“Do you find fat women attractive?” asks a calm, disembodied voice at the beginning of Big Girls: Big Beautiful Women in the Adult Entertainment Industry. “No,” “not really,” “not generally”–the answers come back quickly as the camera cuts from one man on the street to the next, culminating with one guy’s declaration that “big women suck!” At that, Sara McCool turns the camera on herself and flips it the bird.
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McCool made Big Girls two years ago as her senior project at Antioch College. The 25-minute video includes interviews with prostitutes, phone sex workers, pornographers, activists, self-described “fat admirers,” and models for fetish magazines like Big Butt and Plumpers and Big Women, as well as clips from The Sally Jessy Raphael Show and hot pink graphics comparing the pay scales and circulation of mainstream girlie mags with those of their “niche” counterparts. Juxtaposed against the talking heads and statistics is footage of McCool trying on tight clothes, laughing in disbelief at a can of Slim-Fast, and shaking her own frilly-pantied ass.
“When I was 14,” she says, “my mom let me and my friend get on a bus and go to D.C., and we went to the first riot grrl convention, and it completely changed my life.” On “a billion” diets since she was a child, she now says, “I credit riot grrl with me not having an eating disorder.”
Near the end of production, she realized she could make a quick $100 by modeling for Plumpers. She submitted four “boobie shots” to its amateur section, but the magazine folded before they ran and she never got paid. “That would have been great, though,” she says. “I would have liked to have been in Plumpers. I’m kind of sad, now that I think about it.”
