Today I’m joined in our SOURCE-ED SESSION by the super-talented Sarah Jayne Dunn.
She’s an actress, a mumma, a wife, an advocate for health and fitness + she + I met on insta when Sarah shared her love for the book, Witch.
I instantly fell for her over a super-smart post that she shared in response to someone’s thoroughly boring + very out-dated comment about her being a 40 year old woman who dares to share and celebrate her body online - I KNOW, right?!!
I’m totally obsessed with her defiant celebration of ALL that she is - come join us as we pull a SHE oracle card + riff together on what comes up!
Insta: @sarahjaynedunn
Some of the things we talk about include:
✨ Sarah's acting career and how it conditioned her to put other people in charge of many of her life choices
✨ How looking for more autonomy and agency led her to create an OnlyFans account, and the controversy this led to
✨ Why industry norms in film & television impact the ways in which women view themselves, in particular the erasure of older women
✨ Social media's censorship of women's bodies and why this needs to change
✨ How viewing our sexuality through the lens of shame or "taboo" censors our very humanness
✨ What Sarah would go back and tell her younger stuff
Here are a few quotable moments that I BLOODY loved from our chat:
"It's brilliant. It's a much safer site for the users and the creators. Someone slides into my DMs on Only Fans and sends me a picture it's pixelated, so I have to choose to open that picture. So I'm not getting a horrible photo or an abusive message or anything. I can block a user and then they're shut down immediately. They can't then create another account. So much safer for me. I feel much safer on there. And I genuinely feel like the people who follow me on there because they're paying a subscription, why would they pay that and then come on and give me abuse. They're genuine supporters. And people who go on there and expect me to be doing porn, which I am not, very soon leave and go, 'Oh you don't do that then? You don't show that then?' And I'm like, 'No, you've come to the wrong place.' But they can just leave. It's fine."
"Why is it now that I'm, by some people, being judged and put down because I've now taken back that. It's my body. And I'm going, I don't want to edit my pictures. I don't want to be airbrushed my body. I might air brush out a bruise or a scratch from the dog or something. But I'm not going essentially move my belly button and my torso and make my boobs all pointy and do weird things to my body. That other people have done and decided."
"You've got all these younger women and men going, 'Well that's what I need to look like and clearly that's perfect.' But the pictures you're looking at aren't even perfect. They're not real.""Because of everything that happened, it opened up that door to go, 'Well I'm going to say these things out loud that people have stopped me saying out loud before.' I could never have said 'sex' before unless it was on their terms."
"You know, you want to live your life to the full. You want to do what makes you happy. And why should you be judged for something that alright someone else might go, 'That's not for me.' Alright well it's not for you, but it's for me.""Still the majority of my followers are still women on Instagram. And a lot of them are just like, 'Oh my god, this is awesome! And just keep shouting like you're shouting and blazing a trail and you know, stick to what you're doing.' So for every hater that you get on there you sort of get ten or twenty people who are like, 'Just tell them to go fuck themselves and crack on with what you're doing.' Because you're doing it for yourself and for the majority."
Lisa’s new book Self Source-ery will be released on 22 November 22.
You can pre-order it from your favourite bookseller now.
The Source-ed Sessions with Sarah Jayne Dunn