Princeton University hosted the event “Creating a Pleasure Practice” with “The Fat Sex Therapist” Sonalee Rashatwar on Wednesday.
The talk, which was attended by just nine students, was sponsored by the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding, the Pace Center for Civic Engagement, and the TigerWell Initiative.
A self-described “superfat queer bisexual non-binary therapist” with over 150,000 followers on social media, Rashatwar sparked controversy in 2022 by arguing that men should be able to fulfill the “fetish of having sex with unconscious people” with women willing to be drugged. She later apologized for the comments.
Rashatwar began her talk with “emotional disclaimers,” stating “[I am] a person who lives in a very fat body myself, I feel like we’re establishing this right off the bat.”
“The kind of fatphobia we have in the U.S. is directly rooted to anti-blackness,” she added.
“I also identify as a fat futurist, and what that means is that I want fat people to exist in the future, and I want us to have pleasureful and shame-free lives,” Rashatwar said. “I’m really proudly bisexual, butch, and queer. Queer as in politically queer, not as in who I’m attracted to, but how we like design solutions to systemic and social problems.”
Rashatwar is a co-owner of the Radical Therapy Center, whose mission is to “believe in the abolition of all binaries, prisons, and supremacisms.”
The talk addressed the “four dimensions of fatphobia,” which include “healthism”; “thin worship” that is “rewarded by white supremacy” and “enforced by doctors”; “pleasure restrictions” sustained by a “Protestant work ethic”; and “surveillance” imposed by “fat exclusionary ecosystems, white supremacy, desirability politics, and food policing.”
The “common forms of pleasure restriction,” according to Rashatwar, include “christofacism” which “moralizes the delay pleasure,” and capitalism which “teaches us productive bodies are good bodies.” Rashatwar spoke of “productivity shame” that can “show up as a form of internalized capitalism” when “we treat our bodies like a machine.”
Rashatwar seemed to encourage unhealthy eating during the talk, arguing that society “imagines” that certain food “creates fat bodies.”
“We see the thin beauty ideal really reinforced by things like fatphobia at the doctor’s office, or within the medical industrial complex,” Rashatwar added.
“Fat bodies are inherently gender non-conforming,” Rashatwar stated. “My body was not able to successfully shrink or stay small, and I think staying fat saved my life in many ways.”
Rashatwar spoke of “radical imagining” as “a really important tool for decolonization because it reminds us to reclaim this right of our inner worlds and lived reality.” She argued that “shame, fear, doubt, and judgement” all “colonize” our own “imagination space.”
“That’s my space where I get to imagine the biggest, boldest, fattest, most fluid, most pleasurable future that I want for myself,” Rashatwar said.
Rashatwar had caused controversy in 2022 by arguing that, in an “idyllically sex-positive world,” men would be able to pay women who were willing to be drugged to fulfill sexual fantasies.
“If we actually grappled with the fact that sex negativity is what causes this type of behavior, then we could create a world where–in an idyllicly sex-positive world–someone is able to pay conscious women to come and be drugged so that I could get my kink out, my fetish of having sex with unconscious people. There is a consensual way to do that,” Rashatwar said in an episode of the documentary series “We Need to Talk about Cosby.”
She later issued an apology, stating “Consent requires the ability to be withdrawn and using substances to the point of unconsciousness limits this ability.” Rashatwar further apologized for taking the commentary position in the documentary away from a black person, writing “I took this opportunity rather than passing it on to a sex therapist who is Black.”
It wasn’t Rashatwar’s first appearance at Princeton: According to her resume, she delivered the talks “Decolonizing Sex Positivity” and “Race as a Body Image Issue” on campus in 2020. Rashatwar has also spoken at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Other events Rashatwar has led include an “Anti-Diet Fat Liberation Support Circle” and “Cultivating Queer Fat Euphoria in our Bodies.”