Boy Meets World star Danielle Fishel remembers ‘creepy’ TV exec stating he had her calendar at home 2023
Danielle Fishel saw Boy Meets World as Girl Meets Harsh Realities of the Male Gaze, which isn’t as catchy.
Fishel discussed becoming “an object of desire at such a young age” on a recent edition of her revisit podcast Pod Meets World with cohosts and former BMW costars Rider Strong and Will Friedle.
I always wanted to grow up. Adulthood was my dream. Fishel sought adulthood. “Getting adult male attention as a teenage girl didn’t feel scary or odd. I felt validated that they saw me as a person, not a statistic. That’s incorrect in retrospect.”
Danielle Fishel saw Boy Meets World as Girl Meets Harsh Realities of the Male Gaze, which isn’t as catchy.
Fishel discussed becoming “an object of desire at such a young age” on a recent edition of her revisit podcast Pod Meets World with cohosts and former BMW costars Rider Strong and Will Friedle.
8 TV High Schools We Wish We AttendedScroll up to reset view.
I always wanted to grow up. Adulthood was my dream. Fishel sought adulthood. “Getting adult male attention as a teenage girl didn’t feel scary or odd. I felt validated that they saw me as a person, not a statistic. That’s incorrect in retrospect.”
“Romantic, male-gaze sense, I should not have been outwardly talked about at 14, 15, 16 years old,” Fishel, 43, said. And immediately to me.”
“I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday on their calendar,” Fishel added. “I had a male executive—I did a calendar [shoot] at 16—and he specifically told me he had a certain calendar month in his bedroom.”
“Because we are peers, and this is how you relate to peers,” she decided the exec’s statement was OK, despite her first surprise.
Fishel didn’t realize how that kind of attention affected her until her late 30s, after a series of failed relationships, when she realized she was “bad at boundaries” and had “absolutely no expectations of how you’re supposed to talk to me, of how you’re supposed to treat me” because she didn’t want anyone to think she was “better than them.”
Fishel learned to set limits during Girl Meets World, the sitcom’s sequel.
“That was 37 years in the making,” she remarked.
