Upset by that halftime show? Let’s talk about how we feel about bodies. Our bodies. Women’s bodies. Black and brown bodies.

Bodies are beautiful and worthy of love and respect and autonomy. All bodies. Full stop.

My body is beautiful and worthy of love and respect and autonomy.

Chances are you are nodding along, unaware of all the caveats your subconscious brain has for this thought. Caveats we need to examine.

How we feel about other bodies is a reflection of how we feel about our own. How we feel about bodies, ours and those of others, is also a reflection of all the messages, implicit and explicit, we have received about bodies over the course of our lives*.

Over the past year, as a part of my healing journey (and thanks to Sonya Renee Taylor, who I will quote quite a bit), I have been intentionally noticing when I have strong reactions to life in general, and to other people’s bodies in particular. This has led me to notice how frequently a part of my brain judges people based on their body — their size, their abilities, their way of dressing, their gender presentation, their race, etc. Before I started doing this, most of these thoughts flew by, unnoticed, as a part of my mental chatter. But these thoughts are so important. They tell me a lot about how I interact with the world, messages I am giving off I am unaware of, and how much I have internalized messages about how people in general, and women, in particular, should look.

How we think & feel about bodies matters. Bodies are political. Bodies are policed. Bodies are jailed. Bodies are sexually assaulted. As Sonya Renee Taylor writes, “body shame and oppression are both symptoms of and tools in a far more complex and sweeping system of access and resources. A system that impacts not only how we feel about ourselves but also our opportunities and ability to thrive in the world.” (The Body is Not an Apology, 49–50)

We have got to do a better job noticing how we feel and what we think about bodies — other peoples and our own — if we want to achieve justice and equity, if we truly aspire to love ourselves and others (which, as a Christian, is part of the greatest commandment, a sentiment shared by most world religions).

After the amazing show of athleticism and talent J Lo and Shakira blessed us with during the Super Bowl Halftime show, the usual suspects came out decrying the performance. I am completely unsurprised when the Christian Right comes out clutching their loincloths at women owning their bodies in a public space. What I didn’t expect was how many people (I’m lookin’ at you white women) who consider themselves feminists and racial justice advocates would be complaining about women objectifying themselves and what about the children-ing all over my social media feeds. We missed so much of the performance by getting caught up in feeling uncomfortable about their bodies! The kids in cages! J Lo singing Born in the USA draped in an amazing Puerto Rican & American flag! (Also! This performance was in the middle of watching grown men engage in violence for our entertainment, in a racist league that does not care about its players beating women!)

If you were offended, disgusted or angered by the performance, I would like to ask you to take a second and ask yourself why.

Disgust is arm-in-arm with anger — it’s anger with a sense of moral superiority and/or a reaction to some kind of moral danger.

With that in mind, if you were offended or disgusted, what was it about the performance that threatened your morals and why? Is that true?

How does the way you felt about the performance reflect on how you feel about your own bodies and/or women’s bodies?

Cause I gotta tell you, if you’re having a strong, negative reaction to this performance, chances are you have a strong negative reaction to women in yoga pants or short skirts and if you really drill it down, you have negative feelings about the bodies of women and femmes in general. About your own body, too.

And that makes sense! We have been told we have to look a certain way for so long we believe it to be true. Women & femmes have been told that in order to get respect we need to have a certain type of body (thin, white, feminine), dress a certain way (mostly covered up, not too tight, feminine but also powerful?) in order to get respect in the workplace, in the home, on the street (and each place seems to require a different outfit!). And we have done it. We have worn power suits and “tasteful” skirts and starved ourselves and worn deeply uncomfortable bras and layers of makeup, and we STILL don’t get paid as much as men, we STILL get sexually harassed and assaulted, we still get passed up for promotions and people still have arguments about whether we are too emotional or capable of leadership. Latinx and Black women have been told they must contort their bodies and hair and ways of being in this world to white beauty standards and they still get paid less and hold fewer positions of power than white women.

The thing is, it isn’t and has never been about how we present our bodies in public. It’s about control and power. It’s about our existence and the wild notion that we are also human and deserve rights and shit. And yet… we pass on the policing of bodies from generation to generation, even though it actually hasn’t worked for anyone to conform to white supremacist, patriarchal beauty standards. Well, it works great forwhite men. By clutching our pearls at J Lo and Shakira we are doing their work for them. We are reinforcing our own body shame and passing it on to children and whoever else is watching. What are young women supposed to think about their bodies if we are decrying the bodies of other women?! Instead of interrogating our thoughts about bodies and spending some very real, very uncomfortable time deconstructing what we have been taught about bodies, we just keep on keepin’ on, passing the harm to the next generation.

I have seen a lot of commentary from women about J Lo and Shakira objectifying themselves. That’s not how objectification works. The observer objectifies the observed. We turn people into objects by the way we think and talk about them. We have no idea where these remarkable women are on their journey, but to assume they were performing for the male gaze instead of being like, “I’m 50 and hot AF, I’ll wear what I want,” is to take away their autonomy and power. I would so much rather live in a world where Billie Eilish doesn’t decide at 16 she has to wear baggy clothes so as to not be sexualized than a world where J Lo has to wear sweats for us to believe she is dressing for herself. We don’t get to make others decisions for them, we only get to choose how we react.

Notice you are reacting and take a moment to reflect.

How is this writing making you feel? Why? Sit with that and release it.

Then remember how you felt during the halftime show or some other time recently when you had a strong reaction to a persons body. Muster your ability for non-judgement and compassion and ask yourself:

How do you feel about the bodies you are seeing?

Are those thoughts facts? Are they true?

How do these thoughts impact the way you interact with other people?

How do they impact how you feel about your own body?

What have you been taught about bodies? About women’s bodies? About the bodies of Latinx women, Black women, Asian women?

What are you passing down to your children or the children around you?

What messages are you sending the people in your life about bodies? That we should be ashamed of them? That bodies have to be presented in particular ways? That only certain bodies are acceptable? That only parts of our bodies are okay? That women who show parts of their bodies or move a certain way are deserving of judgement and derision? Seriously people, THAT IS RAPE CULTURE.

Would you have reacted the same way to a halftime show put on by a white woman?

What role did your learned beliefs about Latinx women and their bodies play in your reactions to the halftime show?

What role do your internalized beliefs about Black people (black women in particular) play into how you view Black bodies? Asian bodies? Pacific Islander bodies? Indigenous bodies? Are these beliefs facts?

White people hyper-sexualize Black and Brown and Asian bodies (I once had to sit a student of mine of Asian descent down to explain to her white dudes thing with Asian women and WHEW she was displeased) all the time. Like all the time. This has serious consequences. The hypersexualization of women of color has profound effects on educational outcomes, health outcomes, income, experiences of violence and so many other quality of life metrics. So much of the ways we objectify and sexualize is subconscious, which is why we need to pause and take the time to really notice and interrogate our reactions to other peoples bodies.

Doing this work is necessary if we want to live in a just world. So long as we think other bodies are less deserving of love and respect and justice, we perpetuate injustice.

Noticing and asking questions are the first steps to dismantling body supremacy, or as Sonya Renee Taylor refers to it, body terrorism. She writes, “We must not minimize or negate the impact of being told to hate or fear our bodies and the bodies of others. Living in a society structured to profit from our self-hate created a dynamic in which we are so terrified of being ourselves that we adopt terror-based ways of being in our bodies. All this is fueled by a system that makes large quantities of money off our shame and bias.” (The Body is Not an Apology, p. 53)

We have been taught bodies are dirty, that they are smelly, that they need to look like a certain, specific kind of man or woman, that they need to be thin (but not too thin), fit into a very narrow definition of health, fully abled and a whole host of other things. This goes double for fat bodies, triple for black and brown bodies, queer bodies, disabled bodies and goes up exponentially for every intersection at which a person find themselves. If we want to smash the patriarchy and burn down white supremacy, we need to spend time dismantling everything we have been taught about bodies.

If you are interested in doing some inquiry around how your view of bodies perpetuates patriarchy, white-supremacy, ableism, and your own shame and self-doubt, go out and buy The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor and sit with it, maybe with a friend. Expand your social media feed to include bodies that make you uncomfortable — fat bodies, trans bodies, gender non conforming bodies, black bodies, Latinx bodies, people wearing things in public you don’t think they should be wearing. Challenge your thinking. And have compassion for yourself and others as you decolonize your brain.

*I know a lot of trans and gender non conforming people have really complicated feelings about their bodies and I cannot speak to that, but I know it is hard and complicated and am certainly not here to tell you how to feel about your body.