Amy Schumer's Dress Size Controversy

You know, I love Amy Schumer... mostly because she makes my job so fucking easy.

Amy’s been a fertile breeding ground for controversy these past couple of weeks, exhibiting a surprisingly thin skin when it comes to other people’s jokes riffing off the knee-slappers she tells about herself; fending off public accusations of comedic plagiarism; and making her own very public accusation of selfie-rape (which was quite possibly unwarranted). But the Amy-centric controversy I’ve been loving the most these days is her seemingly innocent claim that, when it comes to her dress size, "I go between a size 6 and an 8."

Whether that’s on her way to a size 12, she didn’t say.

I don’t mention the dreaded size 12 to be snarky (well, maybe just a little) or because it’s an easy joke (even though it is), but because America’s Queen of Comedy currently sits on the throne that is America’s newsstands gracing the cover of Vanity Fair in a pose made famous by America’s greatest female sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe—who was a size 12... and was by some accounts a size 14.

Marilyn Monroe vs Amy Schumer

The website The Marilyn Monroe Collection​ lists Marilyn’s most vital​ ​statistics​, based on the most impeccable source around—La Monroe’s personal documents and clothing from her own closet:

According to her first modeling agency, Marilyn’s measurements were 36-24-34. Another website lists Marilyn’s measurements as 37-23-36 (according to her studio) and 35-22-35 (according to her dressmaker). (Fun Fact: Marilyn’s dresses were more than a little form-fitting to make the most of her truly hourglass figure; The dress in which she sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to John F. Kennedy was famously sewn onto her body at the last minute.) She stood 5" 5 ½' tall and, just because it’s a good thing to know, wore a 36D bra. Her dress size was 12, and she weighed 118 pounds (117 pounds at the time of her death).

According to the website HealthyCeleb, Amy Schumer weighs in as follows:

Her measurements are 38-28-39; she stands 5" 7' tall; and, as stated above, goes between a size 6 and a size 8. Amy wears a 36B bra,​ ​when she​ ​wears one​ ​at all​; and she tips the scales at 160 pounds.

So on paper, at least, Amy Schumer is approximately one, five, and three inches larger in her dress measurements; stands an inch and a half taller; wears a bra two cup sizes smaller; and is 42 pounds heavier than Marilyn Monroe—a size 12 woman. But don’t you dare call Amy Schumer plus-size, even though there’s nothing wrong with being plus-size.

While Healthy Celeb is a less authoritative source than the Blue Book modeling agency, the Department of Defense, and the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office, I have great confidence in the statistics regarding Amy’s weight; La Schumer told the world her number when she received the Trailblazer Award at Glamour UK’s 2015 Women of the Year Awards, giving a speech that made her the darling of Third Wave Feminists, body-positivity activists, and nu-male beta white knights around the world, some of whom may have actually heard Amy tell a joke or two beforehand.

Amy Schumer vs Glamour

So it’s ironic that Amy blew up, so to speak, after her unwanted, unapproved, and apparently unseemly appearance in the "Plus-Size" Special Edition of the American version of Glamour. (Special Edition in this case means that the magazine basically repackaged some older material, including a 2015 interview with Amy; a 2014 interview with Lena Dunham; and a Christina Hendricks editorial from 2011. Along with not asking a celebrity for permission to reprint your own editorial content, this is an accepted practice in the publishing industry and frankly none of Amy’s business in the first place.)

It wasn’t long before Amy called out Glamour (US) on Twitter, passive-aggressively asking her personal army of 4.04 million followers to share their "thoughts​" on her inclusion in the mag. (Amy likes to connect with people on social media, when she’s not using it to block people who shared the shadowbanned Twitter hashtag trend #DeportAmySchumer or​ ​just doesn’t agree with the thoughts she solicited in the first place​.) Amy ended the argument, or so she thought, with a cute little GIF showing her running on a beach awkwardly trying to fly a kite, over the caption, "Bottom line seems to be we are done with these unnecessary labels which seem to be reserved for women."

Reserved for women unless you’re​ ​Jennifer Lawrence​. Or​ ​Kate Winslet​. Or​ ​Ellen DeGeneres​. Or, just to prove that the art of fat-shaming knows no timeline or gender bias,​ ​Richard Harris​ (see #25) and Elizabeth Hurley, who told Allure magazine in 2000, "I’ve always thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I’d kill myself if I was that fat. I went to see her clothes at the exhibition, and I wanted to take a tape measure and measure what her hips were. She was very big."

Among the thoughts Amy heard from the Twitterverse were those of Glamour (US) Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, who apologized for spilling their ink about Amy before mentioning that a size 12 is "frequent" among plus-size models, and yet smaller than that of the average American woman! She’s right, too: According to the presumably most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average American woman over 20 years of age is 5' 4", weighs 166.2 pounds, and has a 37.5" waist.

Which makes the average American woman over 20 years of age a size... something. Because like so many things in this great land of ours, women’s dress sizes just ain’t what they used to be.

Size Fudging in the Fashion Industry

Not surprisingly, the fashion industry’s fudging of dress sizing over the years, like most things related to the only business that porn can still laugh at*, has its roots in vanity and money. According to the excellent article "Why Clothing Sizes Mean Nothing" by Carol Anne Krol on the Weight Watchers website, there’s no standard version of a size 6 or a size 8 or a size 12 between competing designers or even within a particular design company. By way of easing the anguish that comes from (or causes) negative body stereotypes, Krol suggests, among other things, buying clothes from designers whose sizing won’t turn you into a cutter. It frankly boils down to a matter of simple economics that I will gladly mansplain to you in the nice, round figure of exactly 60 words:

Clothing designers want your money. You won’t give them your money if they make you feel fat, so they market what used to be a size 12 as a size 6. Now that you feel good, feel free to give them your money.

Normally I’d consider this moving of the goalposts to be a cynical, crass, condescending, and contemptuous money grab perpetuated by an industry built on turning guilt into gelt and promoted by another industry—advertising—whose bread and butter also comes from making people feel bad about themselves (the feminine-hygiene industry doesn’t move $2 billion worth of tampons, sanitary napkins, and menstrual cups every year by convincing women their bodies are fresh as a spring meadow without them).

And make no mistake, changing dress sizes for marketing purposes is all of those things. But there are times when a little white lie told on a woman’s behalf isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially after you learn the startling statistics about how many women (and men) are diagnosed with eating disorders every year, or once you hear that England and France have finally taken the advertising and modeling industries to task for their sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit message to women in general and models in particular that, "If you don’t drop those pounds, we’ll drop you."

So it seems that if Amy Schumer was hitting the stage during Marilyn Monroe’s day, she’d not only be getting blown off it by the likes of Jean Carroll, Joan Rivers, and Elaine May, she’d also be wearing a size 12 or maybe even a size 14. But nowadays, at least when it comes to her clothing, Amy Schumer is actually correct when she says she’s between a size 6 and an 8, thanks to the fashion industry’s trend of reconfiguring figures to make women’s figures more figurative than literal.

Go figure.

*(And I mean that literally. A friend of mine was once a baked pastry, nightshade puree and fermented curd disbursement engineer (pizza delivery boy) to make ends meet while attending what Penthouse Forum would call "a large midwestern University." One night he was sent on a run and brought the goods to the house of a pair of married swingers who proposed an interesting tip: That he be the little (and I use that term loosely) lady’s 1500th sexual opponent. Naturally, he accepted. When he told a group of friends and me this story after the fact, we had no choice but to believe him, especially since he had the photos to back it up. So pizza delivery boys do in fact get sex as tips, but who the fuck really wears those clothes?)