Eating is cheating?

Posted by Isabel Dexter at 19:38 on 5 Aug 2010

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the skinny Parisian girl cliché. The skinny girl thing in general in fact. Apparently back in the days when a man wanted a woman simply to bear his child (and have a little fun in the making) then womanly curves were naturally desirable. Child-bearing hips,motherly bosoms and plenty of (not firm) flesh were what the Renaissance painters like Titian depicted as beautiful. Now that we’re having children much later as a society men want women to have sex with that doesn’t necessarily lead to children. And more athletic sex at that hence the desire for toned,‘fit’, often muscular bodies. Now don’t quote me on this or anything, goodness knows where I’ve read it.. .I’ve gotten into that old lady habit of carrying clipped-out articles from magazines and photocopied chapters from library books in my Marni and franchement it’s like a cross-section of my brain in there. A passage of Ford Madox Ford folded in-between a French Grazia article on the New Ladylike with a screwed up Justine Picardie feature on love and some half-eaten cereal bars. Classy.

Anyway, the skinny thing. Well it’s all comparative isn’t it? In Derby for example I look like a bag of bones as my uncle once very nicely put it and my size 12-16 friends definitely always got more attention from boys in clubs. In London I’m on the thin side but in a healthy, slim way. In Paris I’m not exactly fat but there are girls with legs about a third as wide as mine and when I said once about being slim, Celine raised an eyebrow as though to say ‘Who is she kidding?’. I’ve started to feel guilty about ordering Chocolate Viennois too (Hot chocolate with cream) as though I should pretend it’s for my dog. Or my boyfriend. Or some other item I don’t actually own. (Objectify men? Moi? Never.)

When a friend recently lost two stones here she suddenly got inundated with male attention. My male friends in London thought she looked ill. I remember when I arrived in Paris and was so skinny from heartbreak and being too broke to eat and all the walking around Paris to clear my head. I’ve never been asked for my number so much. And yet…part of learning to accept your body is dealing with how it feels to live in it not how it appears when you look in the mirror or how other people respond to it.

Living in this city is sometimes like living in the pages of French Vogue with all the glamour and pressure to be perfect. Finally though,it doesn’t matter where you are. It’s always more important to be healthy than to be skinny. To feel well for who you are rather than simply how you look. Now I just need to learn to say that in French and my mission is clear. Girls of Paris – let the eating begin!

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