Author & Body Image Activist"I mainly rely on online dating now. But before the internet was a thing, I was a fat girl who nobody wanted to date. I was going on phone chat lines and stuff at 17-years-old, which is kind of the predecessor of online dating in a lot of ways. For a fat girl who was told her entire life that she was undesirable or unloveable, the idea of meeting someone anonymously and having them fall for my personality, and then having the reveal — that’s the fat girl dream. [Laughs.] It was very intuitive to me. I was lying about being 18-years-old to use the service. And I didn’t realize at the time, but all the men [using this service] who worked had to pay. So they were all these white-collar businessmen. So I went to living in the suburbs with mostly immigrant families to dating white-collar businessmen at 17-years-old. And so many different parts of my life emerged from that one introduction to dating. My first dates should have been at McDonald’s, but instead they were at five-star restaurants.""Yes! I’ve always been sort of the smart girl in the class. But being fat also made me want to be the smartest person, because I had to have all these compensatory personality traits. I had to be smart. I had to be bubbly. I had to be easy to talk to. I had to be funny. Since I was fat, these other parts of my personality had to be extra. So these guys wanted a young woman, of course, but I could talk like their colleagues. I didn’t have the life experience, but I was really bright, so it was a good combination for them.""Oh, yeah. It’s still having residual reverberations in my life now. Like one of the things I’m living with right now — so I’m Latina. I grew up with all people of color. I grew up with boys who looked like me, but they all hated me because I was fat. So it’s wild, because I was getting introduced to white men, and they were so into me. I went from my whole world being brown to my dating world being white. All of the sudden, I was hanging out with white men exclusively in a romantic way, because the trickle-down effect of racism is that it’s mostly rich white guys who can afford to pay for this phone service. So it’s complicated and painful now as an adult having had those formative experiences with white men of a certain class."Now it’s very difficult for me to find a partner who can get down with me as a person of color, who is critical of racism and stuff. At 17, I didn’t have a racism critic. I wasn’t a feminist yet. So dating was so much easier. So now I’m woke, and I have life experience, and these same white businessmen who I’m still attracted to, because they were the only guys who would date a fat girl like me off this phone line, just aren’t cutting it ideologically anymore. And yet, I don’t have the dating skill set to be more versatile, because my formative experience is so singular.""It’s complicated. So I’m not of the weight or the body shape that typically gets fetishized. But what men do tend to do is fetishize my bust. And it’s like, I’m fat all over — I’m not just busty. But maybe because they don’t want to confront their desires to fuck a fat girl, they project all of my fatness onto my bust. So that’s weird. There’s also the fact that even though I’m not Asian, I look Asian. So the idea of being a busty Asian person gets brought up a lot. I’m Mexican and Iranian, but I’ve been told I look Korean or Pacific Islander. And in these men’s minds, I’m transmogrified into a busty Asian woman. So I feel like I get fetishized by that ethnic misidentification than I do about my weight.""Not really. I’m not someone who will rule out a partner because of a fetish that they have — even if it’s size-related. I know that there are a lot of women for whom that is a big trigger, but it just isn’t for me. And there’s probably a lot of reasons why. I have a background in sexuality studies. I don’t have that same reflexive disgust around fetishism that maybe some others do. I’ve also dated and had sex with men who have fetishes for fat women, and it’s truly pleasurable for me. And it might be different for me because on the spectrum of plus bodies, I might be considered smaller. If I go to the suburbs, I’m average. So that might be why the fetishization of my body doesn’t bother me so much."I’m somebody who has casual sex and enjoys casual sex. Fat fetishism is much easier for me to appreciate in the casual sex arena, because it’s so much more physical and corporeal. I have to say, with men who have articulated a specific desire for my fatness, there’s a level of comfort that I just feel that is unbeatable. Thin people may not realize this, because it might just be intuitive to them, but for a fat person, it’s rare to have someone say, ‘I love every part of your body. I love your arm fat. I love your back fat. I love all of these things.’ So the fetishization doesn’t bother me all that much. But I understand that might be a unique experience."This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.