Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Moreover, it is a stamp of exclusivity and sophistication, and by association, the wealth necessary to travel. By the very fact of 76 FAT its demonstrations, Nosrat’s Fat shows us that to understand fat in this way, to know how to luxuriate in it and to have access to the right kinds of fat in which to revel, is something that not everybody has. Edible fat is not, of course, the same thing as human body fat. I would not want to suggest a false equivalency. One is taken into the body, the other is created by the body. Body fat may or may not have any relationship to culinary fat. That is to say: the fats we eat contribute energy to our bodies, but so do many other things. It’s possible that some of the energy derived from fats we eat is eventually transformed, through the silent industry of the metabolism, into fat our bodies store. It’s impossible to tell, though, and there’s no magic or “like causes like” relationship: eating fat does not, in and of itself, cause the body to generate fat. Edible fat and body fat are different things. Sensually speaking, they both offer distinctive and often deeply pleasurable experiences. They are symbolic in multiple ways good and bad. But we have strong feelings about both. We regularly make aesthetic judgments and decisions about them. Shall we blot the pizza grease off our slice or revel in its pepperoni-flavored unctuousness? Will we permit our jiggly thighs to do their thing in comfort, or are we going to Spandex those hams into trampoline-firm submission lest their jiggle be noticed? It depends, of FETISH 77 course. What are we in the mood for? What makes us feel good, versus what makes us feel ashamed or guilty? Just how much pleasure are we willing to take in fat, and how much of that are we willing to have witnessed and known? This is just as true when it comes to fat and sex. Fat, of course, is not everyone’s sexual cup of tea. Given that humans are the complicated creatures they are, though, this is not saying much, since neither is anything else. Not all gentlemen prefer blondes, not all blondes prefer gentlemen, et very much cetera. But many people, whether they think of it in these terms or not, appreciate the sexual pleasures of fat: hips, butts, breasts, even the plumpness of kissable lips are very much dependent on fat. Physical femininity and fat are, in a very real way, inextricable. There’s an old, eye roll—inducing joke that runs “How do you make ten pounds of fat irresistible?” “Stick a nipple on it!” Not for nothing is “big naturals,” meaning big breasts whose size is not thanks to surgery, a popular pornography category. Although breasts aren’t the only place the body can deposit fat—and not everyone who has breasts and is fat has big breasts—it is also true that the glands and ducts that allow for milk production are roughly the same size in all bodies, which means that the amount of fat deposited in the breast is what determines its size. As with fat deposits anywhere else in the body, 78 FAT no one can choose how much the body will deposit where. The body’s tendency to preferentially put fat into the breasts is doubtless vexing to people who’d rather not have big breasts or perhaps breasts at all, but it’s a joy and a pleasure to those who find big, plump, weighty, jiggly breasts completely entrancing. The same is true of hips and butts. The so-called “hourglass” or “Coke bottle” figure so often touted as the perfect womanly shape in our culture is due in part to fat. People with uteruses find that at puberty their hips tend to broaden. This is not just a matter of skeletal growth, it’s a matter of sex-linked fat deposition. When puberty arrives, people assigned female at birth add fat at nearly twice the rate of people assigned male at birth. They add it in particular places, too: breasts, butt, hips, and thighs. Scientists believe this confers some advantages during pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation. More to the point for our discussion here, this fat pattern attracts a lot of attention both aesthetically and sexually, and according to the historical and artistic record this is nothing new. But does this attraction and this attention that we pay to fatty feminine curves constitute a fetish? It depends on how you look at it. In psychiatric diagnostic terms, a fetish is an inanimate object or a body part on which a person is sexually fixated and from which that person derives the lion’s share of their sexual satisfaction. Some FETISH 79 formulations of the definition hold that to be a fetish, the fetish object must be present if the fetishizer is to be able to reach orgasm. Certainly there are people who feel this way about fat bodies, and about specific parts of fat bodies including pendulous bellies, cellulite, back fat, and more. These people and their fetishes are, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, mostly harmless, much like the vast majority of other people’s sexual quirks and foibles. After all, there are people whose sexuality is similarly concentrated on other body parts and states: some fetishists love armpits or hair, feet or fingernails, the skinny or the aged or the amputee. Why not fat? Yet as I discovered when I wrote the first book on fat and sexuality back in 2000, a sexual fetish for fat is a bridge too far for many people. Many people, on hearing about the book, had a hard time even with the notion that that anyone could find fat bodies attractive at all. Initially I was baffled by this, then I was just confused. Relatively few people actually have fetishes that fit the classical definition, regardless of whether the fetish object is fat or feet or firearms (a very American fetish object indeed). But many people enjoy them and, furthermore, think nothing of defending their enjoyment. Why else would ample breasts and curvy hips, or stiletto heels and stockings, or for that matter the National Rifle Association, be so popular? In the twenty years since I wrote that book, it has been my repeated observation that to put a name to a sexual attraction to fat is to invite being called a fetishist. The idea of having a “fetish,” after all, seems suspicious to many people, abnormal, probably sick. Given the depth and intensity of our training to abhor and abjure fat, it also seems suspicious and abnormal and probably sick if one fails to hate it, let alone likes it in some way. This, to my way of thinking, is proof of our real fat fetish. We have created a fetish object of wrongness, of ugliness, of undesirability out of something common and generally benign. This is fetish as sympathetic magic: the thing becomes what we believe it to be, and it taints by association. Little wonder that the boundary between fat and thin is so unclear, so prone to shift, and so electrically charged. Every time we compartmentalize fat, accepting some as good and rejecting the rest as vile, tolerating this sort but violently rejecting that one, we transform it into a thing that has far more power than one would think something so profoundly associated with laziness and immobility ever could. Fat is a continuum. This is not a difficult thing to grasp. Fat comes in many varieties and manifestations. But all of them are fat. Only the magic we do through our thinking separates it into the tolerable and intolerable, the delicious and the poisonous. This is why we don’t like to admit that there is even a family resemblance between the fat that cures what ails you, demonstrates your gourmet savoir faire, or fills out your voluptuous body . . . and the fat that might make people think you’re ugly, stupid, uncultured, and whose bad reputation clings like the reek of old fryer grease. Consider the disconnect between the kinds of fat consumption and enjoyment shown in the “Fat” episode of Salt, Acid, Fat, Heat and the kinds of fat that the average American might actually consume on an average day. Porchetta and pesto, prosciutto and focaccia glistening with fresh green olive oil are an absolute cornucopia of delicious fat. So, indeed, are a burger and fries and a milkshake. But the latter is, even when rendered in a high-concept way, a lowbrow meal. The whole gimmick of the Kobe beef burger and duck-fat fries with truffle salt lies in the collision of lowbrow foods and high-end ingredients, the interplay of louche and luxe. In America’s mainstream food culture fat is undeniably a pleasure, but it tends to appear as a guilty, crass, and thoughtless one associated with the greedy maws of the masses. Thus Nosrat’s fatty travelogue had to go not just anywhere but to Italy, with all its centuries of associations with high art and fine living, to establish fat as unquestionably being a realm of cultured, thoughtful, well-savored delight. Fat tastes good and feels good. This is part of why it troubles us. The deep, originally Christian conflict 82 FAT about pleasure we inherited from our ancestors very much includes fat. The denial of fatty and fleshy foods like meat and butter is the cornerstone of centuries of Catholic fast day cuisine. But denial always generates tension. Desire precluded is not desire erased. Even the most devout believer might begin to feel deprived or wake up one Lenten morning with a terrible and unshakable craving. One of the towers on the majestic cathedral at Rouen, France, was reportedly built with the proceeds from priests selling permissions, aptly called “indulgences,” a sort of spiritual hall pass that allowed good Christians to eat butter when they weren’t supposed to. Are we really so willingly naive about our own lives that we can’t glimpse the connection between buying an indulgence to eat butter and cream and our vows, spoken aloud, to go to the gym and work off the French fries we just ate?