Big Girls Don't Cry

‘My second girlfriend actually refused to wear skirts until she got involved with me. I think that the lack of self-esteem can impact relationships to some degree.

People need to feel sexy, and this can be a problem for a bigger girl when she becomes sexually active… It can be hard to console a girl with a body image issue.’

Fair enough. And while Joe says that there are more out there like him, he thinks that many of them care too much what people might think to actually date a fat girl that they’re attracted to.

Next time a billboard makes you feel like a piece of shit because you’re not a Photo-shopped little fembot, keep in mind a saying the French have: ‘Everyone has their own taste.’ As it turns out, there’s a surprising number of dudes whose taste runs to the more ‘decadent’ shall we say. When it comes to their ladies, they believe that more really is more, and that you can ditch the gym if you want, because the only weight you need to be lifting is a Quarter-Pounder with fries…

When Donna Simpson, a 250-something-kilo woman from New Jersey, USA, announced that she wanted to be ‘the fattest mom in the world’, the whole world sat up and took notice.

They looked in fascination at her gigantic form and asked themselves why she would willingly make herself such an easy target for ridicule.

They got taxpayer’s rage at the cost she’d be imposing on the health system. Then they asked themselves, how it was that her slim, proudlooking husband could stand there next to her like that, smiling as if nothing was wrong.

‘He wouldn’t mind if I got bigger,’ she famously said in an interview. ‘He’s a real belly man, so he supports me.’ But to put in terms that everybody can understand, Donna Simpson’s husband is a ‘fat admirer’ or ‘fat fetishist’, what we more colloquially know in everyday life as a good, old fashioned ‘chubby chaser’.

Defined as someone who has a fetish for adipose tissue, it doesn’t sound particularly attractive to anybody who marks the days before the next Victoria’s Secret show. In fact, many of you have probably made fun of a friend who took a big girl home. After doing the research though, I think some of you might be trying to cover up for something: there are a lot more members of the Large Ladies Appreciation Society than we realise, and plenty of them are ones you’d catch yourself perving on at the doughnut shop.

A quick Google search with a few choice words reveals a whole swag of dating sites that cater to the large-lady-lover straight away. Sites like bbw. com (‘big beautiful women’) are full of surprisingly attractive candidates, albeit with a ‘heavy’ skew towards large, pretty-faced women and a decent assortment of guys in a slimmer weight range.

A glance at the typical male profile is the same as you’d expect on any dating website, except that they’ll often stress that they’re looking for somebody ‘particularly curvy’.

I mean let’s not bullshit here: we’re in the prime territory of tits and ass men. It’s just that, unless you pay for them, T&A like that usually come in bigger packaging.

One chubby chaser I interviewed, ‘Joe’ (not his real name), says it’s all about the shape for him: ‘I think that it should be made clear, that it’s not always a matter of actual weight,’ he says. ‘Although I prefer a girl around 200 lbs [around 100 kilos], I’m flexible. A girl can be 150 lbs but if she’s got it in all the right places, she’s sexy. Same with a 350 lb girl.

‘That extra fat accentuates the female figure. It’s also a matter of pleasing more than one sense.

A girl with a little extra fat is not only visually attractive, but also soft, smooth, warm and just overall more sensuous.’

‘I think that some guys would like chubby girls, but they are too self-conscious about what others think of them. History and anthropology reveal that big girls have been highly desirable and are still the preference in some cultures.

This idea that men prefer thin, thin girls is a distortion created by a profit-driven media in a capitalist economy and the idea is actually very young. I don’t think the minority is as small as society would have us believe. It’s not really an accurate picture of most males’ preference.’

So, you might be with a chubber-lover and not even know it then. Giveaways include him saying he wouldn’t mind if you put on a little weight or preparing and buying you food… all the time.

In fact someone who wants to feed you and watch you gain weight is called a ‘feeder’ and it’s a real, legit fetish. To cover her $750 USD weekly grocery bill, Donna Simpson has an alter ego called ‘Treasure Bombshell’ on a website specialising in XXX-L porn: supersizedbombshells.com. You can look at photos of Donna in a bikini, or for 11 bucks, download a video and watch her do what she does best: eat. It’s all as graphic as is possible with that much overhanging fat involved. While most of us can go a whole month without seeing anything larger than a size 2 in a bikini, the sight of Simpson wearing one, supporting herself with difficulty as she poses on all fours is, well, pretty confronting. There’s something very exploitative, sick and unhealthy about the whole thing and clearly at the opposite end of the spectrum to Joe. I mean, he’s talking a few extra handfuls—if Donna Simpson keeps up her current effort of 12,000 calories a day (2000 more than the superhuman amount consumed by Michael Phelps when in training), she is going to die. It’s that simple.

‘These websites are a legitimate niche in the economy just as other porn sites are,’ Joe explains, ‘and although I’ve never fed or encouraged a girl before, I have had the desire. I don’t think most feeders have gotten a chance to act on it. After reading about it though, I found that feeding and gaining isn’t even necessary. One can create the illusion of weight gain by wearing smaller clothes. This works just as well as real weight gain for some couples.’

Although I prefer a girl around 200 lbs, I’m flexible.

OK, we’ve all heard the words the media use to avoid saying the dreaded f word. Flattering terms like ‘curvy’, ‘shapely’ ‘sensual’ and ‘feminine’ get thrown around a lot (making naturally scrawny girls everywhere feel like total shit, I might add). But when you fall into the sort of weight range that people tend to joke about only going home drunk with, does that mean that extra baggage comes with extra emotional baggage as well?

‘Yes, I’ve found that the heavy girls I’ve dated are very uncomfortable with their bodies,’ says Joe.

Well, whether you like big butts or for you there’s ‘no buts about it’, there’s no denying the debate is hefty. While no one can condone being a fat sack of diabetes at 30 and eating yourself to the half-tonne mark, if you don’t want to give up your double E’s for crudités then live it up, big girls: apparently there’s an audience out there who like you better than anything to come out of the ‘Photo-Shop’. So get out there and flaunt what ya mama gave ya! Or Burger King, whatever.

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