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November 02, 2006
BBW Sexuality
Speaker at Silver explores fat sexuality
by Beina Xu
Contributing Writer
March 29, 2006
At 5-foot-3 inches and 430 pounds, xxxxxxxxx.com webmaster Heather Boyle is on a mission: To tell the truth about being fat.
To a group of about 70 students, Boyle openly discussed fat sexuality, the movement behind it and its implications in today’s society.
“We’re somehow social outcasts,” said Boyle, who spoke last night at the Silver Center. “Diets are society’s way of telling you what you should look like, but 64 percent of America is overweight. If we’re the majority, then whey are we being treated like the minority?”
Since she was 18, Boyle has modeled for various magazines and now runs Bigcuties.com, a subscription-based fat porn website, which currently has 16 models that pose both nude and clothed and star in soft core and hard core films.
“Fat sells,” she said, describing the pornography on her website as identical to any other type of porn.
“Just insert fat girl here,” she said.
She encouraged girls to accept their “curves,” and affirmed that the sexual material on her website embraces and respects the models’ bodies.
As a child and throughout her adolescence, Boyle said she tried numerous diets imposed on her by her mother —, all with little or no success. She began to realize that there was “no reason to cover it up,” and gradually learned to embrace her body, modeling for the first time at age 18 on the cover of Dimensions Magazine.
In a slideshow presentation complete with photographs from her X-rated website, Boyle talked about her “fat experience” and compared it to being gay. Although she’s confident and enjoys flaunting her sexuality, she said it isn’t easy.
“It’s like coming out of the closet —, being fat is not a choice,” she said.
Boyle also acquainted the audience with “fat terminology,” introducing them to terms like BBW —, big beautiful woman —, and FA —, fat admirer —, in a slide titled “Learn to Speak FAT!” which roused scattered laughter from the audience.
Yet through her humor, Boyle made sure to communicate her message about the common social prejudices that she said are inflicted on overweight individuals by society.
“They show us as these lazy, sloth-like people like that guy in the movie ‘Seven,’ ” she said. “We don’t just sit at home and eat Twinkies all day. And that image creates the most guilt for FAs who actually dig a little junk in the trunk. It’s terrible.”
Boyle’s own reception at the Silver Center spoke to these concerns about the treatment of overweight people like herself.
Professor Don Kulick, director of NYU’s Center of Gender and Sexuality, said his department was met difficulty when accomodating Boyle for the event. When he asked the Silver Center building maintenance crew to move a couch from the first to the seventh floor so Boyle could sit in that instead of a chair, the building maintenance did not respond.
After Kulick and the center’s administrator, Robert Campbell, appealed numerous times over the course of two weeks, school administrators still denied the request. Their only response was that the couch was too heavy to move, Kulick said.
In her talk, Boyle also discussed some airlines’ policies toward what the airlines call POS —, people of size —, with the same frustration as Kulick in his efforts to accommodate his guest speaker.
“If someone broke a leg and needed a second seat, the airlines would offer it to them immediately,” Boyle said. “But we have to pay for an extra one. Why? We pay taxes too, how are we less than a first-class citizen?”
Boyle said she wants to help overweight individuals feel accepted by society.
“We’re just animals, our bodies take their own course, and that’s who we are,” she said. “And it’s the people who are so unforgiving that makes it so hard.”
Posted by ronnie at November 2, 2006 07:07 PM