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  • 🙅‍♀️#16: The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

🙅‍♀️#16: The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

What is Radical Self Love? What is body shame and body terrorism? How can we fight the urge to judge others and ourselves? How can we make real progress and make a difference using Self-Love?

Hello courageous people! 👋 Welcome to Edition 16.

This week, our featured book is 📚 The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power Of Radical Self-Love 🖋 by Sonya Renee Taylor.

I have learned this past week that Self-Love isn’t the same as Self-Esteem or Self-Confidence or Self-Acceptance. It is a stand alone force for good that cannot be conflated with any of these other concepts.

This book is about deep transformation and deep love both for ourselves and for the people who are around us, particularly those who might be different from us. Self-Love is fundamentally about liberation.

This was a big one! 🤯

Let’s jump in! All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.

💜 What is the main message from The Body Is Not An Apology?

Sonya Renee Taylor has one mission which is crystal clear:

“I want to change the world by convincing you to love every facet of yourself, radically and unapologetically, even the parts you don’t like. And through this work, illustrate for you how radical love alters our planet. Radical self-love is an internal process offering external transformation.” - page 81

It is equally about developing Self-Love for ourselves as it is about developing love for our fellow man.

It is about overcoming internalised shame, which all of us live with in some way or another, that we have absorbed from the world around us:

“Yes, we have been cutting and cruel to ourselves and have watched our internalized shame spill over. We believed that our bodies were too big, too dark, too pale, too scarred, too ugly, so we tucked, folded, hid ourselves away and wondered why our lives looked infinitesimally smaller than what we knew we were capable of.” - page 81-82

Ultimately, if we are able to achieve Self-Love for ourselves and others, we will achieve

“… a world that works for our bodies” - page 82

🧐 What is body shame?

“When we are saddled with body shame, we see other bodies as things to covet or judge.

Body shame makes us view bodies in narrow terms like “good” or “bad,” or “better” or “worse” than our own.” - page 10

Body shame can also express as certain bodies being more valid or invalid, worthy or unworthy, or any other binary, hierarchical judgement about any aspect of people’s bodies.

(The word “bodies” in the context of this book, also includes our brains and our personalities. It is an all encompassing term.)

🔮 Take a moment to reflect before reading on:

From a place of curiosity and compassion, explore the social, culture, and political messages you have received about the bodies listed below. How have those messages informed your relationship with those bodies?

😬 I found this question confronting and difficult to reflect on, because I know that I have misconceptions and beliefs about every single one of those groups.

😔 What forms can body shame take and where does it come from?

There are many different causes for our internalised shame and which may contribute to a struggle to be able to love ourselves—all of the parts of ourselves—fully. These can include but are not limited to:

“Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body.” - page 5

In short, anything that we judge ourselves or others for is standing in our way of Self-Love. 

The interesting thing is, we weren’t born hating our bodies or hating parts of ourselves …

“We did not start life in a negative partnership with our bodies. I have never seen a toddler lament the size of their thighs, the squishiness of their belly. Children do not arrive here ashamed of their race, gender, age, or differing abilities.” - page 7

We learn these things along the way. And the way that we honour our own bodies directly impacts how we honour the bodies of other people. Self-Love means creating a world that is better for every single one of us, without exception.

🐩 Example: Health and the danger of Poodle Science

Dr Deb Burgard, a renowned eating disorder therapist coined the phrase “Poodle Science” in a video on body diversity, and making assumptions about people’s health based on their size:

“Dr. Burgard details how absurd it would be if we assessed the health of all dogs by comparing them to the size and health of poodles. Better yet, what if the poodles decided that all other dogs should look, eat, and be the same size as poodles? The video pokes fun at our medical industry and its one-size-fits-all orientation toward bodies. Rather than acknowledging and basing research on the premise that diversity in weight and size are natural occurrences in humans, we treat larger bodies with poodle science and then pathologize those bodies by using the rhetoric of health.” - page 24

🚑 Additionally, this was a re-frame on Health that blew my mind:

“Health is not a state we owe the world. We are not less valuable, worthy, or lovable because we are not healthy. Lastly, there is no standard of health that is achievable for all bodies.

Our belief that there should be anchors the systemic oppression of ableism and reinforces the notion that people with illnesses and disabilities have defective bodies rather than different bodies.” - page 24

Yikes. We have a lot of work to do. 😳

😰 What is body terrorism?

Body terrorism is an even more extreme version of body shame, with even more severe consequences:

“Living in a society structured to profit from our self-hate creates a dynamic in which we are so terrified of being ourselves that we adopt terror-based ways of being in our bodies.

The outcomes of body terrorism are deadly.

From violence against people of color (e.g., lynching, slavery, the Holocaust, internment camps);

to LGBTQIAA+ bodies being regularly assaulted, murdered, and driven to suicide; to rape and sexual assault;

to the bombing of abortion clinics and the murder of physicians based on people’s rights to autonomy over their own bodies;

to the involuntary sterilization of people with disabilities;

to the debilitating shame that people around the world live with as a result of the psychological attacks our social and media machines wage against us (ending in bulimia, anorexia, addiction, stigma, racism, homophobia, ableism, sizeism, ageism, transphobia, mass self-hatred, and senseless violence)

—it is clear that there is nothing rhetorical or hyperbolic about detailing the impacts of body hatred and calling the promotion of such hatred on any scale an act of body-based terrorism.” - page 58 - 60

👀 What happens when we fail to acknowledge people’s differences?

There can be a tendency for people to say things like “I don’t see colour” when talking about race. Or a more general statement of “but aren’t we all the same?”

Here’s the thing about when we fail to see and acknowledge the ways in which people are different:

“Rendering difference invisible validates the notion that there are parts of us that should be ignored, hidden, or minimized, leaving in place the unspoken idea that difference is the problem and not our approach to dealing with difference. Proposing that humans are all the same leaves the idea of the default body uninterrogated in our subconscious and firmly in place in our world, forcing all other bodies to conform or be rendered invisible.” - page 36

In the end it comes down to this one simple fact:

“When we fail to acknowledge difference, we also fail to account for or accommodate it.” - page 37

👯‍♀️ Striving for Equity versus Equality

Another important reason why we need to be able to see people’s differences is seen in the nuance of striving for Equity versus Equality:

“Equity and equality achieve significantly different ends for those who experience and live with the impacts of racism. Equality means providing the same opportunities or levels of support to everyone—a well-intentioned practice on the surface.

But if we peel back a layer we can see how the guise of equality can spread inequity like a brush fire.

🍽 Consider you were hosting an eight-month-old baby, an eighty-five-year-old woman, and a twenty-two-year-old man for dinner tomorrow night (I know it’s weird to host a baby for dinner, but bear with me). Would you feed them all a roast lamb entrée? How about a single tall glass of fresh breast milk? My hunch is you would know that each of these humans needs considerably different options for their very different bodies.”

Giving each of your dinner guests the exact same food would not be an act of true care for any of them.

“Equity proposes that we give people what they need to best meet their unique circumstances. Equity acknowledges we have varying needs and seeks to provide resource and opportunity based on what will help us achieve the best outcomes based on our specific circumstances.” - page 120

💪 How do we fight the urge to judge and shame our own bodies and the bodies of others?

Through the Three Peaces:

Reading the three peaces, it makes it seem more specific and actionable, but Sonya provides even more help again to assist us in embedding these practices.

🪵 Four Pillars of Practice

Bringing radical Self-Love into our lives is a process of thinking, doing and being. But for sure it can feel like an overwhelming task.

The Four Pillars provide guardrails and signposts to be able to keep us progressing in the right direction while working on the Three Peaces:

🙌 How do we take unapologetic action and prioritise Self-Love communication?

There are 14 specific ways that we can do this (each one with much more detail on the how-to in the book):

These actions do not come without some level of risk. Sonya recounts a story whereby in a group setting someone was body shaming another friend who was not present about having plastic surgery, leading to someone else making a transphobic comment. Sonya was at a crossroads of whether to choose comfort or discomfort, Self-Love or hate. But using the principles above, this was her chosen course of action:

“I said plainly, “I have some really amazing trans friends. They’re incredibly powerful, beautiful, and important in the world. And that’s who I know trans people to be.” My porch companion stammered, apologized, and we moved on to why body shaming their friend was not going to help their friend love herself.” - page 126-127

Self-Love isn’t one huge sweeping action, it is like most things in life an accumulation of small interactions repeated ad nauseum.

Every single moment makes a difference, to ourselves and to others. 😌

This book blew my mind over and over and over again, making me consider the world and its people in ways I hadn’t fully considered before with the powerful reframe of the ultimate purpose of Self-Love.

I don’t know about you, but after absorbing all of this over the past week, I am committed to radical Self-Love and would adore to live in a world where we can all live without fear, without shame and without judgement.

Hopefully if we all keep working, we can get there. 🤞

Until next week,❤️🙏 Eleanor

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a loved one? 🥰

🧠 Resources & Links

🖥 The Body Is Not An Apology Article Library - with resources on Mental Health, Size, Race, Colonialism, Gender, Class, Sexuality, Ageing, Disability, Religion & Spirituality, Parents and Global.

📕 Next week’s book

Coming out next Friday 20th May 2022 is edition #17 featuring:📚 The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice🖋 by Staci K. Haines

If you’re not already, subscribe now to get the next edition straight to your inbox! 📬