This is a serious question. Being a bigger girl myself, I am happen to be attracted to larger men. I like to be thrown around during sex, slapped in the face and physically dominated. A smaller man doesn’t feel dominating. I can definitely see how the reverse could also be true. What is your take on this? Would it considered “fat hating if a 6’ 165 pound man is only attracted to skinnier women?

Mod response:

Yes, in the sense that considering a whole class of people unloveable for a single bodily characteristic is a kind of indirect hatred, especially in a culture that discriminates heavily against fat people as potential love/sex/life partners.

‘Only being attracted to thin people’ in this day and age isn’t really comparable to, say, preferring tall people, as the vast majority of people with a preference for tall people won’t treat shorter people like subhumans unworthy of love. There’s a whole different kind of dynamic between thin/fat in our society than exists between more neutral preferences, as a function of pervasive bigotry against fat people.

Attraction is very complex. It’s undeniable that societal attitudes play a huge role in who we find attractive. Some people subvert those attitudes in one way or another, but when most five year olds pick the fat kid as the person they least want to hang out with of any group of people, then you know you’ve got a powerful kind of soclalization of attitudes right there.

If we lived in a time where fat/thin wasn’t so charged in the love/sex/partnership realm–where on most dating sites things like height and hair color are often expressed as soft preferences and weight, to contrast, a dealbreaker–then this would be an easier question to answer.

But we don’t live in that fat/thin neutral society. We live in an era that teaches kids from toddlerhood that fat people are less-than in all ways, but especially in that they’re lower-status love/sex/life partners. It’s rather impossible to untangle all of that from a more neutral 'preference.’

-artetolife