There's more than one way to be a fatty! - Guest Post by Virgie Tovar

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.