# Widespread Confusion About the Terms "BBW" and "SSBBW"



## Wayne_Zitkus (Apr 4, 2016)

I became a widower two months ago, and have started exploring dating sites to see what's out there. And what I have found is a lot of women who seem confused about the terms "SSBBW" and "BBW".

I joined one BBW chat group and it appears that most of the women there think "BBW" means Beautiful Black Woman. Yes, the majority of them are quite attractive, but much too thin for a life-long FA like me.

I joined one SSBBW group and a woman sent me a message. And when I looked at her profile, she described her body type as "Slender".

A slender SSBBW?

What's an FA gonna do???


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## agouderia (Apr 5, 2016)

It's not so much that there is a confusion about the terms 'BBW' and 'SSBBW' but simply that there is no universally established meaning of the acronym.

'BBW'/'SSBBW' for big women is only known within the fat acceptance/fetish community - outside it's not definitely ascribed. If you ask people on the street in the US, my guess would be that you will get more responses for the meaning 'beautiful black woman' that 'big beautiful woman'. And SS these days is - from what I've seen - often used for 'super sexy'.

This shows 2 things:
1) The fat acceptance community has over the years not really succeeded in penetrating the acronym beyond the narrow boundaries of the 'in'-group. On the contrary, in my observation the awareness of the terminology is actually declining.

Why? On one hand there is there are the massive, hysteric, public, international anti-obesity campaigns which have more than ever turned fat positivity into a deviant, "unhealthy" fringe issue.

There is a backlash to that of course, but that is the mainly female fashion & fitness driven body positivity campaign. It is more about self- and social acceptance though, explicitly going against the perception of women only through the eyes of the media or men (which can amount to the same), concentrating on self-empowerment. So they naturally do not promote a terminology also/mainly associated with the fat fetish community.

2) The virtual world offers the option of building a niche for almost any thinkable community or tribe, no matter which size, how important or marginal it may be. 

That makes it more difficult than ever to establish a truly universal meaning and use of a phrase or acronym. Language and it's use will depend more and more in which community you're using it. English has the additional layer that it is the native or default common language in so many different countries and contexts, each bringing their own sets of meanings & acronyms.

So agreeing on one use of a term is getting increasingly complicated. 
We had the discussion in another thread here just recently: A poster was trying to convince us that BBC means something else than British Broadcasting Corporation .... :doh:


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## RabbitScorpion (Apr 5, 2016)

agouderia said:


> We had the discussion in another thread here just recently: A poster was trying to convince us that BBC means something else than British Broadcasting Corporation .... :doh:



Of course it does!
It's the airport for Bay City, Texas.

&#128522;


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## ThisIsBrian (Apr 6, 2016)

I remember about three years ago being utterly stunned after hearing a coworker use the term BBW to describe to other coworkers my taste in women. Before then I had never heard that term spoken in the real world. Being an FA (for me anyway) has often felt like belonging to a secret society, not that the business of an FA ought to be hidden but it often is hidden just by virtue of its own obscure nature. To hear BBW spoken outside of the internet was so surprising to me that I responded with "How the fuck do you know what a BBW is?" He told me that he learned it from porn, not that he was into that kind of thing, but he'd seen the thumbnails with fat women in them categorized as "BBW". I remain convinced that porn is one of the main avenues through which these terms have spread outside of this community. 

I too have encountered someone insisting that bbw means beautiful black woman. It is kind of disheartening to hear the term catching on with people who don't know the meaning. Like I'm witnessing the beginning of the end (melodramatic much?).

I'm sure that there are plenty of positives about the spread of these terms that I'm overlooking. But in the sense that Wayne Zitkus is talking about above, in the realm of online dating, the terms "bbw" and "ssbbw" no longer cut through the fog in the same way that they used to because they don't mean what they used to. 

When I first learned the term BBW (about 16 years ago) the women using it were using it as a euphemism for "fat" and SSBBW for "very fat". Now BBW, around much of the internet, seems to be a euphemism for "not fat but not thin either" and SSBBW now means what BBW meant 16 years ago. It seems that few of the people using these terms know where they originated and don't care to know. 

It kind of feels like this has slipped through our fingers a bit. It makes me think of that book/movie The Beach in which a bunch of outsiders, who don't know the rules, show up uninvited to a thriving community and as a result everyone is gunned down by drug lords and the happy community is ruined. I don't think any of us are going to be gunned down by drug lords (at least I hope not) but I do see some other parallels between the community in that story and this one.


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## liberator18 (Apr 7, 2016)

Chubby - fatter, than typical woman, but not fat like BBW.
BBW - big and beautiful woman. Woman with big, feminine body, large belly, fat arms and hips. Hard to run, but can walk easily. 
SSBBW - supersize big and beautiful woman. Much more fatter than bbw girl. No run, hard to long distance walk. Typical weight - 350-400 pounds 
USSBBW - ultra super size big and beautiful woman. Nearly immobile or immobile girl. Hard to walk. Typical weight - 500-600 and more pounds.


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## Blockierer (Apr 7, 2016)

Wayne_Zitkus said:


> ... What's an FA gonna do???


Use weight ranges, e.g. 300 to 500, instead the terms BBW, SSBBW, fat, big, chubby ..... 

it worked for me.


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## agouderia (Apr 7, 2016)

liberator18 said:


> Chubby - fatter, than typical woman, but not fat like BBW.
> BBW - big and beautiful woman. Woman with big, feminine body, large belly, fat arms and hips. Hard to run, but can walk easily.
> SSBBW - supersize big and beautiful woman. Much more fatter than bbw girl. No run, hard to long distance walk. Typical weight - 350-400 pounds
> USSBBW - ultra super size big and beautiful woman. Nearly immobile or immobile girl. Hard to walk. Typical weight - 500-600 and more pounds.



Most guys here in this community will agree with your classification.

The point though is that the acronyms BBW, SSBBW, let alone USSBBW mean little to nothing outside the narrow fat acceptance community, or people understand/use them as something completely different.

Also - from the female perspective: Most women don't like to be labled for external traits. The biggest movement in the (growing) plus-size modelling world actually is to try and get rid of size categorization altogether.

So my advice when venturing into the dating world to the OP is in line with what Blockierer wrote: Don't use acronyms but describe what your preferences in a positive way (actual weight ranges imo can be off-putting though - similar to bra cup sizes).

Para-phrasing it like "can imagine myself with a Botero beauty" or "if you could model for a Niki de St.Phalle statue, you're my ideal, or "in my eyes, the only true top-model is Tess Holliday" will get the message across in fun, sexy, imaginative and non-objectifying way.


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## RabbitScorpion (Apr 7, 2016)

Blockierer said:


> Use weight ranges, e.g. 300 to 500, instead the terms BBW, SSBBW, fat, big, chubby .....
> 
> it worked for me.



Problem is, weight alone doesn't really indicate shape. 200 pounds in a short lady is cute and cuddly, whereas the same weight in a WNBA slam-dunker is athletic.


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## HereticFA (Apr 11, 2016)

Wayne_Zitkus said:


> What's an FA gonna do???


Honor your preferences, look for a BBW educated sufficiently to know the real origin of BBW in our community (re: _BBW Magazine_), look for the rarest of women that actually prefers to be fat, and spoil her when you find her

Good luck & best wishes on your quest.


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## jtgw (Apr 21, 2016)

I don't do it by weight, but by BMI (which also has problemz, I know; it's just better than raw weight and way easier to calculate than body fat percentage). My rule of thumb is this:

BMI >30: plus-size
>40: BBW
>50: SSBBW
>70(?): USSBBW


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## squeezablysoft (Apr 21, 2016)

*I pretty much go by eyeballing, if someone is big enough that I would categorize them as "fat" on sight, then they would be a BBW/BHM to me. Where the Super-Size designation starts for me is a bit fuzzy, the thing I'm really liking about Feabie is being able to do a search for ppl with a certain height-and-weight or BMI and see what that size looks like on several ppl. It's helping me refine my tastes as an FFA and also it's fun to see what I will look like at various weights. One thing I have been surprised to discover is that my idea of "definitely fat but not really huge" aka BBW/BHM but not SS, goes way up into the obese category BMI-wise.*


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