"If you weighed whatever your low end healthy weight might be, would I find your body more pleasing than I currently do? I think I would appreciate the different tactile sensations, but for their own sake -- "gee, that feels nice" -- and not because they were not some other sensations. That is, there's nothing inherently unpleasing to me about the feeling of soft, less-toned female flesh; in fact, it has its own pleasures which a more toned body can't provide (and vice versa). My current lovers all have different bodies, & I enjoy each of them for what they are. In the end, it's the female body that attracts me, but not a particular form of the female body."
It's always nice to get reassurance from the people who do actually see you naked on occasion. :-) But I mostly wanted to post this because it startled me -- even though he's said things like this many times, I'm still startled every time. That he really feels that soft, less-toned flesh might provide pleasures that the toned body can't provide -- I just have trouble taking in that a man actually believes that. And *that* goes directly to societal conditioning; somewhere deep down, I've become convinced that all (straight) men want women without extra flesh -- something in the range from skinny waif to slender athlete. Clearly, this isn't true. David says so, Kevin says so, most of the men I know say so. It's remarkably hard to believe them, though.
David asked in e-mail whether I couldn't just look at my own experience and extrapolate outward. Some of my lovers have been very thin, some on the pudgy side -- a couple were outright fat, in fact. I found them all attractive, though I admit that I think some of them would have looked more attractive if they'd either gained or lost some weight. But the key point is that there really was a pretty wide range of what I found attractive, and that part of some women's attractiveness to me was their lush female flesh. The soft expanse of it, breasts and belly and thighs. And yet I can't convince myself that anyone else really feels this way, especially men. A sneaky part of my brain just won't buy it. Very annoying. Illogical.