Mara Wilson Quotes

The industry is quite chauvinistic generally. Expectations of women, girls, what they should look like, how they should be, what they should say, what they should wear, how their hair should be, what colour their skin should be.

I always joke that I'm a feminist with a boob job.

I learned to hide aspects of my personality. Playing with girls was fine, for example, but playing with their Barbies was something I could do only behind closed doors.

I think society is so hard on young women. Growing up, the images that I saw, the standards that I had to live up to in terms of how I looked and how I fit into my social groups - it was a lot of pressure.

Women should look like women. A piece of cardboard has no sexuality.

I don't want to play sex roles any more. I'm tired of being known as the girl with the shape.

There's a lot more to being a woman than being 18 years old on the cover of Maxim magazine.

A woman my age is not supposed to be attractive or sexually appealing. I just get kinda tired of that.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful?

Americans like fat books and thin women.

There are stereotypes that have been out there for a long time that tell girls that their main asset, the main thing that they are valued for, is their appearance and also that it's to the exclusion of anything else.

The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.

When I first started in the industry back home in Australia at 18, there was a lot of push and shove as to how I should dress, if I was allowed to cut my hair short, if I had too many tattoos. If I didn't get a campaign, or if I didn't get a role, they would always come back to, 'Well, she dresses like a boy.'

Even today, in our progressive times, in most movies that come out, the men have to have biceps and the women have to be thin or something.

Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

When women make their image about youth and sexuality, and not about intellect, that's kind of a dead-end road. So I think it's a combination of self-entrapment and entrapment by society.

I don't agree with beauty contests. I did it one time. It wasn't embarrassing being Wonder Woman; it was embarrassing walking around on stage in a bikini. It was ridiculous, stupid, and humiliating.

I still describe myself as the activist with cleavage. Breast implants made me feel a lot sexier.

I can't write - I can't think like a woman... it's not natural, but I've tried.

It's fine being stared at as a pretty girl, but not as a freak. When I tried to make myself ugly, they said, 'Oh, she's lost her looks.'

Society puts so much pressure on girls to look a certain way.

There's so much judgment geared toward young girls. People just expect so much from girls. Even physically and aesthetically, people expect us to always look right, to have a certain etiquette - to talk a certain way and act a certain way - and to know certain things. It's all different expectations, but there are always expectations.

Like many teens, I struggled with my body and looks, but my despair was amplified by the expectations of cisnormativity and the gender binary as well as the impossibly high beauty standards that I, and my female peers, measured myself against.

The way woman is defined by marketable modeling and commercial standards... It makes me feel alien to myself.