Amy Schumer doesn’t think of herself as a feminist icon. And perhaps that is what makes her the ideal feminist icon. Amy Schumer isn’t trying to be anything but herself, and she demands that she not be required to throw in a super-skinny body to boot in order to be taken as seriously as the next guy.
Amy Schumer told Glamour recently, in an interview conducted by her own sister, that being a feminist is not a vocation for her.
“I don’t try to be feminist. I just am,” Schumer said. “It’s innately inside me. I have no interest in trying to be the perfect feminist, but I do believe feminists are in good hands with me.”
no matter how busy i am, i always set aside 2-5 hrs of my day to watch amy schumer
— marissa (@marissa_pereira) July 2, 2015
While there are many actresses shining a light on what it is like to be a female in Hollywood, Schumer is getting notice because she has flipped the bird at establishment norms from the very beginning. It is shocking to hear Maggie Gyllenhaal say, “I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55.”
Schumer takes those kinds of ridiculous events and throws them on screen large, enlisting powerhouse actresses like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patricia Arquette, and Tina Fey to make her point.
“For women, we’re taught to eat less until we disappear,” Amy Schumer says. “And trained to believe that if you don’t look like everyone else, then you’re unlovable. And men are not trained that way. Men can look like whatever and still date a supermodel.”
Serena out here winning everything & random guy on twitter measuring her f**kability, as if he has a shot. Isn't this an @amyschumer sketch?
— Zerlina Maxwell (@ZerlinaMaxwell) July 9, 2015
“Every woman deals with it most every day of their lives,” Schumer says of sexism. “Growing up, it’s just in your day-to-day. There are all these preconceived notions of what it means to be a woman or a girl, and straying from those ideas of femininity is sort of shocking to people. I felt angered by that as a kid. I felt like that was unjust. Like that was not right.”
Sure, there are some who want Amy Schumer to sit down and hush, but that kind of thing only spurs her on.
“I have gotten death threats—that was scary,” Schumer admits. “But it just made me want to use my voice more.”