Some Evolving Thoughts About Weight and Sex

I swear: This is the last I’ll be writing on this topic for a while. But I promised that I’d write a piece about the effects of weight loss on my sexuality… so here it is.)

Bare foot on scale
I want to start by saying this: I am just talking about myself here, and what’s true for me. These issues are heavily loaded, emotionally and psychologically and politically, so I want to spell that out right from the start. I’m not evangelizing for weight loss; I’m personally finding it to be beneficial, erotically as well as in other ways, but I’ve also found it to be complicated and a whole lot of hard work, and I know that the cost- benefit analysis about it is different for everyone. I’m not talking about what’s right or true for anyone else. I’m talking about what’s right and true for me.

As regular readers know by now, I’ve been losing weight for close to a year now, and have so far lost 50 pounds. This isn’t something I’m doing for aesthetic reasons, btw: I’m doing it primarily for health reasons (mostly a bad knee that was getting worse).

But the weight loss is having a complicated set of effects on my sexuality: on my libido, my sexual self-image, my feelings about my sexual history, my cultural politics about sex and bodies. Mostly good… but complicated. And I haven’t seen a lot of writing elsewhere about these effects. Most of the writing I’ve seen about weight and sex has either been your standard “Lose weight and magically fix your sex life!” jargon (which I think is bullshit), or fat-positive, body-positive, “fight body fascism and connect erotically with the body you have” activism (which I more or less support, but with a few serious caveats). I haven’t seen much writing about weight and sex from people who are controlling their weight and feel good about it… but who are still informed by the cultural criticism about how our society views weight and sexuality.

So, as usual, when I don’t like the news, I’m making some of my own.

*

Thus begins my new piece on the Blowfish Blog, Some Evolving Thoughts About Weight and Sex. To read more about physical mindfulness, the minefield of compliments, the hotness of self-love, alienation from one’s sexual history, humping tree trunks, and more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

{advertisement}
Some Evolving Thoughts About Weight and Sex
{advertisement}

2 thoughts on “Some Evolving Thoughts About Weight and Sex

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *