9781626569768

Radical Reflection
Concepts like self-acceptance and body neutrality are not without
value. When you have spent your entire life at war with your body,
these models offer a truce. But you can have more than a cease-fire.
You can have radical self-love because you are already radical selflove.
Why the Body?
Humans are a varied and divergent bunch, with all manner of beliefs,
morals, values, and ideas. We have struggled to find agreement on much of
anything over the centuries (just think about how long we argued about
gravity and whether the world is shaped like a pizza), but here is a
completely noncontroversial statement I think we have consensus around:
You, my dear, have a body. And should you desire to remain on this
spinning rock hurtling through space, you will need a body to do it.
Everything else we think we know is up for debate. Are we spiritual
beings? Depends on who you ask. Do humans have souls? Been fighting
about that since Aristotle likened the souls of fetuses to those of
vegetables. 2 But bodies—yup, we got those. And given this widely agreedupon
reality, it seems to me if ever there were a place where the practice of
radical love could be a transformative force, the body ought to be that
location.
When we speak of the ills of the world—violence, poverty, injustice—
we are not speaking conceptually; we are talking about things that happen
to bodies. When we say millions around the world are impacted by the
global epidemic of famine, what we are saying is that millions of humans
are experiencing the physical deterioration of muscle and other tissue due to
lack of nutrients in their bodies. Injustice is an opaque word until we are
willing to discuss its material reality as, for example, the three years
sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder spent beaten and locked in solitary
confinement in Riker’s Island prison without ever being charged with a
single crime. His suicide and his mother’s heart attack two years later are