Large Bodies Don’t Need Metaphors to Be Beautiful

December 2, 2014 / Samantha Peterson

Fatphobia is so rampantly internalized that many people feel the need to justify their attraction to fat people by comparing them to non-human objects and creatures.

Though the intention might not be to insult, this behavior is still deeply objectifying and dehumanizing. It insinuates that fat people aren’t beautiful or sexually attractive to others unless there is something beyond human about their bodies.

It turns the possibility of mutual desire and appreciation into fetish.

In her poem “Dead Men Can’t Catcall,” Samantha Peterson points out the harmful nuance of these supposedly metaphorical compliments and reclaims her body’s agency, humanity, and beauty.

Click for the Transcript

SAMANTHA PETERSON: To the man in the car who shouted, “I like a big girl in bed, baby, more room to paint on.” I said nothing. I pretended you meant paint. I walked away complimented. In class, I learn about the the tradition of the pastoral landscape, how it tames the wild out, that nature is a frenzied horse most useful after it is broken.

Later, I remember how your thin limbs dangled out of the car. I remember your mouth, not your own. You said, “Darling, your body is like a landscape. The rolling hill of you, the orchard I would set on fire to match the color of your mouth.” And for a moment, I think he meant it. Desirability is a clever thief. It steals you away from your body, cast subject as object if it means I am wanted.

I know bodies like mine can only be talked about in metaphor. My stomach could be the curve of a sand dune, my calves a flexing ocean. You could hook up with a mountain of a body. You could describe it later as legs you climbed all the way up. But a fat body, a dirty sidewalk, is too big to be worthy of a human form.

When I talk about myself, I describe a landscape, a skyline, a galaxy of a woman, a palatable vastness. I ask myself if I could be the sun, streaking someone else’s sky awake. Desirability means my favorite compliment came when a man told me that my mouth reminded him of a jar of fire flies on a hot Southern night.

I grew up in Portland. I have no idea what a jar of fireflies feels like, but I bet you it’s beautiful like the paintings, something you could hang up and show off to strangers, say “This piece shows that nature is a frenzied swarm, but goddamn, how pretty the jar tames it.”

There are days the body positivity movement does not prepare you for, like the day you have to take your body back from the only way people allow themselves to find it beautiful.

To say that my mouth does not firefly. My body is not a landscape. I am not a fucking orchard, or a plate of bruised fruit on the road you stop at on the way to some beautiful hillside with curves in all the right places. My body is good like a body. I take up this much space. I’m not some sprawling thing in the distance. I am right here. I am right here.

Check out these Everyday Feminism articles on fat love and body acceptance for more information:

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Samantha Peterson is a writer, slam poet, body positive warrior, em dash enthusiast, and graduate of Lewis & Clark. Please follow her on twitter at @Izzashark. Video courtesy of Button Poetry. For more amazing spoken word performances, check them out on YouTube and Facebook.