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by Raphael Altman
From Radiance Summer 1999
 he
is five-feet-six-inches and weighs 220 pounds. I call her Fat Aphrodite
and adore her as she is. But not always has it been thus. Let me start
at the beginning.
She came from New York, I from Cape  Town,
South Africa. We met somewhere in the middle. She’d had the typical
fat kid experience: ridicule, bullying, and shame. I had the typical
macho heritage: fatties were out. She was thoroughly artistic by nature:
talented and temperamental. I was intellectually inclined: thoughtful
and analytical. She’d cultivated an assertive, compensating front and
appeared in her towering, indomitable persona wherever she went. We
first met at a folk evening in a club. She was singing. I was playing a
tea chest bass. Later, we danced and I was amazed at how she moved. We
became friendly: we moved in and out of each other’s compass, we
passed through our separate relationships with others. Then, five years
later, through various chains of events, we became a couple.
We both had healthy sexual appetites. Our very first
time together was a perfect, albeit simple, symphony. I was taken aback
at, but gradually became accustomed to, her mass. From the outset, I did
assume that she would lose weight. (Just a matter of time.) She herself
wanted to lose weight. My attitude toward her flesh was ambivalent. I
was getting used to it and indeed getting to like it, but I never veered
from the view that of course she needed to lose weight and that it was
possible. In the meantime, we went through all manner of adventures and
trips, both inner and outer, raised children (both adults now), and
pair-bonded.
We went through all the diets together; the whole
yo-yo experience. The most drastic was her HCG treatment, in our fifth
year together. (She got down to about 140 pounds.) Throughout it all, we
always had a very good sex life: caring, mutually pleasurable,
exploratory, adventurous, romantic, rapturous—virtually without a
break. She had, however, been deeply wounded as a fat child, and on one
or two particular occasions during our life together she was wounded
again. After a good, open start together, which included three years on
a Mediterranean island with lots of nudity, she reverted and retracted
into herself. Now she was up for anything, except open nudity! So there
we were, pushing back all the frontiers, but always vision-impaired:
overly dim lighting, not too much vertical posturing. I struggled with
my own sense of frustration and gave her all the encouragement I could,
but her emergence from this new shell was slow.
We’d already been together for about twenty years
when overt ideas of size acceptance first entered our world. She
happened upon Shelly Bovey’s book Being Fat Is Not a Sin (as it was
known then; later it was titled The Forbidden Body). We read it and I
went through a sea change in my thinking. At one point, I’d been
getting more and more into the way she was physically, but felt a
constraint not to voice this lest it undermine my encouragement to her
to lose weight. Reading Bovey marked a turning point, a liberation from
my inherited, misinformed, prejudiced attitude into a world of
understanding, sympathy, and relaxation of my uptightness about the
pursuit of weight loss. In Bovey’s book we read about Radiance, in
Radiance we first read about NAAFA and then about Dimensions. Each new
fat appreciation encounter rolled back the horizon. In the next couple
of years, we experienced an explosion of contacts with people and
phenomena with a radically different approach to one of the central
issues of our lives.
 I had always felt affection for her body,
and even during the dieting projects, I made tender references to her
shape. I even collected various snippets of "fatabilia" as I
came across them: drawings, pictures, photographs, and the like. But I’d
never seen a glam representation of a fat woman until I saw Dimensions
in July 1995, featuring model "Deb". Wow! Nor had I seen an
assembly of fat women naked until I saw the book Women en Large
(Radiance Summer 1994 feature). Gradually, our maturing views of her
body size and shape and its utter compatibility with being sexy,
combined with our exposure to more and more images of other fat women
and my constant encouragement helped her take steps, one after another,
to emerge from her cocoon of uncharacteristic and un-omfortableinhibition.
Indeed, we emerged together, smiling and blinking in some sun-filled new
space where we have been frolicking and cavorting ever since.
 reed from the fetters of societal indoctrination and grown
accustomed to the abundance of a fat female form, for me, as a man, the
peculiar pleasures of a fat partner became unparalleled. All this I
discovered privately. But increasingly I have read of the similar
experiences of others who have been either in the closet or simply
isolated. Like any other red-blooded late-twentieth-century Western
male, I’ve seen acres of images and print, but the first time I read
something like, "She went down on all fours, and her belly reached
down to the bed," not as a put-down but a turn-on, it was
eye-popping stuff. Of course, society’s portrayal of sexiness as
appearance is a limited view, whatever a person’s shape or size.
Sexiness has to do with appetite, capacity, enjoyment quotient,
imagination, inventiveness, sensuality, freedom. And, in our experience,
love.
 I suppose there is an issue of personal
taste and preference for particular types. The taste for lovemaking with
a fat partner, whether by spontaneous inclination or cultivation, opens
up a world of (apparently) unending delights. The special sensual
allure, feel, texture, and fascination of a fat lover, together with the
myriad of physical possibilities unavailable to thinner types, makes for
voluminous, voluptuous feasting.
So if you fancy a large woman, or, better still, if
you’re already with one, step out of your acculturation and dive on in
your diva on her soft divan. The water is warm and wonderful. ©
RAPHAEL ALTMAN and Tamar Altman have been married
for thirty-one years and have two adult children. Travel, education, and
music have been vital parts of their lives. They spent three years
living the good life on a small Mediterranean island, and thirteen years
in a spiritual study program in the U.K. Currently, they’re winding up
a glass painting business they’ve run for the past ten years. They
live in the countryside near Oxford, England, and can be reached via
e-mail at arty@aranti.freeserve.co.uk.
This essay has been adapted with permission from
the author. It was first published in Freesize, a
size-acceptance publication in Great Britain.
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