Maintenance Phase - Oprah Winfrey & The “Wagon of Fat”

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Do you have weird feelings about Oprah? So do we, and so does our guest! Kimberly Springer, co-editor of "Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture," joins us to talk about the rise of Oprah Winfrey and her infamous "wagon of fat" weight loss episode.Buy Kimberly's books:Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American CultureLiving for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreClips!Oprah Winfrey Rolls Out A Wagon Of Fat  (Buzzfeed)How Oprah's Weight Affected Her Relationship with Stedman (Oprah)MadTv - Oprah - Fat Cam (Mad TV)Links!The Importance of Being Oprah (New York Times Magazine)Oprah's 'Fattest' Mistake (CBS News)5 awesome objects from the new Oprah exhibit (Washington Post)Oprah's biggest on-air mistake? The wagon of fat (Today)Diet That Made Oprah Winfrey Slim Demands Discipline, Specialists Say (New York Times)Support the show

Hello and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where you get complicated feelings and you get complicated feelings and everyone gets complicated feelings. Wait, Mike, can I tell you when I wrote my notes? In case you asked me to do the tagline. What do you have? I wrote, hello and welcome to Maine His Face, the podcast where you don't get a car and you don't get a car.

Nobody gets a car, we don't have cars to give a pay. The problem is there's too many Oprah means to choose from. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Bees. I'm Aubrey Gordon, I'm an author, a columnist, and a podcaster, and I'm here with my co-host. Michael Hobbs, if you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase.

Fun update, we now have bonus episodes. So you can check out more of Mike and I talking about extremely consequential and in consequential things. The most in consequential, which is our first episode, which is Aubrey explains the Bachelor and the Bachelor at to Michael. Yes. There's so many clips and it was so stressful.

We also have T-shirts, notebooks, mugs, totes at T-Public, and you can find both of those links in the show notes for this episode or at maintenancefans.com. Totes. And today we have a special guest. We sure do. Kimberly Springer is a ad

young professor at Barnard College and the editor of a volume called The Opra Focation of American Culture. She got in touch with us a couple of months ago and was like, I have weird feelings about Oprah and I feel like you have weird feelings about Oprah too. And let's all talk about them. After repeated mentions of Oprah, I need to get in touch. Yes. So that's what we're going to do in this episode. We're going to talk about Oprah as a cultural force. We're going to talk about her biography. And then because Oprah, like all of us,

contains multitudes, we couldn't cover her entire career in one show. So this episode, we're going to talk about her infamous wagon of fat episode. And then we're gonna do some sequels on other sort of iconic Oprah episodes over the years. I would just add to that introduction that like, Oprah, like all of us, has a great deal of goodwill amongst the public and rightfully so.

And also, she is someone who does things with a great deal of good intention, and sometimes that good intention leads to harm. And I think we're gonna try and talk about all of those things all at once, the incredible intentions, the incredible work that she's able to do and the harm and try and hold all of those things all at the same time.

Yes, I think that Oprah has done very good things for America and I think that she has done very bad things for America and both are true at the same time. I think it's interesting that we have to issue a disclaimer. Yes, right? What are your weird feelings on Oprah Kimberly? My weird feelings are that everyone assumes that everyone loves Oprah, but I have not experienced that as necessarily being true in black communities. I use black communities plural because of course there are people who love her and they love her capitalism and her entrepreneurship but I know that there are also people who

are very critical of Mora as a person and what she has or hasn't done for the black community and I think that's where it gets very interesting. Well, let's dive in. Do you want to start by telling us like the story of Oprah? Sure. Even this gets complicated because I think there's Oprah's own myth-making about herself that has just become fact. Like it's almost as if she sprung fully forth from her own forehand. So she's born in 1954 in Cusico Attila County, Mississippi. She talks about being a bookish child and how she was literate very early. She said she was able to read by age two and a half. She's reading scripture by the age of three and she's giving oratory in church.

three and she's giving oratory in church. She is raised by her grandparents in Mississippi until she's eight. For that era of her life, it's interesting that all of the biographies of her will talk about her being raised on a pink farm. And I think that's really interesting because I think it, to a particular kind of maybe Yankee imagination, implies a kind of squalor, but actually for the 1950s, for black people to still own their own land and to own their own farm, means that there was a kind of self-sufficiency that gets erased by just calling it and just missing it as a pick bar. One of her odds, there was an interview, was actually in the National Enquirer. Sorry, it was a cousin, a second cousin. She had this close. She said, there was a family rule that no wifery women were allowed to work in the homes of white families. They could work in the fields, but it was a point of honor that they didn't do maid work.

And I think that's really interesting to think about black women in a community, but also her family making this unsvoken rule, which speaks to a kind of determination, a kind of self-determination, that might get overshadowed when we think about how Oprah tells her own story of individual achievement. Yeah, I mean, it's also interesting to think about this sort of question about sort of like, what were the supports that existed in Oprah's life that are maybe made invisible in her self-narrative, right? And how that links to what we see sort of later on when she starts talking about like the secret

and getting into this kind of almost prosperity gospel. One of the things that I came across in my research was a quote from her from the late 80s where she starts talking about the deep spiritual meaning of money. We are in some gnarly pyrotechnic room, bro. Yeah, because she's able to make like living your best life becomes the mantra, but before that it requires her to transcend any kind of racial or gender barriers. Right. And the way she talks about Mississippi is always about leaving the place. And she often will like refer to Mississippi as like a place where there's nothing there. Hmm. So, in about 16 to 67,

she goes to live with her mother in Milwaukee. This period pretty much is characterized by her as the time when she was sexually abused. She's sexually abused from about the age of 10 to 14. Jesus Christ. Actually, it's age 9. It's just by cousin 8, 9, my uncle, and also by a family friend. It's interesting because the narrative that she then

creates on her show, like the things like the child predator watchless, is all about stranger danger as opposed to families as the sight of abuse, which is where a lot of her abuse happened. Does she talk about the effect of all of this abuse on her as a person? Like it must have been a really hard thing to hold onto. So the research in the book shows that she didn't talk about the abuse until she spontaneously confessed it on her show, which was about survivors of incest. Oh wow. So she wasn't, she didn't like, plan it out like I'm breaking my silence. It was about survivors of incest. Oh, wow.

So she wasn't, she didn't like, plan it out like I'm breaking my silence. It was just like it came up. Right. Right. Maybe it's just a changing way that she thinks about it. Because there was a book that just came out where she's talking about abuse of the hands of her grandmother,

being an abuse of household. It's a narrative around her abuse that keeps changing. And I think it would be worth looking at how it tracks with how we talk about abuse in each different time period. Yeah, that's true, because these things are framed so differently. And also, she's been a public figure for so long that she can sort of ride the waves of different societal understandings of abuse and also like processing what happened to her. You would just do that differently at different times. Yeah, I mean, I will say that also came up

in the research that I did where I was like, oh, the way that Oprah talks about her body and particularly her size is just a direct reflection of like, this is how we're talking about this thing at this time. Oh, I was like, oh, interesting. I didn't really think of her as being kind, like, a little bit of like a sort of pop culture cipher.

It's also a fascinating, like, palimpsest, because she's also creating these societal understandings at the same time, right? That, like, she's been so influential that if she does a bunch of episodes on stranger danger, like, she's helping to spread and reinforce that at the same time that she's also reflecting it in her own experience.

Right. Absolutely. And so in 68, she gives birth to a premature baby and that baby dies a few weeks later. And I think that's the point at which she goes to live with her father in Nashville. So this is where we start to have her, her sort of trajectory into speech and communications and drama. She's eventually sent to a gonna lead suburban high school with white students. That's about 25 miles away from what she calls the ghetto.

Here's where we gave little mention. So I think that's why she's senior in high school. She wins the Mishnavil pageant and also the Miss Black Tennessee Beauty pageant. She was a beauty queen? Yes. Wow. Oh, 100%.

I know, idea. Yeah, this also came up just in, like I did some Google image searching and the number, like there is a picture of Oprah holding a bouquet of flowers, having a crown placed on her head, baby Oprah. It's really something. What was her talent? You Oprah, it's really something. What was her talent?

You know, I don't know. I'm going to guess or... Or maybe giving away cars. You can't have a chance at that, you young age. Fun surprise, she's really good at close-up magic. Like, who? So, she was beauty queen, she was runner up for the Miss Black American pageant and based on her beauty queen wedding. She is scouted by interesting

we reported in some places it says a local radio station to be a part-time news reader but it was actually like a new sole radio station so this is a radio station with Black DJs and programmers. It's interesting to mean when the fact that it was a Black run station gets erased from that narrative. So she's working at the station as part 10 newsreader. She's also attending college at Tennessee State University, which is an all Black college. So this is from People Weekly. They're describing how a brown experience college says college was trying for a young black girl uninterested in the compelling black issues of the day. Oprah says she retains neither fond memories nor good friends from college.

quote, they all hated me. No, they resented me. I refused to conform to the notes of thinking of the time. I hated, hated, hated college. Everybody was angry for four years. It was all that college and it was in to be angry. Ooh. I mean, one of the things that this says to me is sort of the way that the sort of the tractor beam into the white mainstream is plucking out people like Oprah, like they're people that are more palatable to white America. Right. And I think it's really dependent on that context because I think it's pretty easy to just be in our present day context and they, well, everybody was radical back then, but no.

But those are not the people who capitalism has to break. Well, there's also a quote that came up in 1989 profile of Oprah in the New York Times. When Winfrey was hired for AM Chicago, the station manager was, according to her executive producer, Deborah Domeo, delighted that he had managed to find someone who wasn't in quote Angela Davis type, who'd pick at the station with a gun in her hair. There is like an active reward for not aligning herself with almost kind of any kind of racialized politics, right?

But I just was sort of a staggering moment to be like, oh right, it is like the early 80s. And like a station manager would totally go to the press and be like, we got a black woman who's not Angela Davis. Hooray! Really? Oh, Jesus. But yet she has an afro. You know, she anchors the news in Nashville,

and then she moves to Baltimore, and she's anchoring the news there, and you can see clips on YouTube. She has a beautiful afro that frames her face like a halo, and then she co-hosts her first talk show, people are talking. So she does that before she moves to Chicago. So I think there is an element of,

like she knows she's black, she accepts that. And she's just black enough to be palatable for white people who are running these institutions. And what year is this when she moves to Chicago? She moves to Chicago in 1984. Okay. She takes over as host of A.M. Chicago and after just a month, her ratings surpassed Donnie Hughes, because his show was also on at the same time. Oh, wow! So it only takes a month.

And after, in less than a year, it goes to an hour and they rename it the Oprah Winfrey Show. Is it a local show or is it national at this point? The Oprah Winfrey Show is local until 1986 when it goes into national syndication. Okay, her estimated earnings for $91.92 were $88 million dollars. In 1990s money?

Yes. Whoa. And, and by like, isn't it 87 or 88 when she buys her own show and creates her own studio? That's when she starts Harpo. And 1988. She fully like now is like owns the means of production. Like she's like all the way in on it.

That was very, very smart for her to do that. It's incredible. It was. And then yeah, how, I mean, I guess she's now on the track of like becoming the Oprah that we know. So is it just like a sort of steady rise from then on? Just some marker. She's in the color purple in 1985

and she gets candy awarding Gold and Globe combinations. She also had started dating sediment in 1986. Okay, I'm sorry. You have to explain his STEM in the beginning. I don't like to know anything about his STEM in the beginning. And he's like one of those words that comes up in like refrigerator magnet ways. Like he's just a physical and Oprah.

But I don't know what his deal is or who he is. I love it too. He's just STEM in now. You know? He's just STEM. Is that his first name or his last name? That's his first. Okay.

STEM in Graham. First. Okay. Stem McCraum. Share. So I think it's interesting that they are engaged in 1992 when she's 38. And people magazine, I just was like, wow, y'all are wild. People magazine in the story about her engagement. I think it was on the cover. They said, for as long as Winfrey has been famous, she's been dogged by two questions. How much does she weigh? And when is she getting married?

What the fuck? The first answer, Alas, has been offered time and again, though it is currently a well-known secret. The second response was six years in come. Oh! My can't- can't assist a celebrate? I know! Just have a moment! It's so gross. It's so gross And can women not be reduced to like these two fucking irrelevant pieces of information? Yeah, it's pretty gross

So what is Stedman's deal like what does he do for living and stuff? He's an athlete and then he also Here's a sportswear model. Are they still married? I honestly did not know this. They never got married. Oh, okay. They call off the ceremony in the 1993. And she wrote about this in Oprah Magazine.

In 1993, the moment after I said yes to his proposal, I had doubts. I realized I didn't actually want a marriage. I wanted to be asked. I wanted to know proposal, I had doubts. I realized I didn't actually want a marriage. I wanted to be asked. I wanted to know he felt I was worthy of being his Mrs. but I didn't want the sacrifices, the compromises, the day in, day out commitment required to make a marriage work.

My life with the show was my priority and we both knew it. So now they say they have a spiritual partnership. So they've stayed together but they're not married. Right, yeah. So the've stayed together, but they're not married. Right. So the book club launches in 1996. Do you know the first title for the upper book club was?

Oh, isn't it, is it the lovely bones? It's Tony Morrison, right? Wait, what just happened? No, and no. No, and no. Wait, really? It's Jacqueline the Sharon's book, The Deep End of the Ocean. Oh, I don't know this book.

I got nothing. Yeah, it's about a kid-backed child who turns up to know that his family's lawn after being missing for several years. But that's also, I feel like that moment marked the sort of realization of what a cultural force both was. Because it became this thing that every single time she would have a book club book, it would be like, oh, it sells like 200 billion copies like the day after she announces it. It just was like this illustration of like this woman is creating culture. And like the amount of power that Oprah has,

she can say anything like, I like Crocs or something. And then all of a sudden it would be like a $10 million market. It's an algorithm before an algorithm. Yeah. And like the earliest example of like what we would call now an influencer. Yeah. So with the club there's the John France and controversy over the corrections being a selection for her book club.

We are not talking about does it all be if I want to do an episode so bad that do sucks that do sucks so much ass. So listen here's my new concept for the show everybody. It's changing starting now. We just read names of people who've appeared on Oprah and Tim Micke and he tells us if they're gonna venture. Okay, so in 2000, she had her, her smanxings launched the Oprah Maxine. Yeah.

In the 2008, she had discovery, announced the creation of the own network, which goes on the air in 2011. Oh, yeah. And in 2015, joining the force for Weight Watchers. Well, also, somewhere in there was like, she did the Lance Armstrong interview. Like, she just got a bunch of humongous culture shifting, sort of major, major interviews,

and has sort of become the source for, oh, one of the most famous or notorious or whatever people in the world wants to like tell their story, they're going to do that with Oprah. Tom Cruise jumping on the couch, I feel like it's another big Oprah moment too. Oh my god. That was America being like, this person is like kind of unwell. So that's the timeline. Nailed it.

That's it. That is, like a lot of things I did not know about Oprah. I feel like as you were talking about it, I was like, oh right, all we do really have about Oprah is her own narrative. And she is like extraordinarily savvy. Like that was genuinely a thing I had not thought about. And I was like, no, that seems like, like a foundational insight.

I feel like a trick is to just literally never believe billionaires when they tell their lie stories. Nobody gets that rich without some like severe shenanigans. Capitalism does not allow that. Yeah. Aubrey, do you wanna rewind us to the episode of the Oprah show that you're gonna walk us through? I'm so excited.

Totally. So I did it the whole thing where I was like, I'm gonna write out my notes and I'm gonna write it in a way that's like, surprise, we're talking about the wagon of fat. Duh, duh, duh. And I was like, no, why? Everyone knows.

Everyone knows. Yeah, we know, we were emailing about this, Aubrey, we know. No, no, no, I mean like the audience. Oh, I'm no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I've at this point done a fair amount of research for this show. A lot of it hard to stomach or like really unpleasant or whatever. None has made me as sad as looking at press coverage of Oprah in 1988. The number of headlines that came up from that late 80s coverage with specific numbers about Oprah's weight in the headline. The number of headlines and stories about whether or not Steadman is just with specific numbers about Oprah's weight in the headline.

The number of headlines and stories about whether or not Stedman is just using her for her money because he couldn't possibly be in love with a fat woman. Every aspect of Oprah's identity and experience is up for this really ruthless and kind of hurtless kind of debate. Uh-huh. She's this fat. How fat should she be? Yeah. I liked her better when she was fat.

Now, she's thin. Well, put that, but, but, right, that just like everyone is having all of their garbage feelings and opinions out, like, in print and on TV about her all the time. But I don't know if I actually am familiar with this episode, the wagon of fat episode. Oh my god. There are times when I really do have to like,

remind myself that you are not in fact, just like a bizarro mirror image of me. Yeah. Oh, you weren't a fat teenage girl? Sorry. Like, I'm on the game. And it's all sureless men in there. I don't know what is going to be open episodes.

I don't get those recommended to me. So, as we mentioned earlier, Oprah is like incredibly successful. She's been on the air with her show for just a couple of years. While she's buying Harpo while all these other things are happening, Oprah has been losing weight and she's been losing a lot of weight. At the point sort of that this episode is filmed, she has lost 67 pounds. What? And she has done it on something called Optifast. sort of that this episode is filmed. She has lost 67 pounds. And she has done it on something called Optifast.

Is that something that either of you have heard of before? Yes. I remember that era. Yeah, I don't know if I know that specific one, but I know the genre of crash diet where you're drinking these awful milkshakes, like these weird powdered, they have flavors like chocolate or caramel, but it's just brown brown chalk or like slightly less brown chalk.

Yeah, that's right, yes. It is a kind of diet that we've talked about on the show before, a VLCD, which is a very low calorie diet. I will just flag for that next couple of minutes. I'm gonna mention some calorie numbers and some weight numbers. It's kind of hard not to. This diet optifast is referred to at the time as a quote unquote medically supervised

liquid fast. So you're like working with doctors is sort of the idea they're keeping an eye on it, but you are consuming 400 calories a day. What? Yeah. That's like prisoner of war rations. Wow. Yep.

So each of these shakes is 160 calories. They're still for sale today. It is, you know, less than 25% of your recommended daily allowance According to sort of the food pyramid and all that kind of stuff There is a piece in the buffalo news at the time that says quote Optifast is made of egg white and milk supplemented with vitamins and minerals to prevent cardiac irregularity. Consolidation differs from controversial liquid protein diets of the past. 40 dieters died on that mix. Made of collagen protein, hooves,

hives, horns, connective tissue of cattle. It was not life supporting. Optifast is. I love it when fat diets are like, we're not like those other fat diets. Yeah, I know. Like those ones that are bad for you. We aren't made of ground up cattle hubs.

Yeah. Like what? Little fun fact about this diet, like many diets of that era, it has the sort of like initial like phase to quote unquote kickstart weight loss, right? That is the 400 calories a day phase. By the time you get to the end, you get to a luxurious 1000 calories a day. That's your forever after this diet. I mean no wonder Oprah lost hella fucking weight. Yeah, yes. This isn't enough food to live. Yes.

Absolutely. And she talks about that later. She's like after I did the show, I started eating again to celebrate just like eating some solid foods, right? She's on it for four months at 400 calories a day and she makes this big deal on the episode about like, I'm back in my size 10 Calvin Klein jeans that I wore 10 years ago. And she was like, I started eating solid foods and within two days those jeans didn't fit anymore.

I was like, yeah, yeah. There's actual food in your actual stomach. Yeah. I don't tell you. The cost of the diet at the time was between $3,000 and $5,000 a year, according to the New York Times. In today's dollar, that is between $7,000 and $11,000. Wait, that's almost $1,000 a month.

That's like people's rent. Uh-huh. There are that's almost $1,000 a month. That's like, people's rent. Uh-huh. There are also some media coverage around, like, a little, some cautionary notes about Optifast. But those are mostly about how the diet is too drastic if you're just trying to lose 10 or 15 pounds. So it's like, the idea is, it's not safe for thin people, but fat people need to do it for their health.

Oh. It's also worth knowing that Optifast is owned by Nestle. Of course. Of course. Always. They're probably selling Optifast in other countries as baby farmers.

Yeah. I'm sure they are. Yeah. So Oprah loses 67 pounds. And the way that she decides to reveal it is at the opening of her show, she pulls out this red classic radio flyer wagon with a clear plastic bag full of 67 pounds of animal fat.

So it's like pork fat and beef fat. So with that, we're gonna watch two little actual clips of this actual episode. I fucking hate what you have done to my recommendation algorithm. I agree. Oh my god, I hate what you done to my right hand bar. It's got, I realize I need to do all of this in Cognito. Mine is all like fucking diet ads now. I can't stuff.

It's how to get 10,000 steps. It's such a dense garbage. At the time, I felt it was important to show it in that way, because I had not, I'd starved. I'd literally starved for four months or four and a half months, and thought, everybody's going to want to know how you lost the weight. So you might as well tell them. 67 pounds since July 7, 67 pounds, and 30 inches from my bust, my waist, and my hips.

And this is what 67 pounds of fat looks like. I can't, I can't lift it. Now when you talk about Jimmy, is this gross or what? It is amazing to me that I can't lift it, but I used to carry it around every day. And when you talk about making yourself the best you can be, I'm glad I did this for my heart because my poor heart that had to send blood to all of this, all of this. It's just it's shocking to me that it is this, I saw it yesterday, I said I'm going to live on broccoli now.

I want you to know that whatever diet you choose, and this audience is filled with people who've 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,

if Scott did it, if Billy did it, you can do it. I thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, this is such a Aubrey bait. Oh, yes.

I know exactly the parts that piss you off, Aubrey. I mean, I think the thing that bothers me the most about that clip in particular is just the intense, like weirdly sort of salacious camera work. Like so much of it is just pushing in on close-ups of like discarded animal fat. Yeah. I forgot how much she will slip into like she code switches. Dude, yes, I know that too.

There's just a tone that she starts to take and I'm like, oh, please don't sister girl be right now. I am 100% projecting, but she looks so miserable in these clips. Maybe hungry, maybe she seems like a very hungry person. That's what I think is like after four months, like imagining exactly the same thing three meals a day and she's being hungry all the time.

Like you can't run your life feeling like that and it feels palpable to me, although again, I'm probably projecting. Yeah, I mean, that part stands out to me. I think the other part that stands out to me is just the sort of like, if I can do it, you can do it. And I'm like, oh, Oprah, that is not a one to one, ma'am. Yeah, you made $88 million last year.

I didn't make $88 million. Yeah, totally. This is an extraordinarily expensive diet. It's an extraordinarily restrictive diet. What she says at different points on the show, she says it was six weeks. Yeah. Some of the media at the time,

they cite a four months number, which seems to lose 67 pounds in six weeks. It's alarming to lose that much in four months. It is deeply upsetting slash maybe physically impossible to lose that much in six weeks, right? Like, woo. I am stealing this point from a lady I know named Aubrey Gordon, but also, Oprah didn't do it.

Like, she gained the weight back. Like, 99% of people who lose this much weight this fast do. What this really is a story of is like even Oprah with her $88 million a year isn't able to keep the weight off because like nobody can continue living like this. Nobody can eat a thousand calories a day for the rest of their life.

Like it's extremely bad for your health. It's extremely bad for your mental health. Like this was never going to work for her in the long term. I will say the other thing that feels really fascinating to me about this clip that is not often mentioned is that this show airs during sweeps. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Wow. This single episode has her largest ratings to date and some of the media that I found claimed that even in the 25 year run of the show, this was still the highest rated episode ever away. This episode got 18.4% of all households with television. Holy shit. That's like super bold numbers, dude.

Uh-huh. And the makers of Optifast say that they got over 200,000 calls. Wow. So it's this really tricky thing, right? Where you're like, oh my God, Oprah's getting all of this horrific negative media coverage about her size and these public debates about her body and about her life and about everything, right?

She's working all that out. Like many of us, she thinks maybe weight loss is the thing that'll take care of it. She does that, but everything she does is on TV, including this. So it also sort of sets off this kind of, you know, it's like a butterfly flapping its wings, right? Daming to sort of a tsunami, right? Where you're like, oh, this is like a deeply human thing to do,

but you're doing it during sweeps on an immensely popular TV show. Also, it's just awful to think about going through the sort of extremely normal cycle of like a crash diet, feeling good, there's a sense of euphoria, and then this general disappointment in yourself and like self-loathing as you inevitably gained the weight back, like that's hard enough,

but doing it in front of the entire country and having people commenting on it and speculating on it and like, what's wrong with her? She's gaining the weight back. Why can't she do it? Like, that's just like this extra level of basically abuse. Yeah. It does make me sad. I did not expect that. But it's like, I'm so sorry. There are two more clips and both of them will also make you sad. I apologize. Okay, so I dropped a link to you guys. Oh no, it's maintenance phase nemesis, Johnny Carton. It sure is. The trash men of maintenance phase.

Oh buddy, you will be surprised by where the trash comes from, it's a particular interview. Oh no. Now let's go back. When, what age were you? When you first started to find out you were a little larger than I actually wanted to be? This is what I learned. I've always been one of those people

Thank you Johnny being delicate Trying to fricking out say speaking of that. I happened to look at some tapes the other day of the first time I was on this show. Why didn't you tell me well? I mean I Look like Shamu. No, you didn't know you know, where we actually it's very interesting I'll bet you some people I'm taking a guess I'll bet you some people said I'd like you better the other way. Is that does that happen? Yeah, they have said that but they line Do they like they are lying? The interesting thing about it is so I was one of those people who always said oh I carried my weight well I carried will I know I'm overweight. I carried well then I look back at pictures. I carried exactly where it was

Yeah, my best friend said to me the other day, you know, I care it well. Then I look back at pictures, I care it exactly where it was. Yeah, my best friend said to me the other day, you know, I see those pictures of you and see, I don't think of you that way, Moby. Yeah. Yes. What? Oh.

Yeah, tell me what you guys are thinking and feeling. Oh. Just just, oh, not see. Yeah. This is a 10 minute clip that I watched in like 90 second intervals, because I was like, I need a break, like, yeah. And I think part of what landed so hard

is watching someone who sometime between, you know, four months or a year or whatever, however long before, was fatter, so aggressively divorce their current self from their past self. So she's divorcing herself from her previous fat self, but she's also kind of divorcing herself from fat people. She's buying into all of this logic that's like,

oh, if people tell you they carry it well, they're lying. If they tell you that they like the way you look, they're lying. She's also congratulating her friends for saying mean shit to her too. Like, your friends should not be calling you a fucking whale, dude. Like, you shouldn't be like, LOL, my friends did this awful thing to me.

Like, that's just normalizing the idea that we're kind of like supposed to confront our fat friends. Like, fuck that. Also, just like, why didn't you tell me her question to Johnny Garza, why didn't you tell like, Jesus Christ? Never don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. acutely aware of at all times. Yeah, make me feel bad in my closest relationship too. To me, it's like this sad thing of like, it's this woman who looks fine and seems like happy and like unbelievably successful. And then it's like she still feels like a failure because of this one extremely superficial trivial thing. And like, and also the whole culture, of course, is telling her that she's a failure

because of this one thing or that nothing counts because of this one thing. I mean, first of all, this is not a standard that we apply to men at all. Yeah. There are many men in public life who have just been like, fat dudes and like no one gives a shit. And it really feels like a firm move and you a kind of white assimilationist individual istic spans for her. The idea that if somebody says they're comfortable, they're lying, it just feels like a direct attack on black women who are a marcher. Yeah, totally.

Aubrey, Kimberly, do you think Oprah was able eventually to just sort of come to peace with the way that she looks, or like is she still in this cycle? I mean, I think this is where we get into a little bit of like the things that we know about Oprah's mindset are the things that she decides to tell us. So I think there's a question about her individual mindset as a human, which we can't know. It feels to me as I was looking through media for this.

She's done media work since, I think it's 2009 maybe, where she starts talking about how healthy is the new skinny, and she doesn't want to just be thin she wants to be strong and healthy by what she means thin, right? Like it just feels very conflicted in a way that feels like a reflection to me of like the way that like many many many people and particularly women feel about their bodies, right? Right. Kimberly, I'm curious about if you have thoughts or experience to share on this. I was gonna take us into it. I kept getting distracted by her hair. I don't know.

Right? Why did you get into that, that TNG? Because, you know, I'm like, what is this Tina Turner ring that's happening? I know. So, you know, like, how does, like, her rings speak to me as a particular kind of class achievement so that she's able to like everybody knows Oprah has money. We assume she has more money than god

and so she's able to make herself look a particular way and indulge in particular products like her skin is always glowing products, like her skin is always glowing. So it seems like she's able to move away from conversations about her body and move into more of a class of like, this is what my wealth affords me. So I look and feel exactly how I want to feel. But I think the attention to Bonnie has fallen away. So we're gonna watch one more clip of a pop culture response and then we're actually gonna hear from Oprah.

So what we're about to watch is Mad TV. I used to love this show and it's so problematic. It's so objective. Oh. So they do a series of sketches about Oprah. There's like quite a few of them. And this one is about Oprah being fat, and it is super duper intense.

Okay, girlfriend, what's the topic for today's show? Please tell me I don't have to deal with a bunch of quiet babies. Sorry, today's show is about grieving. Damn it! Sorry. That's okay, girlfriend. I'm just going to smile and think about the money. All right. Let's make the loss of a loved one, buddy!

Woo! Okay, here we go. Oh, yes. Come to mama. Who the hell is that on the monitor? Is that, Suddrick, the entertainer? No, open that tube. Oh, girl, open that tube.

Oh, girl friend, look, I had a rough weekend, okay? I gained over 180 pounds. I told you to take me only with the thinning camera. It's okay, it's okay, it is out there right now. Your thinning camera is camera number two. It's out there. It's guaranteed to make you look 200 pounds lighter. Good.

And I can keep eating. Oh. Yeah, we're going to stop it there. That's the opening. The sketch ends with Oprah getting mistaking herself for forest Whitaker on the monitor and welcoming him to the show and then realizing that the image is of her and getting so angry that she hulks out and explodes fat

onto everyone. Just crazy. Oh my God. So they just, like, you just get these shots of people being sort of soaked in like slimy gooey fat. When is this from, Aubrey? This one's from 2002. Oh, it's that late.

It's that late. Also, Oprah doesn't even say girlfriend that much. That was like the central joke of this sketch. And like, she doesn't even say girlfriend. And it That was like the central joke of this sketch. And like she doesn't even say girlfriend. And it's like you can see the ways at which her womanhood is an issue, right? That she calls herself Cedric the entertainer and she calls herself Forest Whitaker.

You can see the ways in which she is getting painted in this as like an angry black woman, right? That she's got this sort of false front. And the entire conceit of this sketch is just like, look at this gross fat lady. They also made her like significantly fatter than the actual Oprah. Like they made a huge fat suit, right? Right. They made her about my size, which she has not ever been. It's really truly wild. How hard they are leaning into like,

what a grotesque body this is. Yeah. So it's a kind of racialized sexism that is reacting to, I think it's reacting to just the idea that like a larger black woman is supposed to be nurturing and like you big mama and taking care of you, and cooking for you, but a black woman who tries to do anything other than that deserves this kind of viciousness. There were like many more comedy examples of stuff like this. I think they would have said at the time, like we're just calling it like we see it, right?

It was like that sort of era of comedy where it was just like offense is comedy, right? Like just like that sort of era of comedy where it was just like offense is comedy, right? Like just like hurting people is something inherently. Yeah. So the last clip I wanted to show you all is of Oprah talking about this in 2011. Around the same time she is a doesn't interview with entertainment tonight and they ask her what the biggest mistake she made on the show was. This is like around the time the show's wrapping up. And she says it is this episode. Elle magazine quotes her saying, present day Oprah considers the episode quote unquote

hard to watch because quote, you can see that my ego is on flamboyant display. I've had to pay the price for that moment over and over. I literally handed to the world on a fat wagon platter at the story of, is she fat? Is she thin? We're gonna hear from Oprah directly about sort of like what were the kind of pressures that she was navigating. For months, not a morsel of food. I gotta tell you, during that time, I planned a vacation

to the South of France. I gave that vacation away to friends. Anything that involved being around food at all, I just canceled anything that was going to put me any place where I could smell or come in contact with food. So, some people thought I did that for Stedmond. There is, as I said, a lot of rumors, which make me ill, that I did this because of Steadman.

I love Steadman very much, and he cares about me, and has been very supportive of me, fat and thin. I did not do this for Steadman. And anybody who is overweight and whose spouses or friends or telling you to do it, you know you can not do it for anybody but yourself. There was certainly a part of me that felt that I didn't match what he was

in his physical stature. He's a very good looking guy. And I knew that when people would see us together that the first thing they were thinking, I certainly thought for myself that what they were thinking is, what's he doing with that fat girl? Oh, right.

This is very interesting to hear her talk about to be self-reflective like that because I asked my mom, I was telling her I was going to be on this podcast and she was like, what's a podcast? But I was asking her how she feels about Oprah and she was like, I don't really care for her because she always seems like she's doing stuff for the culture. I was like, whoa, I didn't expect this answer. What do you mean? And she said, she doesn't seem like she's doing stuff for herself.

It feels like she's doing stuff for show. It's interesting to see this clip and to see her saying almost exactly the same thing that my mom said. Yeah, she's aware of herself as a visual symbol. Right, but yet all of the rhetoric around the weight loss that she put out was about doing it herself. Yeah, there's this resonance where in the clip from 1988, she's saying, I did this for me, and then in the clip from now,

she's like, I did it for Steadman. Right. Yeah. Well, and not even I did this for me. And then in the clip from now, she's like, oh, I did it for Stedman. Hey. Yeah. Well, and not even I did it for Stedman, where like, that's another part of what I think is so fascinating about this clip, is that she's saying, people were saying I was doing it for Stedman.

I wasn't doing it for Stedman. I was doing it because I felt like people were looking at me as like the part that didn't fit in this relationship, which is different than a 1988 narrative of my boyfriend made me do it. Yeah, yeah. Which is sort of what they're talking about and actually what she's talking about here feels to me

like a pretty clear cut case of deeply internalized to anti-fat sort of attitudes, right? That's just like people won't trust my relationship. They won't like, you know what I mean? All of that sort of attitudes, right? That's just like, people won't trust my relationship. They won't like, you know what I mean? Like all of that sort of stuff. Or like my weight emasculates my boyfriend. In this weird way. And even if he's fine with the way that I look,

there's something about the public facing nature of us that like invalidates our relationship in some way, even if we internally are happy. Yeah, I mean, there were also those rumors for years and years and years about both her and Steadman being gay. Oh yeah, part of what lens credence to those sorts of rumors is this kind of perceived

physical mismatch, right? He's too handsome and too well groomed to be like a straight man, and she's too like fat, basically, to be a straight woman because we all know how the mechanics of heterosexual attraction work, right? And this doesn't make sense in that very simplistic kind of calculation

that also bears no resemblance to how people are actually drawn to other people, right? Like it's sort of like a cultural set of rules that we've kind of agreed upon. That's like the rumors for years that Jake Jalenal was gay, basically because he's like attractive. There was no actual evidence. It was like, oh he's hot. So probably hiding gayness. I don't know. He's one of ours guys. Can I make one note about the clip and the images?

They picked the worst images of her instead. The worst images. They picked the worst images of her instead. The worst images. Like I was looking at some really cute pictures when they looked happy and really supportive, but they picked these pictures. We're like her foundation, like the skin back, the toe of the eye.

It looks off. It's just, it's very, I guess the choice makes sense in what she was talking about. No, totally, but they also have like found a bunch of pictures of her, definitely at her fattest, at least that I have seen. Again, she is a bajillionaire. They have plenty of really nice staged photos of the two of them.

And what they have picked is these sort of vacation shots that look like when you had a disposable camera, these might be the ones that you would throw away. That's what I was going to say. They look like the photos you're tagged in on Facebook, of someone else's camera and you're half in the background, you're like, whole. Hard untagged. Yeah, sorry.

Sorry. Sorry. The other thing that I will say that is sort of related to the Stedman stuff is that this comes up in that New York Times profile from 1989, quote, when Winfrey was fat, she hugged and touched her studio guests a lot. She practically cuddled.

Now that she is slim and awfully glamorous, she maintains a far greater distance. A weird. The touch of a woman with a perceived sexual allure is scarier, more charged, dangerous. Oh. Paradoxically, her body seemed more loose, her movements more flowing when she was fat.

When she is with Stedman, her body regains its comfortable eloquence. I guess there's something about like a fat lady not being as threatening and I guess de-sexualized so you feel comfortable with them touching you and you touching them. I mean, I think that's part of it. And I also think that's part of Oprah is stepping away from a very like hademic Daniels body type, right? That she has been able to be cast in this role of like,

unnurturing fat black woman that people can rely on. And now that she's like, you're like more aware of her thinness, which also makes you kind of more aware of her wealth, which also makes you more aware of her beauty. Like all of those things sort of start to become a threat. I mean, I'll say just as a person who's gone through major weight loss and major weight gain both, there is this sort of hint at, but they don't really get into the ways in which that kind of dramatic change

can really alienate you from your own body. That like, there's sort of this narrative about weight loss that is like, it only gets better and you only like yourself more. And really and truly, it can be like extremely alarming to see how differently people treat you to figure out how to just like move and be in the world. Like really, that profile and sort of our cultural logic

at the time doesn't really allow us to go there. Yeah. So the last thing I will say, just to like bring this one to a close, is in 2018 2018 the National Museum of African American History and Culture had an exhibit on Oprah And the Washington Post did a piece that was like these are the five things you have to see in the Oprah exhibit One of the five things was the size 10 Calvin Klein jeans from the wagon of fat episode So like even now this was in 2018, right?

So like even within the last few years, this remains like one of the biggest sort of like touchstones of her show. And it's really complicated. And she is still saying it's one of my biggest mistakes. And I really don't like it. And she's also still owning weight watchers. And she's still, you know, like it's all sort of unresolved. Of all the things she's done, how in the Black History Month is that the thing that you wanna have in the Black Soda and I don't understand? Right?

When they should have done the 40-foot long foam colon that Dr. Aung in his introduction episode. Kids could've crawled through it. It's not like a... Mike, I'm hosting you. I'm hosting you.