August 11, 2021 • 48 mins
In part 2 on our look into Cathy's commentary on body image, we speak with author Marissa Metzger, hop on a rollercoaster of boomer disordered eating fads, and see what Cathy's frustration with her own body says about us.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
She burst into the world in nineteen seventy six. She's
at what, She's out on dates, and she don't like politics,
from Mama and urban to feminist friends. And she's fighting
all the stands with chocolate and hand Kathy, She's fighting back.
She stressed with success. Let's call her some slack Kathy,
(00:24):
Mycathy fan Cathy. She's gotta like go in all baby.
(00:46):
Welcome back to ac cast. I am Jamie Loftus, and
today we're gonna keep digging into the assortid and frustrating
history of American beauty standards that were commented on in
the Kathy comics. We're picking up at the dawn of
second feminism in the late nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies
and the expectations of women's bodies that existed when the
(01:06):
Kathy strip first debuted. Body positivity was not a part
of the second wave American mainstream feminism that Kathy Guy's
White released her comic strip into hell. Body acceptance wasn't
in the popular conversation. Body neutrality doesn't come up once,
But that doesn't mean that fat activism wasn't happening. The
(01:27):
fat rights movements started in nineteen sixty nine by Bill Fabri,
which led to the establishment of the National Association to
Advance Fat Acceptance. Then, a group of radical California feminists
formed the Fat Underground in nineteen seventy three and released
the Fat Manifesto, which demanded equal rights for fat people
(01:47):
and condemned quote unquote reducing industries wholesale but in the mainstream,
just as white feminist did in the first wave of feminism,
rigid control of the body was co opted by femine
is m as this showing of competence and control, a
control that was rare for a woman to have over
herself at the time. Second wave mainstream feminism very much
(02:11):
subscribe to this, and so what we see in a
lot of early Kathy comics feels very bizarre. In thees.
From the very beginning of the strip in nine, the
Kathy character is extremely self conscious about her weight. This
is originally prompted by her gaining some weight after successfully
quitting cigarettes early in the strips run good on your Babe,
(02:33):
not easy to do, but this fixation on her weight
and her body continues in the strip for the next
thirty four years. The Kathy characters weight loss goals shift
throughout the strip and remained pretty vague. She usually seems
to be looking to lose between ten and forty pounds
and is willing to try almost any fad, diet or
fitness trend to accomplish that. Like many of the themes
(02:56):
explored in the Kathy strips, the subject of food and
even gaining weight after quitting cigarettes came from Kathy guys
White's own life. She wrote on this shared struggle with
her character to ditch cigarettes, which was at the time
considered to be a popular weight loss and weight maintenance tool.
In a collection of the strip, guys White says this,
(03:19):
on one hand, it seems a little cruel to share
this particular vice with Kathy. On the other hand, in
light of the number of women whose liberation has included
the freedom to start smoking, it seemed very appropriate. Besides,
I didn't think it was fair that Kathy should go
completely untouched by something that made me so miserable. And
(03:40):
the most hardline feminist character in the comic strip, Kathy's
friend Andrea, is fully in support of Kathy's weight loss goals,
in spite of the fact that we're never led to
believe that these goals have anything to do with Kathy's
health or that her weight is negatively affecting her health.
Her goals and Andrea's support of them are completely aesthetic based,
(04:01):
and for a hardline feminist, it's bizarre to hear her
kind of bullying Kathy over dieting. Here's a strip from
the late nineteen seventies, from the first collection of Kathy
comics ever to be released. Kathy and Andrea are sitting
in the kitchen, Kathy in front of a plate of
milk and cookies. What do you think you're doing, Kathy?
(04:22):
I'm eating cookies, Andrea, but you're within four pounds of
your goal. You can't give up your diet now. I
don't think I'm ready to deal with success. The difference
that forty plus years can make here. The intention of
this strip is clearly that Kathy has failed at her goal.
She hasn't restricted the way she was supposed to, and
(04:42):
picking up the cookie is a sign of weakness. But
with a modern lens turned on this, Andrea's kind of
the villain. Why is this her business? Why are you
yelling at your physically healthy friend, as far as we know,
over a cookie like get a life? You cop early
Kathy strips also established the themes of dieting, weight, and
(05:03):
restriction as a cornerstone for Kathy's relationship with her mother.
Throughout the strip's history, it becomes a very recognizable dynamic
between these characters to first take on a diet, then
try to reinforce the rules with each other, and eventually
quit the diet in celebration and eat food together. Another
common dynamic is Cathy's tendency to break her diet and
(05:25):
gain weight while visiting her parents. It's a recognizable dynamic
with a lot of families, but it makes a Kathy
character double down on associating time with her family as
times to police her body extra carefully. Here's Kathy and
her mom talking in mom's kitchen in that same nineteen
seventies collection, The Kathy Chronicles. I thought you were out
(05:48):
shopping for new clothes today, Kathy. I tried, Mom, but
I'm still too fat to fit into anything. Dacent, Kathy
takes a back of chips off the counter and starts
eating them. So why are you stuffing yourself again? I
figured I might as well put my money where my
mouth is. By the time these strips were written and released,
the concept of women publicly discussing their weight with each
(06:11):
other and encouraging each other to achieve the body standards
of the time was deeply normalized. Part of this was
thanks to the continued success of women's magazines, but by
the nineteen seventies there were also groups like weight Watchers,
which was invented in the nineteen sixties by a former
Queen's housewife named Gene Nititch. Weight Watchers is still massively
(06:34):
popular today Oprah as their current big name representative, but
it began as essentially a rip off of a nineteen
fifties diet from the U. S Board of Nutrition that
was built around lean meat, fish, skim milk, and fruits
and veggies. What Gene Nititch added to the equation was
the idea of community. Weight Watchers wasn't just a diet,
(06:55):
it was also a weekly meeting with the same group
of locals, mostly women. It provided structure, a sense of
being beholden to your fellow weight watchers, and sometimes friendship.
I can't tell you how many moms and aunts of
my friends growing up were in programs like this and
held the communities created by them very very closely. The
(07:15):
history of Gene Ninitch's life, her company, and the persistent
existence of weight Watchers is chronicled in the book This
Is Big by writer Marissa mets Her. The book also
follows Marissa's own experience as a millennial woman being pressured
in socially conditioned to engage with diet culture for most
of her life, which culminates and her trying weight Watchers
(07:39):
as a social experiment that doesn't give the result promised,
but did yield really incredible insights into how diet culture
works today. She also speaks on her thoughts on the
pitfalls of body positivity messaging and much of diet cultures
rebranding as wellness culture, and she was kind enough to
speak with me about how diet clure became so popular
(08:01):
during the second wave of feminism and how diet culture
and white feminism aren't as at odds as history would
like you to believe. Here's some of our interview. It
does seem like during the second wave feminist movement, Geane
and weight Watchers were at least making these, however flawed
attempts to interact with that movement, which I found kind
(08:25):
of surprising, honestly, um, so, could you speak to that
a little bit and just kind of contextualize how diet
culture has kind of overlapped with feminist movements. So, you know,
one way to view weight watchers and is that it's
always kind of this mirror to the culture. One way
to that I really looked at weight Watchers was through
(08:46):
Weywatchers magazine because there was at complete archive that I
could look at, and Um, Gene knight Ish, the founder,
had a column. It was an advice column, and so
every once in a while she get these pieces, these
like letters from people asking about things like feminism. So
(09:08):
you could see sort of what weight watchers thought about
these things firsthand. And it's you know, it is interesting
because so the magazine would do things like tackle women
going to work, and um, you know there's like a
picture of Gene with Gloria Steinem and so feminism was
(09:35):
Feminism was not ignored, but it also wasn't necessarily something
that was like a linked society, and I maybe that
era there was a little less of that sort of
like connecting everything you do back to feminism. And then
you know, as like the eighties went on, you start
(09:59):
to see part tenants of weight Watchers that are more
sort of reflective of feminism in a big picture way,
like maybe women were working and not making food at
home as much, so weight Watchers allowed or made it
easier to eat out in restaurants. And this is where
(10:19):
Gene Nightich and weight Watchers really took hold on the culture.
The way that Knightag's involvement in this company that she
built from the ground up declined over time was very
telling of the period and American feminism that she was
prominent during. Jean was born only three years after women
got the vote. She was a lower middle class housewife who,
(10:41):
unhappy with how others perceived her fatness, ripped off an
existing diet and made it marketable to women like herself.
In the early days of weight Watcher's massive success, Nightitch
was an essential part of the brand. She lived large,
she spoke in a motivational capacity, She had a consistent
column and weight Watcher's magazine, The Whole Bit. She and
(11:01):
her first husband eventually split due to his frustrations with
her career coming before her being a wife. Then, in
nineteen three, Nightitch stepped down from weight Watchers during the
company's tenth year, and she sold the company to the
Heinz Corporation for over seventy one million dollars. As she
grew older, her image and legacy were slowly stripped from
(11:24):
the picture. Metzer shares an anecdote that, towards the end
of her life, Nightitch has claimed to have called Weight
Watchers corporate headquarters to ask secretaries if Jeane Nightitch was
still alive, and that sometimes the person picking up the
phone had no idea. Marissa Metzer is no stranger to
wait Watchers and programs like it, having been pushed into
(11:44):
them from a very young age. So I asked her
what her experience was coming of age in the eighties
and nineties in the same period of diet culture that
Kathy Comics comments on extensively. Here's some more of our interview.
I remember are going to a Weight Watchers location in um,
(12:05):
Santa Cruz, California, where I grew up. And UM it
was in you know, like some kind of like strip
mall and UM, and I was definitely the youngest person there.
I was probably like eight or something like that. My
mom and I did it together because that was a
totally acceptable thing thing to do in the eighties, and UM,
(12:30):
I had been on kind of my parents has probably
put me on my first diet when I was about
I don't know, four or so, so you know, dieting
was not um new to me at all, probably unfortunately.
And um, I don't feel like I lasted very long
on Weight Watchers, mostly because I just didn't laugh very
(12:53):
long on any diet. Like it's hard to really like
be disciplined when you don't really understand why you're on
a diet, and like it's hard enough to kind of
be on a diet when you decide you need to
lose weight and you want to be on it, and instead,
I feel like I was always just put on these
diets and it was like, you know, like now you
(13:14):
can't have lemonade or whatever, and it was always just
sort of like, you know, just confusing and um, so
you know, I just the overall sensation of diety in
that era was that, you know, it was something that
I had to do because my body was sort of
(13:36):
too big and wrong, and that it was something that's
sort of like all women or most women kind of
did and worried about. The Cathy character's life was filled
with diet moments like Marissa is describing and Cathy guys
white always approached the futility of bad diets with the
knowledge that the vast majority of them were a scam.
(13:59):
While fat liberation movement continued throughout the eighties and nineties,
the mainstream did not accept it. The message of restrictive
diets and bodily discipline reigned over women of this time,
feminists or not. Often, the Kathy character would enlist her
friends and later in the strip her on and off
partner irving to lose weight with her. Here's Kathy talking
(14:22):
with Andrea on a walk in the early eighties. I
can't believe you're actually going through with the membership, and
Merric spark. Kathy, you can't afford it. Well, the lady
pointed out to me that if I spend that much
on a membership, the guilt will really drive me to
use the place. She said that when I see how
fast my anches disappear, it'll be worth any price. Andrea,
(14:47):
it's gotta make me lose weight. Andrea walks away, and
Cathy's optimism melts into anxiety. In the last panel, I
just spent my whole year's food budget on it. And
let's get that fat diet music going again, because here
is just a smattering of fad diets that existed during
the Cathy Comics run. There was, of course, wait Watchers,
(15:12):
Jenny Craig slim Fast. I didn't have time to eat right.
I was constantly on the go. All I was doing
was grabbing jump food. I've lost twenty two pounds on
the slim Fast plan. This has been the easiest plan
I've ever been on. The Atkins Low Carb diet, the
South Beach diet that had good carbs and bad carbs,
the Cabbage diet, the Grapefruit diet, the Cottage Cheese diet,
(15:35):
the Beverly Hills diet. If edra pills, those ones are bad,
the Scarsdale diet, and liquid diets, most famously endorsed when
Oprah pulled out a little red wagon full of sixty
pounds of fat that she lost live on the air
after a six week liquid starvation diet. But up until
(15:56):
six weeks, I absolutely nothing. I want you to know
that whatever diet you choose, and this audience is filled
with people who have had great successes, you can do
with the help of your family doctor, and if you
can believe in yourself and believe that this is the
most important thing in your life is Scott said to
us earlier, you can conquer it because if I did it,
(16:18):
if Scott did it, if Billy did it, you can
do it. I thank you very much, thank you. And
let's take a second for Oprah here. There's a great
episode of Maintenance Phase that examines some of the more
dangerous diets that she pushed. But Oprah was more than
just a tastemaker for American women of the late twentieth century.
(16:53):
From the debut of her daytime talk show in through
now as a Weight Watchers ambassador, Oprah was the boomer
woman who told other boomer women how to empower themselves.
And being a massively popular daily show, Oprah covered and
often pushed fads in diet and exercise. And for all
(17:13):
of the good that she's done and the unquestionable icon
that she is, she's also introduced figures into the American
zeitgeist who continue to how you say reek, absolute havoc
on the general public to this day. Your doctor phills,
your doctor os is just a litany of scary and
sometimes fake doctors. Kathy Strips mentioned Oprah in text a
(17:36):
number of times. Because of who Oprah was, she served
as a cultural stand in for a woman who struggled
to meet the societally accepted body norm of the time,
and both succeeded and failed very publicly. So she definitely
would have been a person that the Cathy character would
have compared herself to and taken advice from as far
as the wagon of fat goes. Not for nothing, Oprah
(17:59):
did say in two thousand five that this liquid diet
was extremely unhealthy and that she wouldn't do it again.
As the third wave of feminism crusted in the early nineties,
the mainstream engaged in diet and fitness fads and promoted
them as a part of how women could feel empowered.
It presented this illusion of control in a way to
(18:20):
better oneself that simultaneously preyed on women's time and their
money and their sense of self. Here's a Cathy strip
from the nineties, as she's standing outside the gym with
her friend Charlene. She's about to start a new diet,
a fad called the Healthy Food Plan for Life that
was all the rage at the time. The grapefruit diet
(18:41):
three weeks and it was over. The Healthy Food Plan
for Life. Sixty more years of fat free salad dressing,
the Hollywood diet four weeks and it was over the
Healthy Food Plan for Life, sixty more years of boneless,
skinless chicken breast, the fruit juice Fast thirty six hours,
(19:02):
and it was over the Healthy Food Plan for Life.
Sixty more years of melon balls for dessert. In the
last panel, Kathy and Charlene leave the gym looking at
their diet plans. Crash diets never worked, but at least
they had an end sixty more years of brand flakes
and skim milk. The county character's long standing battle with
(19:25):
body image intersected with two other common themes in the comic,
fashion and exercise pads. The exercise trends and Cathy's constant
struggle to abide by them were referenced in the characters
merchandizing all the Time. I actually owned some of these
oversized T shirts. One reads body language and shows Kathy
frantically jazzer sizing as thought bubbles surround her body. They
(19:48):
say ac grumble, crunch out, and on and on. Another
T shirt shows five Kathy's a hiker, a walker, a runner,
a biker, and an eater. Another shirt shows for Kathy's
one is power stepping one is power walking, one is
power sliding, and the last is her collapsed on the
gym floor power outage. So even the merch explicitly references
(20:12):
that the Kathy character fails but keeps trying. As we
talked about at the top of this episode, Kathy and
Irving lent their image to wait Watchers for a couple's
workout program, and Kathy and Mr Pinkley's images were used
to promote a weight Watchers at Work program. The character
tried to keep up with workout trends in the strip.
(20:33):
She got a home gym, she got an overpriced gym
membership that she barely used, and at the same time,
real life workout fads came and went in the US
think step classes, jazz er size, buns of steel, the
Thigh Master. Richard Simmons piloates the Jane Fonda workout, which
I did do in Quarantine quite a bit, but I
(20:54):
hear it's actually not good for you. And then there's
the subject of fashion. The Kathy character is seen literally
hundreds of times in the strips run looking at herself
in the mirror of a department store changing room and
being unhappy with what she sees In many strips. Kathy
Geiswhite is commenting on the consumer fashion industry itself, how
(21:14):
it often failed to take anyone but the supermodel into consideration,
and how stores targeted women to pressure them into buying
an excess of clothes they didn't actually need. Here's an
example with Kathy talking to the department store employee who
serves as the service industry character stand in across the
board for the duration of the comic. This one's from
(21:35):
the seventies. Hi, I'd like some blue jeans. What collar
do you want? Kathy is behind the changing room partition
and hands the sales lady a pair of jeans. These
jeans are great, except they're nine inches too long. Can
I try the same size, only shorter? Now? The women's
geans only common wan leg If you want the right length,
(21:57):
you'll have to go with men's jeans. I your pardon,
living jeans coming one length, men's genes coming all different lengths.
Does someone out there think all women have the same
size legs? Now? I guess they just figure out women
know how to sell. Look, let's just forget it. I'll
take these, but I want them altered. No candy that either.
(22:17):
We only do alterations on the men's side. The men
don't need alterations there janes come the right length. Oh wow,
and we girls when wear blue jeans. I that one
of the little things, and we have that one up.
Kathy's fashion dilemmas are almost always telling of the cultural
moment they're released into, and that strip we see the
(22:40):
double standards of second wave feminism, where women are promised
the genes that men have been wearing, but are still
met with increased aesthetic pressure. This carries throughout the nine eighties.
The feminist backlash brought with it a new wave of
constantly changing fashion trends and pressure put on women of
all classes to keep up with them. The chronicling very
(23:02):
specific fashion trends became the norm, and the strip normally
Kathy arrives at the department store only to be frustrated
by yet another trend made only for thin women, that
she's expected to spend money on in order to be accepted.
Here we are in the nineties, Cathy is trying on
an ill fitting suit with a miniskirt. The same sales
lady speaks with her. Nothing mirrors our emancipation from the
(23:24):
workaholic eighties than our quest for the nineties quality of life,
like the refined women's suit. Every feminine inch says, Oh sure,
I may be going to a board meeting, but I
may also be popping out for tea. I may go
for a stroll in the museum. I may spend the
afternoon at the theater. In short, it's business attire that
says I have better things to do with my life
(23:45):
than sitting this boring office. In the final panel, the
sales lady places a hat on Cathy's head as Cathy
checks the price tags on the suit. Cathy rolls her
eyes and says, for instance, I could go stand in
the unemployment law. Oh ha ha, here hot pink, your
lips still look a bit serious. Cathy's experiences in the
(24:08):
department store comments on everything from shoulder pads in the
coke days of the eighties to the grunge trend of
the nineties to my personal favorite, the hot topic got
trend of the mid two thousand's. But Cathy's most memorable
brushes with fashion and looking at herself with dissatisfaction was
in the swimsuit department, a trope so associated with the
(24:30):
comic that Kathy guys white herself talked about it on
late night appearances. Here she is with Jay Leno. Look
at a bathing suits you wants have like a couple
of bathing suit things, ex abaiting suit things. Well, women
have two main figure problem areas the top half of
our bodies and the bottom half of our bottom. And
every year the fashion industry finds a way to make
(24:53):
things worse. You know, it used to be that a
woman could depend on a one piece suit which at
least covered more. And now the one piece suits that
they have out their I'm sure the women in this
audience have had that experience. If you pull them up
high enough to cover the top, then the length hoole
comes up to the waist and the entire rear end
is on displaying when I wait. And if you come
(25:13):
the top pull the suit down far enough to cover
the rear, then the top is either smashed as flat
as a pancake or entirely exposed. And if you find
that one miraculous bathing suit that that actually covers both
the top and the rear, then they will have laminated
a sequin leopard on the stomach with a hole for
all the flat points out of his mouth, like in
(25:35):
this clip. Guy's White talked in the strip about how
bathing suit were not made for regular women's bodies, and
her character tended to interpret this as a frustrating but
ultimately personal failing. The Kathy character vocalizes her anger that
swimwear isn't made for her, but ultimately buckles to the
pressure that it's her who must change, not the fashion industry.
(25:58):
Here's Kathy bringing a tiny one piece into a changing room.
She thinks to herself, swimwear shopping Stage one, I want
a bathing suit that's fabulous, looking, sexy, flirty, and fun.
Swimwear shopping stage two. I want a bathing suit that's
attractive and fits my life and personality. In the third panel,
(26:20):
Cathy is in the changing room after putting the swimsuit on,
leaning outside the curtain and panicking. Swimwear Shopping Stage three.
I want something that's not gross. I'll consider anything that
isn't grows. In the last panel, the curtain of the
changing room is entirely closed. A narration box reads once again,
(26:40):
the quest for a bathing suit parallels the search for
a date. Cathy's voice comes from inside the changing room. Okay, fine,
A little grows, but not really really grows. This is
where the Cathy versus stood on body image in the
ninety nineties, and the merchandizing continued to capitalize on now
(27:00):
well established connection between the Kathy character and diet culture.
This brings me to the mother of all Kathy food crossovers.
I still can't believe this exists. I'm kind of obsessed
with it. It's a cookbook called and I cannot stress
this enough Girl Food, Girl Food, Girl Food. I am
(27:24):
genuinely thrilled to report that this isn't a diet cookbook wholesale.
There are some low calorie recipes, but there's plenty of
food as well. It was co authored by Barbara Albright,
a cookbook author who had also made cookbooks with the
likes of Regis and Kathy Lee, and with Jim Davis
on a Garfield cookbook. Girl Food is separated into five
(27:46):
sections with different recipes according to these themes romance food,
swimsuit food, sweatsuit food, grown up food, and consolation food.
The introduction from Kathy S. White reads like this, this
is the cookbook that speaks to women. Women who want romance,
(28:06):
women who require chocolate, women who dream of wearing a
swimsuit somewhere besides the bathroom. Women who need to entertain
like a sophisticated grown up. Women who want to lie
on the sofa in a sweatsuit and eat cookie dough
in short, women whose lives are a little too complex
to only have one sort of recipe on hand at
any given moment. The book consists of simple recipes written
(28:28):
by Barbara Albright, with dishes named by Kathy guys White,
along with a series of original Kathy cartoons and the
recipe titles. If I may do not disappoint, Let's get
a music bed, going something vacation e recipe titles from
the Girl Food Cookbook. While he casually reads the morning paper,
(28:49):
I'll be silently planning out the course of our entire relationship. Waffles.
Instead of using the old seran wrap and stiletto heel's
approach to spice things up, I think I'll try some
fru dsac asparagus vinagrette. Love means never having to say,
of course, I like football pork tenderloin. After five hundred
(29:10):
and two dinners and four hundred and twenty seven cups
of coffee, I think it's time to get serious. Marry me. Moose,
always a bridesmaid, never the same size, low calorie cole Slaw.
Why did I buy an itsy bitsy teeny weeny bikini Linguini?
That one is my favorite one. I got this book
five months ago, and I think about that recipe title
(29:31):
every day of my life. I go to the gym,
but I seem to have misplaced my energy art to
choke mushroom tortalini salad. And I woke up late anyway,
So why bother leaving the house spiced struzel apple bunt
coffee cake. And look, I haven't cooked any of these recipes.
But if you don't think that this woman deserves a
Pulitzer for coming up with why did I buy an
(29:53):
itsy bitsy teeny weeny bikini Linguini? Turn off the podcast
Hemingway wishes. So that's the cookbook, and I legally must
tell you again that it is called girl food. Try
the most avoid the cole Slaw, trust me. Kathy Guy's
(30:25):
White towed this line of disparaging diet culture while also
dipping her toe into it at a time where the
pressure to consume products diets ideas was reinforced by advertising
and the women who were advertising clothes were overwhelmingly thin
and traditionally attractive, going back to that American beauty standard
(30:47):
that have been taking shape for a hundred fifty years.
Kathy comics were popular at the same time that supermodels
reigned supreme over the fashion industry. In our episode on
the Boomer generation, I spoke with Elanie, a retired ad
executive from California who was working at a high level
at the time some of the most successful supermodels in
(31:08):
history were coming to prominence. Your Christie Brinkley's, your Naomi Campbell's,
your Cindy Crawford's. While these women were presented to the
world as care free and effortless, it's commonly known now
that the modeling industry was, and to a degree remains,
rooted in promoting disordered eating and food restriction, as well
as perpetuating racist standards of colorism and featurism in order
(31:31):
to curate and promote the version of American beauty that
Kathy was trying to live up to. To better understand
how these images are constructed, I returned to an interview
that I did for our episode on Boomers with a
former ad executive. I'm going to call Melanie, who worked
high up in the model driven advertising world of the
nineteen eighties and nineties. Here's a little bit of our talk.
(31:54):
You know, there's a whole whatever. There's so many Kathy
comics that are about body image and about comparing her
self to magazine images and commercial images. What was it
like curating those kinds of images, especially with um the
beauty products, Revlon Um, Mabeling, I mean, you name it,
(32:15):
we did at Claire all Um, the Virginia Slims. A
lot of it was wanting the women, the girls, and
when it was beauty they had to be eighteen. They
didn't and some of them they could even slide younger
than that. If they were younger, if they were fifteen, sixteen.
They wanted them to look thirty but with no wrinkles.
(32:41):
So there was a very unrealistic thing of what the
thirty year old might look like. A thirty year old
might have a few lines. Um, they might have a
few lines here, um. Breasts were augmented right and left. UM.
(33:01):
I did a lot of things. I do remember doing
the first Self magazine cover, and the main thing about
Self was that I just remember a lot of times
I would have to ask they need to come in
in a bathing suit or eliotard because we need to
see their body. And unless they asked for someone ethnic,
(33:21):
it meant white, okay, just without question, without question, without question,
there would if they asked for they would ask for
an ethnicity. Um. If they wanted Hispanic, they would ask Hispanic.
If they wanted Asian, they would ask Asian. If they
wanted black, they would ask black. But the black always
(33:45):
had to have whider features. Much of mainstream advertising, diet culture,
and the bulk of how women are told to feel
about their bodies in the West is tied back to
white colonialism. That's just what it is and what see
And Kathy is a middle class white woman failing to
meet an impossible standard. But we didn't see in the
(34:06):
newspaper funnies very often at all were women who were
excluded from the notion of American beauty altogether. What I
feel sure of is that, in spite of occasionally profiting
from it, Kathy guys White knew that diet culture was bullshit.
We don't just know this because her heroine fails to
change her body, but because Guy's white is explicitly telling
(34:28):
us that it's bullshit, and her work all the time.
Here's a strip where Kathy, Charlene, and another friend talk
about their years of monitoring their bodies while getting changed
for an aerobics class. It will never be like it
was the first time, Charlene. Yeah, I know, Kathy. I
was so innocent, so full of hope, and it worked.
(34:51):
It worked because I didn't sabotage it with analysis and distrust.
It worked because I just believed it would work. Their
friend walks in and she only catches the end of
Kathy's sentence, first love, first diet. In the last panel,
Kathy is inconsolable. I've never even heard of trans fatty
(35:13):
acids for the Kathy character. Body optimization is a zero
sum game for American women. Body optimization as a zero
sum game, and as comfortable as it is to consider
this an issue of the past, it isn't. Young people
of all races, genders, classes are still targeted by this
culture to this day. And you're kidding yourself fifth and
(35:36):
I'm about to sound five hundred years old, but you're
kidding yourself if you think we won't be talking about
the body image repercussions of social media filters and influencers
very soon. They're the most recent way to reinforce those
same standards that white Western men have been pushing four
hundreds of years. And the gen Z end of this
story is still unfolding, But I feel pretty comfortable saying
(36:00):
at millennials have been pretty firmly fucked up by the
body standards they grew up around. The good news is
that the body positivity movement and fat activism is firing
on more cylinders than at any other time in history.
There's now a number of prominent celebrities that are rejecting
diet culture and embracing themselves, emphasizing that their self worth
(36:21):
and personal health are what take precedent over aesthetics, and
activists who are demanding fair treatment. Legally, that's not nothing,
because that's not the messaging that most millennials and all
previous generations received in magazines and pop culture when they
were growing up. Fun fact about me, I used to
work at Playboy magazine as a fact checker. They paid
(36:42):
me ten dollars an hour before taxes. Anyways, the time
that millennials became media cognizant in the late nineties through
the early twenty tons, depending on when you were born,
we're actually kind of a low on how rigid body
standards were enforced. Here's a viral tweet from writer Lucy
Huber from a few months ago that I think sums
this up really nicely. If any gen z you're wondering
(37:05):
why every millennial woman has needing disorder, it's because in
the two thousand's, a normal thing to say to a
teenage girl was when you think you feel hungry, you're
actually thirsty, So just drink water and you'll be fine.
There's a great essay on this topic by the wonderful
writer Ann Helen Peterson called the millennial vernacular of fat phobia.
(37:25):
She begins by talking about how a cover of seventeen
magazine from the summer of featured a photo of a
quote unquote regular girl on the cover. This girl is
still sis, white, thin and wearing a bikini, but I
guess isn't quite the supermodel level of thinness. Honestly, I
wouldn't have guessed that until Peterson draws your attention to
(37:46):
the fact that this was very deliberately done by seventeen
their reason to be inclusive of other kinds of bodies.
A link of photo of this cover, because it truly
is like what that just looks like a model? Peterson writes,
if this body was non ideal, I remember thinking, then
what was mine? This is a question that Kathy geist
(38:09):
White seeks to answer through her characters with varying degrees
of success, because she did sometimes profit from the diet
culture that she criticized. Cathy's Trips, as you know by
Now ended in two thousand and ten. But I'd be
interested to see how the character would have received the
body positivity and wellness movements that became prominent in the
(38:30):
through now. Anne Helen Peterson sites writer Sarah Miller's New
York Times essay the diet industrial Complex got me and
it will never let me go. Miller writes, this suddenly
about a decade ago, when I started to notice that
fat women were a calling themselves fat with pride and
be walking down the streets of our nation's great cities,
(38:52):
nonchalantly wearing tight or revealing clothing with a general air
of yeah, I will wear this, and I will wear
whatever I want. And I am hot too. I will
be hot forever, long after you have all died. I
thought to myself, Oh my god, what the solution is
not the diet I started seeing fat, beautiful models and
(39:15):
actresses and catalogs and on television shows. I would have
liked to see more, but I was pleased to see
them at all. I was and remain in awe of
their confident beauty. I feel tenderness for them as well,
for what they endured and still endured to achieve it.
I sometimes choke up with love for them and for
the idea of how I could have lived if I
had allowed myself to just weigh what I weighed. It's
(39:39):
worth acknowledging that this is not and I can't think
of a worse phrase to use here, so I apologize.
But this is not a one size fits all ideology,
and everyone has a pretty personal connection to how body
standards and diet culture have affected them specifically. I started
disordered eating when I was eight years old, and I'm
(40:00):
trying to push past it. I still have these vivid
memories of how women's bodies were discussed by other people.
I don't know why this is the thing that's stuck
with me, but there's a very specific episode of Family
Guide that informed my anorexia through high school. This ship
is hard to shake and and it's still everywhere Marissa Metzer,
(40:20):
who we spoke with earlier, has written on modern body
positivity and how wellness culture that's popular right now tends
to rebrand old diet culture standbys extensively, and she spoke
with me about how the body positivity movement has affected
her on a personal level. Here's some of our conversation.
When coupled with something like Instagram, which is so visual,
(40:44):
there was this kind of bastardization where instead of being
about um, you know, the idea that any body is
entitled to exist and live and not harassed and you know,
right on roller coasters and wear great clothes and all
(41:07):
of that, the message was becoming more and more about just,
you know, I love myself. And it was so often
in the guys of you know, attractive women who had
proportionate our glass bodies, you know, like selfies with your like,
you know, boyfriend with like a David Beckham haircut, and
(41:28):
he's like, you know, like scaring your crevide or whatever.
Like it just drove me crazy and I started, you know,
thinking about it critically because I was just feeling like,
not only am I a failure um at dieting, and
that I can't keep the weight off and I, you know,
(41:49):
at all diet and I'll stop dieting and I'll diet again. Um,
but I'm also a failure at loving myself. You know.
This idea of like failure on top of fail Elier
was really interesting to me and really pled me, and
frankly still does. I think the core that I come
to is that our relationship with our bodies is of
(42:14):
course going to feel really important and really central, which
is why something like the idea of body neutrality is
hard for me, because I'm never going to feel neutral
about my body, and so we have this really important
relationship with our body, but at the same time we're
told to just kind of like manage our feelings with it,
(42:36):
is if that's something that's easy to do or to change.
To be clear here, fat activism and body positivity are
not the same movement. Fat activists have criticized the body
positivity movement for lacking an explicit political goal. It's a
complicated topic, and I encourage you to learn more about
the activist work that's being done. With all that in mind,
(42:59):
it's pretty is safe to say that the Kathy character
never had body positivity in her vocabulary, much less fat activist,
and the very fact that these movements have continued to
thrive and grow is a testament to hard one progress.
But that doesn't mean that the hundreds and arguably thousands
(43:19):
of years connected to controlling and mothering women's bodies just
goes away in a handful of years. One of the
most talented actors and comedians working today is jannasch Meeting,
who is currently on Rutherford Falls on Peacock. You should
watch it, and she gave an interview with Bona Petite
recently about her experience as a mini Kanju and Lakota
(43:41):
woman and her evolving relationship with food. Her sadly defunct
podcast is called Woman of Size and is another I
would strongly recommend. But I've been thinking about this interview
for weeks and it came right to my mind when
I sat down to record this. Jenna says this, there's
a direct link between culture and anti blackness and anti indigenousity.
(44:04):
The Settler Gaze Center's piety and purity in the way that,
especially for women, means you have to be anti savage.
It says you should practice control and suppression over food.
Over all of these that we find joy in over
a lot of the things that were celebrated by indigenous
people and enslaved African people. Later in the interview, she continues,
(44:26):
I can't stand the rhetoric that food is fuel. It
is directly linked to weight loss and what I would
call white wellness culture, which I feel is a very
hard thing to vilify because then people think your anti wellness. Well,
how come we're not looking at wellness more holistically? How
are we not looking at justice as well We're not
(44:48):
looking at restoring food ways as wellness, We're not looking
at reparations as wellness. And that doesn't make any sense
to me. I mean, I sure as hell can't say
it better than that. The Cathy's Trip always seemed aware
that the issues that Cathy had with her body, with
her job stress, with her spending habit to look the
right way in a body she didn't like, at a
(45:09):
job she felt stressed out at, were all connected. What
challenged readers is that she never overcame it. But honestly,
especially in this era, how many people did. Here's a
strip from the nineties featuring Cathy at her desk, snacking
and surrounded by a tall pile of work in the
form of loose leaf paper. She thinks this to herself. Problem.
(45:32):
Over eating cause job stress problem, overspending cause job stress problem,
crankiness cause job stress problem, exhaustion, disorganization, wrinkles to decay,
(45:53):
eroding social skills, hostility, flab cause job stressed, job stress,
job stress, job stress, And the last panel, Cathy relaxes
and smiles. On the bright side, I believe I've identified
or remarkably productive area of my career. So here's the thing.
American beauty standards are unquestionably racist and fat phobic distractions
(46:17):
intended to perpetuate white supremacy and drain women of their
capital to fit a randomized normal made up by some guy.
But it's one thing to know it, and it's another
thing to untrain it. It's not impossible, as demonstrated by
some of the people I've talked with and about, but
it's hard, and to people who are still struggling with it,
(46:39):
I'm right there with you. If this is your first
time hearing about a lot of this, I hope it's
a start for you. But as it always has, it
still makes a lot of assholes a lot of money,
making people feel like shit about themselves. Kathy guys. White
knew that, and so did her heroine, but it didn't
stop either from trying to meet that impossible standard. In
their heyday, this was talked about as a sign of
(47:02):
woman's hope, but in retrospect I see it more as
a commiseration with others over an inevitable defeat. So thank you, Kathy.
It's nice to know that other people are feeling like
shit about themselves, even in the fictional realm. You're welcome,
and they were all being ridiculous. You're extremely hot. Look,
(47:23):
it's been eleven years since the comic ended. I know,
I fuck, and that's our gal. In spite of the haters,
the Kathy comics were able to pull rightful frustration at
ridiculous standards and put them in the newspaper every day.
But that was not an opportunity available to everyone. Next week,
I'm going to speak with artists who have worked through
(47:43):
other channels to get their semi autobiographical work out there
and how works like Kathy and from within your own
communities made it possible. Artists telling their stories in zines,
web comics, and more. That's next week on act Cast.
Why did I buy an itsy Bitsy teeny Weeny Bikini Linguini,
(48:07):
Oh My God. Act Cast is an I Heart Radio production.
It is written, researched, and hosted by me Jamie Loftus.
Sophia Lichtman is the best producer on the planet, Isaac
Taylor is the best editor on the planet. Zoe Blade
writes the best music on the planet, and Brandon Dickert
wrote the best theme ever written. In this episode, you
(48:30):
heard the vocal talents of Sharene Lonnie unas Maggie Cannon,
Isaac Taylor, and Julia Claire. Our cast is Jackie Michelle
Johnson as Kathy, Melissa Lozada Oliva as Andrea, and Maggie
Mayfish as Charlene and the Sales Lady. See you next week.
She burst into the world in nineteen seventy six. She's
at what, She's out on dates, and she don't like politics,
from Mama and urban to feminist friends. And she's fighting
all the stands with chocolate and hand Kathy, She's fighting back.
She stressed with success. Let's call her some slack Kathy,
(00:24):
Mycathy fan Cathy. She's gotta like go in all baby.
(00:46):
Welcome back to ac cast. I am Jamie Loftus, and
today we're gonna keep digging into the assortid and frustrating
history of American beauty standards that were commented on in
the Kathy comics. We're picking up at the dawn of
second feminism in the late nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies
and the expectations of women's bodies that existed when the
(01:06):
Kathy strip first debuted. Body positivity was not a part
of the second wave American mainstream feminism that Kathy Guy's
White released her comic strip into hell. Body acceptance wasn't
in the popular conversation. Body neutrality doesn't come up once,
But that doesn't mean that fat activism wasn't happening. The
(01:27):
fat rights movements started in nineteen sixty nine by Bill Fabri,
which led to the establishment of the National Association to
Advance Fat Acceptance. Then, a group of radical California feminists
formed the Fat Underground in nineteen seventy three and released
the Fat Manifesto, which demanded equal rights for fat people
(01:47):
and condemned quote unquote reducing industries wholesale but in the mainstream,
just as white feminist did in the first wave of feminism,
rigid control of the body was co opted by femine
is m as this showing of competence and control, a
control that was rare for a woman to have over
herself at the time. Second wave mainstream feminism very much
(02:11):
subscribe to this, and so what we see in a
lot of early Kathy comics feels very bizarre. In thees.
From the very beginning of the strip in nine, the
Kathy character is extremely self conscious about her weight. This
is originally prompted by her gaining some weight after successfully
quitting cigarettes early in the strips run good on your Babe,
(02:33):
not easy to do, but this fixation on her weight
and her body continues in the strip for the next
thirty four years. The Kathy characters weight loss goals shift
throughout the strip and remained pretty vague. She usually seems
to be looking to lose between ten and forty pounds
and is willing to try almost any fad, diet or
fitness trend to accomplish that. Like many of the themes
(02:56):
explored in the Kathy strips, the subject of food and
even gaining weight after quitting cigarettes came from Kathy guys
White's own life. She wrote on this shared struggle with
her character to ditch cigarettes, which was at the time
considered to be a popular weight loss and weight maintenance tool.
In a collection of the strip, guys White says this,
(03:19):
on one hand, it seems a little cruel to share
this particular vice with Kathy. On the other hand, in
light of the number of women whose liberation has included
the freedom to start smoking, it seemed very appropriate. Besides,
I didn't think it was fair that Kathy should go
completely untouched by something that made me so miserable. And
(03:40):
the most hardline feminist character in the comic strip, Kathy's
friend Andrea, is fully in support of Kathy's weight loss goals,
in spite of the fact that we're never led to
believe that these goals have anything to do with Kathy's
health or that her weight is negatively affecting her health.
Her goals and Andrea's support of them are completely aesthetic based,
(04:01):
and for a hardline feminist, it's bizarre to hear her
kind of bullying Kathy over dieting. Here's a strip from
the late nineteen seventies, from the first collection of Kathy
comics ever to be released. Kathy and Andrea are sitting
in the kitchen, Kathy in front of a plate of
milk and cookies. What do you think you're doing, Kathy?
(04:22):
I'm eating cookies, Andrea, but you're within four pounds of
your goal. You can't give up your diet now. I
don't think I'm ready to deal with success. The difference
that forty plus years can make here. The intention of
this strip is clearly that Kathy has failed at her goal.
She hasn't restricted the way she was supposed to, and
(04:42):
picking up the cookie is a sign of weakness. But
with a modern lens turned on this, Andrea's kind of
the villain. Why is this her business? Why are you
yelling at your physically healthy friend, as far as we know,
over a cookie like get a life? You cop early
Kathy strips also established the themes of dieting, weight, and
(05:03):
restriction as a cornerstone for Kathy's relationship with her mother.
Throughout the strip's history, it becomes a very recognizable dynamic
between these characters to first take on a diet, then
try to reinforce the rules with each other, and eventually
quit the diet in celebration and eat food together. Another
common dynamic is Cathy's tendency to break her diet and
(05:25):
gain weight while visiting her parents. It's a recognizable dynamic
with a lot of families, but it makes a Kathy
character double down on associating time with her family as
times to police her body extra carefully. Here's Kathy and
her mom talking in mom's kitchen in that same nineteen
seventies collection, The Kathy Chronicles. I thought you were out
(05:48):
shopping for new clothes today, Kathy. I tried, Mom, but
I'm still too fat to fit into anything. Dacent, Kathy
takes a back of chips off the counter and starts
eating them. So why are you stuffing yourself again? I
figured I might as well put my money where my
mouth is. By the time these strips were written and released,
the concept of women publicly discussing their weight with each
(06:11):
other and encouraging each other to achieve the body standards
of the time was deeply normalized. Part of this was
thanks to the continued success of women's magazines, but by
the nineteen seventies there were also groups like weight Watchers,
which was invented in the nineteen sixties by a former
Queen's housewife named Gene Nititch. Weight Watchers is still massively
(06:34):
popular today Oprah as their current big name representative, but
it began as essentially a rip off of a nineteen
fifties diet from the U. S Board of Nutrition that
was built around lean meat, fish, skim milk, and fruits
and veggies. What Gene Nititch added to the equation was
the idea of community. Weight Watchers wasn't just a diet,
(06:55):
it was also a weekly meeting with the same group
of locals, mostly women. It provided structure, a sense of
being beholden to your fellow weight watchers, and sometimes friendship.
I can't tell you how many moms and aunts of
my friends growing up were in programs like this and
held the communities created by them very very closely. The
(07:15):
history of Gene Ninitch's life, her company, and the persistent
existence of weight Watchers is chronicled in the book This
Is Big by writer Marissa mets Her. The book also
follows Marissa's own experience as a millennial woman being pressured
in socially conditioned to engage with diet culture for most
of her life, which culminates and her trying weight Watchers
(07:39):
as a social experiment that doesn't give the result promised,
but did yield really incredible insights into how diet culture
works today. She also speaks on her thoughts on the
pitfalls of body positivity messaging and much of diet cultures
rebranding as wellness culture, and she was kind enough to
speak with me about how diet clure became so popular
(08:01):
during the second wave of feminism and how diet culture
and white feminism aren't as at odds as history would
like you to believe. Here's some of our interview. It
does seem like during the second wave feminist movement, Geane
and weight Watchers were at least making these, however flawed
attempts to interact with that movement, which I found kind
(08:25):
of surprising, honestly, um, so, could you speak to that
a little bit and just kind of contextualize how diet
culture has kind of overlapped with feminist movements. So, you know,
one way to view weight watchers and is that it's
always kind of this mirror to the culture. One way
to that I really looked at weight Watchers was through
(08:46):
Weywatchers magazine because there was at complete archive that I
could look at, and Um, Gene knight Ish, the founder,
had a column. It was an advice column, and so
every once in a while she get these pieces, these
like letters from people asking about things like feminism. So
(09:08):
you could see sort of what weight watchers thought about
these things firsthand. And it's you know, it is interesting
because so the magazine would do things like tackle women
going to work, and um, you know there's like a
picture of Gene with Gloria Steinem and so feminism was
(09:35):
Feminism was not ignored, but it also wasn't necessarily something
that was like a linked society, and I maybe that
era there was a little less of that sort of
like connecting everything you do back to feminism. And then
you know, as like the eighties went on, you start
(09:59):
to see part tenants of weight Watchers that are more
sort of reflective of feminism in a big picture way,
like maybe women were working and not making food at
home as much, so weight Watchers allowed or made it
easier to eat out in restaurants. And this is where
(10:19):
Gene Nightich and weight Watchers really took hold on the culture.
The way that Knightag's involvement in this company that she
built from the ground up declined over time was very
telling of the period and American feminism that she was
prominent during. Jean was born only three years after women
got the vote. She was a lower middle class housewife who,
(10:41):
unhappy with how others perceived her fatness, ripped off an
existing diet and made it marketable to women like herself.
In the early days of weight Watcher's massive success, Nightitch
was an essential part of the brand. She lived large,
she spoke in a motivational capacity, She had a consistent
column and weight Watcher's magazine, The Whole Bit. She and
(11:01):
her first husband eventually split due to his frustrations with
her career coming before her being a wife. Then, in
nineteen three, Nightitch stepped down from weight Watchers during the
company's tenth year, and she sold the company to the
Heinz Corporation for over seventy one million dollars. As she
grew older, her image and legacy were slowly stripped from
(11:24):
the picture. Metzer shares an anecdote that, towards the end
of her life, Nightitch has claimed to have called Weight
Watchers corporate headquarters to ask secretaries if Jeane Nightitch was
still alive, and that sometimes the person picking up the
phone had no idea. Marissa Metzer is no stranger to
wait Watchers and programs like it, having been pushed into
(11:44):
them from a very young age. So I asked her
what her experience was coming of age in the eighties
and nineties in the same period of diet culture that
Kathy Comics comments on extensively. Here's some more of our interview.
I remember are going to a Weight Watchers location in um,
(12:05):
Santa Cruz, California, where I grew up. And UM it
was in you know, like some kind of like strip
mall and UM, and I was definitely the youngest person there.
I was probably like eight or something like that. My
mom and I did it together because that was a
totally acceptable thing thing to do in the eighties, and UM,
(12:30):
I had been on kind of my parents has probably
put me on my first diet when I was about
I don't know, four or so, so you know, dieting
was not um new to me at all, probably unfortunately.
And um, I don't feel like I lasted very long
on Weight Watchers, mostly because I just didn't laugh very
(12:53):
long on any diet. Like it's hard to really like
be disciplined when you don't really understand why you're on
a diet, and like it's hard enough to kind of
be on a diet when you decide you need to
lose weight and you want to be on it, and instead,
I feel like I was always just put on these
diets and it was like, you know, like now you
(13:14):
can't have lemonade or whatever, and it was always just
sort of like, you know, just confusing and um, so
you know, I just the overall sensation of diety in
that era was that, you know, it was something that
I had to do because my body was sort of
(13:36):
too big and wrong, and that it was something that's
sort of like all women or most women kind of
did and worried about. The Cathy character's life was filled
with diet moments like Marissa is describing and Cathy guys
white always approached the futility of bad diets with the
knowledge that the vast majority of them were a scam.
(13:59):
While fat liberation movement continued throughout the eighties and nineties,
the mainstream did not accept it. The message of restrictive
diets and bodily discipline reigned over women of this time,
feminists or not. Often, the Kathy character would enlist her
friends and later in the strip her on and off
partner irving to lose weight with her. Here's Kathy talking
(14:22):
with Andrea on a walk in the early eighties. I
can't believe you're actually going through with the membership, and
Merric spark. Kathy, you can't afford it. Well, the lady
pointed out to me that if I spend that much
on a membership, the guilt will really drive me to
use the place. She said that when I see how
fast my anches disappear, it'll be worth any price. Andrea,
(14:47):
it's gotta make me lose weight. Andrea walks away, and
Cathy's optimism melts into anxiety. In the last panel, I
just spent my whole year's food budget on it. And
let's get that fat diet music going again, because here
is just a smattering of fad diets that existed during
the Cathy Comics run. There was, of course, wait Watchers,
(15:12):
Jenny Craig slim Fast. I didn't have time to eat right.
I was constantly on the go. All I was doing
was grabbing jump food. I've lost twenty two pounds on
the slim Fast plan. This has been the easiest plan
I've ever been on. The Atkins Low Carb diet, the
South Beach diet that had good carbs and bad carbs,
the Cabbage diet, the Grapefruit diet, the Cottage Cheese diet,
(15:35):
the Beverly Hills diet. If edra pills, those ones are bad,
the Scarsdale diet, and liquid diets, most famously endorsed when
Oprah pulled out a little red wagon full of sixty
pounds of fat that she lost live on the air
after a six week liquid starvation diet. But up until
(15:56):
six weeks, I absolutely nothing. I want you to know
that whatever diet you choose, and this audience is filled
with people who have had great successes, you can do
with the help of your family doctor, and if you
can believe in yourself and believe that this is the
most important thing in your life is Scott said to
us earlier, you can conquer it because if I did it,
(16:18):
if Scott did it, if Billy did it, you can
do it. I thank you very much, thank you. And
let's take a second for Oprah here. There's a great
episode of Maintenance Phase that examines some of the more
dangerous diets that she pushed. But Oprah was more than
just a tastemaker for American women of the late twentieth century.
(16:53):
From the debut of her daytime talk show in through
now as a Weight Watchers ambassador, Oprah was the boomer
woman who told other boomer women how to empower themselves.
And being a massively popular daily show, Oprah covered and
often pushed fads in diet and exercise. And for all
(17:13):
of the good that she's done and the unquestionable icon
that she is, she's also introduced figures into the American
zeitgeist who continue to how you say reek, absolute havoc
on the general public to this day. Your doctor phills,
your doctor os is just a litany of scary and
sometimes fake doctors. Kathy Strips mentioned Oprah in text a
(17:36):
number of times. Because of who Oprah was, she served
as a cultural stand in for a woman who struggled
to meet the societally accepted body norm of the time,
and both succeeded and failed very publicly. So she definitely
would have been a person that the Cathy character would
have compared herself to and taken advice from as far
as the wagon of fat goes. Not for nothing, Oprah
(17:59):
did say in two thousand five that this liquid diet
was extremely unhealthy and that she wouldn't do it again.
As the third wave of feminism crusted in the early nineties,
the mainstream engaged in diet and fitness fads and promoted
them as a part of how women could feel empowered.
It presented this illusion of control in a way to
(18:20):
better oneself that simultaneously preyed on women's time and their
money and their sense of self. Here's a Cathy strip
from the nineties, as she's standing outside the gym with
her friend Charlene. She's about to start a new diet,
a fad called the Healthy Food Plan for Life that
was all the rage at the time. The grapefruit diet
(18:41):
three weeks and it was over. The Healthy Food Plan
for Life. Sixty more years of fat free salad dressing,
the Hollywood diet four weeks and it was over the
Healthy Food Plan for Life, sixty more years of boneless,
skinless chicken breast, the fruit juice Fast thirty six hours,
(19:02):
and it was over the Healthy Food Plan for Life.
Sixty more years of melon balls for dessert. In the
last panel, Kathy and Charlene leave the gym looking at
their diet plans. Crash diets never worked, but at least
they had an end sixty more years of brand flakes
and skim milk. The county character's long standing battle with
(19:25):
body image intersected with two other common themes in the comic,
fashion and exercise pads. The exercise trends and Cathy's constant
struggle to abide by them were referenced in the characters
merchandizing all the Time. I actually owned some of these
oversized T shirts. One reads body language and shows Kathy
frantically jazzer sizing as thought bubbles surround her body. They
(19:48):
say ac grumble, crunch out, and on and on. Another
T shirt shows five Kathy's a hiker, a walker, a runner,
a biker, and an eater. Another shirt shows for Kathy's
one is power stepping one is power walking, one is
power sliding, and the last is her collapsed on the
gym floor power outage. So even the merch explicitly references
(20:12):
that the Kathy character fails but keeps trying. As we
talked about at the top of this episode, Kathy and
Irving lent their image to wait Watchers for a couple's
workout program, and Kathy and Mr Pinkley's images were used
to promote a weight Watchers at Work program. The character
tried to keep up with workout trends in the strip.
(20:33):
She got a home gym, she got an overpriced gym
membership that she barely used, and at the same time,
real life workout fads came and went in the US
think step classes, jazz er size, buns of steel, the
Thigh Master. Richard Simmons piloates the Jane Fonda workout, which
I did do in Quarantine quite a bit, but I
(20:54):
hear it's actually not good for you. And then there's
the subject of fashion. The Kathy character is seen literally
hundreds of times in the strips run looking at herself
in the mirror of a department store changing room and
being unhappy with what she sees In many strips. Kathy
Geiswhite is commenting on the consumer fashion industry itself, how
(21:14):
it often failed to take anyone but the supermodel into consideration,
and how stores targeted women to pressure them into buying
an excess of clothes they didn't actually need. Here's an
example with Kathy talking to the department store employee who
serves as the service industry character stand in across the
board for the duration of the comic. This one's from
(21:35):
the seventies. Hi, I'd like some blue jeans. What collar
do you want? Kathy is behind the changing room partition
and hands the sales lady a pair of jeans. These
jeans are great, except they're nine inches too long. Can
I try the same size, only shorter? Now? The women's
geans only common wan leg If you want the right length,
(21:57):
you'll have to go with men's jeans. I your pardon,
living jeans coming one length, men's genes coming all different lengths.
Does someone out there think all women have the same
size legs? Now? I guess they just figure out women
know how to sell. Look, let's just forget it. I'll
take these, but I want them altered. No candy that either.
(22:17):
We only do alterations on the men's side. The men
don't need alterations there janes come the right length. Oh wow,
and we girls when wear blue jeans. I that one
of the little things, and we have that one up.
Kathy's fashion dilemmas are almost always telling of the cultural
moment they're released into, and that strip we see the
(22:40):
double standards of second wave feminism, where women are promised
the genes that men have been wearing, but are still
met with increased aesthetic pressure. This carries throughout the nine eighties.
The feminist backlash brought with it a new wave of
constantly changing fashion trends and pressure put on women of
all classes to keep up with them. The chronicling very
(23:02):
specific fashion trends became the norm, and the strip normally
Kathy arrives at the department store only to be frustrated
by yet another trend made only for thin women, that
she's expected to spend money on in order to be accepted.
Here we are in the nineties, Cathy is trying on
an ill fitting suit with a miniskirt. The same sales
lady speaks with her. Nothing mirrors our emancipation from the
(23:24):
workaholic eighties than our quest for the nineties quality of life,
like the refined women's suit. Every feminine inch says, Oh sure,
I may be going to a board meeting, but I
may also be popping out for tea. I may go
for a stroll in the museum. I may spend the
afternoon at the theater. In short, it's business attire that
says I have better things to do with my life
(23:45):
than sitting this boring office. In the final panel, the
sales lady places a hat on Cathy's head as Cathy
checks the price tags on the suit. Cathy rolls her
eyes and says, for instance, I could go stand in
the unemployment law. Oh ha ha, here hot pink, your
lips still look a bit serious. Cathy's experiences in the
(24:08):
department store comments on everything from shoulder pads in the
coke days of the eighties to the grunge trend of
the nineties to my personal favorite, the hot topic got
trend of the mid two thousand's. But Cathy's most memorable
brushes with fashion and looking at herself with dissatisfaction was
in the swimsuit department, a trope so associated with the
(24:30):
comic that Kathy guys white herself talked about it on
late night appearances. Here she is with Jay Leno. Look
at a bathing suits you wants have like a couple
of bathing suit things, ex abaiting suit things. Well, women
have two main figure problem areas the top half of
our bodies and the bottom half of our bottom. And
every year the fashion industry finds a way to make
(24:53):
things worse. You know, it used to be that a
woman could depend on a one piece suit which at
least covered more. And now the one piece suits that
they have out their I'm sure the women in this
audience have had that experience. If you pull them up
high enough to cover the top, then the length hoole
comes up to the waist and the entire rear end
is on displaying when I wait. And if you come
(25:13):
the top pull the suit down far enough to cover
the rear, then the top is either smashed as flat
as a pancake or entirely exposed. And if you find
that one miraculous bathing suit that that actually covers both
the top and the rear, then they will have laminated
a sequin leopard on the stomach with a hole for
all the flat points out of his mouth, like in
(25:35):
this clip. Guy's White talked in the strip about how
bathing suit were not made for regular women's bodies, and
her character tended to interpret this as a frustrating but
ultimately personal failing. The Kathy character vocalizes her anger that
swimwear isn't made for her, but ultimately buckles to the
pressure that it's her who must change, not the fashion industry.
(25:58):
Here's Kathy bringing a tiny one piece into a changing room.
She thinks to herself, swimwear shopping Stage one, I want
a bathing suit that's fabulous, looking, sexy, flirty, and fun.
Swimwear shopping stage two. I want a bathing suit that's
attractive and fits my life and personality. In the third panel,
(26:20):
Cathy is in the changing room after putting the swimsuit on,
leaning outside the curtain and panicking. Swimwear Shopping Stage three.
I want something that's not gross. I'll consider anything that
isn't grows. In the last panel, the curtain of the
changing room is entirely closed. A narration box reads once again,
(26:40):
the quest for a bathing suit parallels the search for
a date. Cathy's voice comes from inside the changing room. Okay, fine,
A little grows, but not really really grows. This is
where the Cathy versus stood on body image in the
ninety nineties, and the merchandizing continued to capitalize on now
(27:00):
well established connection between the Kathy character and diet culture.
This brings me to the mother of all Kathy food crossovers.
I still can't believe this exists. I'm kind of obsessed
with it. It's a cookbook called and I cannot stress
this enough Girl Food, Girl Food, Girl Food. I am
(27:24):
genuinely thrilled to report that this isn't a diet cookbook wholesale.
There are some low calorie recipes, but there's plenty of
food as well. It was co authored by Barbara Albright,
a cookbook author who had also made cookbooks with the
likes of Regis and Kathy Lee, and with Jim Davis
on a Garfield cookbook. Girl Food is separated into five
(27:46):
sections with different recipes according to these themes romance food,
swimsuit food, sweatsuit food, grown up food, and consolation food.
The introduction from Kathy S. White reads like this, this
is the cookbook that speaks to women. Women who want romance,
(28:06):
women who require chocolate, women who dream of wearing a
swimsuit somewhere besides the bathroom. Women who need to entertain
like a sophisticated grown up. Women who want to lie
on the sofa in a sweatsuit and eat cookie dough
in short, women whose lives are a little too complex
to only have one sort of recipe on hand at
any given moment. The book consists of simple recipes written
(28:28):
by Barbara Albright, with dishes named by Kathy guys White,
along with a series of original Kathy cartoons and the
recipe titles. If I may do not disappoint, Let's get
a music bed, going something vacation e recipe titles from
the Girl Food Cookbook. While he casually reads the morning paper,
(28:49):
I'll be silently planning out the course of our entire relationship. Waffles.
Instead of using the old seran wrap and stiletto heel's
approach to spice things up, I think I'll try some
fru dsac asparagus vinagrette. Love means never having to say,
of course, I like football pork tenderloin. After five hundred
(29:10):
and two dinners and four hundred and twenty seven cups
of coffee, I think it's time to get serious. Marry me. Moose,
always a bridesmaid, never the same size, low calorie cole Slaw.
Why did I buy an itsy bitsy teeny weeny bikini Linguini?
That one is my favorite one. I got this book
five months ago, and I think about that recipe title
(29:31):
every day of my life. I go to the gym,
but I seem to have misplaced my energy art to
choke mushroom tortalini salad. And I woke up late anyway,
So why bother leaving the house spiced struzel apple bunt
coffee cake. And look, I haven't cooked any of these recipes.
But if you don't think that this woman deserves a
Pulitzer for coming up with why did I buy an
(29:53):
itsy bitsy teeny weeny bikini Linguini? Turn off the podcast
Hemingway wishes. So that's the cookbook, and I legally must
tell you again that it is called girl food. Try
the most avoid the cole Slaw, trust me. Kathy Guy's
(30:25):
White towed this line of disparaging diet culture while also
dipping her toe into it at a time where the
pressure to consume products diets ideas was reinforced by advertising
and the women who were advertising clothes were overwhelmingly thin
and traditionally attractive, going back to that American beauty standard
(30:47):
that have been taking shape for a hundred fifty years.
Kathy comics were popular at the same time that supermodels
reigned supreme over the fashion industry. In our episode on
the Boomer generation, I spoke with Elanie, a retired ad
executive from California who was working at a high level
at the time some of the most successful supermodels in
(31:08):
history were coming to prominence. Your Christie Brinkley's, your Naomi Campbell's,
your Cindy Crawford's. While these women were presented to the
world as care free and effortless, it's commonly known now
that the modeling industry was, and to a degree remains,
rooted in promoting disordered eating and food restriction, as well
as perpetuating racist standards of colorism and featurism in order
(31:31):
to curate and promote the version of American beauty that
Kathy was trying to live up to. To better understand
how these images are constructed, I returned to an interview
that I did for our episode on Boomers with a
former ad executive. I'm going to call Melanie, who worked
high up in the model driven advertising world of the
nineteen eighties and nineties. Here's a little bit of our talk.
(31:54):
You know, there's a whole whatever. There's so many Kathy
comics that are about body image and about comparing her
self to magazine images and commercial images. What was it
like curating those kinds of images, especially with um the
beauty products, Revlon Um, Mabeling, I mean, you name it,
(32:15):
we did at Claire all Um, the Virginia Slims. A
lot of it was wanting the women, the girls, and
when it was beauty they had to be eighteen. They
didn't and some of them they could even slide younger
than that. If they were younger, if they were fifteen, sixteen.
They wanted them to look thirty but with no wrinkles.
(32:41):
So there was a very unrealistic thing of what the
thirty year old might look like. A thirty year old
might have a few lines. Um, they might have a
few lines here, um. Breasts were augmented right and left. UM.
(33:01):
I did a lot of things. I do remember doing
the first Self magazine cover, and the main thing about
Self was that I just remember a lot of times
I would have to ask they need to come in
in a bathing suit or eliotard because we need to
see their body. And unless they asked for someone ethnic,
(33:21):
it meant white, okay, just without question, without question, without question,
there would if they asked for they would ask for
an ethnicity. Um. If they wanted Hispanic, they would ask Hispanic.
If they wanted Asian, they would ask Asian. If they
wanted black, they would ask black. But the black always
(33:45):
had to have whider features. Much of mainstream advertising, diet culture,
and the bulk of how women are told to feel
about their bodies in the West is tied back to
white colonialism. That's just what it is and what see
And Kathy is a middle class white woman failing to
meet an impossible standard. But we didn't see in the
(34:06):
newspaper funnies very often at all were women who were
excluded from the notion of American beauty altogether. What I
feel sure of is that, in spite of occasionally profiting
from it, Kathy guys White knew that diet culture was bullshit.
We don't just know this because her heroine fails to
change her body, but because Guy's white is explicitly telling
(34:28):
us that it's bullshit, and her work all the time.
Here's a strip where Kathy, Charlene, and another friend talk
about their years of monitoring their bodies while getting changed
for an aerobics class. It will never be like it
was the first time, Charlene. Yeah, I know, Kathy. I
was so innocent, so full of hope, and it worked.
(34:51):
It worked because I didn't sabotage it with analysis and distrust.
It worked because I just believed it would work. Their
friend walks in and she only catches the end of
Kathy's sentence, first love, first diet. In the last panel,
Kathy is inconsolable. I've never even heard of trans fatty
(35:13):
acids for the Kathy character. Body optimization is a zero
sum game for American women. Body optimization as a zero
sum game, and as comfortable as it is to consider
this an issue of the past, it isn't. Young people
of all races, genders, classes are still targeted by this
culture to this day. And you're kidding yourself fifth and
(35:36):
I'm about to sound five hundred years old, but you're
kidding yourself if you think we won't be talking about
the body image repercussions of social media filters and influencers
very soon. They're the most recent way to reinforce those
same standards that white Western men have been pushing four
hundreds of years. And the gen Z end of this
story is still unfolding, But I feel pretty comfortable saying
(36:00):
at millennials have been pretty firmly fucked up by the
body standards they grew up around. The good news is
that the body positivity movement and fat activism is firing
on more cylinders than at any other time in history.
There's now a number of prominent celebrities that are rejecting
diet culture and embracing themselves, emphasizing that their self worth
(36:21):
and personal health are what take precedent over aesthetics, and
activists who are demanding fair treatment. Legally, that's not nothing,
because that's not the messaging that most millennials and all
previous generations received in magazines and pop culture when they
were growing up. Fun fact about me, I used to
work at Playboy magazine as a fact checker. They paid
(36:42):
me ten dollars an hour before taxes. Anyways, the time
that millennials became media cognizant in the late nineties through
the early twenty tons, depending on when you were born,
we're actually kind of a low on how rigid body
standards were enforced. Here's a viral tweet from writer Lucy
Huber from a few months ago that I think sums
this up really nicely. If any gen z you're wondering
(37:05):
why every millennial woman has needing disorder, it's because in
the two thousand's, a normal thing to say to a
teenage girl was when you think you feel hungry, you're
actually thirsty, So just drink water and you'll be fine.
There's a great essay on this topic by the wonderful
writer Ann Helen Peterson called the millennial vernacular of fat phobia.
(37:25):
She begins by talking about how a cover of seventeen
magazine from the summer of featured a photo of a
quote unquote regular girl on the cover. This girl is
still sis, white, thin and wearing a bikini, but I
guess isn't quite the supermodel level of thinness. Honestly, I
wouldn't have guessed that until Peterson draws your attention to
(37:46):
the fact that this was very deliberately done by seventeen
their reason to be inclusive of other kinds of bodies.
A link of photo of this cover, because it truly
is like what that just looks like a model? Peterson writes,
if this body was non ideal, I remember thinking, then
what was mine? This is a question that Kathy geist
(38:09):
White seeks to answer through her characters with varying degrees
of success, because she did sometimes profit from the diet
culture that she criticized. Cathy's Trips, as you know by
Now ended in two thousand and ten. But I'd be
interested to see how the character would have received the
body positivity and wellness movements that became prominent in the
(38:30):
through now. Anne Helen Peterson sites writer Sarah Miller's New
York Times essay the diet industrial Complex got me and
it will never let me go. Miller writes, this suddenly
about a decade ago, when I started to notice that
fat women were a calling themselves fat with pride and
be walking down the streets of our nation's great cities,
(38:52):
nonchalantly wearing tight or revealing clothing with a general air
of yeah, I will wear this, and I will wear
whatever I want. And I am hot too. I will
be hot forever, long after you have all died. I
thought to myself, Oh my god, what the solution is
not the diet I started seeing fat, beautiful models and
(39:15):
actresses and catalogs and on television shows. I would have
liked to see more, but I was pleased to see
them at all. I was and remain in awe of
their confident beauty. I feel tenderness for them as well,
for what they endured and still endured to achieve it.
I sometimes choke up with love for them and for
the idea of how I could have lived if I
had allowed myself to just weigh what I weighed. It's
(39:39):
worth acknowledging that this is not and I can't think
of a worse phrase to use here, so I apologize.
But this is not a one size fits all ideology,
and everyone has a pretty personal connection to how body
standards and diet culture have affected them specifically. I started
disordered eating when I was eight years old, and I'm
(40:00):
trying to push past it. I still have these vivid
memories of how women's bodies were discussed by other people.
I don't know why this is the thing that's stuck
with me, but there's a very specific episode of Family
Guide that informed my anorexia through high school. This ship
is hard to shake and and it's still everywhere Marissa Metzer,
(40:20):
who we spoke with earlier, has written on modern body
positivity and how wellness culture that's popular right now tends
to rebrand old diet culture standbys extensively, and she spoke
with me about how the body positivity movement has affected
her on a personal level. Here's some of our conversation.
When coupled with something like Instagram, which is so visual,
(40:44):
there was this kind of bastardization where instead of being
about um, you know, the idea that any body is
entitled to exist and live and not harassed and you know,
right on roller coasters and wear great clothes and all
(41:07):
of that, the message was becoming more and more about just,
you know, I love myself. And it was so often
in the guys of you know, attractive women who had
proportionate our glass bodies, you know, like selfies with your like,
you know, boyfriend with like a David Beckham haircut, and
(41:28):
he's like, you know, like scaring your crevide or whatever.
Like it just drove me crazy and I started, you know,
thinking about it critically because I was just feeling like,
not only am I a failure um at dieting, and
that I can't keep the weight off and I, you know,
(41:49):
at all diet and I'll stop dieting and I'll diet again. Um,
but I'm also a failure at loving myself. You know.
This idea of like failure on top of fail Elier
was really interesting to me and really pled me, and
frankly still does. I think the core that I come
to is that our relationship with our bodies is of
(42:14):
course going to feel really important and really central, which
is why something like the idea of body neutrality is
hard for me, because I'm never going to feel neutral
about my body, and so we have this really important
relationship with our body, but at the same time we're
told to just kind of like manage our feelings with it,
(42:36):
is if that's something that's easy to do or to change.
To be clear here, fat activism and body positivity are
not the same movement. Fat activists have criticized the body
positivity movement for lacking an explicit political goal. It's a
complicated topic, and I encourage you to learn more about
the activist work that's being done. With all that in mind,
(42:59):
it's pretty is safe to say that the Kathy character
never had body positivity in her vocabulary, much less fat activist,
and the very fact that these movements have continued to
thrive and grow is a testament to hard one progress.
But that doesn't mean that the hundreds and arguably thousands
(43:19):
of years connected to controlling and mothering women's bodies just
goes away in a handful of years. One of the
most talented actors and comedians working today is jannasch Meeting,
who is currently on Rutherford Falls on Peacock. You should
watch it, and she gave an interview with Bona Petite
recently about her experience as a mini Kanju and Lakota
(43:41):
woman and her evolving relationship with food. Her sadly defunct
podcast is called Woman of Size and is another I
would strongly recommend. But I've been thinking about this interview
for weeks and it came right to my mind when
I sat down to record this. Jenna says this, there's
a direct link between culture and anti blackness and anti indigenousity.
(44:04):
The Settler Gaze Center's piety and purity in the way that,
especially for women, means you have to be anti savage.
It says you should practice control and suppression over food.
Over all of these that we find joy in over
a lot of the things that were celebrated by indigenous
people and enslaved African people. Later in the interview, she continues,
(44:26):
I can't stand the rhetoric that food is fuel. It
is directly linked to weight loss and what I would
call white wellness culture, which I feel is a very
hard thing to vilify because then people think your anti wellness. Well,
how come we're not looking at wellness more holistically? How
are we not looking at justice as well We're not
(44:48):
looking at restoring food ways as wellness, We're not looking
at reparations as wellness. And that doesn't make any sense
to me. I mean, I sure as hell can't say
it better than that. The Cathy's Trip always seemed aware
that the issues that Cathy had with her body, with
her job stress, with her spending habit to look the
right way in a body she didn't like, at a
(45:09):
job she felt stressed out at, were all connected. What
challenged readers is that she never overcame it. But honestly,
especially in this era, how many people did. Here's a
strip from the nineties featuring Cathy at her desk, snacking
and surrounded by a tall pile of work in the
form of loose leaf paper. She thinks this to herself. Problem.
(45:32):
Over eating cause job stress problem, overspending cause job stress problem,
crankiness cause job stress problem, exhaustion, disorganization, wrinkles to decay,
(45:53):
eroding social skills, hostility, flab cause job stressed, job stress,
job stress, job stress, And the last panel, Cathy relaxes
and smiles. On the bright side, I believe I've identified
or remarkably productive area of my career. So here's the thing.
American beauty standards are unquestionably racist and fat phobic distractions
(46:17):
intended to perpetuate white supremacy and drain women of their
capital to fit a randomized normal made up by some guy.
But it's one thing to know it, and it's another
thing to untrain it. It's not impossible, as demonstrated by
some of the people I've talked with and about, but
it's hard, and to people who are still struggling with it,
(46:39):
I'm right there with you. If this is your first
time hearing about a lot of this, I hope it's
a start for you. But as it always has, it
still makes a lot of assholes a lot of money,
making people feel like shit about themselves. Kathy guys. White
knew that, and so did her heroine, but it didn't
stop either from trying to meet that impossible standard. In
their heyday, this was talked about as a sign of
(47:02):
woman's hope, but in retrospect I see it more as
a commiseration with others over an inevitable defeat. So thank you, Kathy.
It's nice to know that other people are feeling like
shit about themselves, even in the fictional realm. You're welcome,
and they were all being ridiculous. You're extremely hot. Look,
(47:23):
it's been eleven years since the comic ended. I know,
I fuck, and that's our gal. In spite of the haters,
the Kathy comics were able to pull rightful frustration at
ridiculous standards and put them in the newspaper every day.
But that was not an opportunity available to everyone. Next week,
I'm going to speak with artists who have worked through
(47:43):
other channels to get their semi autobiographical work out there
and how works like Kathy and from within your own
communities made it possible. Artists telling their stories in zines,
web comics, and more. That's next week on act Cast.
Why did I buy an itsy Bitsy teeny Weeny Bikini Linguini,
(48:07):
Oh My God. Act Cast is an I Heart Radio production.
It is written, researched, and hosted by me Jamie Loftus.
Sophia Lichtman is the best producer on the planet, Isaac
Taylor is the best editor on the planet. Zoe Blade
writes the best music on the planet, and Brandon Dickert
wrote the best theme ever written. In this episode, you
(48:30):
heard the vocal talents of Sharene Lonnie unas Maggie Cannon,
Isaac Taylor, and Julia Claire. Our cast is Jackie Michelle
Johnson as Kathy, Melissa Lozada Oliva as Andrea, and Maggie
Mayfish as Charlene and the Sales Lady. See you next week.
Host
Jamie Loftus
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