Boy Meets World star Danielle Fishel recalls 'creepy' TV exec saying he had her calendar at home

The show may have been called Boy Meets World, but for Danielle Fishel, it was more like Girl Meets Harsh Realities of the Male Gaze — which, admittedly, isn't as catchy.

During a recent episode of her rewatch podcast Pod Meets World with cohosts and former BMW costars Rider Strong and Will Friedle, Fishel opened up about becoming "an object of desire at such a young age" and recounted an awkward interaction with a TV executive that left a bitter taste in her mouth.

"As a kid, I always wanted to be older. I always wanted to be an adult. I wanted to be seen as an adult," Fishel said. "So getting adult male attention as a teenage girl felt like — I didn't think of it as being creepy or weird. I felt like it was validation that I was mature and I was an adult and I was capable and that they were seeing me the way I was, not for the number on a page. And in hindsight, that is absolutely wrong."

Fishel, 43, explained that while she was always mature for her age and capable of interacting with adults, in a "romantic, male-gaze sense, I should not have been outwardly talked about at 14, 15, 16 years old. And I was, even directly to me."

"I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday on their calendar," Fishel continued. "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."

Though she was initially taken aback by the exec's comment, she immediately thought what he had said was on the up and up "because we are peers, and this is how you relate to peers.'"

Fishel acknowledged that she didn't really process how that kind of attention affected her until her late 30s, when she realized after a series of failed relationships that 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 that she was "better than them."

It was actually during Girl Meets World, the follow-up series to the '90s sitcom, when Fishel took the time to figure out how to set up boundaries for herself.

"That was 37 years in the making," she said.

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