What I’m saying is that fat women’s bodies are never (in the mainstream) represented as desirable. I think the emphasis on attraction to ‘the person inside’ perpetuates the idea that fat women’s bodies aren’t desirable, that no one could be attracted to a fat body.

Absolutely I agree that attraction changes as you get to know people, and personality is a big part of it. But personality is a big part of friendship and platonic love too. Desire – sexual, romantic, bodily desire – is what makes lover relationships different from friendship relationships.

I just don’t get the idea that sexual desire is shallow. I wouldn’t want to have sex with someone I wasn’t attracted to in order to not be shallow. There are people who I love and adore as friends who I don’t desire sexually (even though most of them are really good looking). I think desire and attraction are actually incredibly deep.

The idea of ‘being desirable’ is far too subjective to hold up for any kind of analysis. I certainly don’t mean that one has to conform to mainstream standards of beauty in order to be desired, or that the viewer has to find that body desirable, but that it has to be conceivable that someone could desire them. And I would argue that, in mainstream representation, desire for fat women is inconceivable (Roseanne springs to mind as one of very few exceptions).

You’re absolutely right that men and women are portrayed differently, and I thought I was pretty clearly only talking about fat women. Although I think some of the impacts of fat occur across all genders, I think gendered bodies are dealt with so differently that it’s impossible to talk about all in the same way.

Yes, men’s desires are seen as always valid no matter what they look like – I don’t think the sexual desires of fat men are portrayed as unintelligible (although I would argue that there are times where the fat male body does stand as an ‘embolism’ between sexuality and society). But those desires are almost always for a conventionally attractive (thin) woman – desire for fat bodies is not part of the cultural imaginary.

I think this is in part because men are positioned as desiring subjects and (conventionally attractive) women are positioned as desirable objects. Women’s desire is produced as the desire to be desired, and only women who are desirable objects can therefore be intelligible as desirous. Even though I’m not actually talking about arousal here, I think your example fits quite well with this idea.

Women I know talk about not being able to feel turned on (desiring) unless they feel they look sexy (desirable). I don’t know men who feel this way.

There are people who are conventionally beautiful, and more people may be initially attracted to them because of that, but it seems to me that a person’s looks alter fundamentally once you get to know them at all. Their level of attractiveness changes to fit your interest. If you really like them, their smile turns you to jelly. If it turns out they’re kind of a dick, you sure notice that funny way their earlobes stick out a bit. I guess I’m calling it shallow if that doesn’t happen. Probably unfair; just a different way of being.

I think where I agree with you most is when it comes to kids. There is tremendous value in seeing someone that looks like you being appreciated by the world. Kids and teens are very sensitive to rejection based on difference, and soothing that hurt in any way possible is valuable.

But let’s be honest, isn’t it a hell of a lot easier to teach your kid that people who care about this stuff are shallow than to teach hundreds of millions of men that they are sexually attracted to a particular, personality-free body type that they weren’t previously attracted to? No harm in aiming for both, but …

I do agree that there is a drive in some parts of fat acceptance which is pretty simply to expand the idea of beauty to include fat, and I think that’s problematic, though understandable, and in some ways valuable as a first step. I think that being objectifiable is an extremely limited position, if that’s all there is to it.

I think that some parts of fat acceptance are re-defining beauty and aesthetics in ways that aren’t simply about trying to fit fat bodies into a mainstream ideal, but about re-working the system to allow for a range of bodies and aesthetics and expressions to be seen as valid and valuable, and I think that is really important work.

I think the dichotomy of shallow people and deep people is overly-simplistic – I think in reality, most people tend to be a combination.

I think sex is quite fundamentally about bodies – not only about bodies, but definitely about bodies, and the idea that they can be overlooked, or gotten past, or seen through is…well, it reinforced a split between the body and the self which I think is really damaging.

I want my lovers to want my body. I want them to want my heart and my mind as well, but in order for sex to happen, I absolutely, unquestionably want them to be physically attracted to me. That doesn’t mean I have to mimic the ideals of Hollywood, but I can’t – and don’t want to – remove my body from sex.

Obviously this is helped by the fact that she’s bisexual, but I do think it makes a good point