The Fat Muse visits

Muse has arrived. Today it is the fat female muse. She sits down. I offer her something to drink. She takes hot apple cider.

I tell her that there are things I'd like to put in the poem, but I feel a bit weird putting them in because I am fat.

"Like what?" she asks, spreading her skirts and getting comfortable.

"Oh - knowing someone very well, having him appreciate me, appreciate my curves. Slowly send his hands over them. You know - that stuff."ex

"What is so bad about that?" She drinks the rest of the apple cider. I ask if she wants more. She shakes her head.

"The more you put such details in, the more you legitimize the insertion of such details and the more you make it both legitimate and natural for fat women to write about their own hotness and sexuality. The more they write about it, the easier they make it for women after them to do so, as well. It's a cycle."

I then think of The Biggest Loser, and how there seems to be a hidden subconscious subtext of showing fat people clad in brief garments. People can't seem to get enough of them. Fat is so prohibited that, like the bodies of women in certain countries where they are not allowed to be seen, it becomes sexy by default.

"You're right," I tell her. "But I'm scared. I am not the kind of person who can blithely take on the opinions of millions of people and change them."

"You don't have to be," she says. "Others will come along who can and who do. You are, in Doris Lessing's words, a boulder pusher. You push the boulder slowly up the hill. Others will come along and make it fly."