“‘I’m a Married Man. No, I’m Not. I’m a Married Fat Man’: Compensatory Manhood Acts, Hybrid Masculinities, and Fat Sexuality”

Fat sex is a prohibitive topic; media and scholarship render a paradoxical image of fat sexuality as either extreme impotence or insatiable sexual appetite. Previous literature on fat sex highlights women’s experiences with violence and fetishization yet little research on fat men’s lived sexual experiences is available. Conducting 19 phenomenological interviews, narratives illustrate hybridization techniques participants use to distance themselves from feminine readings of their bodies. To work around their seeming undesirability, respondents adopted hyper-masculine idealized traits, evidenced by themes of compensatory manhood acts, strategic dress, downplayed eroticism, seeking sex online, abstinence, and critiques of the Bear community. Findings suggest that participants rely on hybridized, fluid masculinities and symbolic separation from effeminate gendered performances to experience sexual agency and engage with phallocentric discourse as fat men.