Thursday, July 05, 2007

FA’s Find Friendship

FA’s Find Friendship

In recent days I had the reprisal of an event which has come to be a very special event for me. The husband of one of my dear internet friends, a ssbbw of great beauty and wisdom and class and charm and lots more neat stuff, came into town. He usually comes into New York twice a year for business and ,being a New Yorker originally, he drools for several months in advance over the thought that he will have a chance to have a “real” tongue or corned beef or pastrami sandwich. On his arrival we usually retire to an old style Kosher Deli where the sandwich thickness is akin to the Manhattan Yellow Pages, digging deep into the culinary timewarp that accompanies this living embodiment of childhood memories.

However, as wonderful as the food and company is, his arrival triggers another event which I’ve truly looked forward to now with even greater anticipation(since I live in NY and can eat the deli whenever the urge grabs me). That other event is related to the fact that my friend, I’ll call him Sting, though as far as I know he doesn’t play bass, sing professionally or have any association with the Police, is a dyed in the wool, card carrying Fat Admirer. While he is faithful and adoring of his lovely wife, in his heart and soul, eyes and loins he feels the pull and attraction of the glories of fat women. Like all of us FAs he wanders through life attuned to the appearance and presence of the mystical, magical and magnificent charms of BBWs and SSBBWs in the wild.

It is an article of faith that when FAs write about their thoughts the concept of “the sighting” is never far from their writings. Many BBWs and SSBBWs seem mystified and/or insulted by this seeming obsession with the way in which FAs seem to share and trade sightings with each other like trading cards or rare stamps or coins. They sense that there is an objectification of the women into some “thing”, having a shape, size, face but devoid of personality or other characteristics of humanity. I think, that in many ways this is an unfair charge because, for the FA, the sighting is as much of as a FA’s being as is breathing, smelling fire to warn one when to run, smelling good food as a sign to eat or a dark shadowy alley alerts some primeval early warning system to prime the fight/flight responses. For an FA, the sighting in some primitive, hardwired way, prepares the FA for the presence of a potential partner. While in our complex society this function is generally not something that can be acted on(in the way it might have been in our distant past when the number of people was so low and the only way to assure procreation was to act on someone interesting to you pretty much immediately), the hardwired system is in place and triggers automatically, much in the way that the smell of fire triggers a bodily reaction or aroma of good food causes the saliva to begin flowing.

The interesting thing for me is that “most people” and even many BBWs and SSBBWs find the whole FA reaction to be gross, repulsive or in some fashion infantile, when, I suspect it is something completely natural, normal(among FAs), and proper. I will, however, agree that acting on that FA reaction without the usual societal restraints and controls would be improper.

The meeting with Sting, the FA, was a seminal event in the continuing evolution of my understanding of my own being(and no fluids were passed apart from mustard and ketchup). The reason is that by nature and probably more by virtue of the ostracism of our preferences, most FAs are loners, at least as to our preferences. While there are some highly evolved FAs who are not only open about their preferences but wear them on their sleeves like a badge of honor, more of us who are open about our preferences feel no need to broadcast our proclivities and taste because it generally isn’t most people’s business what we believe or find attractive. Anyhow, it appears that vast numbers of us(like Nixon’s Silent Majority), are rather lonely and cloistered in our FA’dom in real life. The internet has provided a more comfortable venue for finding other FAs, although again most FAs on the net are looking for BBWs and SSBBWs and see the other FAs more as competition than as comrades in arms(fat arms, naturally). So, even on the Dimensions Boards and Chat there tends to be more of a separation of FAs from other FAs. The women chat with the women, the men chat with the women(and vice versa), but only more rarely do the guys chat with the guys except as a way of besting another to vie for the attention of a woman. I suspect a certain amount of homophobia may be one of a number of reasons for this.

In real life environments where there are fat women and FAs grouped together the dynamics of the environments again tend to disfavor FAs grouping together in a way where they recognize, revel in or explore each other as a way to find out more about themselves or just have a good time. Having attended Naafa conventions over the years I see this playing itself out repeatedly. There are various social groups… all girls, one woman surrounded by a posse of men, one man surrounded by a posse of women(I like this one….) or a group of men and women sharing a space as a group. But only rarely are there groups of male FAs together to hang out and enjoy the time together and revel in the wonders of being an FA in such a beauty rich environment. I wrote about one such FA meeting at a Naafa convention on the dimensions boards many moons ago.

So, my FA friend’s visits to my town provide us a time to hang out, catch up on people we know in common, see how each of us is doing, and our families, and break bread together(preferably rye). And this has always been a source of enjoyment, but the FA side of us has in some way been tacitly accepted but not really discussed as some embarrassing wart or birthmark that we know the other knows we have, but isn’t to be discussed or compared. Usually, in the past we have danced around the subject and shared a rushed sighting of some extraordinary nature or the like. But, no real discussions as to what we really have happen inside as we wander the world locking in on flabulous fat women in the wild have surfaced.

Until the last time.

For the first time we somehow had a little extra time together and had a meal at a place more conducive to sitting and hanging out and lingering over a very pleasant dinner and talking. And, finally, our talk slowly, and initially scarily trespassed on the forbidden fruit of FA’dom. And, rather than a lightning bolt striking each of us down as we sat, or the other looking on in horror or disgust, the gates began to open and decades long private thoughts passed our lips and crackled off our tongues. And there was no horror or disgust, but amusement, knowing nods and serious belly laughs. The amazing secret that we discovered…. Inside we’re almost totally the same. We play the same private mental games, perform the same FA activities and enjoy the same internal debates about a woman’s size, shape, dimensions, weight and beauty. We each have elaborate mental constructs to calculate what a woman weighs, what her dimensions are, from height, to bust, to waist, hips and thighs. And, not wedded to a single estimation, as we continue to observe a fat woman we often tweak the initial calculation based on the way she moves, observations from different angles and other visual and sensory inputs.

As a game, and because it allowed us to spend more time together until I had to take my train home, he walked with me to Grand Central Terminal and we situated ourselves on the mid step landing at the Western end of the main room of the terminal, the one with the high ceiling with the stars of the Zodiac laid out on it. But rather than observe the stars on the ceiling we talked and followed the female stars below and in front of us. The area is so vast you can’t immediately see everyone across the whole expanse of the big space. Yet, we each would see all of the fat women within seconds of each other and then would share our estimates of their sizes if they were sufficiently interesting and ther weren’t too many at one time to focus on. My methods of calculation, honed over decades of FA’dom are empirical and subjective, not based on any formulaic approach. Sting’s approach is more highly mathematical, based on an evaluation of the basic three dimensions with some “weighting” factors, such as relative proportions and others. Yet, our guesses were usually quite closely linked together. Usually less than a ten percent variation, which in such a setting is quite small would divide our guesses.

We also discussed the way in which our bodies, eyes, brains are set up so that we need do nothing for a fat woman to trigger our attention .It is clearly some system from the dim past that continues to function and aid us in our search for the perfect mate. However, it is an acute sense like those of sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. Whether it’s a jungle sense that dates to the early sense of whether the sound you hear is prey or predator or friend or foe, I know that my FA sense of an approaching fat woman is as much a part of me as is my ability to distinguish the smell of frying bacon from burning rubber. One arouses my taste buds and salivary glands to action. The other alerts the cough reflex and eyes to churn out tears to fight the oncoming horrid stench and acrid smoke. In the same way the locking onto an attractive fat woman causes my heart to beat faster and some shrunken bony woman’s appearance devoid of any secondary signs of womanhood, breasts, hips, butts triggers no reaction apart from a slight uneasy agita, distaste or pity.

In many ways I wonder about non-FAs and if they experience the same sort of independent below consciousness tracking system for hunting out the women who appeal to them on some visceral level. And, of course, whether women have a similar sort of early warning system in place.

It’s funny, I started out intending to write about how wonderful it is as a FA to have another FA who is your friend, but moved beyond that to what I see as a core FA issue, which has never received much play in the discussion boards apart from some creepy sounding thing that sleezy FAs do when they leer and drool at fat women, making them at least uncomfortable and at worst totally skeevish and frightened/angry.

However, I believe, and put it out there for others to weigh in, that the FA’s BBW early warning system is an inherent element of the FA makeup and something that is just hardwired into our systems. Neither good nor evil, merely a part of us like arms and legs and bellies and a penis.

I’d be interested in other comments from FAs, whether men or women, about their relationships with other FAs and comments about this FA sixth sense I’ve tried to get a handle on.

But, to come full circle on the original thought, my friend is coming back into town this weekend and I’ll be able to revisit this subject and go into it in greater depth and perhaps to share inner FA thoughts openly with another connoiseur of curvy charms We have plans to attend a glorious food based event which he attends as part of his vocation and for me as part of my avocation. However, based on his prior visits he assures me that the ratio of bbws and ssbbws to the pool of women is much higher than that of the population in general. I stand prepared to be convinced, stupefied and delighted.