oh, i really wanted to love this. i think sonya renee taylor is a fantastic human. i love her deep commitment to radical self love, and her belief that it can change the world. her book is powerful and well-researched. but i had a really hard time vibing with it!
i'm not sure what went wrong. i listened the the audiobook, and the author's narration is not my favorite. the writing style is also a little strange; sometimes it feels like a research paper with so many detailed citations. everything is extremely organized, and sometimes taylor will refer back to pillar five or inquiry seven and i'm just like uhhh. was i supposed memorize all of those??
but these are small criticisms, because overall i really like what taylor did here. the book is certainly at its best when it focuses on the political and systemic, rather than the self help angle. obviously the personal is political, and these things are intertwined, but i think taylor's cultural analyses are stronger than her amped-up encouragement.
i really liked the short section on consumerism, and detriment buying vs. best interest buying. taylor says we need to pay attention to what we consume, and ask ourselves whether our consumption choices are made with love for ourselves and for others. if we're committed to radical self love, it's our responsibility to make consumption choices in accordance with that.
i also like the ending, where taylor talks about the importance of having grace for ourselves and those around us. she says this is the most important part of radical self love: being gentle and kind, and knowing that we will sometimes fail, and forgiving ourselves for that when it does happen. how we treat ourselves extends to how we treat others, and kindness is essential. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism Why I Recommend Bumping This UP On Your TBR:
This is a MUST READ educational novel about how to live your best life and how to improve this world. The author is intelligent, has an impressive way with words, inspires, validates, and address many important topics that revolve around our health, our community/ies, and our world. I cannot emphasize enough how much I got out of this and how much I know that you will too. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism This is my first written review as I usually only give star ratings. However, this (audio)book was near impossible to get through. I had high hopes for this book, being that I am a woman that is all about empowerment, self awareness, and loving oneself entirely, as well as others. By no means have I always been this way. I am a 34 year-old Cuban mulatto with medium-toned skin that doctors deem as morbidly obese. I was raised in a racist neighborhood and experienced being bullied, abused, and abandoned by my parents and others through most of my life. I say this to give perspective that I've, like almost everyone else, experienced negative things from outside forces that I internalized for a huge chunk of my life. It took a lot of reflection, self awareness, and internal conversation to transform to being a better person.
My main dislike is Sonya's approach. I didn't appreciate the way she lumped everyone together as hateful people that need her to become better human beings. When she wasn't making people feel bad for doing something they may or may not have even done, she contradicted herself and turned us into victims of the aforementioned people's actions and words. Instead of writing this solely from her perspective and experiences, she says everyone or you or we, seemingly to make herself not feel so alone when she was still a work in progress.
She hasn't really acknowledged that people are capable of embracing others that are different. Instead she makes it seem like it's this impossible feat that we need her radical self-love program to be able to achieve it. It was like an infomercial in (audio)book form. People that already love, respect, and embrace themselves and others don't need something nonapplicable repeated to them. Shaming people to be better or telling them they're something they're not is not helpful. Not only is all of this daunting to listen to on repeat, it distances readers/listeners from being able to both relate to her and respect her views beyond the fundamentals of respecting her simply because she's a human being with an opinion.
I wish she would have simply told us her entire story thus far from her point of view only, allowing us to see our similarities and personal wrongs on our own so we could consciously choose to make a change that has potential to be successful, using her advice only if we choose. Readers/listeners are not really given a chance nor choice with this book.
I wholeheartedly agree that our society needs to be more accepting of everyone, advertisers convince us we need beauty products when we truly don't need anything, implicit bias is irrefutable, and there are people that shame and abuse others for being different to make themselves feel better about whatever it is they're going though. I do recognize what Sonya hopes to accomplish and truly respect her for not sitting silently on the sidelines. However, none of the above can change the fact that this (audio)book was challenging to get through. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism I finished it! It was a feat, trust me. Took me 4 or 5 months. It was exhausting and times and I felt punished my the reading, constant exhortations. I don't think I can recommend it. This is an attempt to be honest rather than tear down the book or the author. I think that the content and the message are important, however the delivery system leaves some to be desired. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism My favorite reviews of this one is about how surface level it is. That's the point, but the surface level is SO HARD to access because of how deeply embedded the garbage is and it feels selfish, self-centered, and weird to work on the surface of the self, which is the body. But once you do that surface work, it is radical, and it embeds more deeply, and you do truly become a body capable of helping others to find their own light and power.
I loved this deeply, and it's so rare to see a body positive book that's not about middle class, able-bodied, cis white ladies feeling good about themselves. It's about how every person needs to step into the truth of THEIR body in order to liberate the bodies of everyone.
It's simple and straightforward. Really. But it's not easy work in the least, and that's precisely the point Taylor hammers home. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism
A book that makes you cry in chapter one is one that will stick with you, indeed. I loved this book. From the language of it to its message to its format, it spoke to me so much and I can envision just how wide-reaching this sort of messaging could be.
I assumed this book was only going to be about body positivity and self love, but Sonya has spun all forms of diversity and marginalizations as aspects of the body. In this way, race, disability, sexuality, and gender are all intersecting forms and variations of types of bodies. In this way, racism/homophobia/sexism/etc. is a form of body terrorism (her coined term for prejudice against someone's body or their perceived appearance), and it can be corrected through being at peace with your own body (radical self love) and then creating a community that accepts their bodies and others' as well so that in the end, no one is judged by their body.
Let me say, I just love that idea. I love that Sonya attacks these issues from the angle of acknowledging your own hypocrisy and privilege first. Most feminist books I read talk about how we, feminists, have one set of ideas we want to promote, but there are Others who are against our agenda, and the more opposed to one another we are, the more weaponized our vocabulary becomes. This book instead shows that often we're the perpetrators of the system because humans perpetuate the system and we ARE human.
The writing of this book was just fantastic, as well. It's very mature and academic at times with the language and quotes that are punchy and poignant, but at the same time, Sonya inserts conversational bits and anecdotes to dispel too much of a lofty tone. Interspersed are little discussion questions to ponder and tidbits of information off to the side, and those interruptions almost made this read like a group book where I could stop and put the book down to discuss. I could see this being highly implemented in classrooms.
Part of me is skeptical about whether even the toughest, most masculine men will ever buy into the idea of radical love solving all prejudice and hate, but it's that skepticism that this book encourages me to challenge. And I think that's an important focus of this book: question every thought and impulse you have. Don't let yourself be passive in a system that is upheld by the passivity of people who maintain default structures of white heteronormative body ideals. For that message alone, I was sold.
Even though I'm pretty comfortable with my body so I think I'm already well on my journey, for such a short book, I think this is required reading no matter how you feel about yourself. This was validating in a personal sense but also gave me the inspiration to spread love instead of wielding my feminism like a sword. I anticipate that final chapter of advice will resonate with me for a long time. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism Overall, I acknowledge that this book does contain important themes that can be helpful for a variety of people. However, this was not the kind of book I expected. Personally, the author's fast-paced style of stating many different facts about how body-shaming affects us each individually did not go deep enough into the core problems that lead people to criticize themselves and others. The content seemed pretty surface-level stuff, things that seem fairly obvious, but rebranded in order to make it sound more powerful. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism A solid introductory text about body positivity and its relations to social justice, oppression, and radical self-love. I appreciated Sonya Renee Taylor highlighting the role of capitalism, racism, and transphobia in promoting body shame. So many books and research articles about body image focus on cisgender, heterosexual white women’s experiences and often neglect the role of systems of oppression in making people dislike their bodies. Taylor draws several arguments about how various social inequities and injustices lead us to disdain nonnormative (e.g., nonwhite, nonthin or nonmuscular, etc.) bodies, as well as how we can cultivate radical self-love to view and treat our bodies better. She makes astute points about how professionalism promotes white supremacist and oppressive norms, how children’s bodies are not public property, and how color blindness blocks us from seeing each other and ourselves as who we truly are.
I refer to The Body Is Not an Apology because I feel like there’s so much room for more writing about each of the topics Taylor presents in this book. While I loved pretty much all the ideas she raised, I wanted more depth about each of them, more intellectual richness and nuanced emotional exploration. For example, in one section she writes about how children’s bodies should not be treated as public property and then transitions right into the perils of color blindness, and I felt confused about how that transition happened, even though I appreciated both topics.
Recommended to those who are interested in body image and want a quick foray into how social justice concepts and topics relate to body image. I so stand with Taylor’s message that we do not need to apologize for our bodies, no matter what they look like. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism If you are a person with a body, you should read this, even if you don’t think you have a bad relationship with said body. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism thought provoking and full of good reminders. would definitely recommend giving it a shot if, i don't know, you have a body...maybe you don't feel awesome about it all the time...you get it. Nonfiction, Self Help, Feminism
Sonya Renee Taylor  6 SUMMARY
A global movement guided by love.
Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.
The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world--for us all. The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love