The intersection between fatphobia and misogyny

I felt as a young girl that the boys in my class expected me to "know my place" as a girl they did not find attractive. I was mercilessly picked on and targeted by the group of popular boys in my grade. It felt like everything I did was ammunition for ridicule.

For some context: I moved around a lot growing up because of my dad's job, and have been assimilated in a lot of different cultures. But in primary school, I attended a French school. In my experience, French culture is the most fat phobic of the cultures I've lived in by a lot. Many of the girls I knew back then later developed eating disorders, and started chain smoking to manage their weight. The teachers would encourage this behaviour too, making snide comments about fat people, discouraging us from eating too much cake when it was someone's birthday (one memory that sticks out in particular is being called greedy by a teacher when I went to get a second slice, I was 8). French culture is broadly intolerant. They don't like people from different religions , different races, or people who live different lifestyles. But the brand of intolerance directed at women has a particular edge to it. Because men date us, there is an incredible amount of pressure to conform to what they want in a woman, and this pressure is beaten into you young.

Being beautiful was expected of us as girls. And if we were not beautiful, we had "failed" in a major way.

When I later moved to America, I found the culture there to be much more free, and the people much less bigoted thankfully.

It's funny because in the movies, I feel like fat girls or ugly girls or just unpopular girls get bullied by the beautiful, thin, popular girls.

However, in my life the people who have been the most cruel towards me were consistently boys. In fact the "popular" good looking girls in my school were always kind to me, and did not perceive me as being lesser than them. I never lacked for female friends. But amongst men, i felt like being a girl who they did not find attractive was license enough to be extremely vicious towards me. Attempting to stand up for myself just drew more attacks. Because they didn't see it as my place to contradict them, have my own opinions, or stand up to them, they felt that I was the one "wronging" them when I stood up their bullying.

Although this bullying happened to me mainly in primary school, to this day I feel it has affected my relationship with men. I am extremely guarded, and feel that a lot of guys probably see me as inferior to them even if they are polite to me when we interact.

One memory that sticks out to me was when I was dating this man who I worked with (at this point in my life, i was slim). He started taking about a girl we worked with who was fat. I could not believe the hateful, misogynistic monologue that came spewing from the mouth of a guy I had thought was "one of the good ones". He began by saying he could not believe her boyfriend could ever sleep with her, that she used her tits to get tips at work (this was not true. She was only 18, and actually quite shy and introverted. She just happened to have big tits) He complained about how disgusting it was that she ate so much, and said many many similarly awful things. Bear in mind this is a man who was always kind to that girl, to her face. Interestingly, this man had been fat at one point of his life as well. But understanding that it was wrong of people to mistreat him as a fat man apparently did not make him understand that this behaviour is also wrong when it's towards a girl!

I know there are good men out there, and lot of men have been kind to me as an adult. But my experiences have made it incredibly difficult to trust them.

!foidmoment