“Every Single Woman in America Is Now Curvy”

If curvy can mean anything we want it to — on a scale of size 2 to size 22 — then our reductive thinking on the subject of bodies and beauty standards hasn’t actually changed. The ubiquity of “curvy” is just a gloss of body acceptance, not actual body acceptance. Once you start looking for it, for every positive article about celebrating bodies of all shapes and sizes, there’s an equally negative one; though we’re celebrating new shapes and sizes, it all adds up to zero.

What are your thoughts on Lauren Ban’s article? 

Little Known Fact: Our Sizing System

During 1939 and 1940, about 15,000 American women participated in a national survey conducted by the National Bureau of Home Economics of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was the first large-scale scientific study of women’s body measurements ever recorded. The purpose of the survey was to discover key measurements of the female body - that is the important measurements from which other measurements could best be predicted - and then to propose a sizing system based on this discovery.