Eat More, Have Less Sex?

I think fat people are more interested in sex than those who are starving themselves all the time.

Bizaare indeed. Interesting that premarital sex is considered a sin, and yet gluttony isn't. (Not that all obese teens are gluttons... I'm mostly noting that the obvious reference to sin is missing. It would be fascinating to see which 'sin' is considered worse if this bozo's assertion is correct.)

Ah, yes, the old "fat people can't get laid!" stereotype! Assume? This guy didn't THINK at all, just opened his mouth & let shit spill forth. I am kind of surprised that he never managed to mention the "sin of gluttony." And no, most fat people (the word "obese" should be stricken from the English language, it is a made-up name for a made-up disease & always sounds like a value judgment) are not necessarily any more "gluttonous" than most thin people, as studies have shown. Studies have also shown that, on average, fat people, fat women in particular, have stronger sexual appetites & greater enjoyment of sex than thin people. But, no, we must reinforce all the stereotypes...that fat people are undesirable, or that fat people like food better than sex, & substitute one for the other, & on & on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

If fat women are considered so "undesirable," why are there so many porn sites that feature them? I think a lot of men really wish they had the courage to hook up with a big woman, but are afraid of what their friends would say. Too bad, because most fat women can cook AND are good in bed.

The uproarious laughter of my 16 year old fat self, who wanted and got plenty of sex, echoes down the hall from 28 years ago.

Sorry if this sounds homophobic, but Richard Goldstein is an old poofter. He's a 60-ish gay guy who wouldn't have a frigging clue what hetero men (let alone teenage boys!) want in bed. And what's this "less likely to be depressed" shit? Is he saying that thin people are happier because they have the privileges of thinness? Or is he saying (I dread) that depressed people just loooove to eat themselves into oblivion and gain tons of weight and don't care? Go tickle your throat and leave us alone, fuckstick. An amusing aside about Mr. Goldstein: Back in 1967 he panned the Beatles' SGT. PEPPER album as being "clichÈd." So this is a guy who seems to have a long-time affinity for getting people's goats just for the sake of getting them.

Heh. Haven't had any complaints. And lots of guys like something soft to bounce against, that is certain. I say no to more people than I say yes.

i have awesome earth shattering sex. i don't know what that guy is talking about.

When I was a teen, I did not have "awesome" sex, nor was I "well laid." It was pretty fumbling and confusing with other people (with self, it was terrific, but I doubt if even this guy would suggest that fat kids cannot engage in autoerotic pleasures). I suspect that a lot of people had my experience. Most teens aren't able to talk honestly about what they want and what feels good, they have low self-esteem, and even if that's not true, they're NEW at it, and you know, nobody is good at a sport that complicated the first few dozen times they play! I just don't know what to make of this writer's assumption that teen sex is a good thing. It's certainly a personal choice, and I don't condemn it--had some myself (fat). But 1 of 10 girls from 15-19 get pregnant in the U.S. And while some of those teen mothers are good mothers, most are not. Nearly every violent criminal in jail was born to a teenaged mother. And since the kind of sex that gets a woman pregnant is the exact sort that 80% of American women also don't have orgasms from having...well, I can't imagine those girls were "well laid." As a college teacher, I've heard from several students that they've never had sober sex yet...which to me, says they've never actually had real sex. If you have to be drunk to do it, you shouldn't be doing it. Thus, I have to conclude that most teens--girls in particular--are getting BADLY laid, fat or thin. So why push them to do it by this sort of adolescent teasing? (This guy is 60??? cripes!)

Ugh. Oh ugh. This is horrible. To over disclose, As a teen - just as a woman - I've had plenty of sex with wonderful partners, thankyouverymuch. And the only thing that depresses me is NOT my fat, but how much America hates me for having it.

Oh good grief. Is this "backwards day", like we had when I was in school?? Not only does weight have nothing to do with finding sex partners, but kids are *not* having less sex! Someone send that man a copy of Generation S.L.U.T., please?

What a wacko. This article kind of reminds me of Dave Barry -- a string of loosely-connected assumptions leading to a ridiculous conclusion. Only, it's funny when Dave Barry does it, because he intends to write that way.

Miki, your comment was so right on! In a study several years ago, researchers found that women with more body fat could get aroused faster and stay aroused longer than women with "supermodel" type BMIs. In essence, sex would be more pleasurable for a heavier woman than for someone who was super skinny. No one was *exactly* sure why this was, but the researchers could all agree that adequate levels of body fat were necessary for good sex. Since the definition of "adequate" varies from person to person, dieting and starvation were pegged as the most likely culprits. If your body is having to choose between using calories for basic functions and calories for sex, sex is going to lose every time. I wish studies like this received more press coverage - it might give disgruntled old men pause before they spin off some crackpot blatherings.

Kids are having less sex because the message of the past two decades is sex is freakin' scary since AIDS.

The article seemed to have a subtle tone of hostility to Christianity in it (critics often use the term ìfundamentalistî pejoratively to describe Christians) and to classify premarital sex as the ìsin of sinsî belies a complete ignorance on the part of the author on the Biblical theology regarding sin. But, coming from the Village Voice, no one should be surprised. Believe me, contrary to the implications of the article, strengthening oneís relationship with God is infinitely more determinative of the decision to abstain from sex than oneís weight. I once saw an editorial cartoon. It had two people in it. One was an aging baby boomer with a big smile on his face wearing a t-shirt that read "sex, drugs and rock & roll." The other person was a teenager who looked really frazzled and on his t-shirt it said "aids, crack and gangsta rap." The message being that today's teens are dealing with the unpleasant and sometimes lethal byproducts of the sexual revolution (and other social disorders) that were put into motion before they were born. One major way teens are coping with today's social decay is to become more active in church and parachurch organizations (like the Navigators, Promisekeepers and Campus Crusade for Christ), joining Bible study groups, going to Christian youth camps and retreats, listening to contemporary Christian music, etc. All of this leads some (if not a lot) of teens to abstain from sex until marriage.

I liked sex more when I was fat. I don't know WHY, I just did. Granted, some positions were harder to do, but sex was "in color" back then, now it feels like its in "black and white". Don't ask me why, I don't know why.

BTW the year before I got married I weighed around 165 lbs. Not truly "fat", but certainly not skinny anymore. I think I was a size 16. Anyway, I came downstairs one morning and my dad looked at me disapprovingly and said, "You're never going to get a man, looking like that." I smiled to myself because I knew that that very evening, I had yet another date with my new boyfriend, a very wealthy restaurateur. Not only did we have GREAT sex, he even wrote an article years later, saying I was the best lover he had "to date" (thankfully he didnt use my real name, but he did send me a copy the cad. ;) I dumped him about 6 months after we started dating, because I'd met the man who is now my husband and has been for many years. So it seems Dad was wrong. :)

To: Feisty, who said "kids are *not* having less sex" I'm sorry, but more teens *are* abstaining. "Generation S.L.U.T." is a novel of fiction, BTW. Here are some real world facts: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau September 27, 2002 Sexual intercourse among teens is declining, survey shows BYLINE: By Seth Borenstein WASHINGTON _ Sexual intercourse among high school students has dropped significantly in the past decade, a federal health survey reported Thursday. The number of teens who remained virgins rose 16 percent in the past decade. In 2001, virgins outnumbered those who say they have had intercourse 54 percent to 46 percent. In 1991, the ratio was just the opposite. The number of students who have had at least four sex partners dropped 24 percent, according to studies just released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2001, only 1 in 7 teens, or 14 percent, had had at least four sex partners, down from 19 percent in 1991.

A survey that depends on teens to tell the truth about their sex lives seems to be an unreliable method of research. Also, just because most teens stick with one partner, it doesn't mean they're not doing it.

what an insane article... i work at a woman friendly, education-based sex-shop, and everyday, i see plenty of happy, sexy fat women coming in to further explore their sex lives with their partners... they are usually much more relaxed and comfortable with the whole thing than the rail thin women i see... as for myself, i have never had a problem getting laid; i used to be heavier than i am now, and i was having as much sex back then as i am now... most men really don't want the skinny little breakable girls... they are lead to believe that a woman is to be considered beautiful because she is thin, but the men who can go beyond what the medias are trying to make them believe recognize that sex is simply better with a big girl, period.

To continue to drift off topic, to matters that effect the fat, slim, old, and young alike: Sorry, Corvette, but the hallucination that people only started having sex--or premarital sex--in the 1960's in the USA is a total invention of socially "conservative" (anti-women/anti-nature/anti-body) forces. One third of the women in the New World Colonies in 1770 were pregnant when they got married. The recent discovery of killer sperm shows that we humans evolved to procreate in the face of women (for aeons) having two or more partners within any 72 hour period (else why the need for killer sperm?). Do careful genealogical research, and you'll find dozens of "illegitimate" children in your own background, back in the 15th and 16th and 17th centuries--we all owe our very lives to teenaged and non-marital sex. Every generation either thinks they invented sex (or the more interesting forms of sex) or that some "base" or "evil" group (hippies, blacks, gays, whatever group you wish to demonize) just recently invented it and left "innocents" with some awful legacy. Further, there was exactly 20 years between the invention of patoralism and today when deadly STDs did not exist. You know, Beethoven went deaf because of syphillis, Schumann went crazy from it and died of anorexia in an asylum, Schubert died from it; read these people's diaries and you see that sex, whoring, bisexuality are common during the imagined "golden age" of religious oppression in Europe...and this group is typical of all groups through all times. Sex is normal. People have sex willingly (with others or alone) from the moment their hormones tell them to. Or they force themselves not to, which is a lot like dieting, isn't it? Denial of the Goddess's gift of our bodies--indeed, a shutting off of our communication with the Divine through demonizing our own bodies' natural urges. An interest parallel to contemplate, for people given to deep thinking.

You're right, LLW. My grandmother always said that people had as much sex when she was a girl as they do now--they just didn't talk about it, and if something happened, they got married or sent the girl to visit Aunt Penelope for a few months. I really think that all these statistics about teens, virginity, and abstinence are useless unless there are questions about oral sex. People laughed at Bill and Monica, but even when I was in high school back in the late 70s and early 80s, we thought you could have oral sex and still be a virgin. Not that many of us were virgins, mind you, but the measure of a deepening relationship with a boyfriend was moving from heavy petting only to oral sex and finally to "real" sex. Attitudes toward oral sex are vastly more casual now than they were back then. If fat teens are indeed having less sex than skinny teens, I would imagine that it has more to do with them *feeling* unattractive and acting insecure and shy with each other than it does a lack of willing partners. As to the advantages of sex with a fat woman, I'm always surprised that no one ever talks about the fact that when you gain weight, your vagina does, too. Anyone who's ever used a diaphragm knows that you have to be refitted if you gain or lose weight--the heavier you are, the *smaller* your vagina, and thus the smaller your diaphragm. In cases of extremely large women, OBs worry about something called shoulder dystocia in the infant being born. Basically all the extra tissue can supposedly cling to the baby and make it a very tight squeeze to get the shoulders out. (That can happen to women of any size, though.) I leave you to draw your own conclusions about what a snugger, more pillowy "fit" might do for sexual intercourse.

LLW, While it is true that if you go back hundreds and thousands of years into human history and study all cultures, you will see that human nature does not change. However, in OUR culture, in OUR time, it is an undisputable fact that in the U.S., there has been devastaing social and cultural decay starting in the 1960's. (I can't believe anyone would say otherwise . . . just OPEN you eyes!) Look at statistics like unwed pregnancies, teen suicide, teens contracting STDs, divorce, crime rates, etc. you will see 200%, 300% ever 400% increases from 1960 to the mid-1980's in the U.S. Only now, decades later, are we seeing the distasterous byproducts of this 40-year culture war (AIDS, crack cocaine, and homocidal, suicidal and misogynist music lyrics, for example). Compare Marilyn Manson to the Beach Boys and you will see what I mean, VIVDLY. But the good news is that our society is generally self-correcting. In recent years cocaine use is down, teens are having less sex, there are fewer abortions performed, I think even divorce rates are down slightly; more people (ESPECIALLY teens) are going back to church and reading the Bible again, etc. And my original assertion is that it is this dramatic increase in teen participation in chruch and Bible study activities, more than any other factor, that have led to higher rates of abstaining from sex. Weight has absolutely nothing to do with it.

... more people (ESPECIALLY teens) are going back to church and reading the Bible again, etc. ooo... hm. Can we please not turn this into a religious issue? I don't want to drag that argument into this, really. Thanks.

The author did mention "sin" in an ironic sense, but I agree. Let's leave religion out, although I would enjoy some frank discussions about sex, dating, relationships, etc. There is definitely a need for more information about these topics as they relate to fat people.

I was just explaining why weight is *not* the reason an increasing number of teens today are abstaining from sex, that's all.

There are probably as many reasons for teens having or not having sex as there are teens. And I agree wholeheartedly with what LLW said about not being "well laid" when I was in high school and college (back in the 70's). I knew next to nothing about my body or its responses, and sex was all about pleasing (and trying to keep) boyfriends, or trying to prove I wasn't a "prude". I also think in those earlier days, I had sex *more* when I was heavier, feeling a need to compensate for my perceived lack of attractiveness. Oh, and Corvette, my grandmother who was born in 1900, commented once that at the time, the general population in the 1920's regarded the behavior of youth as indicative of moral and cultural decay. And this was during Prohibition! Many of my friends (born in the 1950's) have told me that they found out that they were born less than 9 months after their parents married. And these were "upstanding", middle-class families. Many people in the 1930's and 40's thought that "jazz" was corrupting their youth. I also remember reading a quote from a prominent figure in ancient Greece bemoaning the deplorable values of the youth of the time. It's been going on for a lot longer than the 60's. :-)

I was going to mention that quote from someone, I think it may have been Socrates, but I am not sure, suggesting that, as he saw it, young people were terrible & corrupt & that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, & this would have been well over 2,000 years ago.

Socrates was executed for corrupting the youth of Athens.

Like I said, compare the lyrics of Marilyn Manson and Slipnot with the Beach Boys and Chuck Berry, let alone the fact that something like a 400% increase in teen suicide in the same time period. How many high students murdered several of their classmates and then committed suicide in the 1950's? Not many, I'll bet. The cultural differences between the 1950's and the 1990's are as stark as night and day. Then again, the high school kids in the 1950's would never have "pulled a Columbine" because Marilyn Manson was not around to influence them (Harris and Klebold were BIG Manson fans).

Errr...not to veer too far OT, but...Corvette, you're not actually suggesting that Klebold and Harris wouldn't have killed anyone if they'd only listened to NICE music instead, are you? I dunno...if it was my choice between giving a high school senior a Tek-9 plus a Beach Boys CD, or a rolling pin plus a Marilyn Manson CD, I take my chances with Marilyn. Besides, what kind of evil deranged musicians were people listening to when they performed race-related lynchings in the 1930s (to name just the first example that occurs to me)? A lot of those lynch-mobbers were about the same age as Klebold and Harris. And Hitler, BTW, was a big fan of the operas of Wagner. (And didn't you know Charles Manson was a good friend of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson? And a huge Beatles fan, too? "Helter Skelter" was his big happy. I bet McCartney just hates himself for that one.) And also BTW, more kids get killed every year playing FOOTBALL than ever get shot to death at school. Must be the influence of those nasty brass bands, huh? Like I said, I don't mean to go somewhere this thread wasn't supposed to go. But it seems as though Corvette here is guilty of the same b-follows-a-therefore-a-caused-b fuzzy logic as our Mr. Goldstein and all the other lipophobes out there, which is driven by a desire to make a complex, multifactorial issue nice and simple and easily digestible in a way it can never really be. If we can actually get people to think...even a little...

Corvette, this is your last warning. No more off-topic drifts, okay?

I agree with whoever it was that said that any survey that basically takes a teenager's word for whether they are having sex or not/how much sex is probably getting it all wrong anyway. I think how teens would respond on such a survey would have more to do with whatever the current attitude towards such issues is than what they are actually doing in their personal lives. This is the dumbest article I have seen in a while This guy basically pulls out two random, unrelated stats and pulls a correlation out of his a$$.. what a moron! I guess these days to make any article hot you need to tie it to the *obesity ""epidemic""* *eye roll* Btw I was surprised to hear that Schumann died of anorexia.. While I obviously never thought that sex was something invented by our generation, I did think that anorexia was.... I thought the ancients had more sense that to want to look like skeletons, specially in an age where i would have thought extreme thinness would be associated with dread diseases like TB etc.

The term "anorexia," by itself, simply means "inability to eat," for any reason. "Anorexia nervosa" is the specific term utilized for someone willfully refusing to eat, due to fear of weight gain or of food itself. The terms might be of this generation, but the actual behavior isn't. I have to admit I don't know a lot about Schumann, but it's certainly possible that if syphilis messed with his head that much, he might have been irrationally terrified of food. I don't know if during his time and place, thinness was enough of a status symbol that his inability or refusal to eat was linked to fear of weight gain...but I suppose it's possible, especially if he wasn't putting around on all cylinders.

ajoyce, you're right. I was stunned when obtaining my med records from the 1970s (when I was a teen), that at one point my dr wrote that I suffered from anorexia (WTF?!) I was thi, but NOT anorexic! My current dr explained to me what you did: that the medical term for inability to eat (due to depression, etc) is called anorexia. But the DISEASE is called anorexia NERVOSA (which is an eating disorder.) What my other dr was trying to say was that when I am depressed, I lose my appetite (which is still true of me.)Thats how I got so fat after my marriage: I was HAPPY!

I'm so sorry I didn't see this thread before Paul said not to go off topic! I'd love to discuss the darker themes of Beach Boys and Chuck Berry music, not to mention their various pecadillos. Of course, that is because I am a total 60's music geek.