Why It’s Great That Amy Schumer Named Her Weight

For more women who are unapologetic about being themselves, see what Katie Sturino has to say about cellulite, and watch Linda Rodin defy societal standards about career, age and marriage status.

Amy Schumer recently accepted the UK Glamour Trailblazer award. While thanking the magazine before a room full of people, she told her audience exactly how much she weighs — while providing a status update on her sex life — in the same breath.

“I’m like, 160 pounds right now and I can catch a dick…whenever I want,” Schumer stated, eliciting raucous applause from the audience and Internet reposts and support. “It’s not a problem.”

Schumer is a force of nature, tackling new, oft-forbidden, female-specific topics. She receives constant accolades for her work, yet the amount of press her Glamour speech garnered suggests it may be her most groundbreaking moment of all — simply because women never talk about exactly how much they weigh.

For women famous or otherwise, there’s an Emily Post, “A Lady Never Tells”-type attitude towards weight and age that’s prevailed for centuries. I’m not sure what the logical origin of this is or why we allow numbers to hold so much power, but I do know the effect this weight-taboo has on women: it makes us feel alone. Without an honest dialogue about weight, we are left with no scope for the reality of what women’s bodies look like. In its absence, we’re left to rely on the media and advertising to dictate false norms.

There’s a section in Schumer’s Glamour speech where she talks about growing huge boobs in tandem with losing her baby teeth. She calls herself a “Jack-o-latern with tits,” and when I heard it, I thought, Exactly. That was me. I had all my teeth, sure, but I looked like I was twenty-two when I was twelve. I wore two training bras at a time to hide my chest, and boys ran away from me at dances because I was a giant.

From an early age, I felt like the single biggest girl in the room and it’s taken me a long time to numb that feeling. Working in the entertainment industry hasn’t helped. Svelte, beautiful actresses who are predominantly white, 25 and “perfect” represent us in television and film, and Hollywood ideals of beauty pervade much of my professional conversations.

Yet American women, on average, weigh 156 pounds.

The phrase “You can’t be what you can’t see” is often used when discussing women making strides in traditionally male-driven fields; the same is true of having a variety of women in the public eye. This includes women who are a size two, yes, but also women whose bodies look like yours, your mother’s, your cousin’s, and mine.

We are beginning to evolve past the notion that every leading lady has to be a clone — we have the likes of Schumer, Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Gina Rodriguez and Melissa McCarthy to thank for that. We’re moving toward a place where we value skill and personality over looks, and women can contribute to that movement by not letting weight define us. We not only need to celebrate diversity of the physical form on the screen, but also in our own lives. We need to strike down the taboo attached to numbers that do not define us.

So I’ll throw it all out there — I’m 5’6″ and 142 pounds. Men no longer run from me at dances. It’s not a problem. And you?

Original image by Peter Yang

Want more women telling it like it is about their bodies? Check out Katie Sturino’s tips for shorts-shopping and the first post we did with her about fashion in general. You might also be into The Other C-Word. Guess what it’s about? Cellulite.