Thick, curvy, voluptuous—nah. I’m a proud fat Black chick with no hangups about my size, and I have the nerve to expect a romantic interest to be comfortable with it. I learned a long time ago that I needed to love myself before anyone else was going to love me, so I’m perfectly happy being on my own if I can’t find a partner who accepts me as I am. But my past experience has borne out that it’s not impossible for a fat chick to get a date. Being sexy and fat isn’t as hard as some people would have you believe.

That said, society doesn’t exactly make it easy on fat women to develop healthy self-esteem. Even within the Black community, where fat is supposedly accepted so much more readily than in other cultures, fat women experience discrimination, disgust and ridicule. Fat might be more acceptable, but you have to be a certain kind of fat—padding in all the “right” places and none where it’s not desirable. Fat women with bodies that don’t fit the bill are either desexualized and Mammy-fied, or their sexuality is seen as a joke—take for example, Eddie Murphy’s Rasputia in “Norbit.” Black men dressing in fat woman drag and overpowering skinny men with their animalistic desire gets a lot of laughs because society has conditioned us to see fat female sexuality as something to be laughed at or disgusted by.

[Read the rest on Clutch Magazine.]