There are plenty of Parisian middle-class families who will sit down to a frugal meal of steamed vegetables and a cup of herbal tea in the evening to avoid weight gain.
“There is simply no mystery about it. Of course French women grow fat,” says Sonia Feertchak, editor-in-chief of L’Encyclo des Filles, external, a popular guide to health and beauty for teenage girls.
“But the fact is they daren’t, and some will even starve themselves because in this society to be a fat female is to be a failure.”
“Fat women are seen as stupid. Their lives must be out of control. They are judged ugly, weird losers,” explains Sonia.
“Women have come so far in France – we have a political voice, good childcare, access to work – but instead of being more confident, we are increasingly obsessed with our weight and shape.
“Coco Chanel freed us from the corset more than 80 years ago – but we have fallen for a mental one instead – a silhouette of supposed perfection that is unattainable and leads to eating disorders and misery,” she adds.
Everywhere one looks in Paris she is there, that idealised French female, pouting glamorously from buses, billboards and metro stations; petite, fragile and very slim; advertising anything from lingerie and lipstick to discount car-insurance, even food – ice-cream parfait, perhaps, or a rich French cheese poised tantalisingly just beyond the reach of her gorgeous, half-open mouth.
“It is an absolute tyranny,” says Marjorie, a 49-year-old business executive, herself pencil slim.
“The tyranny of the silhouette, we call it – but it is also a kind of dream because it represents total success.
“It is not like in the UK where TV shows have women of all shapes and sizes doing all kinds of things. I love that – chubby 55-year-olds kissing men full on the mouth. You would never see that here,” she adds.
Marjorie works near the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis where there is a large immigrant population from the Maghreb.
She is inspired by these women with their full, rounded, curvaceous figures and the way they walk tall.
“They are so much more feminine than our Parisian chic,” she says, “but the sad truth is that if they want careers in this society, they are going to have to get skinny to get ahead.”
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