Virginia Postrel Quotes

If I didn't have to fit in to sample sizes I'd be a size 14, easy. I wouldn't bat an eyelid.

Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.

The fashion industry has a responsibility to represent a healthy image of women, but to start weighing them and putting them against a wall and making them feel like animals? No.

I've never heard of a size 0 or a negative human. That's hard. A lot of girls aren't naturally built that way.

Compared to a lot of actresses my age, I'm actually overweight.

Outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in.

I feel I'm such a big part of that insecurity that some girls might have because of my job, that girls think they have to be that picture. And even boys, they think that that picture exists, and it's so frustrating because I don't look like that picture - I wake up not looking like that picture.

I did not label myself 'plus size.' The fashion industry did.

There's no pressure on me to be a particular weight. But I loathe being renowned as a 'larger' model. It makes me cringe.

I was never thin enough to be a proper model and not big enough to be plus-size.

I don't think what size I am really matters.

Everyone has to realize that body-shaming can happen at any size.

Not one person would admit that they didn't want me to wear a bikini because of their aesthetic preference - a preference that is shaped by our cultural perceptions of what is and isn't beautiful.

I think calling me 'full-figured' is just rude.

In New York, if you weigh under 200 pounds and decline so much as a cookie at a co-worker's party, women will flock to your side, assuring you of your appealing physique. This is how skittish we are about the dangers of anorexia and the pressures of body image.

I don't think I'm curvaceous. It's simply that most other actresses are really, stupidly tiny.

Other than my sexuality, I am vulnerable regarding my physical appearance, as I am not what people considered ideal by most standards. For the entertainment business, I am not the body type of what is typically cast for television or movies.

When I'm sitting in a casting room in Paris, I'm not the thinnest model. Sometimes I'm not the most flat-chested, either.

I was told I was fat in the modeling world, and a director on a shoot told me I needed to lose weight. The J-Lo booty wasn't popular then, and I wanted to be the perfect Hollywood girl - tall, blonde and skinny. I couldn't do the 'tall' because I was 5'2, and I couldn't do the skinny, either.

I don't believe in doing things to manufacture my body to appeal to what I think people might like.

I'm being mocked because I don't live up to a socially determined view of what other people think a person should look like.

Women feel like we're fat if we can't wear the clothes we wore in high school. Men, in contrast, only start to feel fat only when they can no longer fit into a foreign car.

I am in an industry that makes women feel bad about themselves, absolutely.

Our cultural discussion of fat bodies and how we clothe them has nothing to do with health concerns, the obesity epidemic, or the comfort of fat people. It has everything to do with what we expect from women, what we've been told by the fashion industry, and the value we place on 'perfect' bodies.

I have a figure, and there aren't many girls out there right now who have that.