Sure, it was a little weird to stand next to Kathie Lee and Hoda in my sexy pajamas. Sure, I was a little uncomfortable. Sure, I was having visions of accidentally projectile vomiting on Kathie Lee Gifford. But I went with it. And the world kept spinning. (Also, important to note: I did not vomit on anyone.)
I wish I could say I walked off the set feeling empowered and confident. But the truth is, I went to watch the clip after we wrapped and my stomach dropped. I immediately started picking myself apart: My cellulite was visible; I looked angry (my default facial expression when I’m feeling most high-stakes emotions); I kept fidgeting. This reaction wasn’t new for me—it’s been my knee-jerk response to seeing images of myself that I wasn’t in control of for the last decade.
Still, there was something different about this.
I had heard a voice screaming in my head to stop, to not pass go, to turn around—and I tuned it out, walked onto the set of the Today Show, and modeled sexy pajamas. I had professional hair and makeup done and stood in great lighting for 10 seconds. I didn’t feel embarrassed or horrified. I felt like I had just woken up.
For so many years, my choices (in fashion, and in everything else) weren’t affected just because of that loud, angry voice telling me what my body was and wasn’t allowed to participate in. It was because I trusted it. I thought it was saving me—from ultimate humiliation, from embarrassment, from someone thinking I wasn’t good enough. Now, I knew that voice was a fucking liar.
The thing is, when you do that big, ridiculous, scary, terrifying thing that every part of you insists you’re not supposed to do—because of how you look, because of what you weigh, because of the size of your clothes, because you might fail—and the world manages to go on, you wake up. You wake up to the fact that for a long time, you’ve been saying no to opportunities both big and small.
You remember saying no to pool parties. You remember wearing a cardigan in the middle of summer and sweating for no reason. You remember deleting thousands of photos, millions of memories. You remember it all. And then, you say no more. No more of that. You say it’s time to make up for lost time, and then? Then you start saying yes.
Olivia Muenter is a writer and editor based in Philadelphia. Follow her at @oliviamuenter.
Because I’m a trainer and a gym owner, January means one thing: The floodgates are open, and resolution-fueled gym-goers are pouring in. As for many gyms around the country, January is our busiest month—new clients sign up in droves, classes are full, and our personal trainers are all squeezing in workouts before they’ve even had their coffee. I should be excited for the onslaught of new clients and the re-upped commitment from old ones. But I’m not—I dread resolution season.
It’s not because I don’t love the work. I really do love working with people to help them reach their goals. But I hate how this time of year always seems to reinforce and intensify the horrible messages we get about our bodies. Every January, people pour into my gym rattling off a laundry list of things they want to change and reasons they hate their bodies. It’s soul crushing.
I used to greet their gripes with my perky refrain of body positivity. “Your body is awesome,” I would tell them, in as many permutations as I could muster. But the more I preached self-love, the more the message felt problematic.
Body positivity sounds like such a nice idea, until you realize it’s not always attainable. It promises that posting a picture of your rolls on Instagram will suddenly make you fall in love with them. But throwing away a lifetime of body hang-ups is way more complicated than adopting a few “empowering” hashtags. Believing we “should” love everything about our bodies makes us feel like failures when we don’t. Sometimes it seems that body positivity doesn’t leave any room for insecurities and frustrations, which every single one of us struggles with.
I call bullshit.
I started to notice how harmful the one-dimensional message to love your body can be when I was talking to my clients. When clients confided in me about their body insecurities, I responded by telling them that they should love their body just the way it is. But I was telling them that their experience—the insecurities, the doubt, the shame—wasn’t valid. I was gaslighting them with praise.
Body positivity can feel like pressure.
Don’t get me wrong, I love that the body-positivity movement has helped us celebrate our bodies, no matter the shape or size. It’s helped us address toxic messages about bikini bodies and messed-up ideals of perfection that have been lurking in our cultural conversation for decades. It’s been the catalyst to change the narrative—and push brands to keep up. But the pull between the “love yourself no matter what” message and the realities of what it’s like to actually do that creates a tension that I see every day. People feel guilty for not loving their body.
“Body positivity can feel like pressure,” says Claire Mysko, CEO of the National Eating Disorder Association. “The reality is that we live in a culture that makes it pretty tough to feel positive about our bodies every day.” It’s a worthy goal to work toward, but when we start blaming ourselves for not loving every single thing about our bodies all the time, it can make us feel even worse. “That’s when ‘body positivity’ can be a problematic term,” Mysko says. It can create one more way for you to feel bad about yourself. So, rather than preach body positivity, I’m making a shift toward working on body acceptance in 2019.
You don’t have to want to post your body hang-ups on Instagram to prove that you love yourself.
“Acceptance is about making peace with our bodies,” Mysko says. “It’s about striving to treat our bodies with respect—wherever we are in that journey.” In other words, you don’t have to feel positive about all aspects of your body all the time. We all have days when we look in the mirror and just aren’t feelin’ it. That’s OK. That’s normal. That does not make you a failure.
The key to body acceptance is, rather than demonize your jiggly belly or cellulite-sprinkled thighs, to work toward accepting them. You don’t have to want to post them on Instagram to prove that you love yourself. Your body hang-ups also don’t have to be “wrong” or “bad”—they’re simply a part of the way you’re built.
As a trainer, I’ve found that the first step in making body acceptance a reality is shifting your focus from how your body looks to what your body can do. People come to me all the time, saying they want to lose 20 pounds or fit into a size 6 again. But my response is always the same: I want people to stop thinking about appearance as a metric to judge themselves. What your body looks like shouldn’t dictate how much you love it.
I’ve come to believe it’s not the power of positive thinking that will erase the bad messages we’ve internalized; it’s the act of radical acceptance. There’s no hashtag or trend that can get you there. We need empowered communities, built on acceptance and supporting incremental change—that’s what we should resolve to strive for this year. The rest of it is just B.S.
Alyssa Royse is a certified trainer and gym owner in Seattle.
In 2008, my final year before high school, there was a controversy that gripped a large amount of the mothers in my community: do they take their daughters to see the PG-rated Mamma Mia? Was it responsible for a young girl to see that a woman could have three potential fathers as a result of her mother having sex in her youth, that it didn’t actually matter which one of them was her dad because—as the movie spelled out—she came from happiness and love?
Because sexual liberation is a large source of the free-flowing joy that drives both Mamma Mia movies, anything else would only bring the party crashing down. Consider the original, where young and loved-up Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) invites her mother’s three summer flings to her wedding (which happens to be on the fictional Greek island Kalokairi) in a bid to figure out which one is her father. The film plays with the mystery of Sophie’s parentage briefly (everyone has their own theories as to who it is), but there isn’t a hint of judgement towards her mother Donna (Meryl Streep), and you end up not really caring to know who the father is. Donna was young, carefree, not hurting anybody, and has been a loving single mom for over 20 years. Why should we care about such a trivial detail as which man she slept with?
As a result, all potential for judgement is removed from the very beginning of Mamma Mia, imbuing the movies with a sense of freedom. It’s not age-restricted either: whether 20-something Sophie, or her 40-something mother Donna, or Donna’s friends Rosie (Julie Walters) and Tanya (Christine Baranski), the women of the film are empowered, frank, and unashamedly confident in their sexuality. In the new sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, Tanya once offhandedly utters “be still my beating vagina,” which got a roar of laughter from my audience. It’s hard to remember another scene I watched as a tween quite like one in the first movie, where Tanya (who also enjoys a fling and a rendition of “Does Your Mother Know” with a much younger man) asks Streep’s Donna if she’s “getting any”—the latter jokingly miming with a drill before answering negatively.
PHOTO: Universal Pictures
Streep in Mamma Mia
The effect on those who watched it at the time is undeniable—just scroll the YouTube comments of clips from the first movie. They’re filled with people (like me) who are now in their early 20s, who were hotly anticipating the new installment and going in search of a nostalgia hit. There’s a lot of reminiscing—of memorable first exposures to healthy, open, and equal displays of sexuality on screen. On a video of Sophie and Sky (Dominic Cooper)’s mutual seduction to “Lay All Your Love On Me,” one of the top comments is: “I remember being 10 years old and thinking of this like I think of Fifty Shades of Grey now”. (Debates aside about whether Fifty Shades of Grey depicts a healthy relationship, YouTube user Brandon L, but I know what you mean.)
Now, 10 years after bringing a cinematic sexual awakening to a generation of preteens, Mamma Mia is back—and going back in time. In Here We Go Again, Sophie, Tanya, and Rosie have all returned to Kalokairi five years later, but they’re on screen relatively briefly. The rest is devoted to young Donna (Lily James, so infectiously confident it’s impossible for her to not walk away with your heart), who is in her early 20s, and enjoying her newfound post-college freedom.
This time, we get to see her joy at discovering herself first hand as she travels through Europe, in quick succession meeting a young Harry (Hugh Skinner, the most neurotic punk ever, Colin Firth in the present day) and Bill (Josh Dylan, smoldering, Stellan Skarsgard presently), before falling head-over-heels in love with heartbreaker Sam (Jeremy Irvine, fittingly earnest and sad, Pierce Brosnan presently). She sings, she dances, she loves, and she (most importantly) has the time of her life without a single care in the world. If the altered lyrics and staging of the graduation day rendition of “When I Kissed the Teacher” is to be believed, she’s also bisexual. It is undeniably all-consuming, emotional, and life-affirming.
PHOTO: Jonathan Prime/Universal Pictures
Lily James, center.
Just like it was vital for the women of Mamma Mia to be so explicitly liberated in the original, it’s possibly even more important to focus so extensively on young Donna and her journey. The best moments are rapturous —the roof-raising “When I Kissed the Teacher” and her excited but unsure departure to Paris; her flirtation and singing “Why Did It Have To Be Me” with Bill on his stunning boat, their scenes burning with plenty of nascent sexual tension; a quickly flooding basement quickly becomes a meet-cute for her and Sam, their attraction quieter but nonetheless emotional, peaking with her disarming rendition of “Andante, Andante.” She’s exploring the world—and her sexuality—without a hint of cynicism or judgment lurking in the background. Her experiences with these three guys (both sexual and otherwise) are depicted positively—it’s simply her just living life. There’s no punishment in sight for unashamedly enjoying herself.
Sometimes it doesn’t go quite to plan—her fling with Harry is sweet but awkward and unsatisfying, and she definitely wasn’t expecting to fall pregnant – but neither are viewed as catastrophes, rather as unplanned moments that she just equally takes in her stride. They’re all part of growing up, and what led to them is nothing to be ashamed of.
PHOTO: Universal Pictures
From left: Seyfried, Dominic Cooper, Cher
Women are taught from a young age to feel guilty about their sexuality.Whether it’s in the slurs we use to talk about women who have multiple sexual partners in a short amount of time or openly enjoy sex, letting sexuality run proudly wild and free is impressed from childhood to be reckless and sure to result in earth-shattering catastrophe. We’re used to stories playing out much differently to Donna’s, resulting in young women shamed and punished for exploration .(Blockers earlier this year was a rare and delightful exception.)
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is an absolute delight of a film. It’s fun, it’s energetic, but it’s more than that, too. Interspersed between the songs and the sun is a message vital for young women: our life and self should be enjoyed exactly how you want —and that includes your sexuality. In the words of Donna as she embarks on her adventure: Life is short, the world is wide. I want to make some memories. What’s a more important than that?
Ella Donald is a journalist, university teacher, and writer from Brisbane, Australia. She is a regular contributor to GQ Magazine’s Australian edition.
