Róisín Ingle: In a loud voice he said, ‘Now I just have to get past this very fat woman’

I recently read a moving public plea from a well-known Irish woman. She asked on social media for people to keep all opinions regarding her body to themselves. As I understood it, this was not only an attempt to limit disparaging comments being made about her body; although being a woman who inhabits a body, I imagine she has experienced such negative comments throughout her life.

She was also talking, so far as I understand, about the so-called compliments people might feel moved to make about her body. She was saying, in brief summary, “please don’t talk to me about my body”. She was saying what I used to teach my kids to say if something was happening that they didn’t feel comfortable with: “Stop it, I don’t like it.”

As somebody with a body that has all my life provoked comments from complete strangers and sometimes well-meaning friends, I had a deep understanding of her plea.

At age 13 and for many years after, I didn't know what to call the verbal abuse but these days we have a word for it: bodyshaming

I won’t name the woman because then I would not be respecting her wish to have her body removed as a topic of comment or conversation. So I will recount, instead, an experience I had in a branch of a well-known convenience store last week.

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I had made my purchase and was standing in an aisle, engrossed in the social media app on my phone. Further up the aisle, a man walking towards me with a pizza box in his hand said in a loud, disgusted voice, as though addressing both himself and everybody else in the shop, “Now I just have to try to get past this very fat woman”.

This kind of thing has happened to me numerous times in my life since the age of about 13. By this kind of thing I mean people – usually men or boys – informing me in a variety of ways that they disapprove of the shape of my body. This includes but is not limited to “fat b**ch” being shouted at me as I cycled happily along the road one morning, to being addressed Dear Fatty in one memorable email from an Irish Times reader.

It’s mostly men and boys who are responsible for the random, everyday verbal abuse, while I’ve found it’s mostly women who will congratulate you for being pregnant, unable to comprehend that a woman might be a different shape from them for any other reason other than she is carrying a soon-to-be-arriving infant.

At age 13 and for many years after, I confess I sometimes believed I deserved the abuse. It was my fault, I reasoned, for eating too many chips and inhabiting the wrong kind of body.

But I am a grown-arse 50-year-old woman now. I know now that I don’t deserve it. I do not believe my body (or your body) whether bigger or smaller or anything inbetween is anybody else’s business. Also at age 13 and for many years after, I didn’t know what to call the verbal abuse but these days we have a word for it: bodyshaming.

You are going about your business as a human but all of a sudden you are reduced to the size of your body, no longer a human

And yet no matter how much I’ve evolved, no matter how many new words are invented, these moments always sting. I know objectively, factually, I am fat or overweight or larger or whatever you are having yourself, but when your body shape is used as a weapon to shame you the words still land as a dehumanising shock to the system.

You are going about your business as a human but all of a sudden you are reduced to the size of your body, no longer a human, just an accumulation of fat cells that someone you’ve never met in your life wants to attack.

This is to explain that I was hurting as I stood in the convenience store aisle. Hurting the way you might if a random stranger came up and slapped you across the face.

As he passed me by – there was, despite his mock concern, plenty of room for him to pass – I asked him, “Why did you say that to me?” He looked me up and down and with a withering look said: “Because you are, you’re very, very fat.”

I then said something that I now regret. I said: “Well you are very, very ugly but I wouldn’t say that to you because it’s mean.” It was a lame riposte. I’d sunk to his level and he didn’t even bother to turn back to respond. He and his pizza just walked off down the aisle.

I had to meet someone then for work. And after that I had to meet someone else for drinks. So I put my feelings in a box and did not think or talk about it for three hours. When I went outside to unlock my bike it was dark. I was a bit tipsy. My feelings were bursting out of the box.

Hurt people will continue to bodyshame and fatshame and use our bodies as a weapon against us

I saw a man approach and decided it was the man in the shop. He was the same age and build, he had the same grey hair.

“Did you just call me fat in the shop?” I asked the confused-looking man. Now he was beside me, I could see it was a different man entirely. I stood there, freezing and emotional, explaining to the man what had happened.

Maybe this man was friends with the Dalai Lama, because without missing a beat he told me that what the man had said in the shop had nothing to do with me. That it was about something the man was going through, the pain he was carrying.

“I’m sorry that happened but it’s not about you,” he repeated. “Now you mind yourself.”

Hurt people hurt, as a friend of mine always says. Hurt people will continue to bodyshame and fatshame and use our bodies as a weapon against us. There is nothing I can say to them – “stop it, I don’t like it” – that will prevent it from happening.

The people who are doing it are not interested in our polite requests on social media, or in newspaper columns. They don’t want to hear us. Maybe they can’t.

All I can do is understand, deep in my bones, that their opinions, their judgment, their ignorance and their hurt have nothing to do with me.

That knowledge won’t stop the words stinging. But it does give me the freedom, when I’ve dried my tears, to put the hurt back firmly where it belongs. With them.

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]