Sex Gets Real 223: Virgie Tovar on fat dating, boundaries, misogyny, & diets

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Dating. Sex. Boundaries. Fat bodies. Virgie Tovar must be here!

Virgie Tovar always makes me think and this chat is no exception. Holy smokes I love Virgie’s brain, and she is going to take us into some BIG feels.

Let’s talk about dating while fat. Let’s talk about misogyny and sexism. Let’s talk about access to pleasure and delighting in our bodies.

Let’s explore the ways diets and dieting impact our ability to say yes and no in bed and in relationships.

Virgie has a new book about to hit shelves and it is small but VERY mighty in scope, so be sure to check it out courtesy of Feminist Press.

Follow Dawn on Instagram.

In this episode, Virgie and I talk about:

• The freedom of being in a body and tapping into the moment of effortlessness, and freedom, and play in a body that’s deeply traumatized and politicized.
• How dieting and fatphobia are being deeply fed by sexism and misogyny, and how it alienates us from our own desires, happiness, and humanity.
• How our relationship with food has become dangerous because of the lack of discipline we think we have over our own bodies that the culture prescribes and requires of women.
• Seeing dieting as more than a behavior that happens in a plate with a fork and knife, and understanding what it really means symbolically.
• What does it mean to recognize that you’re having a racist response to your own body and what does it say about the culture.
• Realizing that it’s not okay to be in relationship with someone who is OK with you not eating just so you can fit in the dress that you want to show off for them.
• When do we reveal that we’re not actually chill? How do we navigate boundaries in a fat (or otherwise marginalized) body?
• Virgie’s experience on exploitation with thin, white, cis men and how it is the marriage of entitlement and disempowerment. How the people we are in relationship with have to participate and accept that they are a part of a culture that is actively hurting us.
• We need to be in a space that allows us to have difficult conversations that can be uncomfortable

About Virgie Tovar:

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics, and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing, and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So, welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Dawn Serra: Hey, you. Welcome to this week’s episode of Sex Gets Real. I am chatting with Virgie Tovar about her new book “You Have The Right to Remain Fat.” It is such a rich, luscious conversation. We talked about dating, sexism, and feeling free in your body the way that you did when you were a kid before you ever knew you should be self-conscious about it or monitor it. There is so much richness in this conversation. Every time I talk to Virgie I feel like I leave going, “Holy shit. I hope that one day I can think like that.” So, I’m really excited to bring this conversation to you. 

Patreon supporters, if you support at the $3 level and above at patreon.com/sgrpodcast, I am reading a couple of paragraphs from Vergie’s yet to be released book and sharing a little bit about what I read and what I think about it. Plus, a little bit of tidbits from the ASDA conference that I am attending in Portland right now. So please hop over there to hear your bonus. And if you support at the $5 level and above, there are listener questions waiting for your responses. So please be sure to go and check those out as well. So my birthday happened this weekend and it was fantastic. We are actually in an Airbnb in Portland right now. If you want to see something funny, be sure to head to my Instagram @dawn_serra for what greeted us when we arrived at our Airbnb in Portland. But we are having an amazing time, we had dinner with friends. The conference was so fantastic. There are so many people doing really incredible work around eating disorder recovery and bodies, and access to respect and love, and health and resources – wonderful stuff. And of course, pleasure and sex fits so beautifully and with that, and I had the immense opportunity of presenting. So I’ll talk a little bit more about that in the Patreon bonus as well. 

Dawn Serra: So let me tell you about Virgie if you don’t already know who she is. Virgie Tovar is an author, activist, and one of the nation’s leading experts and lectures on fat discrimination and body image. She is the founder of Babe Camp, a four week online course designed to help women who are ready to break up with diet culture. And, she started the hashtag campaign #losehatenotweight. She has been featured by the New York Times, Al Jazeera, NPR, Tech Insider, and SELF Magazine. So here is my chat with Virgie and then be sure to head over to Patreon for a little exclusive clip from the book and lots more from me.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Virgie. I think this is going to be a fat-tastic chat.

Virgie Tovar: Yes, I agree.

Dawn Serra: So we are here to talk about your new book “(You Have)The Right to Remain Fat” which is being put out by Feminist Press and I had an opportunity to read it so that we could have a really yummy talk all about fat phobia and diet culture. And, I want to first say congratulations on putting a book out into the world, especially about a topic that so many people are going to have so many strong feelings about.

Virgie Tovar: Yes, thank you. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. I want so many more of these conversations that are really looking at culture and theory. Because it runs so counter to the narrative that we have all internalized that it’s us.

Virgie Tovar: Yes, exactly. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. So, I just want to start with how your book starts and ends, which to me is pure delight. And, so much of where I’ve gone in my work the past year or two is around play, pleasure, joy, delight – how can we invite more play in? And your book starts and ends with this beautiful moment of play around juggling your naked body. Can you please tell us about the joy that is jiggling your naked body? 

Virgie Tovar: Yes. Well, I mean, I was talking with my editor about, and I knew that I wanted to start the book with the image of me as a four year old before I was introduced to fat phobia. And it’s essentially – it’s this story, it’s describing what it feels like to be free before you’re taught how not to be by our culture. And so, the first line in the book is, “My body used to belong to me,” and I’m recalling being a small child and you’re coming home from – my favorite part of the day was when I would come home for running errands with my grandmother, and I would run from the front door into the bathroom. And I would take all my clothes off, and then I would run back out into the kitchen and I would spread out my arms and legs, and I would jiggle my entire body.

On the one hand, my grandmother found this so funny and cute. And so, I have this beautiful memory of her, like bubbly, effervescent laughter that I would do this. But more than that, I remember the extraordinary sense of joy, pleasure, and curiosity, and particularly pleasure that flooded my body that was inspired by the sensation of my body’s movement. 

Virgie Tovar: I think this is what’s so incredible. Before fat phobia, I had no context of my body’s functionality and movement as shameful. One of the things that we’re taught as fat people is that our body moves more than other people’s do, and that that’s a bad thing. And as a four year old, who hadn’t learned that lesson, yet, my body’s movement was this extraordinary magical thing that could do this special thing. It could move like water. I think I very much saw it as similar to l the undulations of water at the beach or like water in the bathtub, and I loved bath time. And it’s interesting, right? I don’t talk about this in the book, but I was unable to recall that memory until many years after I stopped dieting. I’d actually suppressed that memory. And that’s what’s so incredible about the human mind, right? We get taught something and through constant bombardment of a negative education, our brain pushes out the memories that counteract that reality. And so, many years into no longer dieting, I finally unearthed that memory. My brain could finally make room for that and the new life that I created for myself. 

The book kind of ends with this beautiful moment where I’m doing work with fat women in Jamaica, as part of a retreat. And, one of the things that we do is we take all our clothes off on the beach during the sunrise and we jiggle, and we reenact that four year old experience of freedom and play. And, I think what’s incredible about– We jiggle for a full minute and it’s so powerful because there’s this energy release that happens. Because we don’t normally move our bodies that way. So there’s this extraordinary release of kinetic energy and memory, and that child… That child access to playfulness that is so powerful. 

Dawn Serra: That is something I’ve been trying to really bring more into my life for that very reason. That ties me to the possibility of a freedom that I have not known for my entire adult life. That freedom of being in a body that just moves because it can and because it’s mine, and because I want to go somewhere or do something. And not because I have to think about how am I moving? How do I look? What do I get from this movement? What does it earn me? Those kinds of things. That delight. That’s apparent in the way that the book is bookended just hit me so hard in the feels. Because I’ve been trying to incorporate that myself of how can I just tap into those small moments of effortlessness and freedom and play in a body that has been deeply traumatized and politicized? 

Virgie Tovar: Yes, exactly. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. So, your book takes on some massive topics that will bring up massive feelings for people, which I, of course, love. That’s my bread and butter. And you talk about diet culture and fat phobia, and how it relates to sexism, classism, racism. You tie it to dating and romance and worthiness. There’s just some huge concepts in here and I’d love to just start with – you were talking about how diet culture and sexism are inextricably linked and you quoted Naomi Wolf from The Beauty Myth, “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history.”

I would love for us to just kind of start there. For people who are just starting to wake up to the conversation and are just starting to find some of this language, it can feel a little fuzzy of, “Okay, I know that dieting thing doesn’t work and I know I shouldn’t feel this bad about my body.” And then, seeing that it ties to some of these other really massive systems of oppression, I think can be a little overwhelming and you make it very accessible throughout the book. So I’d love to talk a little bit about your experience and how you’ve teased apart the ways that fat phobia and dieting feed and are fed by sexism and misogyny.

Virgie Tovar: Yes, I mean, dieting is one manifestation of sexism. I think of sexism and all systems of oppression as this multi-headed Hydra. This monster with many heads. And depending on where your position in society, your head is going to be a little bit different, right? So, if you’re a smaller bodied woman, you experience sexism in a particular way. And if you’re a bigger bodied woman, you’re experiencing it in another way. And so, it’s important to recognize that diet culture – dieting is really about the subjugation of women’s spirits. It’s about the extinguishing of women’s desire and to alienate someone from their desire and their humanity is to subject them to a life of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. I think what’s really important to recognize is through diet culture, women are taught that hunger is imaginary and that it’s negative. And the reality of it is that hunger is a human instinct and so when you tell someone that this thing about them that is very human is either not real or that they should go to extraordinary lengths to suppress it, you’re essentially saying – you’re asking them to bypass their own humanity to suppress their own humanity, in the name of some other things. Some greater cause, you know? 

I remember for the first time in my life, probably – I don’t know, seven, eight years old, having my hunger questioned like, “Are you really hungry for food or are you just bored? Are you really hungry or are you just tired? Do you really want that or is it really just something else?” This is called gaslighting. When you question a person’s experience of events or their own reality, that’s called gaslighting, right? And so diet culture is very, very, very, very good at mapping on to women’s education in gender inferiority. So, it’s important to recognize diet culture is kind of, I don’t know – it’s almost like a – I mean in tech lingo, like an add on, right? It’s like you already have the application that says, “I am less than because I’m a woman.” And then diet culture comes in and is like, “Oh, you already feel less than because you’re a woman through a series of subtle, but never ending messages from our culture. I’m just going to add this other thing about how you also have to be thin, and it’s going to feel like you’re doing this for the purpose of self improvement. But actually, it’s about the degradation of your humanity and your spirit.” 

Virgie Tovar: So, for me, essentially, these are realities that are particularly potent for women. Because we live in a culture where we’re consistently taught to be silent, to be small, to be quiet, to sacrifice our happiness, our resources – our everything for the culture and for the men in our lives. And I want to talk back or speak to a moment in my own feminist awakening – and this was before I even understood what diet culture was. This was just understanding gender stuff. For the first time in my life, I was 20 years old and I met this group of feminists in college. They started to ask me questions like, “Did you know that you don’t have to do what men say? Did you know that sex could be pleasurable for you? Did you know that you don’t have to want to get married? Did you know that you didn’t have to…?” And my answer to each question was no. “No, I didn’t know that.”

I was born in 1982. I’m not from some kind of weird age, but god knows. Probably to some people who are listening to this that sounds super ancient. Secondly, feminism had already happened. Women had the right to have an abortion. Women were in the workplace. This wasn’t 1933 or 1901, right? This is like a moment – I’m coming of age after 2000 and this is stuff that I’ve never heard before. And so, I want to kind of contextualize that and say, “When that is your reality, that you believe that your life belongs to men and that your whole life is meant to be in pursuit of being near them and one of them loving you…” It’s easy to see how you add a request for, “Oh, just suppress your hunger forever. Is that cool?” It’s such an easy extension when a person’s already experiencing sexism. 

Virgie Tovar: I think that there’s this particular way… I say in the book that, “Dieting is the evidence of an epidemic of female unhappiness.” Because what is so startling in working with so many women who are actively dieting or are in the midst of an eating disorder– And by the way, I don’t see those things as different. I mean, I use that phrase because definitely as a culture, we see them as on a spectrum, and certainly there is a spectrum. But I don’t see dieting as outside of eating disorders. I don’t. It’s not. It might be in the “shallower end.” But, I remember starving myself for months on end and thinking that I was dieting. So, I just want to break down that binary that people have eating disorders have a pathology and are sad, and need help and that dieters aren’t that. That’s not true. 

Anyway, I think about the ways that food became dangerous because it meant that I wasn’t going to have the kind of discipline over my body that the culture wanted me to have as a woman. And I think the last thing I want to say on this topic is there’s this extraordinary sociologist named Sander Gilman who writes about fatness quite a bit actually. And he writes that, “Dieting is a way that women show the culture that we understand our role and are willing to give in to that role.” And so, it’s important to look at dieting, not just as a behavior that happens on a plate with a fork and knife or not – to take it to the next level and see what it means symbolically. And that’s a lot of what the book is about. It’s about a little bit taking ourselves out of that microcosmic moment and really giving a little bit of an eagle eye view on… When this happens on a grand scale among hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people, we have to start asking ourselves, “What does this behavior symbolize?” 

Dawn Serra: Yes. And I think one of the things that hit me so hard, too, that one, I’ve kind of had to live my way into as a truth, and you’ve just stated so beautifully is that diet culture is about disintegrating our self trust. And so many people who write into me on the show and who come to me for coaching around sex and relationship issues – I only work with women and queer folks. And, the number one question that I get other than, “Am I normal? Am I broken?” is, “How do we I even know what I want and then how do I even ask for it?” 

Virgie Tovar: Yes, yes. 

Dawn Serra: And that, to me, is such a symptom of this – from the youngest of ages, if we’re starting to deny the things that we’re feeling in our body and disconnecting from them intentionally because we’re told us what makes us a good human, then how the fuck are we supposed to know what to want when someone’s touching us or what feels good in our body because we have such a skewed perspective on pleasure? 

Virgie Tovar: Yes, exactly. And I think that’s one of the first things that girls are asked to do. It’s essentially, question, extinguish, discipline, get rid of – our hunger. And hunger is a manifestation of desire. To deny someone desire is unconscionable. That’s the thing, right? People don’t realize the rhetoric around diet culture – renderers diet culture as innocuous as this harmless, in fact, positive behavior; when in fact, it’s actually immoral, unconscionable, repugnant, unforgivable. It just blows my mind. I mean, I can relate to what you’re saying about hearing this from the folks you’re working with. I feel like they have no – the women I’m working with, the people I see around the world talking about this issue – there’s a complete ungrounding or unmooring of the things that make them human. Diet culture really is that – it’s about rendering you into part of a machine. That is so damaging to the soul and to the spirit. 

Humans want to feel loved. They want to feel connection. We want to feel freedom – these are universal human truths. And I think what’s so heartbreaking to me is people are doing these dehumanizing diet behaviors and thinking that they’re making their lives better. And then they’re confused about why they’re unhappy. That’s an extraordinary sign of manipulation on a grand scale. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, yes. Oh my god. This ties really beautifully into a piece of the book that I loved, which was speaking to this sense of inferiority and the ways that it can show up. And you were talking about how, and I think this is one of the really seductive things about basically all of the systems of oppression: racism, classism, fat phobia, transphobia. They are very smart, and they morph culture. So, what looked like racism 30 years ago now looks very different, but racism still exists. It’s just hard to see. And, you were talking about how this sense of inferiority, that fat phobia and diet culture put on us to ask most women, do you feel inferior? The answer would be, “Well, No, I don’t.” And so, you asked these questions to help people kind of really get under that kind of knee jerk instinctual no – and I would love to read those questions and then talk a little bit about inferiority and worthiness. 

Virgie Tovar: Yes. 

Dawn Serra: So, the four questions that you posed as part of this lecture you are giving was, “A sense of inferiority shows up like wearing something that is physically uncomfortable because you believe it makes you look better. A refusal to eat something you wanted to eat, because you were worried it might impact the way you look. A refusal to do something you wanted to do, because you’re worried about how it would make you look to another person. And a denial of an impulse to say no or yes to something that mattered to you, because you were worried that someone wouldn’t like you if you did that.” I mean, right off the bat, I can think of the thousands of times I’ve worn something physically uncomfortable just because I thought it made me look more flattering or better, right? What are some of the ways you’ve noticed inferiority showing up in your life? 

Virgie Tovar: Yeah, I mean, those questions really come from my own life. This is what’s interesting is in the book, the story that is sort of the precursor to those questions, is that I’ve been hired to speak to a group of high school students. And normally I talked to college students who are not necessarily that different in age, but a lot of them are – they’re just in a different environment. And also, a lot of them have been, at least somewhat introduced to the idea of social – cultural criticism or the sociology or anthropology or something. A critical perspective on the culture and a lot of times at the high school level, that’s not part of the school culture in the same way. And so, I was trying to… There are lots of people like you’re saying, right, like, I think if I point blank went up to 1000 women on the street or 100 women on the street, and asked every one of them, “Do you feel inferior?” They probably say no. 

I think what I learned when I was in grad school and doing research on this topic of fatness, I learned that a lot of times the most obvious question isn’t the right question to get to the answer. Our culture, especially our culture has adapted so well to sexism and it has obscured sexism so much that I think about, let’s say 100 years ago or 70 years ago, if you talk to women, and you ask them that same question, they might be a little bit clearer, right? “Maybe I am inferior because I don’t have the right to do this, this, this or this, and my husband maybe tells me that I’m not as smart as him and I can’t get a job or I’m not allowed to work because I’m considered intellectually inferior. Or I’m not allowed to drive because people are worried that my uterus makes me unstable.” And I think what’s interesting is, we look at that and think, “Oh, my god. Lol. How ridiculous, of course, I don’t feel that way.” 

Virgie Tovar: I think what’s really important to recognize is, “Where are the shades of truth in that?” And so, that’s where the questions really come in. And I talked about this example, being a young woman – and this is actually about race and racism. I was the director of this series of monologues by women of color. And, I decided to write my own monologue and share it in the show as well. I just kept coming back – it could have been on anything, but I kept coming back to my breasts and particularly my nipples. 

So, I’m Mexican and Iranian, and I have dark skin and I have brown nipples. And for years, I have this extraordinary shame around them. Like, if a lover saw them and commented on the color, I would blush and I kind of had this really specific feeling that pink nipples were prettier and that my nipples were different, weird or ugly, or I don’t know. And it’s fascinating. As I’m telling this story, it’s so obvious in retrospect, what was happening. I was having an internalized, racist response to my education white supremacy. And yet at the time, I could not allow myself to see it. 

Virgie Tovar: I had grown up in an era where I was singing songs about how I could grow up to be president. I grew up in an era where I was told that racism didn’t exist. I mean, like all these kinds of things. So, I’m being told this by my culture. Meanwhile, I’m having an internalized racist response to my own body. And I can’t make the connection because it goes against what the culture has been telling me about my life and my world. So, what does it mean? What does it mean to recognize that I’m having a racist response to my own body? What does that say about the culture? And so, I’m not allowing myself to see it. Because then I would have to admit that the culture was lying. This is an extraordinary act of treason.

I think what we don’t realize is the magnitude of allowing ourselves to see the truth. It means to be a culture traitor. It means to look at the truth and to refuse, and to recognize that people are lying to you on a grand scale. And I think it’s terrifying. It’s a terrifying prospect that the television is lying to you. The President is lying to you about the state. Well, our current president isn’t but like… unveiling truths that have been obscured for so long. But what does it mean, especially as a woman, and for me as a woman of color and a fat person – What does it mean to look at the culture and say, “I don’t believe that my best interest is your best interest. I don’t think we share a best interest.” And that’s huge, right? So anyway, I’m kind of writing this monologue and I’m not allowing myself to see the truth of it. So I’m kind of writing around the truth. I’m like, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that I think that brown is not as pretty as pink and that’s totally fine. It’s totally okay to like the pink crayon more than the brown crayon.” 

Virgie Tovar: I was, again, I was sabotaging myself from the understanding. And then, after I wrote that piece and was unable to accept what was happening, it was like the question kept burning in my head. And it wasn’t until about two years later, that I was finally able to say, “This is self-hatred and I learned it from my culture.” And when I look at my brown nipples and feel like they’re shameful or unattractive, that is me acting on the knowledge that I was taught. And that that is racism. It was this extraordinary moment of reckoning. And it was very powerful to essentially say, “I know, culture, that you’re telling me that we’re post racism, and we’re post this or post that. But the truth is, we’re not. Because if we were, I wouldn’t feel this way about my nipples. And so what does it mean to bring that critique and bring that spirit of inquiry to all the things around you?” 

To bring it back, obviously, talking about my body and my nipples and stuff is very gendered, as well. Because, why does it matter what my nipple color is? Because I have to be attractive to a man and I have to be competitive for male sexual desire. And I understand intrinsically that having darker skin makes me less “competitive” in the sexual market, especially in a place like San Francisco where there’s a lot of affluent white people.

Virgie Tovar: So, that’s a little bit of a deep dive into a process for me, more around race, but certainly certainly around gender. But I think, for me, coming into an awakening around the fact that diet culture was specifically sold to me because I was a woman. That it was through the idea that– A lot of the reasons I dieted for so long was because I thought that I had to do it for men to love me or find me attractive. The idea that you would be pursuing someone who’s completely okay with you not eating or you not living life in a way that’s authentic in the body that you’re meant to have. That’s not love, right? There’s just so much enveloped in all of it. But I think really allowing myself to come into the awakening that I was specifically sold diet culture as a woman, because there is this real cultural obsession with controlling women’s desire, women’s dreams. And when we’re constantly out putting emotional, psychological, spiritual, physical energy into being as thin as possible, we’re losing, at least, 80% of our bandwidth – at least, right? 

I think back on the days when I was dieting, it was all I ever thought about. All I ever thought about. I mean, literally when I was going to eat next, what I was going to eat, how it was going to affect me, what I needed to do to offset that food – that’s obsessive thinking. And it’s completely normalized. It is completely normalized, and in fact, it is aggrandized. It is rewarded when women behave that way. What does that say about our culture? That the culture is completely fine with women giving away 80%, at least, of our bandwidth and our resources. That’s not a culture that’s on our side and that’s what sexism looks like.

Dawn Serra: Something that hit me really hard as you were talking right there specifically the end to was – how often in my life in the past, I entered into a relationship with someone who was completely okay with me consistently denying myself pleasure, joy, and a sense of freedom in order to look a certain way that served their ego? Why would I want to be in an intimate relationship with someone who sees the denial of my pleasure, and my body trust, and my joy, as a good thing? And yet, our entire culture is structured around, “That’s the sign of a good relationship.” Who is someone who’s going to be like, “Go you. How about you have that smaller portions so that you fit into that smaller dress size for me.” It’s like God, what a mind fuck. 

Virgie Tovar: Yeah, no, absolutely. Through sexism women are rendered commodities that belong to men. And all that matters is the intimacy between men and the competition between them because they’re the ultimate – like they’re primary citizens. So the idea is that this woman is meant to be witnessed by other men and create a sense of envy or pride or camaraderie. This is extraordinarily dehumanizing. I mean, it’s so astounding to me that I see women striving so hard to become as small as possible in order to find some – what they’ve been taught is love what actually isn’t love, right? It’s like a conformity pact that you’re… I’m like, it’s different, right? That’s not what love is, right? I don’t know. 

It’s hard watching women in this cycle of self destruction and then maybe sometimes getting the thing they think they wanted and it’s not at all what they thought it was. It’s not at all what they were told it was going to be. It’s actually really, disgusting and sad and disheartening and wrong Because the thing that I often reflect back on is if you’re losing weight in order to or you’re dieting or weight cycling or whatever, in order to find love – the contract doesn’t ever end. It’s not like the minute you find the love, you can go back to finally eating pancakes. That’s not how that works. You’re just expected to do it forever and ever and ever. 

Virgie Tovar: I remember one of my big awakening moments was sitting down at my kitchen table being in my 20s. I was still dieting. I was working – I just came back from my gym and I was sweaty and it was gross. And all I wanted was a dessert, but I knew that I couldn’t have one because it would undo the workout that I had just– “undo.” And then I started to think, Well, geez. I know I can’t have a cupcake now, but when can I have one? In like six months?” Then I was like, “No.” And I was like, “A year?” And I was like, “No.” I was like, “Five years?” No. And then I was like, “Ten years?” I kept going until I reached the end of my life and the answer was still no.

I think what’s so incredible about diet culture is it keeps you in that moment, it keeps you in the struggle and the drive -the hunger keeps you in that and you can’t think logically about how this is going to extrapolate out 70 years from now or 50 years or 30 years from now. You’re so hungry and unhappy that all you can think about is making it to the next day. You’re also not going to have a donut, but that might be slightly better than today. It’s just that bad. I think people don’t realize this is the mindset of people who are deeply distressed. They don’t see it, you know? 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And what’s coming up for me, too, of this thought of, “I never get to actually have the cupcake,” is if you do give in and you do decide to go off of the diet and to find joy and to do whatever it is, then you’re seen as letting yourself go, which is seen as a reason to be cheated on or left. Because that’s the definition of love, I guess? It’s just like – I don’t know. The more that you talk about it, the more I can just hear the blatant disregard for the humanity of others that’s present in this exchange of like, “Well I love you now because you look this way and if that changes, well, all bets are off. I’m going to go be an asshole and sleep around with these people over here, because I don’t actually care about you. I just care about the social asset that you bring to my life by looking a certain way.”

Virgie Tovar: Yes, I think this really gets to the contractual nature of hetero normativity. The idea that a relationship between a man and a woman is the ultimate relationship. And that there’s this kind of silent – there’s a silent component but there’s also a very explicit component of the contractual nature of what we’ve been taught is love. And that contract has been utterly normalized. It’s totally normal for a person to have particular body expectations or any number of kinds of expectations that are about social conformity, and that that’s completely enveloped in our understanding of what love is and what lit looks like. And that’s very scary to me. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. And also, what it rings so true for me is because of these stories that so many of us have taken into our bones and not because we’re wrong because the culture literally gives us these messages non-stop for our entire lives is like, “If I can’t confirm then I need to overachieve to prove my worthiness and all these other ways. So I need to do all of this caretaking. I need to do all this emotional labor. I need to do – I need to have no boundaries. I need to do all these extra sexual things. I need to be the cutest, the funniest, the smartest, the easy going-est, chillest.” 

Virgie Tovar: Oh my god. Chillest! Yeah. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah like, fuck chill. Oh my god. I hate that so much. It’s because I know inherently that I’m not worthy of these things if I’m in a fat body, that’s the message, then I have to perform all these other things 10,000% better than a thin person in order to just get a little bit of love and recognition. 

Virgie Tovar: Yes, absolutely. No, I mean, speaking of chill. It’s funny because I’ve been talking to my friends recently. I was like, “When do you decide to come out as not chill? Do you just like right out the gate? Or do you wait till encounter number three?” Listen, we need to talk about something. I’m not chill. I mean, I don’t know. It’s so frustrating to me to know that that’s the prevailing expectation. It’s like you should not be chill in the face of sexist, racist, fat phobia, right? You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t be chill and you shouldn’t have to deal with anybody who– 

I think what’s really hard is, and I talk about this in the book, is we see sexism and the way that men engage with dating – like cisgender heterosexual men engaged with dating. And the way that this expectation of chill, it’s like the 21st century version of “You don’t get to have any expectations of me because you’re inferior.” But do you see how the language is shifted so now all of a sudden, you just feel crazy admitting that that’s actually what’s happening and you sound like a conspiracy theorist.

Dawn Serra: Oh my god. 

Virgie Tovar: Yeah. I’m single right now and dating and just seeing that expectation over and over again, and being like, “Yep, this is exactly what it was.” And sometimes in my mind, I think like, “Holy shit, if it were in 1950, we’d be talking about this in overt terms about what’s really happening. Because the 21st century and feminism is considered – some level of feminism and women’s liberation is considered polite or whatever, normal – I don’t know. The language is shifted but behavior hasn’t. I derailed the question a little bit but continue.

Dawn Serra: One of the other things that I was thinking about as you were talking about, “When do I reveal I’m not chill?” was – Never. FYI, folks. But I had a distinct period in my life, right around the time that I actually started this podcast. So it was maybe four and a half years ago – five years ago, where I had reached a place where in my life, I felt I couldn’t possibly be seen as sexy or desirable in my fat body. And so, I stayed in a relationship that was very unhealthy and I was very unhappy because it seemed like that was the best it was going to get. And then I reached a tipping point where I’d rather be alone and lonely than in this relationship anymore and I ended it. And then I started just hooking up with folks. 

I started realizing that so many of these men were really interested in having incredible sex with me in the shadows, but they didn’t want to be seen with me publicly. Yeah. And to me at that point in my life, that still felt like a win. It felt like, “Well, they might not want to take me out for dinner or introduce me to their friends. But, I’m getting touched. And I’m getting told that I’m sexy, and I’m getting all these orgasms, and they’re treating me to fancy hotel rooms. And so I guess it’s okay to be the dirty little secret because I’m feeling special.” Then getting to a point now like, “Fuck that shit. I don’t have time for that.” I really truly would rather not have someone in my life, than have someone in my life who feels like I need to be treated like a secret because I’m just that gruesome to be in their lives. That just totally hits me when I think about that chill stuff of – I only want people in my life that I can be vulnerable with and who can see the traumas and the stories that I show up with, and are curious about those, and aren’t going to shy away from that. It might be rare to find but feeling like a hidden secret whether it’s because you’re trans or you’re gay and closeted, or because you’re fat, and people don’t want to be seen with you – whatever it is. Ultimately, that ends up becoming deeply traumatic. 

Virgie Tovar: Yeah, absolutely. I’m thinking of a few things… So I have a column called “Take the Cake.” And one of the articles I wrote was – it was actually like offering a blank invoice for emotional labor that fat people do. And so, I encourage you in order to find it and to download the blank invoice. Either print out 100 and just give them to people who are asking you to do emotional labor or just kind of pin it. Pin it in your mind or in your office or whatever. And just remind yourself that if someone is enlisting you , whether they’re explicitly asking you or not, they’re enlisting you into doing unfair labor because they are invested in your inferiority and your service to them. So just keep that in mind and really ask yourself, “Do I actually want to be doing this?” And the answer is usually no. I’m thinking of that and I’m also thinking about the ways in which there’s this very– 

So I recently wrote something about, essentially, thin people who romantically exploit fat people. And, I was talking to a lot of fat friends and they were talking about this very particular phenomenon that happened again and again and again – where often straight cisgender men were asking them – essentially, doing things like… I had a friend who told me she had a colleague who would randomly after hours, after everybody got home except her and him, he would come and talk with her with his shirt off. This was a fat woman who’s telling me the story. He would then ask her for romantic advice about his wife or a situation that I experienced in my early 20s. And this goes to that really weird dynamic where, I had a coworker, also a straight cisgender man, very attractive. And that’s the thing, a lot of times the stories are about thin, “attractive” men doing this to fat women. 

So anyway, he was very “desirable.” A lot of my thin colleagues went out of their way to show romantic interest in him and flirt with him and do things for him. But what was happening when we would have meetings, he and I alone, out of nowhere, we would just be talking about work, out of nowhere, he would scoot in closer to me. He would pretend to tickle me around my crotch for 15 seconds and then just stop, and go back to the meeting and then do it again. Sometimes he would do it in front of our colleagues like an after work social thing. It was just wild breaks and the flurry of emotions that it caused in me – I felt special. I felt desired. But I also felt ashamed but I also felt like – it was maddening, right? Because the whole set of behaviors was so strange. The fact that he never verbally acknowledged what was happening. He never verbally acknowledged his desire or attraction to me. There was never any recognition of what happened and then he would do it in front of other people. And they would act like it wasn’t happening, right? Because they, themselves, were probably having cognitive dissonance at this hot dude would be doing this to this fat girl. And so they discarded the data or whatever. 

Virgie Tovar: So anyway, I was just talking to a lot of people and these stories were consistent, right? Literally,essentially, thin dudes asking fat women to go on dates but then pretending that it wasn’t a date, and then just wanting to hang out with them for hours alone. I mean, we’re talking a little bit about a middle ground between it’s not exactly that this person is full on having sex with you in a hotel room and then hiding you from their friends. What they’re doing is they’re gaslighting, romantically gaslighting, a person over a long period, definitely crossing the line of platonic, but always keeping the behavior within the realm of plausible deniability. And then acting shocked when that person wants to go on a date or kiss or anything else. They’re shocked that… It’s just horrible. Essentially, this is exploitation. 

So I understand completely. And I talked about this, in this particular piece that I wrote about, where exploitation is the marriage of entitlement and disempowerment. And so what happens is, the entitled person believes that the fat person is inferior and that their body, their mind, their spirit, their resources, and their dignity, belong to them. And then disempowerment is what happens when fatphobia creates a lived reality without people feeling less than human. This creates a reality where we’re less likely to advocate for ourselves, we don’t understand our worth, we don’t see our resources as actual resources that need to be protected and boundaried. And so, a lot of times what happens is that marriage– I think the component, maybe the silent component that I’m sensing in this conversation is also the very specific way that fat people, especially fat straight women, are taught to pursue thin men. Already in that, there’s already an inferiority that’s built into the desire. And then the person, the thin man, both has male privilege and thin privilege, and sometimes cisgender privilege or any white privilege or any other number of things. They know that that’s the dynamic. They sense that that’s the dynamic, and they sense that they have the upper hand and they take advantage.

Virgie Tovar: On the one hand, desire is part of it. But on the other hand, there’s another bigger control power dynamic that’s happening that’s actually probably a bigger component in the exchange. And so, what ends up happening is it creates a cycle, because the person loves the feeling of power. Some part of us like as a subjugated – maybe in the thin person’s mind – as the subjugated, oppressed, fat person, some part of us is like, “Oh, it feels so good to feel recognized by someone who’s superior to me, who’s a representative of a successful citizen in our culture.” And so, we get to access a sense of belonging through that.

Dawn Serra: Yes, yes. I think that’s so crucial is, “If I can’t access the privilege and the resources myself, and if I can be in a relationship with someone who does access them, that I’m closer and more likely to also get some of that access.” 

Virgie Tovar: Yes, exactly. 

Dawn Serra: Which I think is often just really this unspoken survival technique. I think it also just speaks, too, before we hopped on for the interview – one of the things you were talking about is the way that dating and romance and the politics of fatness never really leaves the room and how so often the people that you date don’t want to really contextualize your exchange, and all of the things you’re bringing into the room with you. And I think that’s so important to name, too. We carry our traumas with us and that can make for such rich, interesting experience. But when the lived experience and the trauma is denied or downplayed, it can feel so invisibilizing. So, I think that’s just – I don’t know – important for people listening to hear that the stories you bring with you might be ugly and they might hurt. And they might be scary to someone who doesn’t have those same experiences, but those stories inform so much of who you are. And if you want to honestly connect with another human being, you have to be able to see those things as present and to be able to talk about them, and to share experiences, and to have people who just don’t want to go there I think is really frustrating. 

Virgie Tovar: Oh, yeah. I mean, essentially, it’s not fair or right when someone asks you to only bring certain parts of yourself to the table. On the one hand, I think it’s important to set boundaries and say, “Okay, I’m somebody who’s a codependent or recovering codependent.” And so, my tendency has been like, “Date one: I’m going to tell you every single thing about me that makes me me.” I think through that I was trying to create vulnerability and trust. But what was happening was, I was leaving myself extraordinarily vulnerable to people I didn’t know. You can’t give away the keys to the castle. 

I think one of the things that’s so fascinating and hard and complicated for me and I think others is, as a woman, as a person of color, as a fat person – I don’t even realize I’m giving away the keys to the castle, because I haven’t been taught that I have a castle. And the truth is we have lived experiences that are very rich and very valuable. And that’s the castle, right? Treat the castle like it’s a fucking castle. And don’t let everybody in. So I think, on the one hand,it’s important to recognize what kind of boundaries do I need to have in order to protect myself and not give away too much too soon in order to protect my heart? Not in order to protect another person’s ego or whatever, but protect you because your precious and worthy of being taken care of. But specifically, what a lot of times people ask for is that we not bring up any parts of our life that implicate them. 

Virgie Tovar: I feel like that – and I’m going to speak to this on a personal level as someone who does a lot of straight dating – I date a lot of straight cisgender men. And a lot of times what I have noticed is that, a lot of times they’re very willing to hear me out on my fatness. They’re sympathetic. They’re very loving and caring. I’ve been very moved by men’s capacity, by the men I’ve dated anyway, their capacity to care takes me around that. But, if I want to talk about what it’s like dealing with men, they shut down quite quickly. 

I mean, I had a situation recently where I was dating someone who I was head over heels for – like completely and utterly just enamored of this person. I’ve never felt that way before with anybody. And things were going really, really well and he was holding me so well around my fatness, and he read all my work. I mean, he admired me so much and very clearly. And then, it got to a point in our exchange where I needed to talk to him about the tension of straight dating, the tension of what it means to be intimately involved with a man as a woman in this culture. And I opened up to him and said, “There is a tension to heterosexual exchange because you’re always going to have more power and access than I am. And it’s very difficult. It’s a big ask to give complete trust to someone who will always have more versatility and who is always considered more valuable than me in this culture.” And he just could not hear it. I’m like, “This is my lived experience. I have to live with this truth every day and you, at 33, have to hear it for the first time and have compassion rather than be defensive, and accept that this is my lived reality as a woman. And you just can’t do it because it implicates you.”

He didn’t feel implicated as a fat phobe. He felt defensive and protective of me against fat phobia. But once I was like, “You too. It’s you too. Whether you want to admit it or whether you’re actively participating in it or not. You are a beneficiary of sexism.” I cannot date someone who refuses to see my reality. And it had to end because I’m like, “You cannot even take accountability for what’s really happening in my life. And I understand that it hurts to hear that you’re part of something that’s hurting me. But your refusal to do it, your refusal to be empathetic, to be sympathetic, to hear me and to not make this about you, is an indication that you’re not here for me as a full person. And I’m just not going to deal with that.” 

Dawn Serra: Yes, yeah. I think that’s amazing. And I also know that a lot of people listening are probably deeply uncomfortable with that and that’s a great thing. I mean, what would change in our world, if in the relationships we had, we have the skills and we had the space to be able to process those kinds of conversations knowing they were going to hurt, knowing they were going to be uncomfortable, knowing we were going to get triggered and defensive, knowing we might be mad at each other for a little while and mad at the world for a little while, but to still be able to have a connected, committed relationship structure that could hold those kinds of conversations? What a fucking world that would be. 

Virgie Tovar: Yes. I think a lot of it, for me, it starts with recognizing how much bargaining power we actually have – How much we’re actually bringing to the table. I mean, I think if you’re a woman and if you’re a fat person, you think that you’re bringing three pennies to the table. That’s why we do so much side bargaining, right? Where it’s like, “Okay, I only have three pennies, but I’m totally willing to not have boundaries for you” or “I only have three pennies, but I’ll work all these extra hours that are not compensated.” We’re not recognizing that it’s actually not three pennies that we’re bringing. We’re bringing this enormous treasure trove. And that we can act from that place. We can recognize that’s what we’re bringing, and we can act like we know it, you know what I mean? And I think for me, that’s been a huge step in my journey.

Dawn Serra: God, I love that. I just want to kind of sit in that and think about, what would that look like for me, even? I’ve certainly grown so much over the past handful of years in this space, but there’s still places where I apologize or if not explicitly, inside I can feel an apology sitting there. And to do that shift of like, “I’m bringing a whole fucking treasure chest.” There’s some rich stuff here, folks. So, F the apologie. You don’t have to like me, but I’ve got some awesome things that we can roll around in and delight in. I think that’s a really beautiful shift that could offer people some big permission. 

Virgie Tovar: Yeah, and I think that the corollary of it that I want offer on that is, and then you’ve got to stop fucking with people who don’t want to see your treasure trove. And that’s the hard part. Right? It’s like what we’re taught to do is to go after the person who is telling us we have three pennies and to shift the dynamic and say, “I have a treasure trove, and I’m only fucking with people who see my treasure trove.” And that might mean radical shifting around your work practice, your dating practice, and your friendship practice. Those are big things. 

Dawn Serra: Yes. Oh my god. Well, to everybody who’s listening, I hope you just chew on that for a while and really think about what that would mean and more importantly, what it would mean to decide, “I really am only going to spend time and energy on people who can show up for me in the ways that I deserve.” That’s a really big question I think to end on. I have so many other things that I totally want to talk to you about, but I want to respect your time and our listeners’ time. So, Virgie, can you tell everyone how they can stay in touch with you and find you online if they want to read all the things and follow along with your adventures? 

Virgie Tovar: Yes. So the first thing is please buy my book. It’s called “You Have the Right to Remain Fat.” It’s out by the Feminist Press and you can get it on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. You can find me online at www.virgietovar.com – VIRGIETOVAR.com. And then I’m also pretty active on Instagram @virgietovar. 

Dawn Serra: Yay. And also totally be sure to check out your column, “Take the Cake”, right?

Virgie Tovar: Yeah, yeah. “Take the Cake” on ravishly.com.

Dawn Serra: So much good stuff there. Such a backlog of awesome pieces. So everyone go check that out too. If you’re hungry for more because we want to feed our hunger. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Virgie, and sharing all of this. This was like the most delicious brain sex ever. I loved it. 

Virgie Tovar: Yes. Oh my God, thank you for having me. 

Dawn Serra: You’re so welcome and to everybody who tuned in. Thank you so much for listening. Remember if you support the show on Patreon at $3 or above – patreon.com/sgrpodcast. Head over there now to get your bonus content. I’m going to do a little reading from Virgie’s book and then do some more sharing and some more theorizing around these topics around fatness and sex and pleasure and all that good stuff. So go check that out. If you have any questions for me head to dawnserra.com to submit those. You can do that anonymously. And of course until next time, I’m Dawn Serra with Virgie Tovar. Bye

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?