Big love

Forget abs of steel -- give me soft arms, wide hips and fleshy lips! For as long as I can remember, I've been turned on by fat women.

By Josh Max

Read more: Sex, Marilyn Monroe, Relationships, Dating, Fat, Life

June 22, 2006 | "Christ, look at that mess."

A colleague and I are driving from Hollywood to Los Angeles. I look out the passenger window and see a beautiful young woman with extra-large thighs sitting on a bus stop bench.

"How'd you like to wake up next to that?" he snickers. Though we'd just met that morning, after two hours in the car together, we've covered every subject from cars to politics to music to money. Not girls, though.

I take a deep breath.

"I gotta tell you something. I love fat women, and I'm married to one. You're entitled to your opinion, but comments like that don't float with me. She looks pretty damn cute, too."

The color drains from his face.

"Are you kidding?"

"Nope. Not kidding."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I knew, from the time I was old enough to know what a woman was, that I loved big women. As a kid, the "before" photos in diet ads fascinated me. The bespectacled, round beauties hiding under Snoopy sweatshirts in the corner of the school cafeteria made my heart pound. A plump teacher, a full-figured classmate, a cushiony customer in the deli I worked at in high school -- all were early crushes.

But as a teen, I worshipped from afar. While my friends ogled high school cheerleaders and drooled over Playboy and Penthouse, I felt guilty and freakish for wanting these women, and I told no one. At that time, there was only one magazine for men who wanted to see what fat women looked like without their clothes on. It was a no-budget affair published in New Jersey, and some of the models were missing teeth; but others were delicious-looking, round and smiling, proud of their generous figures. I drove 40 miles from Westchester to Manhattan to buy my copy the day it hit the newsstands every month.

In every other regard, though, I was a typical teenage guy, with a surplus of raging hormones. I lost my virginity at 16 with a plump girlfriend of two weeks, and then soon began dating an apple-cheeked neighborhood tough girl. When I moved out of my parents' house into Manhattan, I went out with women I met through mutual friends, at clubs and at classes. All were thin or close to it. I loved the sweet details of those relationships: holding hands on the street, talking on the phone after midnight, making out, sleeping together. But I just didn't feel anything approaching atomic longing for any of those women -- no matter how smart or conventionally sexy they were. And I knew what the problem was. I wanted a woman with a belly, a butt, thighs; I wanted lots of soft flesh to look at, to touch and put my arms around.

When I was alone, I questioned the origin of my longing. Was it a fetish, spurred by some suppressed childhood trauma, to be analyzed and cured so that I might someday develop a "normal" attraction to the women in Victoria's Secret catalog? Or was it something I was born with, like my perfect pitch and an ability to touch my nose with my tongue? Having a "fetish" usually means one needs a certain object or body type to become sexually aroused, and that isn't -- and wasn't -- my situation. I am attracted to women of all sizes. I just prefer a big lady, the way some women prefer a big, tall, hunky guy.

Delving into the past, I found my desires validated. The cult of thinness is strictly a modern-day phenomenon. In Billy Wilder's screen classic, "Some Like It Hot" (1959), there is a scene where Marilyn Monroe -- arguably the most famous sex symbol of all time -- is lounging on a bed, with a very prominent, jiggly belly apparent underneath her slip. In 1943's Broadway production of "Oklahoma," the character Will Parker admiringly describes his favorite burlesque bombshell this way: "One of the gals was fat and pink and pretty/ as round above as she was round below." Lillian Russell, a superstar singer, popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and pursued by countless admirers, weighed over 200 pounds. Clearly, once upon a time, a penchant for plump women was nothing to be embarrassed about.

So after embarking on countless dates, and even being engaged for three years to an average-size woman, I decided to charge ahead and find a partner who not only had the requisite heart, soul and intelligence, but was also way, way bigger than me. With the aid of the Internet, I refined and pinpointed my search, the same way any man might if he were looking for a woman of a particular religion or age.

My first online date was with a 5-foot-1-inch, 325-pound, 22-year-old model. After a nice dinner, a walk and a late-night stroll, we ended up together for a night. That was when I put my money where my fantasies were; she was a woman who was approximately three times as big as any other human being I had ever touched. She was also, I realized, a living, breathing, feeling person, not an image in a magazine, with vulnerabilities and needs of her own. I didn't quite know where to start. But after a while, I began to happily, gently lose myself in her spheres, her bountiful soft flesh, her tiny lips and enormous hips. A long-term relationship wasn't in the cards, but that night was an exclamation point to my years of exploration, and it satisfied a deep longing. I wanted more.

Next page: I won't accept being labeled a closet Kevorkian just because I love a woman and her fat, too