Virgie Tovar

There are a lot of places where fat people don’t feel safe because of fatphobia. What does it feel like to feel safe in your fat body?

You deserve someone who loves your body, who makes you feel safe, who makes you feel sexy. Never date someone who doesn’t love your belly!

After years and years of fatphobia-induced body dysmorphia, it’s hard to actually just see my body with anything approaching objectivity. But when I finally looked at the photos of myself in my underwear, I knew there was nothing that fatphobia or my inner asshole could do to take away the beauty and the magic that was right before my eyes.

The double standard of the soda tax is glaringly absurd, but grounded in a long history of selective regulation and bigoted attitudes.

This week I went to a networking event and had feelings about it. This is the story of those feelings. 

I don’t want to move the line of the socially acceptable body by 50 or 100 or 150 pounds. I want to get rid of the line altogether because the line hurts everyone — even the people who are seen as the “winners.”

Fat people often get so little attention that feels positive. When someone offers exploitative attention or exploits fat people it can feel really good.

My favorite thing about this trip was that I spent my time in Vienna with fat feminists by my side every single day.... Occasionally, our bellies bumped into one another and then rebounded for just a second, like balloons. The familiar physics of fatness multiplied by two or three. I felt like we spoke in shorthand, the language of shared experience.

So, recently I started dipping my toe back into the poisonous dump site that is straight dating. Deep breath.