Monday’s edition of NBC’s Today explored “fat sex” and the misconceptions about fat people and their sexuality with Rebecca Jane Weinstein, the large-sized author of Fat Sex: The Naked Truth.
Weinstein characterized the subject as a “provocative,” explaining that it is important to counter the widely-held beliefs that “large-sized people are unattractive to everyone, that they’re asexual, that they’re not interested in sex.”
“The truth of the matter is,” she explained, “there’s no difference between large-sized people, small-sized people — as far as sex goes. Everybody is interested in what they’re interested in.”
(Source: NBC-TV and Mediaite.com)
For the book, Weinstein collected stories about sexuality from other adults who struggle with weight issues. The common theme, she found, was that “because of the messages people are given about size — starting from very young — they believe that they just aren’t worthy.”
Nutritionist Kerri Glass added that, regardless of weight, “the person with a better body image and a positive body image is much more likely to be intimate and get into bed with someone.” She mentioned that the popular Barbie doll represents the unrealistic goals set by society, especially because if Barbie were real “she would be seven-feet tall and wear a size five shoe.”
“And those images in our culture can be damaging to anyone’s self-image, regardless of their weight,” Glass concluded.
Weinstein told the stories of her own personal struggle with weight. When she was a nine-year old, she explained, her grandmother told her and her family that “no one would ever love her” because of her weight. “You never get over that entirely,” she said as she detailed her “yo-yo’ing” struggle with weight loss and weight gain as a teenager.
