On Wednesday, April 19th, Princeton’s Pace Center for Civic Engagement and the Carl A. Field Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding hosted an event entitled “Creating a Pleasure Practice with The Fat Sex Therapist,” featuring Sonalee Rashatwar. This was not Rashatwar’s first engagement at Princeton. In 2020, Rashatwar gave two talks at the University: “Decolonizing Sex Positivity” and “Race as a Body Image Issue.”
According to the Pace Center website, Rashatwar, a biological female who uses they/he pronouns, is a “clinical social worker, sex therapist, adjunct lecturer, and grassroots organizer.” The site also describes Rashatwar as “a superfat queer bisexual non-binary therapist.”
Rashatwar is a co-owner of the Radical Therapy Center, which “provides trauma informed, client-centered services and products that have an intentional anti-oppression lens.” According to the center’s website, “our mission is simple – to politicize your therapy.” Rashatwar’s clinical practice focuses on “treating sexual trauma, diet trauma, racial and immigrant trauma, and South Asian family abuse while offering fat positive sexual healthcare.”
Rashatwar’s views have been subjects of controversy in the past few years. Rashatwar received pushback for comparing putting a child on a diet to statutory rape, saying: “I truly believe that a child cannot consent to being on a diet the same way a child cannot consent to having sex.” Rashatwar also claimed that high blood pressure might be a result of “weight stigma” rather than unhealthy habits.
Rashatwar gained the most notoriety from an interview featured in the 2022 BBC documentary We Need to Talk About Cosby. In it, Rashatwar argued that in “an idyllically sex-positive world,” people would be able to drug women and have sex with them while they are unconscious “so that I can get my kink out—my fetish [of] having sex with unconscious people.” Rashatwar has since apologized for the comments.
Despite the controversy that Rashatwar has caused outside of Princeton’s campus, only a handful of people attended the event.
“I have taught workshops like these for seven or eight years and…I always like to offer a grounding in black radical feminism because that’s what radicalized me,” Rashatwar told the audience at the beginning of the April 19 talk.
The focus of the talk was creating a “pleasure practice,” which Rashatwar defined as “the finding of moments throughout the day to savor the little opportunities and experiences of joy in your experience.” Rashatwar emphasized how common forms of “pleasure restriction” are socially conditioned and should be dismantled. Rashatwar’s presentation slides on “common forms of pleasure restriction” argued that “capitalism teaches us that productive bodies are good bodies… christofascism moralizes the delay [of] pleasure, non-normative pleasure (BDSM, kink, tattoos, etc) is pathologized as deviant” and finally “refusing medication is healthist + rewarded.”
Rashatwar expressed skepticism of scientific consensus when questioning the role of the “doctor’s office” and the “medical industrial complex” in reinforcing the “thin beauty ideal.” Rashatwar also decried the “pleasure restriction” inherent in “being told that fatness symbolizes overindulgence,” presumably so that one restricts oneself from eating fattening foods.
Rashatwar told the audience that “for a lot of us, the health outcomes we experience later in life, for the most part, are genetic,” arguing that diabetes is not caused by the unhealthy lifestyle associated with being overweight. “If you have been told that, or if someone believes that,” Rashatwar said, “it is often because they have read something that affirms their already fatphobic beliefs. The belief that fat people are inherently inferior. That they do not live long enough or do not have long enough lives.”
During the talk, Rashatwar self-identified as a fat futurist, a term designating a desire for “fat people to exist in the future.” Rashatwar also argued that fatphobia is “really based in white supremacy” in many cases and that “the kind of fatphobia that we have in the U.S. is directly rooted in anti-blackness.”
(Photo courtesy of the Pace Center for Civic Engagement’s website)
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