Life & Wisdom Quote by Sue Johanson

In four blunt words, Sue Johanson delivers the kind of sex-positive tough love that made her a cultural wedge: warm, practical, and quietly radical. "Get to like your own body" isn’t a scented-candle affirmation; it’s an instruction, almost a dare. The verb matters. "Get" implies effort and time, not instant enlightenment. Liking your body is framed as a skill you can build, not a personality trait you either have or don’t.

Johanson’s context is everything: she became famous translating sex education into plain speech for audiences steeped in shame, misinformation, and the constant, low-grade policing of especially women’s bodies. In that ecosystem, body dislike isn’t just an emotion; it’s a market and a method of control. If you’re busy managing disgust, you’re easier to sell to, easier to silence, less likely to negotiate pleasure or boundaries.

The subtext is a refusal of the beauty-industrial bait-and-switch. She doesn’t say "love your body" or "accept yourself" because those can feel unreachable, performative, even coercive. "Like" is strategically modest: it lowers the bar without lowering the stakes. Like means livable. It means you can look at yourself without flinching, ask for what feels good, visit a doctor without dread, have sex without disappearing into self-surveillance.

Johanson’s genius is how she sneaks politics into the everyday. A person who likes their body becomes harder to intimidate, harder to monetize, harder to gaslight about their own experience. That’s not self-help. That’s autonomy.