Have you ever turned down a pool party because you didn’t want to be seen in a swimsuit? Avoided intimacy because you couldn’t stop thinking about your body? Junie Moon spent decades doing exactly that.
Junie is a love coach who works primarily with women in the second half of life. She helps them navigate dating, starting over, and learning to want themselves again. But before she could do any of that work for others, she had to do it for herself. So in 2016, she did something most of us would never consider: she had her naked body painted by internationally known body painter Andy Golub, filmed the whole thing, and turned it into a mini documentary called Shed the Shame.
It didn’t start as a grand statement. Junie had a live streaming show and Andy was a guest. Mid-conversation, she asked if he’d paint her body while they filmed. He said yes. And then the dread set in.
Her stomach went into knots. Andy paints naked people. What was she doing? She spent a month sitting with the question: was this for attention, or was there a real message here? The answer came when she realised there was more risk in not doing it. She had already missed out on pool parties, beach trips, living freely in her own skin. The fact that she could even consider standing naked in front of a camera meant something had already shifted.
She decided to go all in and she hired a videographer. She screened the resulting short at film festivals, sat in a cinema watching herself on a huge screen, naked. Not because she felt perfect but because healing is possible, and she wanted to prove it.
What she found wasn’t perfection. It was about the fact that she’d given herself permission.
That’s the word that keeps coming up in Junie’s work. Not transformation, not a before-and-after, but permission. Permission to take up space. Permission to let someone touch you. Permission to be seen, imperfect and whole at once. Her partner tells her he loves every inch of her, every curve. She can receive it, she says, because she’s done enough of her own work to mostly believe it.
“My body is a vehicle,” she says. “It’s holding my beautiful spirit.” But there’s a lot of old messaging, she adds, that tells us we’re not enough. Her work is helping women trace that messaging back to its roots and stop letting it make decisions for them.
It’s the same work I’ve been doing in my own way. I’ve been going to Cap d’Agde, a naturist village in the south of France, for years. Forty thousand naked people wandering around, shopping, cycling, living. (If you’ve never been there, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience!). And what you see quickly is that no one looks like the magazines. The women who look perfect in clothes have stretch marks. Everyone’s got something going on. It’s the single most effective cure for body shame I’ve ever found.
Junie agrees. She’s done nude beaches herself. Seeing real, unfiltered bodies in their every shape and size just brings you back to reality, she says. The body is unique and beautiful and different. And even the people you’d wish you looked like have their own insecurities.
That’s the whole message. Not that we have to love what we see in the mirror every day. But that we can stop being at war with it.
Key Takeaways
* Body shame isn’t a personal failure. It’s old programming, and it can be reprogrammed.
* Seeing real, unfiltered bodies, at nude beaches, in documentaries, in honest conversation, is one of the most powerful antidotes to shame.
* You don’t have to believe you’re beautiful every day. You just have to stop letting the belief that you’re not run your choices.
* Confidence is the most attractive quality in any room, at any size, at any age.
* You can keep your clothes on during sex and still feel fully seen. Do what works for you.
* Movement connects directly to desire. When we move our bodies, we move our energy. Everything wakes up.
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