Body Shaming in a Relationship: A Scene on a Greek Beach

On the beach of an average small Greek town, you can meet all kinds of people, and not only depending on which country they come from, but also on their (lack of) manners and (lack of) culture.

Three days on the beach are more than enough to collect impressions for a whole book, let alone for a post or two.

But not every situation is worth recording, while some badly need to be brought to light.

I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation of a married couple on the sunbeds right next to us, not because I particularly like eavesdropping on strangers, but because their tone was anything but quiet. Like it or not, I became a witness to their argument.

So, a man of around thirty, with the build and weight of an average well-fed walrus, starts lecturing his wife, who is sitting right next to him, while their three-year-old plays happily in the sand.

“Seriously, you could finally lose a bit of weight! Just look at yourself!” he grunts at her, pointing at her stomach.

At first without a word, she instinctively stands up and looks down at her stomach in confusion.

“Why, what’s wrong with me?” she replies defensively, instinctively gesturing that she doesn’t actually have a “big” stomach at all.

But that’s not enough for him.

He keeps insulting her with words I won’t quote here, because there are limits to decency, limits he clearly doesn’t know.

The whole scene is spiced up by the cynical smirk of the guy sitting next to him (his best buddy, I presume, because in build and, apparently, in mindset they are as alike as two peas in a pod).

“Yeah, man, seriously, look how much she’s let herself go,” the walrus adds, putting the cherry on top and turning straight to the other specimen of the same species.

The humiliated woman sits down and instinctively crosses her arms over her stomach to cover her “imperfections”. A few moments later she even gets up and puts on her beach dress.

The saddest part is that situations like this are not rare, and that this kind of male behaviour is, sadly, widely accepted where we come from. Some would even file it under a word I’m particularly allergic to: tradition.

Nobody has the right to lecture others about their looks. It makes absolutely no difference how the verbal abuser and his victim are related.

Even if it’s your closest family, husband, wife, mother, father, it doesn’t matter. In fact, in those situations comments like that are even more toxic.

The toxic masculinity of the typical Balkan man, the so-called “man of the house”, usually matches his looks, because by an unwritten rule he is the one who may look however he likes and “let himself go”, who wears his fat belly proudly like a trophy. As if a belly were proof of manhood or status.

And yet the very same men of the house expect, or even demand, like the walrus on the beach, that (their) women always look as if they had just been photographed for the cover of Cosmo.

Double standards!

In a short-lived relationship, my then partner once told me it was “about time I waxed again”. The only thing that disappeared as fast as a strip of cold wax comes off the skin wasn’t the hair on my legs, but his presence in my life.

Because that’s how it starts, painlessly: today fix this, tomorrow fix that, and in the blink of an eye you no longer feel good in your own skin and you feed your insecurities with his approval. No, thank you.

We live in a world that is set up to programme girls from an early age to be insecure and to believe there is something wrong with them, that they constantly have to “fix” themselves, wax, tone up, put on make-up… All with the subtext: to be more attractive to men.

The world screams from every side: something is missing! And this kind of behaviour from the people closest to us only feeds the trend.

A man can be a walrus and lose none of his worth, but a woman has to be a runway model?! Nope. Not on my watch!

A woman can look exactly the way she likes, the way she feels good in her own skin.

Read that again!

And how did the story from the beginning end?

It was one of those situations where the bully has to be told, in a polite way he may not even grasp, that his behaviour is unacceptable.

So I stand up demonstratively, walk over to our “alpha male” and casually drop:

“Lucky for you, you’re the spitting image of Brad Pitt.”

He didn’t see that coming.

Neither did she.

A faint smile of silent agreement and female solidarity lit up her face.

I’m sick of sitting and watching, staying silent and thereby quietly approving that kind of behaviour.

I know I won’t change him or his behaviour, but I still hope she knows she is not alone and that she finds the strength to stand up for herself, for her own sake, and even more for the sake of her little girl, who was playing happily right at her feet.