Sheppard

Saggy tits. Let me start off by saying I will talk a lot about my saggy tits in this. My saggy tits and my fat body. Mine - that belong to me. Though for reasons I can’t quite fathom I let act as if they belonged to him for a long while. His fetish for my chest was made obvious from the get go, when we were talking on Snapchat before we’d met and he asked me if I had any weird fetishes, to which I replied no, and asked him the same question. 

His reply was “sounds strange but I love saggy boobs”. Initially inside I was quite delighted - thinking finally I was going to fuck somebody who would completely love my body and not pick fault with it in the ways that I do. But the glee soon faded when I realised that I’m not wrong to other my body, his way of describing it as a “weird fetish” just reinforced the ideas I already believed in, that my body isn’t as it “should” be, which made his liking of them so “weird”. My tits aren’t as perky as other people’s breasts and the depressing thought that although, yes, I do have big tits, they’re still not good enough because my nipples point to the floor when my bra comes off.

 I should also probably preface this essay by stating that as much as I tell myself I enjoy casual sex, deep down (actually, maybe not that deep) I crave something more intimate and fulfilling emotionally. This is probably where my problem with fetishism begins, lying plainly in the fact that having sex with someone who’s just using you for their own pleasure, means they’re unable to see you as good for more than that. 

My saggy tits - the pair that my mother gave me - that I despise and merely tolerate, that I hold up in photos I send to guys that want to see tits but don’t want to see my tits, are the one thing I am not honest about when it comes to portraying my fat body in my work. I’d been somewhat prepared for having to deal with tits that hang to my waist when I grew up, as my mum has never stopped moaning about hers. Even my dad had said not-so-kind words about my mum’s chest to me as a child: probably not realising the hatred he was helping manifest inside of me for my own body. 

My mum and I joke that all of my bad traits I got from her, my depression, my addictive self destruction, my non-existent excuse for a bum, but mostly my E cup enemies. I’m not sure I could have ever been totally ready to realise the repulsive reactions that my boobs can bring to people though. Young, ashamed, and not knowing any better, I internalised all of the boob shaming hatred I heard, which as I got older, left me utterly desperate to find somebody that would just do me the favour of fucking me. 

This led me to him. For the purpose of this piece let’s call him X. He was the second person I slept with in London, and his arrival was at a time I was most lost and looking for something to fill a void. After matching on every fat girls’ favourite app (not) - Tinder - he asked my Snapchat. Here, I was very aware of how this was going to go. Snapchat is not a place for delectable, romantic conversations - it’s now almost exclusively known as the go to app for easy-to-hide sexting. 

We first fucked a week or so after we’d matched - I’m not usually so impulsive but my flatmate was away and having a free house overnight was something I didn’t get too often. That first night was everything I could have wanted at the time and when he left, I felt elated. Sex for me has always been affirming I guess, which is debatably wrong in itself, but after having spent 23 years feeling like the least attractive person ever, sex validated me.

 It seemed like we had a good set up going, except the fact he’d just disappear on messages and then pop up a month or so later when he next wanted a shag. 

After living out the entirety of my 23 years single (something that isn’t as uncommon as I’d always thought) I conflated the want for sex with wanting love and affection too. When someone likes me or asks me on a date, I wonder what is wrong with them. What went wrong in their childhood that makes them attracted to a fat girl like me? 

This is my internalised fatphobia, that I have had no choice but to swallow due to its prevalence throughout my life. With him, I was shocked when we were having regular sex and I started to realise that it wasn’t actually me he was wanting to fuck - it was my flesh, my overflowing, copious rolls of fat, that got him off. His treatment of me was abysmal, yet for the fear of never finding anyone else to fuck as often, I couldn’t let go of him. He is mixed race, and for the first few months that we were fucking, he’d ask me what I liked and if I was just into black guys and whether it was a fetish thing for me. Which it isn’t; but I wonder if his asking me this often was his own way of projecting his fetish of my body onto me. If he just sees me as a slab of meat, maybe I feel the same about him? 

I think the exact moment the penny dropped was a fair few months into our tryst, when he sandwiched his dick in between where my hanging stomach fat was touching my thigh, and started to fuck it. I was confused. I remember laying there and thinking “what the fuck?” while he did it to me.

During sex he never shied from any part of my body, but this was something else. 

Grabbing my stomach during sex is very different from putting a dick between where it folds. Did I miss the memo on my stomach being a secret erogenous zone? 

I felt revolting, less than human, and spelled it out to myself - “I’m just a meat suit, so eloquently laid out for him to fuck as he likes”. In that moment it was as if what I’d always feared had been confirmed - that the only way I’d get to have sex in this fat body, was by fucking someone who had a fetish for it. That thought is something that has been drilled into me repeatedly from a teenager, whether it be from someone mocking a character on a tv show for dating someone fat and calling them a ‘chubby chaser’ or a message on a dating app saying “I love a BBW, wanna fuck?”  

On some level, I think I avoided admitting he had a fat fetish because I didn’t want to acknowledge that this was the only person I could get to fuck me. I feel less worthy than my thin peers every day, and this relationship between us just reinforced that: I don’t deserve the love that they do, with a body like this I am asking for a lifetime of being desirable to no one but a fat fetishiser. 

I watch my thin friends have sex with different people all the time, with minimal difficulty, and while they may get treated like shit and a personal sex toy too, it’s not specifically because of their body. I still slept with him for almost a year because I have had it drummed into my head that nobody would ever find me attractive, so it feels almost triumphant when I’m fucking someone and knowing that whoever made me feel that way was wrong. Like a giant fuck you! 

But am I even having sex for me, or to prove some sick sense of worth? 

He sends me a video of 2 guys penetrating a fat girl, and tells me this is what he wants to do to me - he’s been badgering me for a threesome ever since we first had sex. I shrug it off most of the time, the only time it seemed appealing to me was after my pregnancy drama and I really wanted to hurt him - I thought engaging in a threesome and having him watch me pay attention to and fuck another person would upset him, make him jealous - which is far from the truth; that’s what he wants - he just wants his dick somewhere in me whilst I’m doing it.

To him I am not a person, essentially soulless, just a body. During the peak of lockdown, resorting to drunken phone sex to get ourselves off together, he asks me to bend over in front of the camera as he wants to see my sagging tits swing. I oblige, and shake my shoulders so my chest mimics a relentless pendulum. 

The gratification I get from making someone cum is beyond me. I think I could engage with fetishism more if it felt pleasurable to me, or if they cared about my pleasure on any level, but for now my experiences of being fetishised have just left me uncomfortable and even more aware of how little self worth I seem to have. 

It could be that I’m merely searching for love in the wrong places, unable to admit that and be honest with myself, which is why I set myself up for this failure by exclusively fucking someone that has that fetish. 

For just the sex part, this premise is fine, especially when the sex you have is occasionally great. But not for anything else - not for romance, for intimacy, for seeing my worth reflected back at me - which seems unbelievably obvious as I type it, I just couldn’t see it whilst it was draining my own life. 

I’ve read a lot of stories from people who have the opposite mindset to me, who find empowerment in their indulgence of somebody else’s fat fetish and how it’s actually helped them to love their body more. For now, the thing that helps me love my body more, is discarding people that treat me like shit and just use me as and when they want. Which means I can safely say, having written this piece and having a new perspective, X will never be fucking, or within fucking distance, of any piece of my fat again.