Quenby Creatives

This is a post about my own body image issues, and an experience I had which helped me with them. This story is based on real experiences but has been edited and fictionalised for reasons of concision and discretion.

 

Trigger Warnings: Fatphobia, Body Image Issues, Sexual Content

 

We are all over each other, mouths locked together in a filthy kiss. Our hands are frantic, pulling off clothes, touching and teasing and feeling each other with desperate lust. I push her down onto the bed and then step away for a moment, pulling off my shirt and jeans. I turn back and pause, her eyes are on me now, staring shamelessly.

 

And suddenly I’m painfully aware of what she sees, what the world tells me I am. A fat man in a thong. All folds and flab and stretch marks. Disgusting, grotesque, unequivocally unsexy. I look away, not wanting to see the revulsion in her eyes.

 

I hear the bed groan slightly as she gets up and moves towards me. Her arms wrap around me and nails run over my body, varying between teasing and scratching. I moan in surprise as the roaming hands find the sensitive skin on my sides, then blush self-consciously.

 

She grins and leans in to kiss me. “I love those”

 

I look at her in bemusement “What?”

 

“Stretch marks, people can have such interesting reactions when you touch them”.

 

I stare at her, looking for the sarcasm, the punchline, the insult I’ve learned to expect whenever this topic comes up. But her eyes are alight with genuine affection,  the pupils dilated with lust. She moves down my body now, kissing and nibbling as she goes. She bites down hard on my chest, I gasp and look down at the flushed mark on the swell of my breast. She kisses the swell of my belly, and then her hands are on my ass.

 

“You look fucking hot in lingerie”. Again I search her face for mockery. Again my anxieties fail to be reflected there.

 

---

 

And thats when I realised two things at the exact same time:

1. She found me genuinely attractive, she desired my body rather than merely tolerating it
2. This was genuinely the first time I’d thought of that as a feasible possibility.

 

Looking back it’s painful to see how much I’d internalised the fatphobic messages perpetuated throughout society. Growing up I was told I was fat and learned to be ashamed of that fact.

 

Of course this was just the start of a long process. Years later I am still trying to mprove my relationship with my body. But it was a beginning. It was a realisation that things could be better. Looking back that was when I started to look at my hatred of my body as a psychological rather than a physiological issue. And for that I will always be grateful.