It’s 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and I’m on the 12th floor of a sexy New York City hotel. The king-size bed is inset into a floor-to-ceiling window. The room is lit from below and everything glows warm. A beautiful skater guy is in the bathroom taking off the second condom, while I’m sprawled out naked, giggling to myself. Our Nikes are on the floor next to our clothes. All black. I hear the water running and watch as he washes me off his hands and rinses me from his mouth. The curtains are open, the lights are on, and I’m buzzing. We just gave the neighborhood below quite the show.
If you had asked me a year ago, I never could have imagined I’d be having a night like this. Back then, I felt like I was wasting away in a sexless marriage. While we were very much in love, after two years, the sex stopped and we never figured out how to get it back. So I did what I always had—I attributed the loss of sex to the fact that I was a fat woman. A fat woman would never find love. A fat woman doesn’t have hot sex. A fat woman would always watch her thin friends date while remaining the funny, loyal, fat (read “horny”) sidekick. All lessons I learned by the age of 12.
Growing up in northern Japan in the 1990s meant the only access I had to American culture came to me through TV and magazines. And there were no movies or shows about fat girls falling in love. Or at least ones in which fat girls were loved back.
When my marriage ended, I was left feeling the familiar ring of self-hatred creeping in. Even though I’d already been years into my work as a body-positive activist and photographer, I still harbored deep self-hatred and internalized fatphobia. I believed the inspiring things I said were true about other women, not about me.
Sitting across from a girlfriend at brunch, I shared my thoughts on beginning to date again. “I have a hard time dating because guys…,” I began to trail off. I was going to say most guys didn’t like me because I was fat. But as I started to repeat that toxic statement, it became clear that I was still blaming my body for things that had nothing to do with me. And honestly, that made me sad—sad that after almost 10 years of publicly preaching the importance of self-love, I wasn’t fully embracing it. After 10 years of looking in the mirror and saying, “You are beautiful. You are worthy. Your body is not flawed,” I was still reverting back to self-hatred. After 10 years of panel discussions, photo shoots, and body-positive Instagrams, there were still remnants of that pain inside of me.
If I was going to move past my divorce, I needed to move past my insecurities and stop betting against myself. And the first step was to prove to myself that my size had no bearing on my ability to land a date—or at least a hookup. So, like any self-respecting, newly single millennial, I downloaded dating apps. Dating in New York City is a numbers game. The bigger the net, the bigger the catch. I decided on Tinder and Bumble to increase my odds and added the hottest photos of myself to my profile. It was both exhilarating and terrifying.
A few right swipes later, and I found my first “date.” A Jersey boy. Dark brown hair and eyes—and scruff meticulously trimmed close to his face. Muscular, square jawed, a vegan, and seemingly sweet.
“I’m free tonight. I could come over…but if I do, I’m spending the night. It’s a long drive.”
My stomach turned as I read his text. My divorce was still fresh, and I hadn’t “done this” in years. Was I going to be good at it? Did I even remember how to have sex? Were my pictures misleading? What if he doesn’t realize I’m fat? A million questions raced through my mind. But I made the conscious choice to quiet them—to still the voices of self-doubt that bubbled up inside of me. Maybe I couldn’t stop them from rushing in, but I could control how much real estate they occupied.
We sat on my couch and talked for hours. I watched as he stretched back, licked his lips, shifted his pelvis. We kissed on our way to my bedroom—tripping over our own feet as we moved. He was passionate, and a great kisser. The best part? He was as hungry for me as I was for him. And in that moment my size was the furthest thing from my mind.
We laid facing each other, spending the first few hours just kissing like teenagers. Slowly at first, then building. His hands are in my hair, mine on his face, then his neck, drawing his mouth deeper into me. I feel the passion boil up, setting my skin on fire. We deliberately take our time, and with the flick of his tongue, and the pulse of his hips, he makes waves move inside of me…for six hours that night.
People are surprised when I talk about sex now. Almost like they think it’s a miracle I have an active sex life, let alone a fucking hot one. But it doesn’t surprise me one bit. Because I’ve decided that self-love defines me. I am beautiful. I am worthy. I am horny.
Riding the high of sleeping with the vegan, I continued dating and meeting men. First the hot finance guy, the male model, then the neurosurgeon. Once I got back into the swing of flirting, to my surprise, no one was off limits. There’s no type of guy I'm “not allowed.” I spent a few weeks with a blond San Diego boy who loves to wear Celine. Then I spent a night with a 23-year-old in the Hamptons. I find magic with a sustainable fashion guy who is the best sex I’ve ever had. And the journalist, a devastatingly handsome man from Connecticut, reminds me about romance—and gives me orgasms that leave me shaking.
With each exploration of my sexuality, and each new partner (every one vastly different from the next), I marveled at how hot it all was.
At first I attributed it to being lucky. Somehow I just happened to find these secret sex gods. Then I realized it’s not that they are sex gods—it’s that I am. Once I became comfortable in my fat body, I was able to stop getting in my own way. I love my fat body now. The security I have in me radiates out. This isn’t to say that every experience has been perfect, or that my body is for everyone. Plenty of men still heavily subscribe to fatphobic rhetoric, and plenty of those men troll me on dating apps. I won't even repeat what they say, because it's not worth the time or energy, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t hard to receive those kinds of hurtful messages. But at the end of the day their fatphobia is their problem, not mine. Occupying public spaces (like dating apps), and giving my fat body the pleasure it deserves, is an act of defiance against a culture that still very much wants me to shrink, hide, and punish myself.
But once I decided I wasn’t limited by my size, my dating life changed. Suddenly I went from feeling like I had to just accept whatever came my way to feeling like I’m seated at a buffet table of men. Tinder Plus said 5,000 people swiped right on me. With every option on the menu, what do I actually want?
The narrative that fat girls don’t find love or have great sex with hot guys has become as foreign to me as any other fairy tale I was told as a kid.
I attract the hot guy because I am the hot girl—a fact that is neither hindered nor amplified by the size and shape of my body. Despite what I believed, the rules never existed. The limitations weren’t reality, and the only rules for attraction are the ones I make for myself. No one decides who is attracted to you except you. Every relationship, every partner, every hookup is a reflection of you. And when I decided that I was hot, the men of New York agreed.
Anastasia Garcia is a photographer and body-positive activist in New York City. She is currently working on her first novel detailing her experiences with dating as a fat woman. Follow her on Instagram @anastasiagphoto.
