WTAF: It is perfectly okay for you to have these fantasies. And, honestly, FUCK NORMAL. There is nothing morally superior about having any particular taste in sex, whether that is completely kinky or completely ordinary, as long as what you are doing is not hurting anyone without their consent. There’s nothing wrong with fantasies, period, no matter how bizarre. And this isn’t that bizarre. Unusual to find in a young woman, granted, but you are hardly alone.

Besides, most people don’t have normal sex lives. Most people have a weird fantasy or two tucked away somewhere, and many of those people have REALLY weird fantasies.

My earliest sexual fantasies were . . . a little odd. Overtones of rape/nonconsent and BDSM. As I’ve gotten older, my fantasies have changed and blossomed and shifted, and I have many, many fantasies. Some of them are completely “unacceptable.”

Now, I do have a kinky sex life, and there is nothing wrong or shameful about that. I act out some of my fantasies, and it is a really wonderful and powerful thing, sometimes heartbreaking in its clarity. I write about others, to give myself an outlet, and that (writing) is something I suggest that WTAF think about doing someday when she has a safe place to do it.

But the really fringe stuff, the stuff I have never really told any one person all of, that’s stuff that I don’t want to do in reality. I don’t want to fuck a horse or a dog or pee on anyone or physically harm someone who had not consented to it. Fantasies about medical play are arousing to me, but real doctors, and even acting it out IRL, make me feel sick to my stomach.

We, as sexual beings, human beings, are very complicated. What we fantasize about says very little about what kind of person we are, morally. In everyone I have ever spoken to who has outre tastes, tastes the really freaky shit, they indicated that the theme cropped up very early. It isn’t something for which we should feel ashamed or responsible in the sense that we did it to ourselves and have the power and obligation to stop doing it to ourselves.

What bothers me most, the thing I would most like to personally sit WTAF down and talk to her about, is the feeling shameful about masturbation thing. And that is something that it might be helpful to talk about with a professional. You don’t even have to divulge the nature of your fantasies if you aren’t comfortable doing so. But having someone help you through this difficulty, someone to help you see why it upsets you and see that it’s really and truly for-real okay, might be very helpful. And I would say this to anyone, even if they had no bizarre fantasies at all (maybe ESPECIALLY then). Clearly you have a sex drive, clearly it wants to come out and play, and I think finding healthy expression for that would be good. And it’s better, in my experience, to do that with yourself first, than with someone else. Get a grip on yourself, so to speak. Become okay with how you think and comfortable with making yourself feel good. Work from there.

I would recommend, if you can get it, WTAF, is any of the books by Nancy Friday about women’s sexual fantasies. Forbidden Flowers, My Secret Garden, Women on Top, any of them, or better yet, ALL of them. They are scholarly works, not properly erotica, and should be available in libraries. Even if you only read them AT the library, hidden in a corner, read them. You will find it liberating in the extreme to realize just how alone you are not. Please, read them.

And, on a final note, I am an avid proponent of fat acceptance, and I find fat fetishism to be deeply disturbing when directed *at me personally* at the expense of actually getting to know me as a person, not just a fat person, because it fetishizes a part of my identity that is not, to me personally, sexual, and is also a part of my identity that makes me vulnerable socially (I’ve had people tell me I should kill myself because I’m fat . . . no, really).

The idea of the fetish itself, that people have that fetish, is not bothersome to me at all. I think it’s fine and wonderful that people have such a variety of tastes.

To me, fat fetishism is not the same as fat acceptance as a political movement. That is its liability AND its strength. A liability in that people often mistake sexualization for acceptance, and that is a grave and disturbing error, especially when made AT you; and a strength in that it is separate, in that having a fat fetish does NOT necessarily say anything about how you feel, politically, about fat as a social justice issue (good or bad), or even how you feel about real fat people.

There’s a lot for you to explore here, a lot of questions, and it’s a terrifying time, being a teenager, one I remember with zero fondness, but there’s nothing wrong with you, or your thoughts, and they won’t hurt you or make you hurt anyone else or turn you into a bad person or make you into something you are not. They don’t change you or say anything bad about you.

If you seek understanding, and I hope that you do — the fact that you’ve written to Sugar says you do — seek it because this is a part of yourself that is interesting and strange and human, and which could bring you a lot of entertainment and pleasure; not because it’s something you want to understand so you can get rid of it.

It doesn’t work, trying to burn that stuff out. It only complicates things, makes things grow ugly, and that WILL hurt you, make you hurt yourself. And I don’t want that. None of us reading this want that. Look at it this way: literally all I know about you is that you are a teenager, a woman, and you have nobody to talk to about this, and that you are into this to-you bizarre and frightening thing. And I still think you are a good and fine person, even though I know what must seem, to you, to be the very least flattering thing about you. It’s not. It’s not a bad thing that says bad things about you. Obviously. It’s just A Thing.

It’s okay. I promise.

I also love to watch women shit.

It’s something that tortured me for so many years–something that I kept brutally secret. I would visit it for pleasure, and then revisit it many times in between in torture. I couldn’t do hallucinogenic drugs because I would spend the entire time dwelling on what a disgusting freak I was.

I am at ease with it now. There are a couple reasons I can list that I believe contributed to this.

I have worked my way into a circle of very loving friends–intelligent and mature people who have a high enough understanding of life that they know how pervasive fetishes are. People have fetishes. Some people have more specialized ones. They rarely make sense. I have a female friend in her early twenties who is sexually attracted to elderly women. She knows I like poop. We think each other are great.

Another reason is becoming more confident in myself in general. “Yeah I like fat girls, so what? I like other stuff too,” is the attitude you should take. But not with a scowl on your face, which might be your first reaction, but with a smile. Say it with a look like, “Don’t act like you don’t have some weird sex thing.” Because chances are very good they do. Try to learn all that you can, not only about your fetish, but all of them in general. Convince yourself that it is not weird to have a fetish, and that the fetish doesn’t have any real bearing on who you are as a person.

I wanted to weigh in on this topic because I have a fetish that is even further from societal standards than yours, and I wanted to make sure you knew that there is such a thing. You can watch fatty porn on any multi-genre porn site on the web. Not mine. Mine is even illegal in a lot of countries. Yet I have found peace with it. As long as you don’t practice a fetish that encroaches on other people’s free will, you are a good person. You might have to keep your secret for a while, but one day you will find yourself comfortably lodged between caring, mature, understanding people, and you will find yourself letting your secret out, and feeling good about it.

I love the compassion & common sense Sugar doles out, working within the system, dealing with emergent sexuality, issues of desire, and fantasy.

But if this letter isn’t a sign of the damage we’re actively participating in and how small our worlds are in this era of “globalization,” I don’t know what is.

Hey – WTAF – YOU are totally normal & cool. You know what you like! Do you know how healthy, and what a gift that is? Our dominant culture is sick. Not you, lovely.

I so love what Sugar said in her note to the Sugar Group: It takes faith to make a home in the body. That’s so beautiful, and it says it all — your body is your home.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of. As other people have expressed, I’m concerned when you say you don’t like yourself when you masturbate — because I think you deserve to feel wonderful about yourself.

I would be careful about the rabbit hole too — spending too much time there, especially if it makes you feel bad. I think desire is a lot more plastic than most people realize, and there’s no need for it to define you. People who sell porn have a vested interest in wanting you to define yourself this way. But you don’t want your kink to become WHO you are, how you see yourself in the world, how you connect socially. What I mean is you don’t want a kink to be a trap. It’s part of your sexual imagination — the way your mind is creating the world you live in. And that’s beautiful. Big women are beautiful — you’ve got great taste, like Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, and the unknown sculptor of Nike of Thrace. Wanting to nourish is beautiful — it’s probably an evolutionarily necessary urge. So I’m celebrating you as I write this.

WTAF, working out your specific fantasies and how you feel about them is important, but I think this may be more important still — and definitely something to discuss with a therapist, even if you don’t feel ready to discuss anything more detailed.

Please believe me: it is okay.