Afua Hirsch: “Nobody gets to police our bodies!” How to reject beauty trends
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.6 • 15.2K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2025
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do you get rid of your body hair? Do you hate your periods? Are you debating a nose job? Why? Writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch has been tracing how we’ve become so loathing of our bodies.
In this chat with Fearne, Afua explains where our modern, Western notions of beauty come from, and why she’s advocating for us to celebrate how powerful our bodies are.
She’s rediscovering and reclaiming rituals her ancestors will have done before Western ideals became the norm, and points out that wanting to change your facial features to conform to beauty trends will erase your ancestry.
Fearne and Afua chat about a desire for more fluidity around sexuality and identity, as well as why we should respect the wisdom that comes with age rather than fearing it.
Plus, how to dig deep and ask yourself: “Do I think this, or have I been taught this?”
Afua’s book, Decolonising My Body, is out now.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and a massive welcome to Happy Place with me Fern Cotton. This is the show that helps you question if you're really living the life you want. Today I'm chatting to Afua Hirsch. |
| 0:13.5 | My professional life, I analyse social structures, social injustice, systems of race, narratives about history, all these big |
| 0:23.7 | ideas that kind of exist outside of me. And then I realized when I turned 40 that I hadn't been |
| 0:29.7 | doing that same work on my ideas about myself. I was applying those very same colonial and racist |
| 0:35.5 | ideas to my body to things as intimate as my figure |
| 0:39.7 | and my sexuality and my relationship to my body hair and my skin. |
| 0:45.6 | Do you know what? This chat is one that I was really, really keen to have, |
| 0:49.4 | especially because it revolves around body image. And look, I know that many of you listeners, not exclusively, |
| 0:55.6 | but many of you will be women suffering with body image issues. And that's, of course, |
| 1:00.8 | not to exclude the lovely men that listen to this podcast and who I would heartily encourage to |
| 1:05.1 | listen to it more. Tell your friends, chaps, who also suffer with body image. I know that it can |
| 1:10.0 | feel a really female-centric topic, |
| 1:12.1 | but of course there are so many men who are going through absolute hell with this one as well. |
| 1:16.4 | So do stick around men. If you think this chat isn't for you, bloody well is. It's so |
| 1:20.7 | fascinating. And, you know, I've obviously been there. I've had eating disorders in my 20s, |
| 1:27.1 | and I can still sometimes dip into having a sort of |
| 1:29.9 | slightly warped view of what I look like. I think most people, most humans do on this planet |
| 1:35.8 | because we are constantly bombarded, you know, in the most obvious way with imagery and what is |
| 1:42.0 | acceptable and what is not. |
| 1:48.2 | And what this chat is really about is not just sitting there ranting and raving about it. |
| 1:51.5 | It's dissecting the history of these narratives. |
| 1:56.8 | How we've even got them in our subconscious, it is incredible. And also, may I add, I'm slightly obsessed with Afua, |
... |
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