Paris cracking down on fat shaming culture
City of svelte has formally launched a campaign against prevalent ‘grossophobia’
PARIS— Chic, svelte, feline.
This is the caricature of “la Parisienne,” the well-heeled woman who embodies the essence of the world’s most fashionable city. Think Coco Chanel, Catherine Deneuve and Inès de la Fressange: paragons of style, arbiters of taste. To make the cut, you have to be many things. Until recently, one of those things was thin. Not anymore. On Friday, the city of Paris formally launched a campaign against “grossophobia,” or fat shaming. Mayor Anne Hidalgo convened the conference after the stunning success of a book, On Ne Naît Pas Grosse (You Are Not Born Fat), published this year. The book was written by Gabrielle Deydier, a teacher and journalist who has long struggled to find steady employment because of her weight.
“Fat phobia is a reality lived by so many citizens,” Hidalgo said in a statement Friday. “The city of Paris is unveiling this phenomenon and engaging.”
That may very well be the case, but this is still a city where the reigning power breakfast is an espresso and a cigarette. If you’re feeling indulgent, you can maybe allow yourself a drop of milk in your coffee. Come nighttime, the cocktail hour of “apéro”where you might have some nice red wine, and possibly some nuts or a little nibble of cheese — can absolutely count as a meal. And, of course, many Parisians walk everywhere they go and climb steep flights of stairs back to tiny apartments that cost the arms and the legs they otherwise exhaust.
Obesity is far less visible here in the French capital than it is in much of North America or Britain. According to a 2017 report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, drawing on data up to 2015, only 15.3 per cent of the French population is obese, compared with 26.9 per cent and 29 per cent of the British and Canadian populations, respectively. The predominant view in Paris is that you are born thin, and if you do your job right, nothing will ever change.
But it is because of this view, Deydier argues in her book, that fat people — and especially fat women — are stigmatized in French society. She cites multiple personal experiences with discrimination in the workplace and says she has even had trouble finding long-term accommodation as a result of irregular work.
“There is this feeling that women have to be perfect in every way,” Deydier said in another interview. The ideal of the perfect female body is even on display in the French language, in which the word for pregnancy literally translates as “fatness.”
Myths such as that of the lithe, stylish French woman and her perfect body are part of the rhetoric that is most often used to shame American women, said Jes Baker, an American blogger and body activist who also spoke in Paris on Friday.
“Fat is not wrong,” she said. “What is wrong is the way we address fat. It’s time for change, and this conversation is happening all over the world.” It is finally happening in Paris. On Friday, the city hosted a rare plus-size fashion show in the lavish expanse of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’ city hall. While such fashion shows are fairly common in the United States, they are not in France, where the annual couture events remain something of a religious rite. With Rihanna’s music on blast, the models came walking down the aisle, modelling a variety of styles.
They received a standing ovation.