#not really trying to make any all encompassing points about society or fatphobia hence why this isnt rebloggable

[chubsette]

No idea why I'm sharing this but this is something that I've recently realized about myself and need to put it into words somewhere

For many years I was pretty sure I was a lesbian, and I only started to identify more with the bi/pan label over the last 2-3 years of my life. It's weird to say but I never struggled with accepting myself as being someone that liked people of the same sex and/or gender as me, because that felt very natural. Maybe because when I was a teenager, the idea of what was considered "acceptably desirable" in women was just a smidge more diverse in terms of body types than in previous decades (think of how for a while the cool thing for a brand to do was to showcase a couple of plus-sized women on their runways in a sea of skinny models y'know). And like of course I'm not saying that the 2010s were the holy grail for fat acceptance or anything like that, because they weren't, but for me, as an easily influenced teenager, I felt less isolated in being attracted to women of a larger size. But I never saw that kind of sentiment being extended to men in the mainstream, so for whatever reason I never thought I could be attracted to them as well. I was yet to develop a sense of self, so when my (mostly) straight group of friends talked of all the guys they found beautiful and they were always super masculine guys with six-packs and biceps larger than my head, I figured that well if I'm not into these guys, the peak of male attractiveness, then I'm not into guys at all. And I believed that about myself for years.

It wasn't until I actually realized I had food and belly related kinks that I also realized that I could be attracted to men. Because there I was, as a college freshman, seeing a community of people that would talk about fat men in a way that positioned their body as desirable. Suddenly I was like "OH men are just as hot as women actually".

Of course, I'm older now, I no longer need to be told something is good in order for me to admit that that thing is good, but as someone who had to deal with a very fatphobic household growing up, I did need to see my own feelings expressed by someone else before I could recognize and accept them. Well yeah anyway is this anything