Good In Bed

Everyone has a favourite book or maybe 5 or 10!! A book that evoked particular memories, a book that touched you like nothing else has, a book that once you had finished reading it, you thought "Oh wow that book could have been written about me". If I had to be stranded on a desert island and could only take 2 things with me, one would be an endless supply of music, the other would be books. If I could take 3 things, the other would be my husband (to keep me amused when I was between books lol).

Books have the ability to take you away, when you crack open a book and break it's spine for the first time, it transports you away from 'real life', it could take you back in time, forward in time or maybe just down the road but it's the way it takes you there. You find yourself immersed in it's storyline, feeling and caring for characters or plotting their downfall even. A good author will take you into his/her world and make you totally forget all about yours.

I have too many favourite books to list but there are a few that shine above the rest, one of them is a book called Good In Bed by Jennifer Weiner. It IS a chicklit book but a good one. The general plot goes like this, the plus-sized charcter lead Cannie, is happy writing about other people's lives in her local newspaper, she has a nice flat, a great dog and an ok life, she even felt okay about ending her relationship with her boyfriend Bruce.....until Bruce starts writing about their relationship in a national woman's magazine.

It is Bruce's articles throughout the book that fascinate me the most because they show and say what I believe every man thinks when they "love a larger woman".

Here I have typed the first "article" (I have chopped bits out of the articles to get to the point) that appears in Jennifer Weiner's Good In Bed:

"Loving A Larger Woman
by Bruce Guberman

I'll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.
She was out on a bike ride, and I was home watching football, leafing through the magazines on her coffee table, when I found her Weight Watchers folder. There was her name. Her identification number. And her weight, which I am too much of a gentleman to reveal here. Suffice to say that the number shocked me.

I knew that C. was a big girl. Certainly bigger than any of the women I'd seen on TV, bouncing in bathing suits or drifting, reed like, through sitcoms and medical drams. Definitely bigger than any of the women I'd ever dated before.

I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser. But when I met C. I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.

Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome. Holding her felt like a safe haven. It felt like coming home.

But being out with her didn't feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it was the way I'd absorbed society's expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C. was a dedicate foot soldier in the body wars. At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker's build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team's roster, C. couldn't make herself invisible.

But I know that if it were possible, if all the slouching and slumping and shapeless black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant. She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft.

As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many time as I said it didn't matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world's voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theatre, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.

And I knew it wasn't paranoia. You hear, over and over, how fat is the last acceptable prejudice, that fat people are the only safe targets in our politically correct world. Date a queen-sized woman and you'll find out how true it is. You'll see the way people look at her, and look at you for being with her. You'll try to buy her lingerie for Valentines Day and realise the sizes stop before she starts. Every time you go out to eat you'll watch her agonise, balancing what she wants against what she'll let herself have, what she'll let herself have against what she'll be seen eating in public.

And what she'll let herself say.

I remember when the Monica Lewinksy story broke and C., a newspaper reporter, wrote a passionate defense of the White House intern who'd been betrayed by Linda Tripp in Washington, and betrayed even worse by her friends in Beverly Hills, who were busily selling their high school memories of Monica to Inside Editions and People Magazine. After her article was printed, C. got lots of hate male, including one letter from a guy who began: "I can tell by what you wrote that you are overweight and that nobody loves you." And it was that letter - that word- that bothered her more than anything else anyone said. It seemed that if it were true - the "overweight" part- then the "nobody loves you" part would have to be true as well. As if being Lewinky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.

Loving a larger woman in an act of courage in this world, and maybe it's even an act of futility. Because, in loving C., I knew I was loving someone who didn't believe that she herself was worthy of anyone's love.

And now that it's over, I don't know where to direct my anger and my sorrow. At a world that made her feel the way she did about her body - no, herself - and whether was desirable. At C., for not being strong enough to overcome what the world told her. Or at myself, for not loving C. enough to make her believe in herself."