The freshman 15 was totally real for me...In fact, it turned into the freshman 35.
I distinctly remember trying to squeeze into the jeans that I wore around my high school graduation and my heart breaking when they wouldn't go over my hips. I remember holding back sobs as I noticed my weight continuously rise when I went to the doctor. I remember going over the 200 mark, then 210, then 220. I went up around 3-4 sizes during my freshmen year of college; I wore baggy clothes to hide my 'love handles'.
I have always been considered a larger framed girl. I had DD breasts and hips wider than my waist and what they considered "thunder thighs". It was like a breath of fresh air to see models like Tess Holiday and Ashley Graham (who is literally my wife) come out, showing the body diversity that I so longed to see. But something never struck me as quite right...
When people would console me about my weight, they would often say "Men like girls with curves!" "Only real women have curves!" and "At least you have enough to fill out dresses!" Like I was some kind of subspecies of human. Whenever I went to the plus size section of a store, I would encounter one of two things: pitying stares or creepy nods of approval. When the average American size is a 16, why am I being seen as some kind of fetish, needing to be hidden until I'm needed to fulfill a fantasy?
I have had so much trouble accepting my body size, especially because I was considered 'plus size', when in reality, women's clothing sizes are total bullshit. None of these fetishizing comments, usually from men or older women, helped either. Why am I only desirable when I can fill out a sexual fantasy?
Another problem of fetishizing fat girls isn't necessarily sexual. When people see a fat girl (and yes, I will call myself fat, like I will call myself witty or intelligent) eating healthy or at a gym. People will use terms like "Such an inspiration!" to describe this poor woman just trying to finish her daily routine, and people use us "plus sized" women as items of inspiration, as "before pictures", synonymous with "Well if she can do it, why can't you?" Let me explain the problems with this mentality.
1) That is incredibly rude to the woman you are using as a model. Yes, you may think it is flattering, but many of us don't see our weight as something that hinders us in our everyday life. The only time it hinders us is when jerks like you are making a spectacle of our weight.
2) Our weight is not always correlated to our health. Many women are perfectly healthy and are considered obese on a BMI scale.
3) For all of the other girls who struggle with exercising and aren't overweight are automatically feeling guilty.
and
4) We are not our weight.
When you fetishize me, you are degrading me down to the amount of meat I have on my bones. You forget that I was salutatorian of my high school, that I have had a steady relationship with my boyfriend for 4 years, that I laugh and play around with my friends just like everyone else.
When you fetishize me, you automatically characterize me as someone who should be ostracized because of my size. Your ways of "inclusion" actually make our lives harder.
We don't want to hear that guys like our size, that is gross to us. We aren't this size to please anyone else.
We don't want to hear that people pity us, that makes us different than you.
If you want to make us feel better, normalize "Plus size". Make plus size not a thing, and make it a size. I am a size 16, not some creature with 16 arms that needs a special store to fit my needs. Stop fetishizing us, and start normalizing us.
