Melissa McCarthy Quotes

I'm all about empowering women. And by lining them up against the wall and weighing them, surely you are making them feel more like meat than ever - even if it's little meat, if you know what I mean.

When I try to get work in the US all they say is that I need to lose weight - but I bet they never said that to Mae West.

I think that's just part of what people do and part of being a female in the media. One day it's, 'Doesn't she look thin,' then the next day, 'She's put on weight.'

How insulting is it to suggest the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things?

I could truly have gone through life thinking that women were these venomous creatures. Turns out, they're not.

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.

If I want to dislike women, I should be allowed to. As it happens, I love them. Women to me are privately worshipped and publicly disdained.

Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.

Melissa McCarthy just opened this new movie, 'Identity Thief,' and Rex Reed, who's a known critic, wrote a scathing commentary on her weight. I think that weight designation is one of the last frontiers of bullying. I don't know what the right 'ism' for it is, but I think that there's a level of that that's happening that's certainly not okay.

I always laugh when people call me a misogynist. I... love women! Everything I do is to impress women. And if I hated women, why would half my fans be women?

It's okay to be a fat man. It's prestige and power and all of that. But fat women are seen as just lazy and stupid and having no self-control.

I don't really care for, like, fat jokes about women, specifically.

I think a lot of women are underestimated.

I think men are allowed to be fat and bald and ugly and women aren't. And it's just not - there is no equality there.

It is frustrating when in an interview people say: 'Give us your make-up tips' and 'How do you stay skinny?' I think: 'Do you ask a guy that?'

When we get married or interviewed for a job or play professional sports or run for president of the United States, we encounter a whole set of standards and expectations. We can be shamed for an outfit that's too slutty, too dowdy, too pricey--take your pick. That's the burden women carry into the fitting room.

We didn't take Charlize Theron seriously until she did 'Monster' and became physically ugly. I would love to see women be able to be powerful, complex, smart, opinionated and taken seriously, even if they are beautiful.

I wish we lived in a world where how you looked or what you wore wasn't an issue for men or women, and it's by and large not an issue for men, so I wish it wasn't an issue for women, but it is.

It's such a shame that you were put in a category of a dumb blonde, but that's what they did in the '50s. You fought the system, but you didn't win.

When a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse.

Women are inherently told their bodies are objects, so that's how we treat them.

The music industry is hard work, especially for women. A lot of people pit us against each other, comparing two body types or two women that are completely different. It's a lot of pressure.

It's useful to know how much society's holding you back. My mother would talk about how she was told by the head of her art school that she was the best painter, but that she wouldn't get the biggest prize because she would waste her talent by having children. I think we have to get honest with girls about how they can expect the world to block them, and we have to prepare girls, and ourselves, to break through those blocks.

The sad thing about our society is that women are put in one of two categories. You're either in the beautiful category and you're seen as sexy and beautiful, or some version of that, or you're put into another category... The latter category affords women the opportunity to be smart, funny, independent, mean, strong, intelligent and opinionated. We take them seriously as politicians, if they fit into that latter category. We respect their opinions more and give them higher expectations. That latter category is what allows female actors to be characters.

A woman has all too much substance in a man's eyes at the best of times. That is why men like women to be slim. Her lack of flesh negates her. The less of her there is, the less notice he need take of her. The more like a male she appears to be, the safer he feels.