Hello everyone and welcome to the Sex Love and SuperPowers Podcast show. I’m your host Tatiana Berindei and I’m really excited to have with us today, Miss Briana Cavanaugh. We are going to be talking about fat positive sex and this is going to be a really awesome episode and I’m really, really looking forward to it. Let me tell you a little bit about Briana before we dive in. Briana Cavanaugh is the financial bliss mentor and genius behind Bliss Your Bookkeeping, she helps businesses who are making a difference in the world, transform their finances and make more money without sacrificing impact. With over 20 years of experience in her role as a coach and over 14 years of accounting expertise, she runs Bliss Your Money, a bookkeeping firm supporting six plus figure women owned businesses and social impact organizations.
She’s a sought-after speaker, builds and runs workshops and trainings and sometimes still dives into one-on-one to help you understand financial self-care and relieve the financial pressure to support you in moving towards the life you long to live. The reason why she’s on our show today in addition to all that fabulousness is because she recently started a podcast called Fat Girl Finds Love about loving up plus size and fat folks and expanding our confidence and visibility while normalizing bodies of all sizes. And you can find her podcast on all of the podcast channels, so we are really, really pleased to have you with us here today Briana.
Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Yeah, it’s great to have you. Before we dive in, will you tell our listeners what your superpowers are?
Yes. I love talking about superpowers. I have two primary superpowers. One of them I call true sight and it is that I have a gift where I can see into people’s hearts. I can listen to them and kind of identify what the real thing is going on under all of the things. People come to me when they want to be kind of truly seen as I’m very good at kind of seeing people for who they are and not for their image or for their upset or for their challenges. But one of my superpowers is I can just see, right kind of into the center, into the heart of them.
Beautiful.
And then my other superpower as a superpower that a friend of mine calls the gift of the word. My ex-girlfriend called it the gift of proselytizing. She said, “You could sell sunglasses to the blind.” Where it’s like, that sounds like a mixed blessing to me, but it’s the gift of being able to kind of speak the truth. And I feel like it’s a complimentary gift to kind of the gift of true sight of being able to see into people, which is… I sort of used the gift of words too… As a sort of truth to kind of cut away at the bullshit and the unnecessary stuff to kind of get right to the heart of things. When people come to me, friends, lovers, frenemies, they know that I’m one of those people who I just don’t… I’m going to give it to them straight. I’m one of those people who’s just really… I’m really direct and not mean, but also don’t kind of pull any punches.
No sugarcoating with this one.
I mean, I always try to deliver things with love and without… There’s a way that I think sometimes people use truth as a bludgeoned. They’re just like-
Yeah.
… “I’m going to tell you what’s true and it’s going to hurt you.” But I feel like one of the things that I can do is just tell them kind of the exact truth about the thing that I see.
Beautiful. Let’s talk about… First of all, I think it would be good to define some terms for our listeners here today, since our topic title is Fat Positive Sex.
Yes.
What do we mean when we say fat? What do we mean when we say fat positive? I think we’ve covered the sex thing on this show enough. I don’t know that we need to define that one, but I do want to I do want to sort of just get super clear with everyone who’s listening, what those words are meaning in the context of this conversation.
Those are great questions. I think both of those questions could be tomes, there’s a lot there.
Right, yeah.
Let’s start with fat. What do I mean when I say fat, but also why do I use the word fat? There is this way that people talk around the word fat. They will say large, they’ll say overweight, or people like to use the obesity word a lot. And all of these words kind of are all about the stigma of body size. But if we can use the word thin, right? We can use the word fat as a descriptor, but the word fat has so much charge on it that people really want to avoid it, don’t look at it, keep it away from me.
Right, and we were talking about it right before we came on the recording. How this is… It generally has a very negative connotation.
Yes. Yeah. And in kind of fat positive and fat liberation circles, there’s a reclamation of the word fat for people who are fat, for people who are not thin. Taking the charge off of the word fat actually does a whole lot of service to people who have been called fat, who have been called names around their size. Just being able to say words and not have them be so inflammatory makes a huge difference because then we can start to talk about what’s going on with the emotions and underneath the emotions and with the stigma and with the pathologizing and all of the stuff that goes around that. But if we can’t even say the words, there really isn’t a conversation to be had, if that makes sense.
Right. But there’s also a certain subjectivity to it too. I mean even with the word thin, what does that mean? What does fat mean? Who gets to decide? I think it’s an interesting question. And you and I have danced in a very fascinating way around this because there was a question of whether or not I could come and be on your show, this is whether I was actually fat.
Right, because I’m holding a space for fat folks, for fat love fat sex and fat relationships.
Right.
I’m wanting to engage that conversation with other fat people because there’s a lot of space for thin people and even sort of average sized people to be seen around sex, love and relationships. And as soon as you start to talk about fatness or even slightly above average weight people, the opportunities kind of diminish and go away. After having spent time in fat positive and fat liberation spaces, I realized that even though I’m fat and I have lots of love and have had lots of sex and have been quite slutty, it’s fairly rare that in sex positive spaces that we see fat people.
Right.
It just does not…. It just isn’t happening.
I’ve been exploring how do we bring… If we really want to bring bodies of all sizes into being able to be sex positive or even hell, sex neutral, we have to have a conversation from the most marginalized kind of into the realm of fat, positive and sex positive. I’m claiming that space and inviting more people into being slutty and sex positive or even like I said, or even sex neutral that you can be like, “Sex is okay with me.” Right?
Let’s all be sluts.
Let’s all be sluts together, I mean it’s very fun, right? Sex feels good. Touch feels good. I’m very pro-sex.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah.
Okay, we do have to go to a quick break and we’re going to dive deep into this topic when we get back. Before we go to break, will you tell our listeners where they can go to find more about you and your show and everything?
My show is called Fat Girl Finds Love. It’s about fat love, fat sex and fat relationships. And you can find us at fatgirlfindslove.com
Awesome. So, we’re talking with Brianna Cavanaugh about fat positive sex, and there will be more when we get back. So, stay tuned, this is going to be a really good conversation.
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To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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