The Body Is Not an Apology summary

Try to recall your first memory of body shame. Was it a reaction to sudden body change? Were you a teenager or a child? Did you just become aware of the difference between people? If you answered yes to any of these, you’re not alone: The author found that most of the attendees of her radical self-love workshops learned body shame during at least one of these points in their lives.

Take Daemon. When he was eight, he scraped his knee badly at the playground. When he approached his older cousins, crying, they laughed at him and said, “Man up. Only sissies cry.” There and then, Daemon internalized the idea that being a man meant ignoring pain. As an adult, he neglected his body and self-soothed with drugs and alcohol. It wasn’t until he had a stroke at 37 that he finally began to question his toxic beliefs about masculinity. He realized that when we distinguish our true values from echoes of the familial, social, or political messaging we heard growing up, we can begin to heal and find peace.

At this point, you may be tempted to blame your negative feelings about your body on your mother, your cousins, or that boy who taunted you in middle school. You may even be experiencing what one of the author’s workshop participants called meta-shame – shame for having shame. But the truth is that our relationships with our bodies have been shaped by greater forces.

Consider that only five percent of American women have the body type that advertising depicts as the ideal. Meanwhile, a People magazine survey reported that 80 percent of women respondents felt insecure when they viewed images of women in film and TV. Why do advertisers want us to feel defective in comparison with the default body? Because it compels us to buy products that will remedy our supposed flaws – which they invented – enabling them to generate more wealth and power. The author calls this capitalist structure the Body Shame Profit Complex, or BSPC.

During a visit to the Bahamas, the author stumbled upon a small beach marked with a sign for Dean’s Hole: the deepest hole in the world, which dropped to 663 feet just steps from the shore. There, she struck up a conversation with a free-diving champion from Italy named Davide Carrera, who told her: “In the water, I must learn the difference between fear and danger.”

Unknowingly, Davide was also describing the journey of learning radical self-love. Like a deep-sea diver wading into unknown depths, we must be fear-facing when we first encounter the four pillars of radical self-love practice. The first two pillars reorient our thinking, the third reckons with doing, and the fourth introduces a new state of being.

Body terrorism has not only robbed us of our compassion for ourselves, it has also led us to sabotage other people’s self-love. Just as we receive toxic messages, we send them. And by doing nothing to stop it, we are complicit in maintaining the uninterrupted feedback loop of body shame.

Realizing the structural nature of body oppression, we may even find ourselves on that wheel of meta-shame, judging ourselves for judging others. But rather than becoming paralyzed into inaction, we can work towards implementing the final pillar of practice: collective compassion. This happens when we open ourselves to trusting others and engage in community care.

During the US presidential primaries in 2015, former candidate Hillary Clinton had a tense conversation with Black Lives Matter activists about how to address racist police violence. At the time, Clinton believed their approach was unrealistic. She was quoted as saying, “Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. You change laws; you change allocation of resources; you change the way systems operate.”

Meanwhile, history is full of proof that changing laws isn’t enough to wipe out body terrorism. Take the racial bias that’s led to horrendous and disproportionate mass incarceration of Black people in the United States. Because it’s now legal to discriminate against anyone with a criminal record, redesigning the system has ushered in a new era of segregation. 

“Bodies are not the only designators of oppression, but all oppression is enacted on the body.” 

“Radical self-love demands that we see ourselves and others in the fullness of our complexities and intersections and that we work to create space for those intersections.”