August 9, 2021 • 41 mins
Jamie explores how the Cathy character navigates body image and fashion trends, and who and how these colonially driven beauty standards came to dominate the U.S.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Quick trigger warning. This episode contains descriptions of eating disorders
and themes surrounding them. Picture this. It's December two. Aladdin
is at the top of the box office, closely followed
by one of our most predatory presidents having a cameo
in home alone to one of our other most predatory presidents.
(00:23):
And that's really saying something had just been voted into
office and was preparing to take over from a bland, loser,
warmongering president whose garbage son would also be president on
the strength of nepotism alone and would later rebrand as
the world's most terrible artist. And in December nine two, Kathy,
the comic strip character was on the cover of a magazine.
(00:46):
I hear your question, which magazine? No Cosmo wasn't brave enough.
Kathy appeared on the cover of Wait Watchers magazine, wearing green,
red and gold for the season, declaring happy Holidays, Meet
the real Kathy and inside this issue we do The
piece by R. G. Marzuli reads as follows the cartoon.
(01:08):
Cathy's weight struggles and battles with the scale are legend,
so it was only natural for her to team up
with Weight Watchers. Her impish image, Grace's posters and brochures
and outwork meeting locations around the country, giving women a
chuckle as well as the reassured knowledge that they are
certainly not alone. Cathy's problem with her weight comes up
a lot because the general issue of self image is
a huge part of the strip. Guys White explains, it's
(01:30):
central to every woman's existence, even if we don't want
to say that it is. We live in a world
we're expected to look a certain way and where the
role models of perfection are astoundingly hard to achieve. In
our own way. We all struggle to be what the
world expects a woman to be. So this article was
more than just a spotlight on the Kathy character, whose
popularity had steadily risen during the years of feminist backlash
(01:52):
in the eighties. This article was a part of a
sponsorship deal. In the early nineties, Kathy appeared on number
of Weight Watchers posters, pins, and promotions. Also included in
these promotions were Mr Pinkley and Irving, complete with a
caption contest to win two tickets on a Caribbean cruise.
(02:12):
It was the nineties. You wouldn't understand, that's right, Kathy,
I wouldn't understand the nineties because I'm young and full
of life. But it's no surprise that the Kathy character
would become the literal poster child for a company whose
brand relied on regular people, mostly women, who were struggling
with their body image. After all, this had been the
(02:33):
Comic Strips brand for over fifteen years, and it's where
we hear the most persistent criticisms of Kathy. Some of
her crueler critics asked why she could never successfully lose weight,
and others disliked that she was so fixated on it.
Some got bored by Cathy's continual frustration with her own
reflection in a bathing suit, while others thought that her
(02:54):
annoyance with the changing fashion trends was whiny and repetitive.
They're lucky I wasn't a want to wear those hideous
clothes from the Instagram targeted ads. You know, I got that.
You're right, those are very upsetting, and I will grant
you that. But what was Kathy guys White really saying
about diet culture in her work and as promoting the
(03:15):
diet culture surrounding Weight Watchers magazine changed the message? Also,
who the funk won? That caption contest and was the
cruise fund. In today's episode, we're looking at the Kathy
body image complex. So let's get music. She passed into
the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at what, She's
(03:36):
out on dates, and she don't lack politics, from mama
and urban to feminist friends. And she's fighting all the
stands it with chocolate and hand Cathy. She's fighting back.
She stressed with success. Let's snack Cathy, Cathy, fun Cathy.
(03:56):
She's gotta luck go in all. The Kathy and Weight
(04:17):
Watchers collaboration was short lived, but touches on something we've
come up against quite a bit in this series. If
you scan eBay for remaining Cathy merchandise, you'll see more
of the stereotype of the character that Guys White created,
monetized and perpetuated. She can't lose weight, she's addicted to shopping.
She and her mom have an intense relationship, and on
(04:39):
and on and on the other side of that equation
is the actual material this merchandise was based on, which,
as well discussed today, contained far more nuanced and specific commentary.
You might remember from episode two, I asked Kathy, Guys
White about this period of intense merchandizing of her strip
in December ninety two when this magazine came out. Guys,
(05:00):
why it would have been writing the daily strip, raising
an infant as a single parent, and running an entire
merchandising company. In retrospect, she did have some regrets about
this time. Here's what she said, Well, the two big
licensing forces were Charles Schultz, who had, of course the
licensing empire, and Jim Davis, who created Garfield, and he
(05:21):
had a licensing empire. And I saw no reason why
a female cartoonist couldn't have a licensing empire, especially because
you know, we love to shop. Women loved the shop
and there we go. So that that was my plan.
My plan was to have my my female based licensing empire.
So that did not work out as planned, But I
(05:43):
spent decades trying to make a work. I mean, it's
from from where I was sitting. It felt like when
I was growing up, like Kathy was omnipotent. I yeah,
it was. That was hard at yeah, it just was
a lot. I mean I eventually had to have an
(06:05):
office full of people who worked also worked on the
licensing who were dead sales and marketing and all of
that eventually had to have some people helped draw the merchandise.
Uh oh boy, there's so much of that I would
not have done if I had it to do over again,
(06:25):
because a lot of it in in a lot of
that and a lot of like the pursuing, the greed
and glory of having my licensing empire, and a lot
of it I lost, like the like the essence of
Kathy and the heart and soul of Kathy, like my favorite,
my favorite of all the billion greeting cards we did,
(06:48):
my very favorite ones still are the ones I drew myself.
But I would need to agree to stuff just to like,
agreed to deals or endorsements, who uh is to fund
the office, And then it was kind of got into
that cycle. So, I mean, just as a business person,
I learned a lot about I learned a lot by doing,
(07:11):
you know, by making all the blunders that people make,
which is you know, getting a little bit getting too
big and not you know, and kind of losing touch
with what was good. But at the time, Jamie, I mean,
I was fueled by a woman's possibility to do everything.
So at the in the you know, in the nineties,
(07:35):
when the licensing was had gotten really big and we
were just built this this whole other office just got
designed for us to move into, and the comptrip was
doing great. That's and I had, I mean six waking
hours six six seconds you know, per day, where I
(07:59):
wasn't just completely overwhelmed. That's when it occurred to me
that I should adopt a baby. So it's pretty safe
to say that with this in mind, the Weight Watchers
sponsorship was more or less a cashion and that's absolutely
up for criticism on guys White and her company's part.
After all, the comic regularly indicated that diet culture was
(08:20):
prohibitively expensive and didn't work, and so for the Kathy
character to have actually endorsed a weight loss method as
something that works may have been surprising to longtime readers.
But American dieting culture far predated the Cathy and Weight
Watchers collab. Its legacy is baked right into the colonial
(08:40):
dumpster fire that is the American experiment. Let's go back
to that Weight Watcher's article really quick. In light of
Cathy's ongoing weight problems, guys White has her own personal
experience to draw from. At five one, she was once
more than fifty pounds overweight. She maintains her weight loss
through the skills she learned at weight watchers. Weight Watchers
showed me the whole concept of being able eat normal
(09:00):
food and proper portion sizes. It gave me a foundation
for living in a world filled with food. In the strip,
Cathy's weight problems stem from her love hate relationship with
food and the temptation to use it for all the
wrong purposes. Although she's been a student of the physical
fitness slash health movement for years, Cathy will succumb to
a cheesecake were a box of donuts. We all like
to think we're above those struggles, but most of us
(09:21):
begin or end every day of our lives with a
little food fight of our own. Guys White says, Cathy
is honest about those real personal moments that may not
be that cool to talk to people about. So it's
with this kind of aggressive merchandizing in the brief burst
of diet endorsements that a little bit of hypocrisy leaks through,
something that Guys White seems to understand pretty clearly today.
(09:44):
Why endorse a diet company when your work is about
how diets target and fail women. Some would argue hope
that Kathy character has no shortage of that when it
comes to modifying her body to meet the standards of
the day, but in practice, it's more likely, like guys
White said, that she made that choice to continue to
make enough money to keep her merchandizing company afloat. So
(10:07):
I want to pick apart what is exactly going on
with this predatory diet culture. The article mentions things like overweight,
proper portion sizes, normal food, and while these phrases are
very normalized and intuitive, I was curious what their origin
really was. Honestly, I have been dreading writing and recording
(10:28):
this episode because if there's one thing I hate talking about,
it is about my relationship with food and disordered eating.
And in a way, I kind of feel like a
hypocrite even like attempting this discussion, because so far in
my life, no matter how much information I learned, how
much empirically true evidence that exists that the way that
(10:51):
we are trained to see ourselves is rooted in dangerous bullshit,
I'm still nowhere close to deprogramming, shaking whatever, ring myself
from it. Failing. It's a vortex. So you're saying, I'm right.
We'll put a pin in that. And the more I
think about this frustration, this failure to like my own body,
(11:14):
and the deeply ingrained belief that women's bodies require this
constant maintenance, observation, improvement, the more I start to feel like,
and I'm looking at you, Kathy Comic. I mean, it's
not that bad. You're right, I'm protecting. So this isn't
a full history of diet culture, but I tried to
(11:35):
put together a crash course because maybe you need to
hear some of this the same way that I did.
The Cathy character's tendency to get frustrated with her body
and the expectations being forced on it take up as
much real estate in the history of the comic as
her relationship and workplace problems, if not more. It's one
of the themes that's most popularly associated and criticized about her.
(12:00):
For many people, the first association of a Kathy comic
is Kathy looking in the mirror at a department store
because she doesn't think she looks right. She thinks that
she's fat and feels that to be fat is to
be bad. Because the fashion trend of the moment, whether
it's nineteen seventy six, when the comics started, or when
it ended catered to real thin women and not actual bodies.
(12:23):
Here's one of my favorites on this subject from the
late nineteen nineties. Kathy is reading a magazine while working
out on her home elliptical machine in sweatpants. In the
past ten years, the amount of money spent on diet
programs has doubled to thirty five billion a year. In
the exact same tenure period, adult Americans have gained an
(12:44):
average of eight pounds eight Kathy looks stressed and gets
off the elliptical. The more money we spend on dieting,
the more weight we gain. The more weight we gain,
the more money we spend on dieting. In the final panel,
Kathy lies flat on her couch with the magazine covering
her face. She is defeated. When I speak of the millennium,
(13:04):
they're referring to the future span of our waistline, and
Kathy is using authentic statistics of the day for American
dieters here. While people loved to make fun of the
character for feeling, strips like this reveal that the system
was rigged to begin with So we've got to take
a look at that system with a brief, admittedly incomplete
(13:24):
history of how diet culture has affected American women and
not just the middle class working women that Kathy tends
to comment on. Again, this is a crash course, So
(13:49):
I quickly would like to shout out the three sources
I used most often in putting this episode together. Those
were Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings, This is
Big by Marissa Metzer, and the amazing Maintenance Phase podcast
from Audrey Gordon and Michael Hopps, And it is with
their sage guidance that I bring you back to ancient Greece. Seriously, Keathy,
(14:15):
I know you read like every book on personal health
from the nineteen seventies to the two thousand's, but you
need to like give me a chance, let the process work. Okay,
ancient grace, goodbye. She's not wrong, but bear with me
for a second, because the way we look at women's
bodies goes way back throughout history. A full female figure
(14:40):
has been the feminine ideal. But as time goes on,
that ideal, which is almost always formed by white men,
becomes slimmer and slimmer. But we're starting in ancient Greece,
because that is where the classical Venus figure comes from.
Maybe you can picture the statue that I'm talking about. Alread.
(15:00):
She's nude, she's covering one nipple and her pubic area.
She doesn't have a twentieth century supermodel body. She has
a body. She has meat on her arms and her
legs and her stomach. The statue, which was originally made
in the first century BC, came to prominence in the
modern sense in the sixteen hundreds when it was displayed
(15:21):
at the Via Medici in Rome, a property that was
run by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and overtime, this
statue became an icon, and the physical figure of Venus
was considered to be the ideal feminine form in Western
European culture, around a time where Western Europe was aggressively
(15:41):
colonizing around the world. This meant, among other things, that
this image of Venus was perpetuated across the globe very quickly,
and women from around the world with different skin tones, builds,
ages were compared against her this fictional statue. The book
Hearing the Black Body does an excellent job of unpacking
(16:03):
how these prominent standards of beauty were almost always created
and standardized like this. They were made up by white men.
They were enforced on white women to display white women
as the peak of femininity and to other non white women.
I'm going to let this book's incredible research and attention
to detail kind of guide us through this period in
(16:24):
history up until the second wave of feminism, where Kathy's
story begins. Author Zabrina Strings unpacks the Venus de Medici's
legacy and its role in establishing the ideal female form.
In Fearing the black body, she says this Venetian voluptuous
nous was united by the notion that beauty was found
(16:44):
in proportionality and that fleshiness was pleasing to the eye.
Strings also describes the absence of non white women in
popular European art during this time, with a few exceptions.
One of these exceptions was a seventeenth century sculpture, and
seventeenth century means that it's from the sixteen hundreds. That
(17:04):
has never not been confusing to me. So if you
knew that you're smarter than me, If you didn't, there
you go. A seventeenth century sculpture called the African Venus,
whose sculpture has been disputed over the years, but is
currently thought to be a Dutch guy named Johann Gregor
vander schardt vander Shart, vander Shart, It's very serious. He's
a serious letting an artist in his last name is
(17:26):
vander Shart. The statue looks very similar to the Venus
de Medici, but instead depicts a black woman's body. And
while the Venus de medici, a white woman is seen
looking away from her own body demurely, the African venus
holds a hand mirror where she views her own image.
And this is just one example of what I'd really
(17:47):
like to stress here, and that is that the way
we view bodies, particularly women's bodies, is very closely tied
to imperialism from every angle. To say that it's just
patriarchy is overly simplest stick because there's a lot of
factors at play here. There are differences in how women's
bodies are treated and viewed by race, by country of origin,
(18:08):
by time period, by build, and by trends of the day.
Basically all of these attitudes were shaped and enforced by
men of European and later American origin. Strings says this
of the African Venus's legacy. In a prelude to ideas
about Africans that would be developed over the next several centuries,
(18:29):
the African venus is lacking in shame, whereas the European
eyed venus putica covers her pubis and breasts. The African
venus is mesmerized by her own beauty as she gazes
wistfully at her own reflection. At this time, women's bodies
were viewed as property in many ways. This could be
through marriage or, as was the case for many African women,
(18:51):
actual enslavement by white people, and these body standards rarely,
if ever, have anything to do with health and sometimes
be directly harmful to health. At certain points in history,
women with fuller figures would be an indication that their
husbands could afford rich foods, and at other times, more
(19:11):
slender women that her husband restricted the intake of food
and drink in order to bring his family closer to God.
This constant recalibration and optimization of white women's bodies and
the mothering of non white women's bodies is a constant trend,
as was the European male tendency to only call black
(19:32):
and brown women beautiful when they had features that resembled
white European women. Women with bigger figures were celebrated in
a way that directly opposed with body standards imposed on men.
Fatness in men was thought to represent a lack of
self control and thinness, as Sabrina Strings put that represented
quote bodily proof of rationality and intelligence unquote. Okay, We're
(19:57):
going to fast forward a bit to a late Renaissance
flam artist named Peter Paul Rubens, who became very famous
for painting nudes of curvy white ladies lining up with
the voluptuous aesthetic popular at the time. To this day,
you still might hear women referred to as ruben esque
by a creepy uncle or a bad writer. Rubens himself
(20:18):
was extremely fixated on how he felt women should look,
to the extent that he wrote a long treatise on
what he considered to constitute beauty and ideal proportionality. He
included a whole chapter on looks that he thought were
specifically hot. Nothing weird going on here, Rubens says this.
The body must not be too thin or too skinny,
(20:41):
nor too large or too fat, but with a moderate
embondment following the model of the antique statues. The hip
or the tops of the thighs, and the thighs themselves
should be large and apple. The botics should be round
and fleshy, the knees should be fleshy and round. As
if anyone asked, that's what I'm saying, What the fuck so?
(21:03):
Rubens paintings ordinarily featured nude white women, and he would
sometimes feature black women in the portrait as a servant
or slave wearing clothing, as he did in paintings like Bath,
Shabbah and Venus in front of the Mirror. This, regretfully,
would have lined up with Ruben's life. He was living
in Antwerp, Belgium, a hub of imperialism and slave trade
(21:25):
during that time. In paintings like these, black women were
explicitly mothered and portrayed as inferior, while white women were
told by Ruben's images how to look in order to
be valuable to society. Sabrina Strings puts it like this.
In other words, whiteness stood not just for social supremacy,
(21:45):
but general superiority. This body standard held pretty firmly for
some time, but things began to shift by the late
seventeen hundreds and into the eighteen hundreds, and it was
during this time that European colonists continued an increasing rate
to wreak havoc and force white supremacy on a large
(22:05):
portion of the planet. There are very few countries that
have gone untouched by the imperialism of this era, and
in the case of many cultures, including indigenous Americans and
a steep increase in the forced enslavement of African people,
entire cultures were massacred and attempted to be erased entirely
in favor of European ideals and culture. And it was
(22:28):
during this time that the bodies of non white women
were further othered, and at times explicitly mothered by being
linked with fatness. A popular example of this lies in
the story of Sarah Bartman, a South African quake Koi
woman who became known by the cruel nickname of the
Hot and taught Venus while living in Cape Town, South Africa.
(22:50):
Bartman was brought to the UK by a Scottish military
surgeon to display her body as an exhibit, but the
more accurate term, based on how her image and body
was monetized, is more like a circus. Many details of
Bartman's life are unknown, and it's not clear whether she
went to the UK in eighteen ten voluntarily or not.
(23:13):
What is known she was toured across Europe because her
body looked different than European women, and she was marketed
with intense grotesque fixation put on her buttocks. White lookers
on could pay to poke and prod at her, and
Bartman was later brought to France and effectively enslaved while
being put on display before she died at forty of
(23:35):
unknown causes, many of said smallpox. There is a lot
more to discuss here about Sarah Bartman's life and much
that isn't known about it. Her legacy and her image,
which was generally illustrated, exaggerated, and disseminated by Europeans, is
historically connected to how black women's bodies are mothered, and
this is something that Saberena Strings sites to demonstrate that
(23:59):
as European beauty standards shifted to encourage white women to
become thinner, non white women were mothered in order to
show white women how not to be. Strings says this,
whether fact or fiction. The purported size of her bottom
and tandem with her presumed general rotundity placed Sarah beyond
the pale of fair skinned European norms of beauty. Racial
(24:22):
theories had linked fatness to blackness in the European imagination,
and they had also linked thinness to whiteness. I'll be
linking tomorrow about Sarah Bartman's life in the episode description.
As the eighteen hundreds continued, body standards began to shift,
Europeans across gender lines were encouraged to eat and drink
(24:43):
less to demonstrate their class, with a lot of pop
culture at the time reinforcing that fatness was linked with
African women, specifically during a time where race science became
a prominent and deeply harmful component of the European imperialist equation. Here,
according to Strings, is how it worked. Englishmen were seen
(25:05):
as arbiters of taste or those capable of creating the
guidelines for judging beauty. English women were treated as its representatives.
As the eighteen hundreds were on, thin white women gradually
became a symbol of not just white supremacy, but of
divine morality and closeness to God. And it's with this
(25:26):
mentality taking hold across the imperial world that early diet
culture began to rear its head. The idea of food
and drink restriction to force thinness was also originally tied
to Christianity, and it was this that motivated an early
unwitting diet guru named George Chain. Chain was a Scottish
(25:47):
born physician whose invention of a diet of milk, seeds,
and fruits not just helped him lose weight, but became
a lucrative diet among aristocratic women of the day. This
launched him into a prominent and comfortable life, even though
he was at the time deeply annoyed that women seemed
to be more drawn to his work than men. Boo who.
(26:09):
Here's a short history of diets in the eighteen hundreds,
all invented by European men. I know I'm being overly
cautious here, but I'm not endorsing these. Please don't do these.
Let's get some music going. The avoiding Swamps diet, which
claimed that living near a swamp caused obesity. Someone alert
Shrek and Donkey to this one. What are you doing
(26:31):
in my swamp? There was the Fletcherism diet, which instructed
that people chew food until it turned to liquid to
fool the body into thinking it was full. There was
the vinegar and water diet as pushed by Lord Byron,
the tapeworm diet which yep, and the first popularized low
(26:52):
carb diet by a British undertaker in William Banton. He
published one of the first ever popular diet book called
A Letter on Corpulence. Let's cut the music. Pushers of
fad diets have long targeted women specifically and are often
exposed to be total scammers, But their scammers with a
(27:14):
very consistent goal to make money and gain notoriety by
encouraging women to alter their habits and bodies under the
assumption that it will make them healthier and more desirable
by society. Some of these diets simply supplemented less healthy
foods with more healthy foods, while others relied on dangerous
(27:34):
gimmicks or modified disordered eating. Diet Pills also started cropping
up in the late eighteen hundreds, which both did not
work and caused severe damage to users bodies. Another very
effective tool for enforcing these body standards goes back to
where we started in this episode. At mass distributed magazines
(27:55):
primarily directed at white girls and women, Sabrina Strings credits
and magazine called Goodie's Lady Book as an early pusher
of body norms in mass media. It was published from
eighteen thirty to eighteen seventy eight in Philadelphia and was
edited by a woman for forty years of its run,
a writer named Sarah Joseph Hale. But as people with
(28:17):
big old brains like you and me, No, you and
I the smartest people to ever live, a woman's involvement
in something does not mean that that's something is holy
pro women. Because while Sarah Joseph Hale did do some
cool stuff, including spotlighting women in the workforce as early
as the eighteen fifties, and hired first wave feminist Sarah
(28:40):
Jane Lippincott as an assistant editor before she was fired
by GODI for denouncing slavery in the magazine. But Sarah
Joseph Hale, as Sabrina Strings tells us, in Fearing the
Black Body, wanted to push the narrative of women as
more than housewives by reinforcing temperance, morality, and food restriction.
(29:15):
Goadie's Lady Book, as many modern magazines still do today,
pushed the idea of optimizing one's body. According to the
morality of the day and the day of Goadie's Lady
Book stated that American beauty was white, Anglo Saxon and
Protestant wasp city baby, some real Charlotte's walking around. All
(29:38):
this to say that many white women who were tastemakers,
even those who claimed to be feminists, were generally complicit
in this mindset. An example is a writer named Lee Hunt,
who once published a piece in Goadie's called Chapter on
Female Features. Sabrina Strings describes the piece like this, Hunt
makes it clear that excessive eating leads to a figure
(30:00):
that would be undesirable for cultivated white women. With more
than a hint of sarcasm, Hunt acknowledges that there are
fashions and beauty as well as dress. With this, she
is suggesting that in other parts of the world, different
standards of beauty apply. Goodie's Ladybook perpetuated and over time
(30:21):
adjusted what the concept of American beauty was. Originally, it
excluded most white immigrant women as well, at different times,
excluding Irish women, Italian women, Polish women, Catholic women, and
Jewish women by associating them with fatness. Over time, however,
most other white women were welcomed into the fold, while black, brown, Indigenous,
(30:45):
and any fat women remained firmly excluded from what the
term American beauty meant. What it boiled down to was
this image of delicate white supremacy, with the white women
representing the eventual reproduction of the race. Strings says that
it was the quote multiple and colliding factors of Protestant
(31:06):
asceticism scientific racism in the protoscience of health and beauty unquote.
After Godie's Lady Book folded Bye Bye, other magazines with
more familiar names took up the mantel. How about Harper's Bizaar.
It began in eighteen sixty seven in New York by
publishing Magnates the Harper Brothers, who marketed the magazine to
(31:27):
middle and upper class white women, and again a woman
served as the editor in chief for its formative years.
Mary Louise Booth edited the magazine from its beginning and
for the next sixteen years, and frequently included columns about
women's dietary habits. There was a column called for the
Ugly Girls that was about falling short of feminine expectations,
(31:49):
and unlike Godie's Lady Book, Harper's Bazaar was unequivocally a
fashion magazine. Fashion is a complicated and fascinating topic that
we'll get to a bit later in the episode, and
it's been used both really powerfully for self and cultural
expression as well as taken advantage of to enforce the
(32:09):
standards of patriarchy and imperialism. Harper's Bizarre from the beginning,
existed at this very tricky intersection. Saberena Strings says this
of the magazine, Harper's reflected a kindred preoccupation with the
right models of beauty, which were based on one's race
and class status. For this reason, the magazine denounced the
fatness of the savage races and exalted the more streamlined
(32:33):
aesthetic of the Germans. This sentiment was to be found
in an eighteen seventy nine article titled the Fixed Facts
of Beauty. In it, the author informs readers that it
is not to say that the laws of beauty are
not fixed, that because the turxy's beauty are not fixed,
that because the turxy's beauty only in the obese and
certain of the savages and the deformed, that therefore the
(32:55):
laws of beauty are arbitrary. It was in the late
eighteen hundred that Cosmo began publishing with a pretty similar
mission to Harper's. It featured articles by writers like Elizabeth Bisland,
who was actually a pretty fascinating character. She engaged in
a race around the world against pioneer investigative reporter Nellie Bligh.
(33:16):
But Bisland also wrote on the concept of American beauty,
talking about thinness as a type of exceptionalism. Here's how
Sabrina Strings characterizes her work. It is a type of
beauty possible only in the United States, where the best
of all races, those from Northern and Western Europe, had
arrived as immigrants. These desirable immigrants had mixed and mingled
(33:39):
to produce progeny who were tall, thin, and of unsurpassed beauty.
And while this mindset is aggressively bigoted, this wouldn't have
been surprising rhetoric for the time by a long shot.
In the early nine hundreds, eugenic race science was becoming
increasingly popular in the United States as a discriminatory tool.
(34:00):
In a New England, Puritan fancy guy named Charles Davenport
Okay founded the Eugenics Records Office in New York, further
pushing the idea that people of color as well as,
to quote Charles Davenport quote polls, Irish and Italians unquote,
were lesser than Eugenics attempted to accomplish this by drawing
(34:23):
attention to slight physical differences, often imagined to justify its
claims of superiority. Eugenics are still weaponized to this day.
By the time these magazines were popular, first wave feminism
was in full swing in the United States, and as
we investigated in episode three of this podcast, all the exclusionary, white,
(34:46):
middle and upper class dominated issues that came with the
time period led to women being granted the vote in
the US, and by that time the body standards in
the United States had firmly changed. While some areas of
the American South had previously celebrated fuller women's figures than
in the North, mass media had more or less perpetuated
(35:09):
the slender white ideal, to the point where articles of
the time said explicitly that the Venus di medici, once
the beauty standard, would now be considered too big to
be beautiful by the American standards. In the early nineteen hundreds,
Harper's Cosmo and advertising at large were overwhelmed with the
(35:30):
image of the Gibson Girl, which were illustrations of the
white lady ideal, drawn by you won't be shocked, some guy,
Charles Dana Gibson. While the Gibson girls varied in their fashions,
all Gibson girls were tall and descended from the British,
forming this image of white American exceptionalism. Nowadays, the Gibson
(35:54):
girl is more commonly associated with American flappers, what women
looked like around the time of an increased focus on
women's rights. But that wasn't necessarily their intent. Gibson himself
was quick to say that his illustrations, while iconic, were
meant to calcify the concept of American beauty and to
exclude women who did not fit its standard. He once
(36:16):
wrote this, what zeng Will calls the melting pot of
the races as resulted in a certain character. There beyond
question the loveliest of all their sex. Evolution has selected
the best things for preservation. Why should women not be beautiful? Increasingly,
why should it not be the fittest in form and features,
as well as mind and muscle, which survives? And where
should that fittest be? In evidence? Most strikingly in the
(36:37):
United States, of course, where natural selection has been going on,
as elsewhere, there has been a great variety to choose from.
The eventual American woman will be even more beautiful than
the woman of today. Her claims to that distinction will
result from a fine combination of the best points of
all those many races which have helped to make our population.
Other American men took a different tech on women's bodies,
(36:58):
which it's incredible to hear so many different perspectives on
something that is none of their business. The perspective I'm
talking about is that of John Harvey Kellogg, who, yes,
ultimately founded that breakfast cereal empire, but began as a
deeply religious and deeply racist eugenicist who feared that American
(37:18):
women had become so thin that they were no longer
adequately fertile to continue the white American race. Not all
women have uterus, as Mr Kellogg, not that you give
a ship. He's said, I don't know what I'm doing.
At the time, John Harvey Kellogg was very clear on
his views. He said, quote, the only hope for the
race is in the future of its girls unquote. He
(37:41):
rejected the physical frame of Gibson girls and flappers, and
encouraged women to eat well Kellogg's cereal to become, as
he told it, heartier and more fertile. There's an entire
book on the full picture by Dr Howard Markle called
the Kellogg's the battling Brothers of Battle Creek. That all
link in the description. It is a bizarre and disturbing legacy.
(38:05):
So Tony the Tiger part of the EU genesis legacy.
I don't make the facts, but it's my sacred duty
to report them. Snap crackle and pop Uron noticed the
Raisin brand's son sick. Oh, get them out of there?
And what good with these exceptionalist ideals? And magazines and
advertising be without rules and products with which to attain
(38:28):
the look. Beginning in nineteen thirteen, scales for the home
became consumer products so that people could monitor their bodies
from the comfort of their own bathroom. The concept of
calories became standard with a nineteen eighteen best seller called
Diet and Health with Key to the Calories by Lulu
Hunt Peter's Watch Your Weight. The cover warned and in
(38:50):
its pages Peters described fatness as a quote disease unquote.
The concept of body mass index came into play with
something called ideal weight tables, most popularly with tables circulated
by MetLife Insurance. The data these tables used were entirely
based off of white and disproportionately male bodies, and we're
(39:13):
not designed with mind towards actual bodily health, but instead
to be used by insurance companies in order to assess
risk on who qualifies for life insurance. Come on. The
b m I as we know it now came to
prominence in the US in nineteen seventy two, just four
years before the Cathy strip debuted in American newspapers. While
(39:34):
the b m I was just a modification of these tables,
which completely excluded non white people and many women, it
was eventually adopted by the NIH or National Institute of Health. Previously,
the nih had utilized those MetLife Life insurance tables. The
inherent racism of the body mass Index is well documented,
(39:55):
in spite of its popularity to this day. I will
link some resources in the descrip option and it's here
in the nineties seventies where our girl Cathy re enters
the picture. Now that you're up to speed on how
we arrived at the diet culture that the Kathy comic
was staring down the barrel of when the comics started.
We're going to pick up there in part two of
(40:17):
this episode later in the week. By back Cast is
an I Heart radio production. It is written, researched, and
hosted by me Jamie Loftus, Sophie Electuman is the world's
Greatest producer, Isaac Taylor is the world's greatest editor, Zoe
Blade writes the world best music, and Brandon Dickert wrote
(40:38):
the world best theme song. In today's episode, you heard
the vocal talents of Sharene Lana unas Maggie Cannon, Isaac Taylor,
and the Icon herself, Jackie Michelle Johnson as Kathy. We
will see you Wednesday,
Quick trigger warning. This episode contains descriptions of eating disorders
and themes surrounding them. Picture this. It's December two. Aladdin
is at the top of the box office, closely followed
by one of our most predatory presidents having a cameo
in home alone to one of our other most predatory presidents.
(00:23):
And that's really saying something had just been voted into
office and was preparing to take over from a bland, loser,
warmongering president whose garbage son would also be president on
the strength of nepotism alone and would later rebrand as
the world's most terrible artist. And in December nine two, Kathy,
the comic strip character was on the cover of a magazine.
(00:46):
I hear your question, which magazine? No Cosmo wasn't brave enough.
Kathy appeared on the cover of Wait Watchers magazine, wearing green,
red and gold for the season, declaring happy Holidays, Meet
the real Kathy and inside this issue we do The
piece by R. G. Marzuli reads as follows the cartoon.
(01:08):
Cathy's weight struggles and battles with the scale are legend,
so it was only natural for her to team up
with Weight Watchers. Her impish image, Grace's posters and brochures
and outwork meeting locations around the country, giving women a
chuckle as well as the reassured knowledge that they are
certainly not alone. Cathy's problem with her weight comes up
a lot because the general issue of self image is
a huge part of the strip. Guys White explains, it's
(01:30):
central to every woman's existence, even if we don't want
to say that it is. We live in a world
we're expected to look a certain way and where the
role models of perfection are astoundingly hard to achieve. In
our own way. We all struggle to be what the
world expects a woman to be. So this article was
more than just a spotlight on the Kathy character, whose
popularity had steadily risen during the years of feminist backlash
(01:52):
in the eighties. This article was a part of a
sponsorship deal. In the early nineties, Kathy appeared on number
of Weight Watchers posters, pins, and promotions. Also included in
these promotions were Mr Pinkley and Irving, complete with a
caption contest to win two tickets on a Caribbean cruise.
(02:12):
It was the nineties. You wouldn't understand, that's right, Kathy,
I wouldn't understand the nineties because I'm young and full
of life. But it's no surprise that the Kathy character
would become the literal poster child for a company whose
brand relied on regular people, mostly women, who were struggling
with their body image. After all, this had been the
(02:33):
Comic Strips brand for over fifteen years, and it's where
we hear the most persistent criticisms of Kathy. Some of
her crueler critics asked why she could never successfully lose weight,
and others disliked that she was so fixated on it.
Some got bored by Cathy's continual frustration with her own
reflection in a bathing suit, while others thought that her
(02:54):
annoyance with the changing fashion trends was whiny and repetitive.
They're lucky I wasn't a want to wear those hideous
clothes from the Instagram targeted ads. You know, I got that.
You're right, those are very upsetting, and I will grant
you that. But what was Kathy guys White really saying
about diet culture in her work and as promoting the
(03:15):
diet culture surrounding Weight Watchers magazine changed the message? Also,
who the funk won? That caption contest and was the
cruise fund. In today's episode, we're looking at the Kathy
body image complex. So let's get music. She passed into
the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at what, She's
(03:36):
out on dates, and she don't lack politics, from mama
and urban to feminist friends. And she's fighting all the
stands it with chocolate and hand Cathy. She's fighting back.
She stressed with success. Let's snack Cathy, Cathy, fun Cathy.
(03:56):
She's gotta luck go in all. The Kathy and Weight
(04:17):
Watchers collaboration was short lived, but touches on something we've
come up against quite a bit in this series. If
you scan eBay for remaining Cathy merchandise, you'll see more
of the stereotype of the character that Guys White created,
monetized and perpetuated. She can't lose weight, she's addicted to shopping.
She and her mom have an intense relationship, and on
(04:39):
and on and on the other side of that equation
is the actual material this merchandise was based on, which,
as well discussed today, contained far more nuanced and specific commentary.
You might remember from episode two, I asked Kathy, Guys
White about this period of intense merchandizing of her strip
in December ninety two when this magazine came out. Guys,
(05:00):
why it would have been writing the daily strip, raising
an infant as a single parent, and running an entire
merchandising company. In retrospect, she did have some regrets about
this time. Here's what she said, Well, the two big
licensing forces were Charles Schultz, who had, of course the
licensing empire, and Jim Davis, who created Garfield, and he
(05:21):
had a licensing empire. And I saw no reason why
a female cartoonist couldn't have a licensing empire, especially because
you know, we love to shop. Women loved the shop
and there we go. So that that was my plan.
My plan was to have my my female based licensing empire.
So that did not work out as planned, But I
(05:43):
spent decades trying to make a work. I mean, it's
from from where I was sitting. It felt like when
I was growing up, like Kathy was omnipotent. I yeah,
it was. That was hard at yeah, it just was
a lot. I mean I eventually had to have an
(06:05):
office full of people who worked also worked on the
licensing who were dead sales and marketing and all of
that eventually had to have some people helped draw the merchandise.
Uh oh boy, there's so much of that I would
not have done if I had it to do over again,
(06:25):
because a lot of it in in a lot of
that and a lot of like the pursuing, the greed
and glory of having my licensing empire, and a lot
of it I lost, like the like the essence of
Kathy and the heart and soul of Kathy, like my favorite,
my favorite of all the billion greeting cards we did,
(06:48):
my very favorite ones still are the ones I drew myself.
But I would need to agree to stuff just to like,
agreed to deals or endorsements, who uh is to fund
the office, And then it was kind of got into
that cycle. So, I mean, just as a business person,
I learned a lot about I learned a lot by doing,
(07:11):
you know, by making all the blunders that people make,
which is you know, getting a little bit getting too
big and not you know, and kind of losing touch
with what was good. But at the time, Jamie, I mean,
I was fueled by a woman's possibility to do everything.
So at the in the you know, in the nineties,
(07:35):
when the licensing was had gotten really big and we
were just built this this whole other office just got
designed for us to move into, and the comptrip was
doing great. That's and I had, I mean six waking
hours six six seconds you know, per day, where I
(07:59):
wasn't just completely overwhelmed. That's when it occurred to me
that I should adopt a baby. So it's pretty safe
to say that with this in mind, the Weight Watchers
sponsorship was more or less a cashion and that's absolutely
up for criticism on guys White and her company's part.
After all, the comic regularly indicated that diet culture was
(08:20):
prohibitively expensive and didn't work, and so for the Kathy
character to have actually endorsed a weight loss method as
something that works may have been surprising to longtime readers.
But American dieting culture far predated the Cathy and Weight
Watchers collab. Its legacy is baked right into the colonial
(08:40):
dumpster fire that is the American experiment. Let's go back
to that Weight Watcher's article really quick. In light of
Cathy's ongoing weight problems, guys White has her own personal
experience to draw from. At five one, she was once
more than fifty pounds overweight. She maintains her weight loss
through the skills she learned at weight watchers. Weight Watchers
showed me the whole concept of being able eat normal
(09:00):
food and proper portion sizes. It gave me a foundation
for living in a world filled with food. In the strip,
Cathy's weight problems stem from her love hate relationship with
food and the temptation to use it for all the
wrong purposes. Although she's been a student of the physical
fitness slash health movement for years, Cathy will succumb to
a cheesecake were a box of donuts. We all like
to think we're above those struggles, but most of us
(09:21):
begin or end every day of our lives with a
little food fight of our own. Guys White says, Cathy
is honest about those real personal moments that may not
be that cool to talk to people about. So it's
with this kind of aggressive merchandizing in the brief burst
of diet endorsements that a little bit of hypocrisy leaks through,
something that Guys White seems to understand pretty clearly today.
(09:44):
Why endorse a diet company when your work is about
how diets target and fail women. Some would argue hope
that Kathy character has no shortage of that when it
comes to modifying her body to meet the standards of
the day, but in practice, it's more likely, like guys
White said, that she made that choice to continue to
make enough money to keep her merchandizing company afloat. So
(10:07):
I want to pick apart what is exactly going on
with this predatory diet culture. The article mentions things like overweight,
proper portion sizes, normal food, and while these phrases are
very normalized and intuitive, I was curious what their origin
really was. Honestly, I have been dreading writing and recording
(10:28):
this episode because if there's one thing I hate talking about,
it is about my relationship with food and disordered eating.
And in a way, I kind of feel like a
hypocrite even like attempting this discussion, because so far in
my life, no matter how much information I learned, how
much empirically true evidence that exists that the way that
(10:51):
we are trained to see ourselves is rooted in dangerous bullshit,
I'm still nowhere close to deprogramming, shaking whatever, ring myself
from it. Failing. It's a vortex. So you're saying, I'm right.
We'll put a pin in that. And the more I
think about this frustration, this failure to like my own body,
(11:14):
and the deeply ingrained belief that women's bodies require this
constant maintenance, observation, improvement, the more I start to feel like,
and I'm looking at you, Kathy Comic. I mean, it's
not that bad. You're right, I'm protecting. So this isn't
a full history of diet culture, but I tried to
(11:35):
put together a crash course because maybe you need to
hear some of this the same way that I did.
The Cathy character's tendency to get frustrated with her body
and the expectations being forced on it take up as
much real estate in the history of the comic as
her relationship and workplace problems, if not more. It's one
of the themes that's most popularly associated and criticized about her.
(12:00):
For many people, the first association of a Kathy comic
is Kathy looking in the mirror at a department store
because she doesn't think she looks right. She thinks that
she's fat and feels that to be fat is to
be bad. Because the fashion trend of the moment, whether
it's nineteen seventy six, when the comics started, or when
it ended catered to real thin women and not actual bodies.
(12:23):
Here's one of my favorites on this subject from the
late nineteen nineties. Kathy is reading a magazine while working
out on her home elliptical machine in sweatpants. In the
past ten years, the amount of money spent on diet
programs has doubled to thirty five billion a year. In
the exact same tenure period, adult Americans have gained an
(12:44):
average of eight pounds eight Kathy looks stressed and gets
off the elliptical. The more money we spend on dieting,
the more weight we gain. The more weight we gain,
the more money we spend on dieting. In the final panel,
Kathy lies flat on her couch with the magazine covering
her face. She is defeated. When I speak of the millennium,
(13:04):
they're referring to the future span of our waistline, and
Kathy is using authentic statistics of the day for American
dieters here. While people loved to make fun of the
character for feeling, strips like this reveal that the system
was rigged to begin with So we've got to take
a look at that system with a brief, admittedly incomplete
(13:24):
history of how diet culture has affected American women and
not just the middle class working women that Kathy tends
to comment on. Again, this is a crash course, So
(13:49):
I quickly would like to shout out the three sources
I used most often in putting this episode together. Those
were Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings, This is
Big by Marissa Metzer, and the amazing Maintenance Phase podcast
from Audrey Gordon and Michael Hopps, And it is with
their sage guidance that I bring you back to ancient Greece. Seriously, Keathy,
(14:15):
I know you read like every book on personal health
from the nineteen seventies to the two thousand's, but you
need to like give me a chance, let the process work. Okay,
ancient grace, goodbye. She's not wrong, but bear with me
for a second, because the way we look at women's
bodies goes way back throughout history. A full female figure
(14:40):
has been the feminine ideal. But as time goes on,
that ideal, which is almost always formed by white men,
becomes slimmer and slimmer. But we're starting in ancient Greece,
because that is where the classical Venus figure comes from.
Maybe you can picture the statue that I'm talking about. Alread.
(15:00):
She's nude, she's covering one nipple and her pubic area.
She doesn't have a twentieth century supermodel body. She has
a body. She has meat on her arms and her
legs and her stomach. The statue, which was originally made
in the first century BC, came to prominence in the
modern sense in the sixteen hundreds when it was displayed
(15:21):
at the Via Medici in Rome, a property that was
run by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and overtime, this
statue became an icon, and the physical figure of Venus
was considered to be the ideal feminine form in Western
European culture, around a time where Western Europe was aggressively
(15:41):
colonizing around the world. This meant, among other things, that
this image of Venus was perpetuated across the globe very quickly,
and women from around the world with different skin tones, builds,
ages were compared against her this fictional statue. The book
Hearing the Black Body does an excellent job of unpacking
(16:03):
how these prominent standards of beauty were almost always created
and standardized like this. They were made up by white men.
They were enforced on white women to display white women
as the peak of femininity and to other non white women.
I'm going to let this book's incredible research and attention
to detail kind of guide us through this period in
(16:24):
history up until the second wave of feminism, where Kathy's
story begins. Author Zabrina Strings unpacks the Venus de Medici's
legacy and its role in establishing the ideal female form.
In Fearing the black body, she says this Venetian voluptuous
nous was united by the notion that beauty was found
(16:44):
in proportionality and that fleshiness was pleasing to the eye.
Strings also describes the absence of non white women in
popular European art during this time, with a few exceptions.
One of these exceptions was a seventeenth century sculpture, and
seventeenth century means that it's from the sixteen hundreds. That
(17:04):
has never not been confusing to me. So if you
knew that you're smarter than me, If you didn't, there
you go. A seventeenth century sculpture called the African Venus,
whose sculpture has been disputed over the years, but is
currently thought to be a Dutch guy named Johann Gregor
vander schardt vander Shart, vander Shart, It's very serious. He's
a serious letting an artist in his last name is
(17:26):
vander Shart. The statue looks very similar to the Venus
de Medici, but instead depicts a black woman's body. And
while the Venus de medici, a white woman is seen
looking away from her own body demurely, the African venus
holds a hand mirror where she views her own image.
And this is just one example of what I'd really
(17:47):
like to stress here, and that is that the way
we view bodies, particularly women's bodies, is very closely tied
to imperialism from every angle. To say that it's just
patriarchy is overly simplest stick because there's a lot of
factors at play here. There are differences in how women's
bodies are treated and viewed by race, by country of origin,
(18:08):
by time period, by build, and by trends of the day.
Basically all of these attitudes were shaped and enforced by
men of European and later American origin. Strings says this
of the African Venus's legacy. In a prelude to ideas
about Africans that would be developed over the next several centuries,
(18:29):
the African venus is lacking in shame, whereas the European
eyed venus putica covers her pubis and breasts. The African
venus is mesmerized by her own beauty as she gazes
wistfully at her own reflection. At this time, women's bodies
were viewed as property in many ways. This could be
through marriage or, as was the case for many African women,
(18:51):
actual enslavement by white people, and these body standards rarely,
if ever, have anything to do with health and sometimes
be directly harmful to health. At certain points in history,
women with fuller figures would be an indication that their
husbands could afford rich foods, and at other times, more
(19:11):
slender women that her husband restricted the intake of food
and drink in order to bring his family closer to God.
This constant recalibration and optimization of white women's bodies and
the mothering of non white women's bodies is a constant trend,
as was the European male tendency to only call black
(19:32):
and brown women beautiful when they had features that resembled
white European women. Women with bigger figures were celebrated in
a way that directly opposed with body standards imposed on men.
Fatness in men was thought to represent a lack of
self control and thinness, as Sabrina Strings put that represented
quote bodily proof of rationality and intelligence unquote. Okay, We're
(19:57):
going to fast forward a bit to a late Renaissance
flam artist named Peter Paul Rubens, who became very famous
for painting nudes of curvy white ladies lining up with
the voluptuous aesthetic popular at the time. To this day,
you still might hear women referred to as ruben esque
by a creepy uncle or a bad writer. Rubens himself
(20:18):
was extremely fixated on how he felt women should look,
to the extent that he wrote a long treatise on
what he considered to constitute beauty and ideal proportionality. He
included a whole chapter on looks that he thought were
specifically hot. Nothing weird going on here, Rubens says this.
The body must not be too thin or too skinny,
(20:41):
nor too large or too fat, but with a moderate
embondment following the model of the antique statues. The hip
or the tops of the thighs, and the thighs themselves
should be large and apple. The botics should be round
and fleshy, the knees should be fleshy and round. As
if anyone asked, that's what I'm saying, What the fuck so?
(21:03):
Rubens paintings ordinarily featured nude white women, and he would
sometimes feature black women in the portrait as a servant
or slave wearing clothing, as he did in paintings like Bath,
Shabbah and Venus in front of the Mirror. This, regretfully,
would have lined up with Ruben's life. He was living
in Antwerp, Belgium, a hub of imperialism and slave trade
(21:25):
during that time. In paintings like these, black women were
explicitly mothered and portrayed as inferior, while white women were
told by Ruben's images how to look in order to
be valuable to society. Sabrina Strings puts it like this.
In other words, whiteness stood not just for social supremacy,
(21:45):
but general superiority. This body standard held pretty firmly for
some time, but things began to shift by the late
seventeen hundreds and into the eighteen hundreds, and it was
during this time that European colonists continued an increasing rate
to wreak havoc and force white supremacy on a large
(22:05):
portion of the planet. There are very few countries that
have gone untouched by the imperialism of this era, and
in the case of many cultures, including indigenous Americans and
a steep increase in the forced enslavement of African people,
entire cultures were massacred and attempted to be erased entirely
in favor of European ideals and culture. And it was
(22:28):
during this time that the bodies of non white women
were further othered, and at times explicitly mothered by being
linked with fatness. A popular example of this lies in
the story of Sarah Bartman, a South African quake Koi
woman who became known by the cruel nickname of the
Hot and taught Venus while living in Cape Town, South Africa.
(22:50):
Bartman was brought to the UK by a Scottish military
surgeon to display her body as an exhibit, but the
more accurate term, based on how her image and body
was monetized, is more like a circus. Many details of
Bartman's life are unknown, and it's not clear whether she
went to the UK in eighteen ten voluntarily or not.
(23:13):
What is known she was toured across Europe because her
body looked different than European women, and she was marketed
with intense grotesque fixation put on her buttocks. White lookers
on could pay to poke and prod at her, and
Bartman was later brought to France and effectively enslaved while
being put on display before she died at forty of
(23:35):
unknown causes, many of said smallpox. There is a lot
more to discuss here about Sarah Bartman's life and much
that isn't known about it. Her legacy and her image,
which was generally illustrated, exaggerated, and disseminated by Europeans, is
historically connected to how black women's bodies are mothered, and
this is something that Saberena Strings sites to demonstrate that
(23:59):
as European beauty standards shifted to encourage white women to
become thinner, non white women were mothered in order to
show white women how not to be. Strings says this,
whether fact or fiction. The purported size of her bottom
and tandem with her presumed general rotundity placed Sarah beyond
the pale of fair skinned European norms of beauty. Racial
(24:22):
theories had linked fatness to blackness in the European imagination,
and they had also linked thinness to whiteness. I'll be
linking tomorrow about Sarah Bartman's life in the episode description.
As the eighteen hundreds continued, body standards began to shift,
Europeans across gender lines were encouraged to eat and drink
(24:43):
less to demonstrate their class, with a lot of pop
culture at the time reinforcing that fatness was linked with
African women, specifically during a time where race science became
a prominent and deeply harmful component of the European imperialist equation. Here,
according to Strings, is how it worked. Englishmen were seen
(25:05):
as arbiters of taste or those capable of creating the
guidelines for judging beauty. English women were treated as its representatives.
As the eighteen hundreds were on, thin white women gradually
became a symbol of not just white supremacy, but of
divine morality and closeness to God. And it's with this
(25:26):
mentality taking hold across the imperial world that early diet
culture began to rear its head. The idea of food
and drink restriction to force thinness was also originally tied
to Christianity, and it was this that motivated an early
unwitting diet guru named George Chain. Chain was a Scottish
(25:47):
born physician whose invention of a diet of milk, seeds,
and fruits not just helped him lose weight, but became
a lucrative diet among aristocratic women of the day. This
launched him into a prominent and comfortable life, even though
he was at the time deeply annoyed that women seemed
to be more drawn to his work than men. Boo who.
(26:09):
Here's a short history of diets in the eighteen hundreds,
all invented by European men. I know I'm being overly
cautious here, but I'm not endorsing these. Please don't do these.
Let's get some music going. The avoiding Swamps diet, which
claimed that living near a swamp caused obesity. Someone alert
Shrek and Donkey to this one. What are you doing
(26:31):
in my swamp? There was the Fletcherism diet, which instructed
that people chew food until it turned to liquid to
fool the body into thinking it was full. There was
the vinegar and water diet as pushed by Lord Byron,
the tapeworm diet which yep, and the first popularized low
(26:52):
carb diet by a British undertaker in William Banton. He
published one of the first ever popular diet book called
A Letter on Corpulence. Let's cut the music. Pushers of
fad diets have long targeted women specifically and are often
exposed to be total scammers, But their scammers with a
(27:14):
very consistent goal to make money and gain notoriety by
encouraging women to alter their habits and bodies under the
assumption that it will make them healthier and more desirable
by society. Some of these diets simply supplemented less healthy
foods with more healthy foods, while others relied on dangerous
(27:34):
gimmicks or modified disordered eating. Diet Pills also started cropping
up in the late eighteen hundreds, which both did not
work and caused severe damage to users bodies. Another very
effective tool for enforcing these body standards goes back to
where we started in this episode. At mass distributed magazines
(27:55):
primarily directed at white girls and women, Sabrina Strings credits
and magazine called Goodie's Lady Book as an early pusher
of body norms in mass media. It was published from
eighteen thirty to eighteen seventy eight in Philadelphia and was
edited by a woman for forty years of its run,
a writer named Sarah Joseph Hale. But as people with
(28:17):
big old brains like you and me, No, you and
I the smartest people to ever live, a woman's involvement
in something does not mean that that's something is holy
pro women. Because while Sarah Joseph Hale did do some
cool stuff, including spotlighting women in the workforce as early
as the eighteen fifties, and hired first wave feminist Sarah
(28:40):
Jane Lippincott as an assistant editor before she was fired
by GODI for denouncing slavery in the magazine. But Sarah
Joseph Hale, as Sabrina Strings tells us, in Fearing the
Black Body, wanted to push the narrative of women as
more than housewives by reinforcing temperance, morality, and food restriction.
(29:15):
Goadie's Lady Book, as many modern magazines still do today,
pushed the idea of optimizing one's body. According to the
morality of the day and the day of Goadie's Lady
Book stated that American beauty was white, Anglo Saxon and
Protestant wasp city baby, some real Charlotte's walking around. All
(29:38):
this to say that many white women who were tastemakers,
even those who claimed to be feminists, were generally complicit
in this mindset. An example is a writer named Lee Hunt,
who once published a piece in Goadie's called Chapter on
Female Features. Sabrina Strings describes the piece like this, Hunt
makes it clear that excessive eating leads to a figure
(30:00):
that would be undesirable for cultivated white women. With more
than a hint of sarcasm, Hunt acknowledges that there are
fashions and beauty as well as dress. With this, she
is suggesting that in other parts of the world, different
standards of beauty apply. Goodie's Ladybook perpetuated and over time
(30:21):
adjusted what the concept of American beauty was. Originally, it
excluded most white immigrant women as well, at different times,
excluding Irish women, Italian women, Polish women, Catholic women, and
Jewish women by associating them with fatness. Over time, however,
most other white women were welcomed into the fold, while black, brown, Indigenous,
(30:45):
and any fat women remained firmly excluded from what the
term American beauty meant. What it boiled down to was
this image of delicate white supremacy, with the white women
representing the eventual reproduction of the race. Strings says that
it was the quote multiple and colliding factors of Protestant
(31:06):
asceticism scientific racism in the protoscience of health and beauty unquote.
After Godie's Lady Book folded Bye Bye, other magazines with
more familiar names took up the mantel. How about Harper's Bizaar.
It began in eighteen sixty seven in New York by
publishing Magnates the Harper Brothers, who marketed the magazine to
(31:27):
middle and upper class white women, and again a woman
served as the editor in chief for its formative years.
Mary Louise Booth edited the magazine from its beginning and
for the next sixteen years, and frequently included columns about
women's dietary habits. There was a column called for the
Ugly Girls that was about falling short of feminine expectations,
(31:49):
and unlike Godie's Lady Book, Harper's Bazaar was unequivocally a
fashion magazine. Fashion is a complicated and fascinating topic that
we'll get to a bit later in the episode, and
it's been used both really powerfully for self and cultural
expression as well as taken advantage of to enforce the
(32:09):
standards of patriarchy and imperialism. Harper's Bizarre from the beginning,
existed at this very tricky intersection. Saberena Strings says this
of the magazine, Harper's reflected a kindred preoccupation with the
right models of beauty, which were based on one's race
and class status. For this reason, the magazine denounced the
fatness of the savage races and exalted the more streamlined
(32:33):
aesthetic of the Germans. This sentiment was to be found
in an eighteen seventy nine article titled the Fixed Facts
of Beauty. In it, the author informs readers that it
is not to say that the laws of beauty are
not fixed, that because the turxy's beauty are not fixed,
that because the turxy's beauty only in the obese and
certain of the savages and the deformed, that therefore the
(32:55):
laws of beauty are arbitrary. It was in the late
eighteen hundred that Cosmo began publishing with a pretty similar
mission to Harper's. It featured articles by writers like Elizabeth Bisland,
who was actually a pretty fascinating character. She engaged in
a race around the world against pioneer investigative reporter Nellie Bligh.
(33:16):
But Bisland also wrote on the concept of American beauty,
talking about thinness as a type of exceptionalism. Here's how
Sabrina Strings characterizes her work. It is a type of
beauty possible only in the United States, where the best
of all races, those from Northern and Western Europe, had
arrived as immigrants. These desirable immigrants had mixed and mingled
(33:39):
to produce progeny who were tall, thin, and of unsurpassed beauty.
And while this mindset is aggressively bigoted, this wouldn't have
been surprising rhetoric for the time by a long shot.
In the early nine hundreds, eugenic race science was becoming
increasingly popular in the United States as a discriminatory tool.
(34:00):
In a New England, Puritan fancy guy named Charles Davenport
Okay founded the Eugenics Records Office in New York, further
pushing the idea that people of color as well as,
to quote Charles Davenport quote polls, Irish and Italians unquote,
were lesser than Eugenics attempted to accomplish this by drawing
(34:23):
attention to slight physical differences, often imagined to justify its
claims of superiority. Eugenics are still weaponized to this day.
By the time these magazines were popular, first wave feminism
was in full swing in the United States, and as
we investigated in episode three of this podcast, all the exclusionary, white,
(34:46):
middle and upper class dominated issues that came with the
time period led to women being granted the vote in
the US, and by that time the body standards in
the United States had firmly changed. While some areas of
the American South had previously celebrated fuller women's figures than
in the North, mass media had more or less perpetuated
(35:09):
the slender white ideal, to the point where articles of
the time said explicitly that the Venus di medici, once
the beauty standard, would now be considered too big to
be beautiful by the American standards. In the early nineteen hundreds,
Harper's Cosmo and advertising at large were overwhelmed with the
(35:30):
image of the Gibson Girl, which were illustrations of the
white lady ideal, drawn by you won't be shocked, some guy,
Charles Dana Gibson. While the Gibson girls varied in their fashions,
all Gibson girls were tall and descended from the British,
forming this image of white American exceptionalism. Nowadays, the Gibson
(35:54):
girl is more commonly associated with American flappers, what women
looked like around the time of an increased focus on
women's rights. But that wasn't necessarily their intent. Gibson himself
was quick to say that his illustrations, while iconic, were
meant to calcify the concept of American beauty and to
exclude women who did not fit its standard. He once
(36:16):
wrote this, what zeng Will calls the melting pot of
the races as resulted in a certain character. There beyond
question the loveliest of all their sex. Evolution has selected
the best things for preservation. Why should women not be beautiful? Increasingly,
why should it not be the fittest in form and features,
as well as mind and muscle, which survives? And where
should that fittest be? In evidence? Most strikingly in the
(36:37):
United States, of course, where natural selection has been going on,
as elsewhere, there has been a great variety to choose from.
The eventual American woman will be even more beautiful than
the woman of today. Her claims to that distinction will
result from a fine combination of the best points of
all those many races which have helped to make our population.
Other American men took a different tech on women's bodies,
(36:58):
which it's incredible to hear so many different perspectives on
something that is none of their business. The perspective I'm
talking about is that of John Harvey Kellogg, who, yes,
ultimately founded that breakfast cereal empire, but began as a
deeply religious and deeply racist eugenicist who feared that American
(37:18):
women had become so thin that they were no longer
adequately fertile to continue the white American race. Not all
women have uterus, as Mr Kellogg, not that you give
a ship. He's said, I don't know what I'm doing.
At the time, John Harvey Kellogg was very clear on
his views. He said, quote, the only hope for the
race is in the future of its girls unquote. He
(37:41):
rejected the physical frame of Gibson girls and flappers, and
encouraged women to eat well Kellogg's cereal to become, as
he told it, heartier and more fertile. There's an entire
book on the full picture by Dr Howard Markle called
the Kellogg's the battling Brothers of Battle Creek. That all
link in the description. It is a bizarre and disturbing legacy.
(38:05):
So Tony the Tiger part of the EU genesis legacy.
I don't make the facts, but it's my sacred duty
to report them. Snap crackle and pop Uron noticed the
Raisin brand's son sick. Oh, get them out of there?
And what good with these exceptionalist ideals? And magazines and
advertising be without rules and products with which to attain
(38:28):
the look. Beginning in nineteen thirteen, scales for the home
became consumer products so that people could monitor their bodies
from the comfort of their own bathroom. The concept of
calories became standard with a nineteen eighteen best seller called
Diet and Health with Key to the Calories by Lulu
Hunt Peter's Watch Your Weight. The cover warned and in
(38:50):
its pages Peters described fatness as a quote disease unquote.
The concept of body mass index came into play with
something called ideal weight tables, most popularly with tables circulated
by MetLife Insurance. The data these tables used were entirely
based off of white and disproportionately male bodies, and we're
(39:13):
not designed with mind towards actual bodily health, but instead
to be used by insurance companies in order to assess
risk on who qualifies for life insurance. Come on. The
b m I as we know it now came to
prominence in the US in nineteen seventy two, just four
years before the Cathy strip debuted in American newspapers. While
(39:34):
the b m I was just a modification of these tables,
which completely excluded non white people and many women, it
was eventually adopted by the NIH or National Institute of Health. Previously,
the nih had utilized those MetLife Life insurance tables. The
inherent racism of the body mass Index is well documented,
(39:55):
in spite of its popularity to this day. I will
link some resources in the descrip option and it's here
in the nineties seventies where our girl Cathy re enters
the picture. Now that you're up to speed on how
we arrived at the diet culture that the Kathy comic
was staring down the barrel of when the comics started.
We're going to pick up there in part two of
(40:17):
this episode later in the week. By back Cast is
an I Heart radio production. It is written, researched, and
hosted by me Jamie Loftus, Sophie Electuman is the world's
Greatest producer, Isaac Taylor is the world's greatest editor, Zoe
Blade writes the world best music, and Brandon Dickert wrote
(40:38):
the world best theme song. In today's episode, you heard
the vocal talents of Sharene Lana unas Maggie Cannon, Isaac Taylor,
and the Icon herself, Jackie Michelle Johnson as Kathy. We
will see you Wednesday,
Host
Jamie Loftus
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