Sonya Renee Taylor

forty-four women have held a U.S. governorship since the first woman was elected as a governor in 1925

Globally, women hold only 23 percent of the total available seats in national parliaments

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

It is an act of terrorism against our bodies to perpetuate body shame and to support body-based oppression. I call this “body terrorism.”

Making peace with your body is about awakening to who you have always been: the physical, spiritual, and energetic manifestation of radical self-love

Body terrorism is a hideous tower whose primary support beam is the belief that there is a hierarchy of bodies

We uphold the system by internalizing this hierarchy and using it to situate our own value and worth in the world

could identify how the thoughts were mine—as in, happening inside my brain—but they were not me

Say it again, for the folks in the bleachers: You are not your thoughts! That said, avoiding your thoughts will not help you train your brain to think new ones. You must look at them with gentle kindness and say, “Thank you for sharing.” And, with love, release them.

Our inherent sense of radical self-love doesn’t speak to us with cruelty or viciousness