Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It

by Brittany Gibbons

  2 I tried to explain to him why I was self-conscious, and then he asked why telling me how pretty I was wasn’t enough for me to get over it, and I felt like a horrible, horrible asshole.

  Becoming a mother, specifically the physical act of becoming a mother, totally changed my body by way of about fifty pounds. And while I’m on the topic of awkward ways in which sex is related to motherhood, we learn about relationships from our parents. The good, the bad, and the oh my God promise me we won’t be like them ever. My kids were learning the dynamics of a relationship from two people who barely touched and lived like roommates. I’m not saying I want them to watch us make out or force them to watch our sex tapes. But there is a certain level of relationship confidence taught when one of the parents isn’t hiding her naked body behind bathroom doors and jumping out of the arms of the man who loves her because her stomach is too flabby. If I couldn’t be naked around Andy, the man legally obligated to love me, even after having watched three people climb out of me, who could I trust?

  I had hit Pause on our relationship, and had been using life commitments and responsibilities as excuses not to hit Play again. As the effects of that grew, I got really worried Andy was losing interest because I was acting uninterested out of insecurity. Here I was spouting off about body love and wearing bikinis and buying pretty clothes, and at the end of the day, I wouldn’t let him see me completely nude. When I was afraid to be seen in a bathing suit, I forced myself to wear one. When I was terrified to speak to a live audience, I climbed onstage. I conquer fears by making myself face them head-on, so if I was anxious about taking my clothes off, the natural remedy to that would be to strip. Unfortunately, I’m a horrible dancer and poles always leave a weird metallic smell on my hands. That only left two places I could face my nude body: the shower or the bedroom.

  Standing in the shower until I was confident naked was a terrible idea, especially since we only have about twenty good minutes of warm water, and I’d get out of the shower days later freezing and looking like the old lady at the end of Titanic. That leaves sex.

  I asked Andy if he’d be willing to have sex with me every day for one year in an attempt to help me get comfortable without my clothes on, barring any medical emergencies or logistical issues. And by logistical I mean travel, not anal, which I am surprisingly fine with. He said yes.

  Our year started off pretty rough. I didn’t realize how much time it took to prepare for sex, like shaving my legs in the sink and trying to make my hair appear messy-cute and not messy-homeless. Considering most of my romantic activities were rare moments of panties-pulled-to-the-side sex in a closet while the kids were napping, all this primping and prep work was reminding me why it was so much easier to just not put in the effort. We were tired, we had to be up early, and this project was quickly becoming just another chore to tack on to the end of our day, like taking my contacts out. I could fumble around with the case and solution, or I could just climb into bed and play pink-eye Russian roulette. Spoiler alert: I look adorable in eye patches.

  The first three months, I didn’t take my tank top off. After three kids and weight losses and gains, my boobs felt long and saggy. Bras were the only things making them still appear boob-shaped, and lying down without one left my nipples to pool down into my armpits. I was surprisingly insecure about this, so tank tops with shelf bras became my security blanket.

  We also had to address the monthly issue of my period. We could table the experiment for three to five days each month, or we could suck it up and get down with period sex. Surprisingly, every time I talk about this project with other people, the first question everyone asks me is what we did while I was on my period. The answer is we had sex. I think I was grossed out by sex during menstruation for about three seconds, then I remembered I’ve put way worse things in my body than some blood coming out. We tried having period sex in the shower for easy cleanup, but that is really hard unless you are the same height and once you accidentally get soap in your eye or inside your vagina, forget it. So for a few days every month, we put a towel down.

  Around month six, we hit a turning point. I was in Los Angeles for a week taping a pilot for Have Boobs Will Travel, a fun travel show I was hired to host with Greg Grunberg, Alice Clayton and Keili Lefkovitz, and when I walked into my hotel just before midnight, exhausted from a day of shooting in Venice Beach, I found Andy there waiting for me. He flew across the country because he missed me. Not because I wasn’t there to take care of the kids (note: who the hell is watching our kids?) or show him how to work the Keurig, but because he profoundly missed having me beside him in bed each night. And, surprisingly, I felt the same exact way. Going to bed without having sex with him made things feel incomplete and unfinished. Somewhere along the line, sex had stopped being an obligation and instead became the moment of the day I was the most comfortable and relaxed, the moment I could finally, finally, take my clothes off. And I did, all over that hotel room.

  “What is it about hotel sex that’s so hot?” he asked, naked and sprawled out across the messy bed playing with my hair.

  “I think it’s because the bedding is still white, we aren’t paying the electricity bill so we can drop down to sixty degrees in here, and we don’t have to clean any of this up,” I said, gesturing around the now-messy room.

  “Well, you have to clean that up.” He pointed to the table covered in open lubes and sex toys he’d smuggled inside socks inside his carry-on. If I ever forget Andy loves me, I’ll remember the time he went through airport security with a bag of anal plugs hidden in his socks.

  Sex got easier after L.A. I took my tank top off before climbing into bed, and I stopped methodically shutting off the lights and pulling a comforter over me. I even walked to the bathroom after we were done and peed naked with the door open. It wasn’t always convenient, and it wasn’t always even pretty, but the intention and desire for naked intimacy was there. I can’t speak for Andy because this isn’t his book and my voice is way higher than his, but I can assume he had a really good time having sex with his wife, again. On a personal level, it was an amazingly selfish year of using one of life’s most intimate acts to take control of the way I viewed my body as a woman. This is what I’ve learned.

  It’s not you, it’s me. Stop being weird about it

  I disliked my stomach. My thighs. How I looked lying flat on my back. A myriad of things, really, and I’d have the same conversation with Andy about it, telling him I’m self-conscious and I just don’t feel sexy, and then he’d spend ten minutes telling me how gorgeous I am, and then another thirty pouting and being hurt that it wasn’t enough to make me change my mind. So on top of feeling insecure, I felt like a jerk. That vicious cycle needed to stop. I needed to explain to him that seeing me that way is great, but unless I saw what he saw, too, it didn’t count. I mean, at least if he expected me to be an active participant and not just a hole lying on the mattress.

  It took a lot of talking to make him realize that me not feeling sexy was not an attack on him, and that him being hurt about it only made me feel worse. I wanted to enjoy sex, too. And the key for me being able to enjoy it is feeling confident and gorgeous, and that was a me journey, not a him journey, though having a cheerleader on the sidelines was a plus. We quickly learned that confident Brittany sex is way better, and there’s way less crying.

  Pretty panties make me happy

  I found that when I was at home in mom mode, I was opting for ease. And that’s fine. I am not some bitch here telling you to wear heels to the grocery store or pants to pick up your kid at school when you aren’t even getting out of the car and it’s a total waste of clean pants. But one day I was getting dressed for an outside bridal shower in ninety-degree heat, and decided to forgo shapewear for regular underwear, when I realized the only underwear I owned was either ratty maternity underwear or cheap ninety-nine-cent briefs I grabbed at the end of a Walmart aisle to get me through my period week. No wonder I didn’t feel sexy. I had the undergarments of a
n incontinent nursing home patient.

  So I went to a department store and stocked up on adult woman underpants. Some were plain and some were lacy, and when I wore them they looked so pretty across my hips. I’d even find myself walking from my closet to the bathroom wearing them, a stark contrast to the primal run I did covered in a towel and with my Spanx shoved into a ball of clothes in my hands when I thought Andy wasn’t paying attention.

  I am my own sex advocate

  I like being on my knees and I don’t climax with penetration, I only climax clitorally. I do like oral sex, but I don’t like having my nipples touched, because they are numb. I also hate having breath on my neck because I am extremely ticklish, and then I get goose bumps and my leg hair grows in too fast. Please stop doing that.

  I had to work on being okay saying all of that out loud, and get over the idea that I was being selfish and demanding. I deserve good sex as much as he does, and instead of waiting around for him to figure it out, which is totally unfair to guys, by the way, I had to find my voice and use it. Coincidentally, it was a major turn-on. Who knew?

  If you think it’s just about sex, then you aren’t paying attention

  Going in, I knew writing about this project would be met with a certain level of voyeurism and cynicism. Really, every day for a year? But what about your period? Isn’t marriage about more than just sex? No, seriously, what happened when you were on your period? What I didn’t expect was the instant viral explosion that occurred after I hit Publish. The story was picked up on the front pages of CNN, the Huffington Post, the British Daily Mail, and AOL. While this certainly wasn’t the first time I’d received national news coverage for my body journey, it was definitely the first time it included insertion.

  Woman Has Sex with Her Husband for a Year and Likes It!

  Couple Has Sex Every Day for a Year,

  Who’s Watching the Kids?

  Brittany Gibbons Is a Nymphomaniac,

  Is Hillary Clinton Making a Run in 2016?

  Within a week of publishing the article, the Today show flew me into New York to be interviewed by Savannah Guthrie about my yearlong project, and I went because I felt like this was an important conversation. I wanted to talk about ways we, as women, can take responsibility for our self-esteem. Having sex every day wasn’t meant to be seedy or scandalous; it was empowering. Unfortunately, none of that came across in the interview. Instead of asking why, I was asked how. How did I do this with three kids? How was I not too exhausted? How did I pull this off? How did I even walk after that much sex?

  The ironic part was that the one time I finally wanted to talk about my body as the focus of the article, nobody wanted to ask me about it. For years the question had been “how did you find the confidence in your plus-size body to do this,” and now all anyone wanted to talk about was what we did while I was on my period.

  Shortly after the Today interview, Andy and I flew to Mexico with friends for a much-needed getaway. I mean, we’d just had sex for a year, and our genitals wanted to relax off the grid on a beach somewhere. After an evening of drinking and dancing in Playa del Carmen, Andy and I collapsed into our bed at our hotel and fell asleep almost immediately. Sometime after midnight, my phone rang.

  “Buenos noches,” I mumbled into my phone, in the half-Spanish, half-English dialect I’d become accustomed to over the week, clumsily slipping between the two to order drinks and thank servers for their work.

  “Brittany, it’s Greis. Turn on Jay Leno because he is talking about you in his monologue right now!” she squealed into the phone.

  I sat up, instantly awake and sober, scrounging for the laptop I’d tossed in the suitcase in the name of relaxation and no deadlines. Some people might find it humiliating that Jay leno made fun of their sex life on national television (two nights in a row), but I found it to be hilarious, which says a lot, because Jay Leno is anything but hilarious these days, especially now that he’s officially retired.

  My sex life left the confines of PG-rated morning news and became nighttime fodder, teased about in late-show monologues and discussed on HLN’s Showbiz Tonight. It wasn’t that I didn’t like that all of this was happening, though it did make Andy’s job a little awkward—but hey, there are worse things you could be famous for than having sex with your wife. Still, a part of me was sad that once again the victory of a fat girl was lost to a mess of sound bites and shocking headlines.

  Months later, after the buzz died down and our children were getting ample indoctrination into the loving relationship that was now mom + dad = 4ever, I awoke in bed and reached for Andy, but he’d already left for work for the day.

  August 5, 2013

  To: Andy

  From: Brittany

  Alright man take two, five things you love about my body.

  To: Brittany

  From: Andy

  Only 5? I’d pick the curve of your waist between your boobs and your butt, the spot on your wrist where you dab perfume, your hair when you take it down in the morning, the really soft skin between your boobs, and all the freckles on your arms and shoulders.

  To: Andy

  From: Brittany

  Weird, those are my 5 favorite things, too. We have similar tastes in body parts; I should show you my freezer collection sometime.

  17

  THE EMAILS

  Subject: How much I love you!

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  I love you so much, sometimes it hurts my bones. I love you so much, I often forget what I was even doing. Like, I went to go to the bathroom, and then thought about how much I love you, then I walked back out and peed in my jeans. I love you so much air seems stupid compared to you. I love you so much that if you accidentally broke my new camera and shattered my lens because you set it on the car hood while you got distracted, I wouldn’t even be mad at you because my love for you makes that physically impossible.

  Now, say it back.

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  Wait what?

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  SAY IT BACK!!!!

  In high school, my grandmother bought me the book Letters to Sartre, by Simone de Beauvoir. The book featured love letters from de Beauvoir herself to Jean-Paul Sartre, the famed French novelist, philosopher, and political activist, giving you an inside glimpse at their love and relationship, which was both stormy and addictingly passionate. It remains one of my favorite books to this day. You hear lots of people mourn for the lost art of writing letters, and I would be one of those letter-writing people if my hand weren’t hardened into a giant texting-induced claw, unable to hold early-twentieth-century writing instruments. I do, however, mourn the loss of messy love. The kind of love that is spilling down the front of you as you struggle with both hands to hold on to it.

  I never wrote Andy any letters. I actually don’t even own stamps and haven’t been inside a post office since 1995. Are they fourteen dollars now? I honestly have no idea?

  But I do pride myself on the power of the typed word, and use it often to convey emotion, complain about my lost airline baggage on Twitter, and write love notes to my husband. Like Sartre would have done, Andy saved all my emails. I’d like to think it was out of love, but he said it had more to do with potentially needing them as evidence one day. Love. It makes you crazy.

  Subject: Sex Dolls

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  Do you know anyone who can make a full body mold of me and all my holes?

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  Your holes?

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  Yeah. Ears, nose, mouth, belly button, butt, pee and sex.

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  Sex hole, awesome, let’s start the argument now, what’s the goal here?

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  Um- to make life size sex dolls to sell on the Internet? I saw
on My Strange Addiction that gently used ones start at 6k on Craigslist.

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  What does gently used mean?

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  I think it just means she only gave head but still has her doll hymen, so maybe don’t kiss her on the mouth?

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  Some days the way your brain works makes me not want to kiss YOU on the mouth.

  Subject: The Salon?

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  Hey- what is this $100 salon charge every few weeks?

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  Waxer.

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  That seems expensive for waxing?

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  It’s a normal price, plus we can write it off as a medical expense.

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  How is you being hairy a medical expense?

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  I stopped going to my OBGYN because she always makes me get on the scale and I hate that, so I just have Rachel peek up there every 6 weeks to make sure it looks normal and cancer-free.

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  But she’s not a doctor?

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  Who really is these days?

  From: Andy

  To: Brittany

  Actual doctors?

  Subject: The Pacific Time Zone Is Weird

  From: Brittany

  To: Andy

  Greetings from the past.