by Ann Regentin
(07/21/04)
When was the last time you fed chocolate mousse to your lover with your fingers? Been a while? Why? Is it Weight Watchers? South Beach? Atkins?
These days, "food" is the new F-word and hunger, especially in women and especially for certain foods, is the root of all evil. Those foods are said to cause any number of problems beyond mere weight gain: they are addictive, they create an undesirable metabolic state, they are slow poisons. Simply craving a food is taken by some to be a sign of unhealthy addiction, and according to others, every disease from cancer to the common cold can be cured by scrupulously avoiding bad food.
But bad food is sexy. Bad food is Belgian chocolate, or warm apple pie with ice cream. Bad food is pasta smothered in a creamy Alfredo sauce, or fresh bread so warm that the butter melts almost before you can spread it. Bad food is real Hollandaise for the asparagus, real whipped cream for the parfait, a brownie so dense it tastes almost like fudge. Bad food, in other words, is hot, but a good woman will control her desire for it.
What we're told is that it's for our own good, that we are overweight and unhealthy, and these days, very few people dare to argue with that. Those who do are drowned out by a chorus of voices saying that excess weight is the single biggest health threat Americans face.
Body Mass Index (BMI) is the yardstick by which our health currently is measured. A healthy BMI is said to be between 18.5 -- 24.9, with risk increasing at over 25 and the danger zone being a BMI of 30+. Anything below 18 is considered dangerously underweight.
We seem to have this idea that the average American is in the 30+ range, and that healthy weight is a model-slim size 8 or less, but that's not true at all. The BMI of most fashion models is below the ideal range, usually around 17 or so, whereas the BMI of the average American woman is 23.6. She wears a size 14.
A recent British study suggests that even more than waist-hip ratio, men rate women's attractiveness on BMI. The ideal was a BMI of 19 -- 20, with a sharp decrease in attractiveness at 17 and a more gradual decline at 25. This bears a striking resemblance to the healthy body size for women, and even suggests that men have more tolerance for the rounder end of the scale. Where sexiness is concerned, the average woman has less to fear than the average model. Keep in mind that the camera adds ten pounds. Models, photographed, look heavier than they are in real life.
The average woman also bears a close resemblance to those who modeled for such artists as Titian and Vermeer, and Titian's work in particular was often extremely erotic. A stroll through any art museum will show you how history has viewed the female body, and it hasn't particularly cared for exposed ribs. Body fat gives the female form its curves and provides the softness that so many men seem to crave, and seem to have been craving for a few centuries at least.
In some cases, it goes beyond a mere liking for curves. Big Beautiful Women (BBW for short) have inspired an entire subgenre of porn. Whether it's a discrete "bbw" to signal a short story's content or an entire hardcore website, the lavish lady is getting increasingly popular and it's not hard to see why. These women are gorgeous; these are the women who modeled for Rubens and Botticelli. They're big, soft, and smiling, with tits you could hang your hat on and much less of the hardened edge that one sometimes sees in the eyes of thinner XXX models. In fact, there's nothing hard about them. These women are like a pile of comfortable pillows, just the perfect thing to sink into at the end of a long, rough day.
The diet craze causes another problem for courting heteros. It's bad enough that women are starving themselves to look like something most men aren't interested in, but how on earth do you wine and dine someone who doesn't dare drink anything but water or eat anything but salad? These days, the time-honored method of feeding a woman in hopes of bedding her is on shaky ground, and if you do manage to snag her, what then? Is there a difference sexually between thin women and heavier ones? Not having sampled extensively, I can't say for sure, but rumor among the men I know indicates that there is. Larger women are, by most reports, less inhibited, more passionate, and a lot more fun.
I can think of a few reasons why this might be. A seldom-publicized but well-documented side effect of dieting is a loss of libido. When you combine that with the loss of energy that often comes from self-imposed starvation, the result is a lack of interest in sex that goes beyond the usual "not tonight, dear, I've got a headache." A woman who is working too hard to lose weight can kill off her sex drive in the process.
Another possibility is psychological rather than physical. Someone accustomed to keeping her desire for food under a tight rein might have difficulty giving in to other desires as well. Dieting, especially when it's not necessary, is closely associated with control issues in other areas of life. Those who diet to the point of developing eating disorders often have psychological problems including low self-esteem, depression, and a tendency toward perfectionism. Women with such problems often have trouble relaxing and enjoying anything at all, and it can become so severe as to make orgasm difficult or impossible, especially when there's someone else there to see it. Becoming overly fixated on one's body, especially on what it looks like, can make one painfully self-conscious in bed.
When a woman lets her weight rise, she is said to have "let herself go" and she might even be "out of control." She's been bad, and not just once but enough times so that she's back into those size 14 jeans. The thing is, though, good lovers let themselves go and get out of control. Part of the fun of sex is watching the other person lose it, watching them do and say things they would never do or say in public. There's a certain amount of badness in good sex, a certain willingness to break the rules, to let go of the restraints of culture and civility. A woman daring enough to really enjoy a brownie smothered in ice cream and chocolate sauce just might be daring enough to really enjoy other things, and I can't think of anything sexier than guilt-free indulgence.
The push toward an ever-thinner female body has closely matched the increase in women's sexual freedom, and I don't believe for a second that this is coincidence. Western culture has put so much energy for so many centuries into reining in female appetites that I cannot accept the notion that there is no connection between sexual liberation and culinary repression. Women can put whatever they want in their cunts but cannot put anything into their mouths, especially not anything delicious. Sexy foods are off the menu no matter what diet you're on. We live in a time when the normal female body is considered inherently dangerous, even though it clearly isn't, and draconian measures are routinely taken to change it.
Those measures, including dieting and surgery, are often riskier than obesity itself, but we force women into them anyway and then claim it's for their own good. This sounds so much like the tactics used to suppress women's sexuality, it's downright spooky. Whereas women were once told that they should not feel horny, now they're told that they should not feel hungry. What women eat and when is supposed to be strictly controlled, as what women could and could not do in bed once was. A woman who cannot sustain a strict regimen of diet and monotonous exercise, who dares indulge in a chocolate bar or a slice of cake, is considered just as fallen as the woman who dared to sleep with her beloved before rings were exchanged. And as a married woman was supposed to endure rather than enjoy sex with her husband (marriage being the "ideal" state), a woman who has reached her "ideal" weight cannot let up even for a second. Just one of those creme puffs, and she'll wear the evidence of her immorality around her thighs.
The problem is now so bad that it is spreading to men. There was a time when men who wanted to be good husbands punished themselves for their normal urges, and now modern men are developing the same eating disorders women have been struggling with for decades, with nasty results. Chronic starvation, like sexual repression, isn't good for anyone.
Nor is it what we need in order to be healthy. Doctors seem to agree that for those at risk, moderate weight loss is enough, five to maybe ten percent of body weight done over time through small, sustainable changes in diet and exercise. In other words, being healthy requires neither suffering nor a single-digit size. For a healthy, active woman of average height, those size 14 jeans represent no health risk whatsoever. Nor does dessert on a special date.
Do we think that if women are allowed to eat, they will all blow up like Violet from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? To me, this is an echo of the old fear that if allowed unchecked, female sexuality would overrun everything in its path. That has, in fact, not happened. Women, it turns out, are not insatiable nymphomaniacs incapable of controlling themselves if the law doesn't do it for them.
I'm going to be heretical enough to suggest that the same might be true with food. I do not believe that female culinary appetite, unchecked, will result in wholesale destruction. After all, just as few can fuck 24/7, few can eat 24/7 either. Too much sex can make one sore and too much rich food can give one heartburn. Our bodies have built-in safety mechanisms. If we let go of the fear and the moral judgments, we might be able to learn how to listen to them.
Eating, like sex, is a sensual delight. Licking a delicate sauce from one's fingers isn't a far cry from licking a lust-drenched pussy. The melt of good chocolate in one's mouth is remarkably similar to the feel of a well-greased cock sliding home. A good appetizer, like foreplay, both satisfies and creates anticipation. In fact, the physical and emotional gratifications of food and sex are so similar that many are inclined to combine the two, either raiding the vegetable crisper for phallus-shaped residents or eating whatever we like best off or out of our lovers. Food, like sex, is fun, eating can feel so good, and the part that food plays in courtship and bonding cannot be overestimated. It's important for us to break bread together.
Must women buy their sexual freedom with their enjoyment of food and even their health? I don't think so. I think that, in the absence of a properly diagnosed medical condition, we can enjoy food in the same way we enjoy sex. I'm not talking about thrice-daily meals at Burger King. There's nothing sexy about that. I'm talking about eating without fear or guilt. She wants to take you out to dinner? Order something you love, and let her see you revel in it. He comes over with chocolates? Let him watch you suck the last traces from the pad of your thumb. No complaining about fat or cellulite and no thinking about how much time on the treadmill it will take to work it off! Just enjoy it.
