In a world where women are treated by the way we look, we often try and uphold those beauty standards to get ahead in life even if they do not align with our beliefs. Have we come a long way or are we still perpetuating body standards through the male gaze? There are some serious potential physical, emotional, and mental effects on girls and women who try to live up to our culture’s ideal image of beauty. Through my research about self-love, I have learned that what is actually more important than achieving self-love is battling body-terrorism.
In the first chapter of Sonya Renne Taylor’s book The Body is Not An Apology, a section called What Have We Been Apologizing For? What If We Stopped? She talks about how from a very young age she was always apologizing to her grandmother for her silly clumsiness like leaving her sweater on the couch or spilling jelly on her white shirt. She was constantly saying “I’m sorry” and her grandmother would reply “If you were truly sorry you would stop doing it.” She then reflects on all the apologies she made about just simply being herself. She apologized for laughing too loud, being too big, too dark, too flamboyant, and too outspoken. She then realized she was not sorry for any of those things and she was not sorry about her clumsiness as a child. She was no longer going to apologize for being herself. Then Sonya shares a story about an ex and how he said something that hurt her feelings unintentionally. Because he did not intend to hurt her feelings he felt he did not need to apologize, “he felt his intention should have absolved him from his impact.” She then asked him, “If you accidently stepped on someone’s foot, would you say sorry?” and he then replied, “No, not if their foot was the only place to stand.” Her point with these two stories is to know the difference between apologizing for being yourself and apologizing for being thoughtless and hurting someone’s feelings. I am learning to stop saying “I’m sorry” so much and what I learned from these two stories is to decipher the difference between actually being sorry and breaking this habit of apologizing when I’m not sorry. She follows these stories up with two very important questions, “What if we all became committed to the idea that no one should have to apologize for being a human in a body? What if we made room for everybody so that no one had to stand on someone else’s foot?”
The two main terms Sonya uses in her book, The Body is Not an Apology is radical self-love and body-terrorism. As babies, we come into this world out of love and the first thing we learn is love. She explains that we all have radical self-love inside of us we were born with it. Radical self-love is this natural deep affection you have for yourself. What hinders our radical self-love is this learned body shame brought to us through body terrorism.
Body-terrorism is used by conglomerates in the beauty industry to make large amounts of money off our self-hate and insecurities, it is media manipulation and laws made to body shame us for political and economic power. Body-terrorism is most prevalent in beauty ads that mainly showcase thin, light-skinned, wrinkleless, hairless, perfect women, and by creating these unattainable beauty standards it reinforces gender stereotypes and underrepresents people of all races, abilities, and gender identities making it hard for all people to reach radical self-love. That is just the body terrorism that we can see, what we do not see are the laws that support this visible body-terrorism. In The Body is Not an Apology. Sonya lists some laws that support body terrorism and there are two that really stuck with me. If your BMI is over 35 and you are an immigrant in New Zealand you can legally be deported. I knew that people are discriminated against because of their size but I did not know that this discrimination could be written into a law. The other law that really took my by surprise was the Asexualization Act of 1909 making it legal to sterilize people in California who were deemed “mentally ill” or “mentally deficient” and it was still legal to do this to female inmates, mostly women of color, until 2010. We are supposed to be one of the most progressive countries in the world and California is supposed to be one of the most progressive states in this “progressive” country yet we were still forcibly sterilizing women until 2010. This made me think about how U.S. media is constantly informing us of the travesties of third-world countries, specifically when it comes to sterilizing young women, yet we are doing right here. We are constantly being bombarded with images of doctors in these third-world countries helping out victims of sterilization, yet doctors here in our own country are performing these sterilizations that we criticize other countries for letting such a thing happen. This hypocritical pointing-the-finger cycle is very disturbing to me and I don’t even know how to begin to break this system down. Sonya says that before we are able to break down any of these systems that oppress us we must first learn to break them down within ourselves to reach our radical self-love.
