Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It by Brittany Gibbons Page A
Authors: Brittany Gibbons
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covered in blood from the waist down. Terrified, I woke my mom, who took me in the bathroom to clean me up and have a lovely conversation about how to use maxi-pads, in which I wanted to stab myself in the face. But by morning, it had become clear that our cocker spaniel, Mia, had gone into heat, and since she slept with me at night, while the puke was mine, the blood was not. I kept the pad on for the whole day anyways, just in case my person cycle aligned with Mia’s dog cycle. Butit didn’t and my parents had Mia spayed a month later. Because waking up in the middle of the night to find a little girl with big boobs standing next to your bed covered in spoiled ranch dressing and dog period is something you never want to experience twice.
The mystery surrounding puberty and sex did nothing to stifle my curiosity; in fact, much like the overprotective moms who make you spell the words G-U-N-S and S-U-G-A-R in front of their impressionable Mensa babies only to end up raising Second Amendment–obsessed hyperglycemics, keeping it a secret terrified and excited me to the point I’d become consumed with the idea. My health teacher was increasingly uncooperative and furrowed her brown in concern each time she shook off my requests for detailed diagrams and answers about when hair would grow on my you know what, how many holes we had down there, and which ones did we put things inside of? The general takeaway from reading ahead in my health textbook was that our private parts were sacred, blood will eventually come out of them, and sex was something we weren’t supposed to think about having with others or ourselves.
I didn’t even know having sex with yourself was on the table until a damning revelation during my brief friendship with my atheist friend Drea, whose mother worked part-time for my parents. To Drea, I was exotic and mysterious, conducting play versions of Mass in my living room, wearing my mother’s off-white silk robe, carefully placing a shortbread cookie on Drea’s tongue and blessing her as she chewed. In return for saving her from hell and relieving her of sin, Drea invited me to a sleepover with all of her public school friends. We watched PG-13 movies and drank Pepsi from two-liter bottles, until she dismissed us all to our sleeping bags, turned off the lights, and quietly instructed us on how to touch ourselves like she’d seen in the Asian pornographic movies her father collected. I didn’t climax or anything, I was ten with sausage fingers and hangnails,but it felt amazing, which would go on to be a Catholic red flag. The only things Catholics are allowed to enjoy are fried cod, beer, and the movie Sister Act .
Later that year, before even reaching the much-anticipated section on human development and reproduction, my poor health teacher suffered an aneurysm, totally unrelated to my genital interrogations, and went to live with her sister in Florida. Health was then taken over by our priest. Father took his no-nonsense approach to crucifixion and applied it to all areas of our studies, including sex education. He split our class into a boys group and a girls group, and whichever group wasn’t actively learning about sex organs got to sit in the gym and watch Mary Poppins .
I don’t know how the boys group went, but from the time Father walked into the room, it was like we were already in trouble for something. He looked angry and impatiently tapped his foot as we took turns reading aloud about fallopian tubes and menstruation. It was like learning about the human body from the Hulk. He took no questions, and when we’d finished the chapter, he stood in front of his desk, tossed the book down, and gave it to us straight. According to the Father intercourse was a utilitarian act between a married man and woman, with the intention to make enough babies to fill a conversion van. Anything that occurred outside those specific perimeters was deemed damnable. This point was then further driven home by
The mystery surrounding puberty and sex did nothing to stifle my curiosity; in fact, much like the overprotective moms who make you spell the words G-U-N-S and S-U-G-A-R in front of their impressionable Mensa babies only to end up raising Second Amendment–obsessed hyperglycemics, keeping it a secret terrified and excited me to the point I’d become consumed with the idea. My health teacher was increasingly uncooperative and furrowed her brown in concern each time she shook off my requests for detailed diagrams and answers about when hair would grow on my you know what, how many holes we had down there, and which ones did we put things inside of? The general takeaway from reading ahead in my health textbook was that our private parts were sacred, blood will eventually come out of them, and sex was something we weren’t supposed to think about having with others or ourselves.
I didn’t even know having sex with yourself was on the table until a damning revelation during my brief friendship with my atheist friend Drea, whose mother worked part-time for my parents. To Drea, I was exotic and mysterious, conducting play versions of Mass in my living room, wearing my mother’s off-white silk robe, carefully placing a shortbread cookie on Drea’s tongue and blessing her as she chewed. In return for saving her from hell and relieving her of sin, Drea invited me to a sleepover with all of her public school friends. We watched PG-13 movies and drank Pepsi from two-liter bottles, until she dismissed us all to our sleeping bags, turned off the lights, and quietly instructed us on how to touch ourselves like she’d seen in the Asian pornographic movies her father collected. I didn’t climax or anything, I was ten with sausage fingers and hangnails,but it felt amazing, which would go on to be a Catholic red flag. The only things Catholics are allowed to enjoy are fried cod, beer, and the movie Sister Act .
Later that year, before even reaching the much-anticipated section on human development and reproduction, my poor health teacher suffered an aneurysm, totally unrelated to my genital interrogations, and went to live with her sister in Florida. Health was then taken over by our priest. Father took his no-nonsense approach to crucifixion and applied it to all areas of our studies, including sex education. He split our class into a boys group and a girls group, and whichever group wasn’t actively learning about sex organs got to sit in the gym and watch Mary Poppins .
I don’t know how the boys group went, but from the time Father walked into the room, it was like we were already in trouble for something. He looked angry and impatiently tapped his foot as we took turns reading aloud about fallopian tubes and menstruation. It was like learning about the human body from the Hulk. He took no questions, and when we’d finished the chapter, he stood in front of his desk, tossed the book down, and gave it to us straight. According to the Father intercourse was a utilitarian act between a married man and woman, with the intention to make enough babies to fill a conversion van. Anything that occurred outside those specific perimeters was deemed damnable. This point was then further driven home by
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