Emma Dabiri: Bodies, ageing, and Heather Shimmer lipstick

0:00Hello, I'm Fern Cotton and this is Happy Place, the show that questions what we've been told about what happiness looks like. Today, I'm chatting to Emma DeBerry. I think it's something that is subconscious often, but I feel that judgmental gaze, that judgment that I projected onto other people, I was also being very, very self-critical. That kind of, I guess, judgment that I had of others was reflecting the level of self-criticism that I had about myself and the impossibly high beauty standards that striving for an elusive and never achievable perfection that I was constantly feeling I had to achieve.

0:44The external was reflecting the internal. Emma is an activist and broadcaster who spent over a decade as a teaching fellow at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She's written bestselling books, including Don't Touch My Hair, and her latest one is called Disobedient Bodies, which is such a powerful title. Reading this book really made me think even more deeply and critically about the completely unattainable beauty ideals we know we're surrounded by in Western culture. This chat with Emma was so eye-opening. We talked about ageing, about weight, about race, about why when we judge ourselves less, we judge each other less too and vice versa.

1:30But we also talked about how we can critique beauty culture while still allowing for the real magic of self-expression and adornment and art, because those things are incredibly important for our identities too. This chat is a real treat.

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3:53Okay, here we go. This is the show.

4:18Emma, it's so nice to meet you in the flesh. yes it's lovely to meet you as well yeah having followed you on instagram and we were on a zoom once together for the pass the mic initiative oh my goodness yeah yeah and but this is our first time meeting so i'm really and i've loved reading your books as well so it's great to be able to look into your eyes and have a proper meaty chat so i'd love to get stuck into talking about your latest book disobedient bodies which just saying it out loud is a very freeing statement But what does Disobedient Bodies mean to you? How would you how would you summarize that?

4:55Yeah. So I think for me, disobedient bodies can be like many different things, but I think primarily what I am aiming for with that name, with that title, is achieving a sense of enjoyment and comfort and confidence in the experience of being embodied, of having a body, actually being able to enjoy having a body. rather than feeling like it's something that you are plagued with insecurity about, that you are constantly policing and worrying about the appearance of, that you can actually just kind of confidently inhabit your body and enjoy it. Yes. Yeah. I mean, podcast done. Is that it? Yeah, that's it.

5:47Because it's so interesting. you know the like human evolution has given us some exquisite opportunities but one of the things that is probably sort of the the pits of human evolution is our absolute obsession with the exterior and our our outward facing aesthetic we've become so bloody obsessed by it would you say we've reached fever pitch is this the worst it's been I would I would say that we've reached fever pitch yeah I would say like so in the book I talk about like kind of having like we've got beauty standards but like on speed and I think a lot of that has to do or lies with um the level to which we inhabit the the digital realm and where it's not um it's these representations these visual representations of ourselves or and of other people that we're engaging with So everything is, you know, about like photographs and images and representations of of ourselves.

6:48And so is to a far greater degree based on the visual, based on our physical appearance than things. So I talk a lot about like growing up being a teenager in the 90s and the pressures that existed then, but how those pressures still very much exist, but feel like really accelerated and feel really turbocharged. by the fact that we inhabit this digital visual landscape and also this visual economy because it's also, that landscape is also very much connected to how kind of successful we are perceived. Yeah, it's been monetized. Yeah, completely. Exactly. It's wild. I loved your reference of Heather Shimmer Lipstick in the book because I'm very much of the same era as you and Heather Shimmer Lipstick was the one.

7:38And it was kind of, it was a strange colour and it was very, very sheeny. Yeah. I don't know if it was the same in Ireland, but we had to apply a very dark brown lip liner and then Heather Shimmer over the top. Yes, there was a contrasting lip liner. To say the least. That was part of the look. Apparently, they've just reissued Heather Shimmer. So apparently... I don't think I could do it again. I don't know. I don't know that I'd do it again, but I'd love to put some on. Just to see. Yeah, just to see. and I posted a picture recently of me at about 18 or 19 I don't know that I'm wearing Heather Shimmer but I'm definitely I've definitely got that very two-tone lip liner and lipstick effect going on but it was actually so interesting how much people were like oh my god that's such an especially younger people I think people my age you know kind of like looked at it in one way but I think for younger people a lot of people are like oh my god that's so iconic yeah I'm like that's hilarious yeah we are now throwback that's where we're at we're vintage we really are We're seeing things come back and it's absolutely terrifying.

8:41I liked hearing you talk about that era of your life. I mean, again, the whole conversation is complex around disobedient bodies and we'll hopefully touch on all of it. But there's this lovely side to growing up with girlfriends and getting ready together and putting your makeup on and the sort of ritual side of things, which, again, adds a whole other layer. Because when we're having this conversation and we're talking about beauty standards or the pressure that women particularly feel with applying makeup or changing their appearance in any way, we can't see the solution as bin the makeup bag.

9:15I'm never doing anything like that ever again. I'm not going to wear makeup, change my hair, dress in a certain way. I don't care about it because actually there's real magic in the lovely side of it. So the solution isn't just to go be gone all of it. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I'm really trying to do in the book is first of all, identify and then challenge this very binary way we have of seeing the world. And that binary lends itself to the way we've organized. We see everything kind of through this, through this binary lens. And that's how we've organized reality. And that, you know, can be seen in everything from man, woman, black, white, perfect, flawed, gay, straight, beautiful, ugly.

10:02Everything is kind of seen through this, through this binary lens. And I think that also lends itself to this, this idea of this kind of extreme idea of it being one or the other when it comes to makeup. And that if you are critiquing beauty culture in any way, alongside with that, it's a complete rejection of it. And that's very much not, I'm trying to do like the antithesis of that. So I am, you know, putting beauty culture under the microscope, but I'm doing it from the perspective of somebody that like loves makeup and loves dressing up and loves adornment and kind of loves all of those things.

10:40So I think really what I'm trying to do is to tap into all of the ways that those processes of beautification can be joyful and can be liberatory, but at the same time, identifying the ways in which beauty culture is also oppressive and tyrannical, trying to critique that, but trying to maintain all of the, trying to make it more about pleasure than about pain. The interesting thing is, whatever way you go with this conversation, say you've really succumbed to the pressures of the beauty standards that exist, and you're doing it maybe not for yourself, or maybe you're doing it for yourself, but you're slapping on the makeup or you've had Botox or whatever it might be, or the other extreme end of the spectrum where you've just ditched everything and you're not looking at wearing makeup or doing anything with your hair, et cetera.

11:37Either end are judged. It's not like we're just judging people who have ditched this system. We're judging people who have succumbed to the pressures of it because I guess the visual of a human is our first experience of them, whether that's in real life or on Instagram, but certainly in real life. Before they've spoken, before we've got a feel of what they're like energetically, or we've understood who they are as a person. We all do it. We judge people. We go, oh, I've got their number. And none of it's right. We need to get beneath all of it. But we're just judging that. It seems to make up such a large sum of who we are still, certainly on that first experience of meeting someone.

12:17Yeah, absolutely. And it's often so inaccurate and so misleading, you know, the assumptions that we make about people based on these really kind of like superficial things are often just very misleading. And we're also taught that that tendency is just, you know, it's just kind of human nature and it's just a universal norm that we do judge things and we do judge people on site and we make these kind of like immediate assessments of them based on their on their presentation or on their possession or lack of possession of beauty but in my research I talk about in disobedient bodies but I it's something that I had kind of come across years ago I think when I when I was teaching African studies at SOAS that that is actually something that can be attributed to it has a name and it's ocular centricism and it is it comes from a tendency in western culture to obviously we have like many different senses but in western culture historically there has been a tendency to privilege the sense of sight over all of the other senses but that is actually something quite specific to western culture and it's not necessarily a universal norm.

13:41So there are many other cultures that have privileged other senses. And as a result of that would have less tendency to, or actually wouldn't assume that they can make a value judgment or have some sort of insight or intimate knowledge of a thing simply, or a person simply based on how they look. So it is something that's actually quite culturally specific rather than just a kind of human universal norm. Wow. I mean, it's so ingrained. It's so ingrained. We can't even see that. We just assume it's so the norm that you're making some sort of subconscious decision about who this person is from looking at them.

14:20But I find it helpful to know that it is something that we, even though you kind of do it a second nature, it is something that we have been conditioned to do. So I find it really helpful to know that there are other ways of being and thinking, thinking about things, people and reality. So that knowledge, even though I haven't been kind of like socialized in one of those kind of alternative cultures that I'm talking about, knowing that they have existed, knowing that these alternatives exist, helps me kind of like question myself in ways that, like I check myself. And I feel like I am so much less judgmental about people's appearances, about other people's appearances than I used to be when I used to kind of just uncritically reproduce what I had been kind of conditioned to do.

15:15Yeah, I think a period of checking myself has just led to where I am now, where it's actually just not something I do as immediately as I used to. Do you think that's come in tandem with you not judging yourself? Absolutely, definitely. I feel that I didn't know this at the time. And I think it's something that is subconscious often. But I feel that judgmental gaze, that judgment that I projected onto other people, I was also being very, very self-critical. And that was that kind of, I guess, judgment that I had of others was reflecting the level of self-criticism that I had about myself and the impossibly high beauty standards that striving for an elusive and never achievable perfection that I was constantly feeling I had to achieve.

16:10Yeah, it was like the kind of the external was reflecting the internal. Yeah. What were your experiences growing up in Ireland? What did you believe about your own body you know we grew up in the same decade we would have had very different experiences for certain reasons but there were beauty standards that we all saw in it was magazines for us as kids and magazines were weird like you look back at 90s magazines and go how was I allowed to read this stuff you know it's questionable stuff and the imagery was all you know sort of homogenized what what was your experience growing up and what did you believe about your own body?

16:47Yeah. So I grew up where the dominant, not even just the dominant beauty standard, it felt like the only, the beauty standard, you know, kind of exclusively was, I think the most important thing was to be very thin, as thin as, as was physically possible. So I guess the ideal would be to be very, very, very thin, to be tall, to be blonde, to have long hair blue eyes were definitely a bonus I write in the book about the way there was no fat that was permitted anywhere on the body apart from your boobs they were the only place where they were the only part of your body that could be that could be big so that was a beauty standard that I feel everybody that everybody was kind of strut to varying degrees you know striving to achieve and it was oppressive in many ways for for for everyone and I feel like even Even for the few people that maybe naturally had all of those features, they were not...

17:51Earlier you were saying that if there's somebody that is perceived as making too much effort, they're pilloried. But if there's somebody who's seen as not making enough effort, they're also often vilified. Yeah, I've got the exact language that you write for that bit. I've dogged the page. Hold tight. So you're either labelled frigid or a slut. yeah that was it as kids that binary oh yeah that was it as kids so the my my point is that there's no winners in this it was like irrespective of how you behaved irrespective of how you looked you were still doing something wrong yeah that's not to say it wasn't better for some people that or it wasn't it wasn't maybe easier for some people than it was for others but I feel like even for people who were pole position, there was still inordinate pressure and the forces of patriarchy working upon them as well.

18:48So my point is that there's kind of no winners in this game. But for me personally, there was also the added pressure of racism. So I was growing up in an environment where there was virtually no difference. And certainly there were very, very few other black people or people of African descent. So the type of femininity that was expected of us that we were kind of very much like encouraged to perform was one where you were as diminutive, you were as tiny and as frail as possible. So there was this constant pressure to just be very small. And so I was in that environment as well. And I have all of these features that I was just constantly told, you know, were too big.

19:40So like everything from my hair to my lips, the size of my mouth, my body shape, like the size of my bum, everything about me was too big, or I was told was too big. And so I was just very, very, very like self-conscious of my body. And I think the pressure to be very thin was enhanced by also what was going on in terms of in terms of race and you know wanting to um not wanting to stand out any more than I already did if that makes sense well the beauty standards are still incredibly eurocentric and you know I learned a hell of a lot from reading your book stuff that I'd never read before a guy I think you pronounce his name Peter Piter Peter Peter Campos oh yeah yeah yeah Peter Campo and his popularization of the facial angle.

20:40He created a sort of summary of exact angles that equaled beauty. This stuff is, this is not new stuff. This is old shit that has been really pumped into the system and we're just stuck with it. And I think it's amazing that we can have these conversations now and go, what is going on? Can we just put this all out on the table and have a look at what we really truly believe and what we've just been told and we're sticking to? But of course, when you're a teenager and you're growing up and there is the pressure and the magazines and your peer group most of us fit into that category of following suit and the you know we can't talk about bodies without talking about weight and it's a really tricky subject to talk about but it's a really important one for lots of different reasons you know I know that you had a period of sort of disordered eating because of these pressures I had an eating disorder of about 10 years highly compounded by the fact that I was on TV at a young age and you've got this imagery of yourself coming back at you and the discomfort of that.

21:41But it was really interesting reading your points on this. And again, a conclusion that I hadn't landed on, which is the sort of subconscious feeling is that thinness equals willpower. And actually it's female obedience is what's really going on here. I, through all of the crazy roller coasters that I've been on with my body, I'd never landed on that. We see other people that are thin or in magazines, on TV, and we assume they've got more willpower than us. And that's what creates this level of self-loathing and I'm not good enough and I'm not doing enough. I'd never landed on that before. Really?

22:25No. Oh, well, I hope you find it helpful. Massively. It's liberating because I think actually I was still there was still a part of me stuck in. God, there are people that are just more disciplined and willpowered or whatever. That was still. Yeah. Sort of rummaging around in my subconscious. That was still there. And I think actually looking at it being female obedience is a very different feeling and one which you can quite clearly reject very easily. Like, no, I don't fancy sort of abiding to those rules. Thanks very much. Yeah. And this is where the disobedience comes into it and can be liberatory to reject that pressure.

23:00But what you're saying about that kind of like self-loathing and that idea of like willpower and like discipline around the body is really crucial as well. So again, to go back to the binaries and our kind of binary view of the world that we have. So there is like very long standing, deep seated kind of tradition in Western philosophy that basically we're going back to Plato that separates the body and the mind. So sees the body and the mind as almost two warring oppositional entities. and within the binaries that that we have kind of organized reality according to there's always a hierarchy where between the two one is seen as superior and the other the other inferior and in that mind body split the mind is seen as superior the body is seen as inferior um the mind is seen as the seat of, you know, intellect and rationality and has been historically gendered male.

24:06The body has been historically gendered female and is the opposite of rationality and intellect. And there's very much a sense that the mind has to kind of control and discipline the body and subject the body to, has to exert this willpower and control over the body. And again, remembering that the body has been kind of historically gendered as female. So we have, and within that, there is, yeah, this kind of idea of kind of almost, there's this long tradition of almost like scorn for the body, the body being kind of held in contempt. So we have been kind of these ideas are like very far reaching in our culture.

24:56So we've kind of been conditioned for millennia to have this really uncomfortable relationship, you know, with our bodies. When that meets with kind of like beauty culture, when that meets with kind of advertising, when that meets with the form of late stage capitalism that we currently live under, that has kind of encoded into its DNA this notion of constant improvement. We have to be constantly, constantly improving. We can always be better. We can always be working harder. we've already been kind of primed to think that our bodies are not good enough. When that kind of meets with those narratives of constant improvement and constant productivity, it's a very like kind of fertile ground for these like deep, deep kind of like seated insecurities about our bodies to really flourish.

25:56And so we shouldn't be surprised that we are so kind of vulnerable to these narratives that our bodies aren't good enough. And this sense of kind of self-loathing that many of us have or have had about our bodies. I'm sure most people listening to this either feel like that about their bodies or certainly have in the past, in teen years or later down the line, and slipped into self-punishment. And we can do that in so many ways. There's obvious ways like overexercising or not eating the right kind of diet that's going to nurture your body and your mind. But I think there are subtler ways that I'm probably less privy to.

26:37How else might we be punishing ourselves without really realising? It's interesting because obviously exercise and diet are things that are really healthy, you know, and are things that can be really like obviously contribute very much to well-being. But I think what we have to be mindful of or maybe like even vigilant about is what our, I guess, what our motivating energy is, what our intentions are and what our feelings about ourselves are. I was writing something recently about the kind of the diet culture again of the 90s and how things like like Slim Fast and right like it's monstrous. Drink this and have this sugary cereal bar and eat nothing else all day.

27:29I saw someone online on Instagram recently talking about like the special K diet. Special K bars and cereal. yeah and like that stuff is just like so processed i think that bar had some you know those bars with that kind of like fake sugary yogurt like on top like what on earth is that stuff doing to to to your insides you will never shit again never shit again but like yeah you can just kind of feel the congestion um and i actually did i had really like like serious like digestive issues and it's probably not unconnected to those kind of like ham fad diets but like yeah my my concern in those days was in no way about kind of health or well-being it was just about calorie restriction and look being as as thin as as thin as possible so i think when we're thinking about diet and exercise um are we kind of focused more on our health and well-being or are we more focused on trying to achieve a certain type of potentially not very healthy body type.

28:39Yeah. And feeling, I mean, we all know how if we're feeling ourselves appropriately and fueling ourselves, we're going to mentally feel better. And all of us want to feel better. There's no one else out there who wants to feel worse. So we've got to do it for body and mind. We've got to eat properly rather than punish ourselves expecting that getting to a certain minimal weight will then make us happy we can't because we're mentally out of balance the whole thing is totally flawed and and you say there's so many interesting points again about this flawed system that we're in and we're still in it it's not you know there's been oh we're deeply we're deeply in it and you know the interesting thing is certainly with social media there's been this influx of a body positivity movement, which is a lovely thing.

29:26And I think it's definitely helped me. It's helped lots of people out there seeing advocates for looking after yourself and letting your body be naturally as it is and not going to self-loathing and punishment, etc. Yet, simultaneously, we're under more pressure than ever, which doesn't correlate. We're under more pressure than ever, even though we've got this amazing new movement that's there. What's going on? Yeah. So I find that paradox, you know, kind of like fascinating. And it's something that, that I think about in the book, this conversation around like, I guess, representation and, and, and inclusion.

30:02And I know, like when I think about being a teenager and like, so I'm, I guess, like a relatively kind of naturally like quite slim person. Not that I thought I was when I was up. Like I thought I was huge, but I have a different body shape to lots of my peers in that, like, I didn't have a gap in my thighs. My thighs are a certain, my thighs are a certain shape and there's no gap, they meet. But I never saw anybody that had a body like that. Now I look at, you know, there's lots of women I can think of that now are in the public eye that are held up as being beautiful that have a similar body shape to my own.

30:42And that certainly would have been helpful for me in normalising how I felt about myself. Yet at the same time, if representation were the solution to this, if we think about people that have been historically well represented, so if we just take a kind of like prototype of like a slim white woman with straight hair who's been, you know, kind of well represented historically, if representation were the solution to this, were the panacea to this, anybody that fits that criteria would then feel great about themselves. And that is absolutely not the case. Because even though people are being represented, they're still being represented in a way that is often objectifying.

31:28And we are not engaging with, we're not really grappling with this very complicated relationship that we have with bodies in our culture. All we're doing is saying, oh, let's add more bodies into the mix. So while that is in certain ways helpful, it doesn't go far enough. It doesn't go deeply enough in actually grappling with where these ideas, where these complicated ideas about the body come from and how we might overcome them. It's kind of just expanding the existing problematic framework rather than trying to kind of create a new paradigm, which is what I think we need to do. So if inclusion isn't the answer, how do we fix a broken system?

32:15So I think for me, what I have found really helpful, and I found writing the book personally really helpful in kind of like my journey to feeling more just comfortable in in my own body which is really you know that that that should be really uncontroversial that should be really ordinary for us to feel comfortable in our own bodies it's the least ordinary thing it's the least right which is like actually not um so I think knowing just kind of knowing some of the history knowing the kind of ways that we've been like conditioned to have these ideas and attitudes about our bodies, knowing that alternative ways exist or have existed, that this isn't kind of like preordained, that we do have, there are options, there are choices.

33:14I feel like that in and of itself is that doesn't solve where we are at currently, but I think it opens up spaces where we can like, yeah, address a lot of these issues, I hope.

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35:01I mean, we're of a similar age and we're also not allowed to age, by the way. That is the messaging that I'm hearing a lot and I'm happily rejecting it. I actually feel for the struggles that I've had with my physical body that I'm happy to say I'm in a very good place with how I think about my body in my 40s and I'm the happiest I've been in my skin. But with the aging thing, I don't feel any resistance to aging at all. Even though I know the messaging's there, for some reason, I don't feel called to keep myself looking 15. I'm happy to go with it and see what happens. And I know that's not the case for everybody.

35:42And I think I put a post out on Instagram not long ago where I was talking about if I do this with my forehead, I've got about a thousand lines. And if I smile, I have, you know, creases around my eyes and the lines that go from my nose to my mouth as I'm getting older are accentuated. I can hard relate to all of this. And I'm kind of, I'm going with it. I'm like, of course, because I move my face a lot and I talk and I'm expressive and that's going to happen. And I didn't think it would get much of a reaction. But the amount of women that I think actually felt relieved that I was willing to show that my face moved and has creases and crinkles.

36:18and they have felt deep shame and are a lot of them were saying I am I was literally about to book to go and get Botox for the first time or whatever and now I'm maybe not completely deterred but thinking about just pressing pause on that idea for a bit and I'm not going to sit here and sort of slag off anyone that's had Botox or have any judgment because I think you've got to do what works for you and makes you happy but I don't necessarily want to feel swayed or feel like I don't know I could end up like the only one in sort of the whole of London that hasn't frozen my face I don't know but I'm sort of willing to go with that one but the pressure I hadn't seen it coming but it's immense it's immense to not age and it's very female specific that one yes absolutely absolutely um yeah it's something that yeah I'm starting in in my 40s um I'm I'm really I am starting to think about.

37:16I think similarly to what you were just saying, I am not overly concerned or even like super aware of all of like all of those things that you described. Like, I don't know what these lines are called. We need to give them a name. Grinning lines. Yeah, they probably have a name, but I'm not I'm not aware of what it is. But yeah, like I'm aware that they're there and I assume that they weren't 10 or 20 years ago. But yeah, I don't really care. But then I also, what I do find actually a little stressful is being, so I'm often told, people often think I'm a lot younger than I am. And when people find out my age, they are often shocked.

38:04but then I'm commended for looking youthful and that actually that kind of makes me feel like a little uncomfortable because I'm like well if I looked my age whatever that may be whatever that's imagined to be what does that mean would it matter like yeah so but you would never say to a man, I don't think, oh my God, you don't look that. I don't think that's as often the case. I don't think, I don't think age necessarily comes into it or anyone really looks or cares about how old a man is. The aging process is sort of a given and there's these terms like silver fox or whatever. There is no equivalent for a woman.

38:46You become an old hag. An old witch. An old witch. Yeah. Is the equivalent to silver fox. It really is. It's the female version. Yeah. So I think as men get older, you know, they are a woman are ascribed more kind of authority and power and taken more seriously. Whereas I think women, certainly if they're daring to show the signs of aging, have the reverse and experience. A lot of women describe an invisibility that they experience as they get older. So rather than this kind of increase in status, it's very much a decrease in status. But one of the things that I write about in the book as well is the kind of this fear of female power and spheres historically where women kind of had authority and had power were often targeted because in different contexts that authority that kind of female authority and power was seen as threatening to the status quo so it was something that was you know yeah often very intentionally targeted and I think that might also be the case with older women that there is this because I know certainly as I get older and I think this is that this is common I and you've you've just said something similar yourself that you feel kind of far more comfortable in your skin and I think with that comes the market's uncertain revenues tied and hiring on hold that's why results driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving.

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41:44Sign up for your$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash retail, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash retail to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash retail. A certain power and authority and confidence in yourself and in your voice. And I think maybe that is perceived as threatening. So it's often like there are attempts to quash it. Yeah, without a doubt. You talk really beautifully. I mean, in both of your books that I've got here, actually Don't Touch My Hair and Disobedient Bodies, about the Yoruba tradition. So this is the culture that you're, did your dad grow up in that culture?

42:27Yeah, so my dad is Yoruba, but I think a lot of like a lot of what I write about and with in with regards to Yoruba culture is pre-colonial Yoruba culture. So my dad grew up in Nigeria, but my family was like, you know, very Anglicized. My aunts and uncles were all actually born in Ireland in the 50s, my Nigerian aunts and uncles, which is highly, highly unusual. They went back to Nigeria, but they're like very international. When I spoke to my father about many of the traditions from kind of like pre-colonial Yoruba culture that I learned, not necessarily through my family, but through studying and teaching African studies.

43:11When I spoke to my father about them, he might not have been necessarily familiar with them. I even remember asking my grandfather about a philosophical concept in Yoruba and he was an elderly man. This was just a couple of years before he passed away. And he was saying to me that his knowledge of the Yoruba language, even though he could speak Yoruba fluently, he was saying his knowledge of the Yoruba language wasn't actually deep enough to kind of translate this philosophical principle that I was asking him about because it was something like very, very old so these are not necessarily concepts that are you know prevalent in Nigeria today but um they are in the kind of like they are part of the traditional Yoruba worldview or the traditional Yoruba metaphysics and also they existed which is why we need yeah which is why we need to learn about them because actually the way that you describe beauty in that context is entirely different to the one that we're talking about for modern women today in the West.

44:14So can you tell us about any of the traditions that are or have particularly helped you in understanding what beauty means to you? Yeah, actually, and there's an example I can give where it is still very prevalent, actually. So with this book, I was trying to trace where these like, why this feeling of self-loathing about bodies and I think specifically weight was so recognisable and was so commonplace. But again, even though it's global to a certain extent, it's certainly far more pronounced in some cultures than others. So I remember going back to, so I was born in Dublin, but then I spent the first few years of my life in Atlanta in the American South.

44:58And I started going back there as a teenager and spending summers there I still had like a lot of family there and I think as a well I was a teenager but let me say as a young adult that was the first time I'd been around a beauty culture where women being like incredibly thin wasn't yeah wasn't wasn't like the beauty standard and I think like a lot of that has its antecedents in you see that like in a lot of black cultures one of the things I'm doing in the book is trying to trace what attitudes towards bodies are like from cultures that emerge out of different philosophical traditions. And so I'm looking at Yoruba culture, looking at other cultures, and they don't necessarily have that mind.

45:42There's lots of non-Western cultures that don't have that mind-body split, don't have that hierarchy between the mind and the body, and don't have this idea of the body as being, one of the quotes in the book is from St. Augustine, and he talks about the slimy desires of the body. They don't have those kind of attitudes to bodies as being these disgusting things that need to be controlled, that are like overtly gendered as female and need to be disciplined and controlled in that way. So that often they have far healthier attitudes towards people's body types. And I have in the book an ariki, which is a praise poem to one of the Yoruba Orisha.

46:22The Orisha are deities in Yoruba cosmology and one of the most kind of well-known Orisha is a goddess called Ashun and she is the goddess amongst many other things of beauty. But her Ariki, her praise poem, I think I actually quoted in both of those books so I was struck by it and it exists in such contrast to the beauty culture and attitudes about bodies that I grew up with in Ireland. So this is one of the most beautiful Orisha, and she's associated with beauty and with femininity. One of her Oriki says, a corpulent woman, a woman who cannot be embraced around the waist. And when I read that, I was just like, wow, that is like the antithesis of a beauty standard, the beauty standard that I grew up in.

47:08I know, but it's so important that we hear about whether it is different parts of the world, different cultures or historic times, because so much of this, and we forget this because we're living in the moment, is trend-led. It's not set in stone. It's changing by the bloody week at the moment, even when it's down to like eyebrows. They're meant to be thin. Oh shit, I plucked one in the 90s, now they're meant to be thick again. And we forget that this is all trend-led. In 100 years, this could not be the case, we hope, and things will be a lot healthier and much more dedicated towards just health and not trying to overrule the body and quietening the mind on these matters.

47:47We don't know, but they're all trends. I think you really hit the nail on the head where you say they're all trends. And also, even though the pendulum swings wildly from one kind of side to the other and the trends change, central to them is the idea of at any given time there being a particular beauty standard. I was really interested in some of the material I looked at from other kind of cultures and times where there wasn't necessarily like a standardized set of features or idea of beauty that every single person or every single woman was expected to ascribe to or subscribe to or conform to rather.

48:31But rather beauty was assessed on a more individual level based specifically on that person rather than just this kind of abstract set of features that everybody's supposed to have. And again, I found this proverb in Yoruba, which I found really interesting, which it translated in English into one whose beauty is enhanced by their smallpox scars. And I was just like, wow, again, that's just because on this particular individual, the scars on their face made them more attractive. and you know that can be the case and that's another thing we see so often um we're under so much pressure to have this really kind of homogenized type of look where everybody kind of has the same features has the same teeth has the same face i feel like social media is really heightening that big time but it's the idiosyncrasies um about the little differences that exist that make people absolutely absolutely gorgeous i saw the most stunning woman today i almost went up and told her and then didn't.

49:33But her teeth were like very unique to her. And if she were to go and have them like straightened and all of those procedures, like she was so stunning and her teeth were really, really part of how striking and how incredibly beautiful she was. And I feel that those kind of idiosyncrasies that we all have are often our beauty. They are. And I think about all of the features that I was bullied for having as a teenager and how the pendulum shifted and swung and then they became desirable features. And you think, oh my God, well, what if I had had some kind of intervention to try and change them, trying to keep up with this standard that is just going to completely shift anyway.

50:19So I think it's really important that we, I don't know, just, that we have some degree of resistance to all of these kind of pressures that are being piled on top of us. Yes, we have to have the resistance because I think, you know, social media, especially with the algorithms showing you stuff that you're already looking at, so that you do just end up in an echo chamber of this is what I like. And there's filters and God knows what else going on, that we actually forget about our uniqueness and things that are inherently us. It could be a scar that reminds you of something, or it could be a tattoo, or it could be just something that you don't see anyone else has.

51:02It's a beautiful thing. And only we can really own that. We can't wait for the people to tell us we've got to feel it. But I also like the fact that in the book, you talk about beauty being a verb. So it's not just something that you happen to be lucky enough to have or that only some people are privileged enough to experience. It's a doing. It's a doing. It's a movement and it's something that is, you can feel it. It's an energy. Yeah, absolutely. So again, that was something that I saw in other cultures. I speak a little bit about the Navajo people of North America and a form of art they have where the finished product isn't actually what's beautiful but it's the process of creating it where the beauty lies and similarly in a lot of Yoruba traditional visual art it's not just the image of the thing that it being how its beauty is assessed but it's actually like it's the it's meaning and it's usefulness so beauty isn't just this passive visual thing but it's actually found in relationality and in and in process and in the relationships that exists between people and between things rather than just in the thing in the object itself because that's objectification.

52:25So how can we think about beauty in ways that are alternative to objectifying? Yes, I think it's the healthiest thing we can do alongside that much needed resistance at a time when the world is very noisy and we are bombarded with imagery on not even a daily basis, on a like second by second basis. We're just seeing stuff and we actually forget how much it affects us and our self-worth and how we're feeling about our bodies, our faces it's all part of the same thing but but we forget how much we're being impacted by everything we're seeing so the resistance is key it is so key I love this book and I I love the term disobedient bodies I just think it's cracking you've nailed it with that one it just well it does what it says on the can it's like yeah be free stop obeying all of this bollocks and just be yourself and be your yeah be your beautiful self yeah so we we thank you um I feel like we We live in a society that, you know, tells us to just be happy with ourselves the way we are, but then makes it virtually impossible for us to do so.

53:31So with this book, I'm actually like trying to provide some kind of like specific tools that people can employ, knowledge that people can have that might actually truly help them be able to to love themselves, enjoy, enjoy their bodies. Yeah. So it's the enjoyment, isn't it? Enjoy your body. You've got a beautiful body. Whatever it looks like, whatever it does and can't do, it's beautiful. Emma, thank you so much. It's been brilliant talking to you. And thank you for being on Happy Place. My pleasure. I've enjoyed it immensely. Thanks for having me. Oh, Emma, thank you so much for that chat. For a start, I just love the term disobedient bodies.

54:10I think when we start looking at the pressures that women really have had put on them and we see it as female obedience rather than anything else, that is liberating that gives us a little bit more space to go wait a minute do I want to do that do I want to follow suit here and conform and a lot of the time in my head the answer is no Emma's book Disobedient Bodies Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty is out now oh it's so freeing what other books have you been reading by the way if you're a big reader like me then come and share your thoughts on Instagram. We have a book club called at Happy Place Book Club.

54:50Go check it out and tell us what you've been reading. All right, I'm back here with you next week. But in the meantime, the biggest thank you again to Emma, to the producer Anushka Tate at Rethink Audio and to you. Keep being you.

55:39We'll see you next time.

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