The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

by Sonya Renee Taylor

How we value and honor our own bodies impacts how we value and honor the bodies of others.

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. Babies love their bodies!

You were an infant once, which means there was a time when you thought your body was freaking awesome too. Connecting to that memory may feel as distant as the farthest star. It may not be a memory you can access at all, but just knowing that there was a point in your history when you once loved your body can be a reminder that body shame is a fantastically crappy inheritance.

People with disabilities are virtually nonexistent on television unless they are being trotted out as “inspiration porn.” Their stories are often told in ways that exploit their disabilities for the emotional edification of able-bodied people, presenting them as superhuman for doing unspectacular things like reading or going to the store or, worse yet, for overcoming obstacles placed on them by the very society that fails to acknowledge or appropriately accommodate their bodies.

Our relationships with our own bodies inform our relationships with others. Consider all the times you have assessed your value or lack thereof by comparing yourself to someone else. 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.

There are minuscule daily ways each of us will be asked to apologize for our bodies, no matter how “normal” they appear. The conservative haircut needed to placate the new supervisor, the tattoo you cover when you step into an office building to increase your chances of being treated “professionally” are examples of tiny apologies society will ask you to render for being in your body as you see fit.

She felt uncomfortable not only with the visibility of her disability but how such aids took up what she called “too much space.” Take a moment to consider that space is actually infinite, right? The notion of “taking too much space” is born out of a framework of scarcity upon which we have built a world where some people are allowed to build skyscrapers and stadiums or run countries and make laws for the masses, while others are told to stay small, go unnoticed, don’t take up too much room on the sidewalk.

Logic says, “If people are choosing to be different, they can just as simply choose to be the way I believe they should be.” What we must ask ourselves instead is, “Why do I need people to be the way I believe they should be?”

A particularly strategic maneuver is to decide that if we don’t understand something it must be wrong. After all, wrong is simpler than not knowing. Wrong means I am not stupid or failing. See all that sneaky, slimy projection happening there? Projection shields us from personal responsibility.

We must make peace with not understanding. Understanding is not a prerequisite for honor, love, or respect.

Being uncertain, lacking information, or simply not knowing something ought not be an indictment against our intelligence or value. Lots of exceptionally smart people can’t work a copy machine.

Not knowing is an opportunity for exploration without judgment and demands. It leaves room for the possibility that we might conduct all manner of investigation, and after said research is completed we may still not “get it.”

The late poet and activist Audre Lorde said, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

Equally damaging is our insistence that all bodies should be healthy. Health is not a state we owe the world. We are not less valuable, worthy, or lovable because we are not healthy.

“Celebrating difference” is nice but not transformative. It is constrained by the boundaries of our imaginations. We must strive to create a difference-celebrating culture where we see diversity as an intrinsic part of our everyday lives.

In what ways have you tried to make other people “the same” as you? What parts of their identity did you erase by doing this?

Children’s bodies are not public property. Teaching children bodily autonomy, privacy, and consent are the cornerstones of raising radical self-love humans.

Whereas noticing difference was historically necessary, modern humans have continued to use difference to sort ourselves, conflating difference with danger. Our rapid assessment of difference can be understood through a psychosocial dynamic called “in-group out-group bias.”

In 1982, researcher Henri Tajfel divided people into two random groups. He found that people began to favor their random group over people in the other random group (emphasis on random), at times even rationalizing reasons for the other group’s immorality or poor character to justify disliking them.

Ultimately we are wired to recognize difference and maybe even distrust it. However, we were also wired to eat bugs and to poop in a hole in the ground. The point being, we are capable of change.

We may be trying to convey how we don’t judge people based on racial identity, but “color blindness” is an act of erasure. Not only does it make invisible all the experiences a person has had that were shaped by their racial identity or color, it implies that to truly respect another human being we must obscure their areas of difference.

The only reason we would need to erase someone’s difference is because we still equate difference with danger or undesirability. When we say we don’t see color, what we are truly saying is, “I don’t want to see the things about you that are different because society has told me they are dangerous or undesirable.”

Whereas the average U.S. woman is five feet four inches tall and weighs 140 pounds, the average U.S. model is five feet eleven and weighs 117.

We humans are masters of distraction, using makeup, weight loss, and a finely curated self-image to avoid being present to our fears, even as they build blockades around our most potent desires.

I propose that most of our purchases generally fall into two primary categories: best-interest buying and detriment buying.

Best-interest buying furthers our radical self-love journey by connecting how we spend our resources with what we deeply want for our lives, not simply in the short term to avoid feelings of not being “enough.” In this model, we ask ourselves if what we are buying is a desire rooted in radical self-love.

Radical self-love calls us toward a deeper investigation: “Why am I compelled to spend $180 on wrinkle-defying serum?” “Who or what may have been harmed in the making of this shirt?” Posing these questions to ourselves is likely a more effective and loving strategy than haranguing ourselves for making said purchases.

But the practice of inquiry shows us where we have adopted the media indoctrination that connects our worth and value to our appearance and external selves. That is what I call detriment buying.

Our leaders mold and uphold systems of government that directly affect our experiences of body shame and body-based oppression. Officials use these positions of power to codify beliefs that are already present in their lives, in the lives of their constituents, and in society at large.

A ProPublica analysis of federal data regarding police-involved shootings found that young Black men between ages fifteen and nineteen were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by the police than young White men of the same age.

Later, I learned from several transgender friends that the TSA scanners are designed to alert agents to “anomalies” in the groin area. Specifically, agents are instructed to additionally screen all people whose groins appear to differ from their perceived gender.

Being intimately connected to our thoughts is not enough to change our behaviors. Knowing why we do something will not necessarily keep us from doing it. Doing is a choice. It is an act of will. Doing often demands that we act despite our thoughts.

Remember that we are not the sum of our thoughts or even actions. When we fail to make that distinction, we avoid exploring our ideas and continue to cause harm to ourselves and others. Seeing our thoughts and behaviors as part and not the whole of us allows us to transform our way of being with other bodies.

We do not get to say, “Oh well, racism/sexism/weight stigma/ageism/homophobia/transphobia is just so big. Boy, I sure hope ‘they’ figure it out.” Systems do not maintain themselves; even our lack of intervention is an act of maintenance.

Let’s take the example of body terrorism in the form of ableism. One structural manifestation of ableism is access. If you rented a space for an event and never considered whether that space had ramps, elevators, or disability restrooms, you would be individually upholding the system of ableism by not ensuring that a person with a disability could access your event. No, you didn’t build the inaccessible building, but you did rent it, never considering its accessibility for all bodies, thus furthering the erasure of people with physical disabilities and their needs. The architects, investors, and builders who failed to include accessible accommodations for the building project participated in upholding the structural system of ableism by creating a barrier to access for people with disabilities in public life.

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.

Racial equity honors how histories of racism, White supremacist ideologies, slavery, and colonization have altered the playing field, leaving many racial groups to navigate issues that demand a different set of solutions.

When our bodies are the default, we are asked to risk nearly nothing. We are given a refuge of social comfort in exchange for our compliance to a system of bodily hierarchy. Our barbecues and picnics go undisturbed, our family holiday dinners maintain a placid normalcy. We are afforded an existence of relative ease with those who share our default privilege while nondefault bodies absorb the compounding risks from which we’ve opted out. It is this version of comfort/complicity that we have come to prize over justice. What might become possible if each of us absorbed some of the risk placed on marginalized bodies? What if we refused to be accomplices to body terrorism in all its forms, personal and political?