If we can respect fat bodies in Beryl Cook’s paintings, why can’t we do so in the street? | Lisette May Monroe

Cook's curvy characters are glamorous, comfortable in their skins and uncompromising. In real life, I am constantly bombarded with fatphobia

With an exhibition of Beryl Cook's work having just opened at Studio Voltaire in London, I have been thinking about what it means to occupy a fat body. I love Cook's paintings and all their chubby glory. They are celebratory, glamorous, from the sassy half-moon of bum cheek dipping out of well-filled leopard-print shorts, to a gaggle of women, all dressed up and piling into a taxi. Cook frames the nights out we hold tight in our memories, the warmth of friends as you huddle together against the wind, heading towards the next bar and next potentially brilliant thing, perfume and hairspray following you like sparkly, scented fog.

So why, when we stop looking at paintings and move into the real world, does a fat body incite such hatred? I have worked out an equation: reactions to my body operate in eight-pound fluctuations. My body can be perceived as hyper-sexualised and curvy, the type of body that men feel is OK to slide a hand down at the pub as they push past you to the bar. Yet if I put on half a stone, as people often do, I become disgusting, with the kind of body shape about which strangers feel the need to comment. People you have never met suggest better menu options in restaurants; drunk groups of men follow you shouting things that destroy you with every step. The reaction my body generates in others is inescapable.