From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole by Kathleen Collins

Author:Kathleen Collins [Collins, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781496832320
Google: DBTKzgEACAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2021-01-15T05:18:44+00:00

Cambridge 02138

In 1988 Oprah Winfrey pulled a wagon full of sixty-seven pounds of fat onto the stage of her talk show. I was incensed. Almost three decades later she confessed to regretting that stunt. “You can see that my ego is on flamboyant display,” she told an interviewer. “I’ve had to pay the price for that moment over and over. I literally handed to the world on a fat wagon platter the story of ‘Is She Fat?’ ‘Is She Thin?’” I didn’t care about her tabloid troubles. What irked me was her pride in the fact that she had fasted for six weeks, because it was a negative message to send to viewers. At the time of the fat wagon episode, I was getting a master’s degree in counseling psychology and had a vague but noble plan of working with women with eating disorders. The masses were already starting to worship Oprah, and I hated to think of all the women—and girls, especially—engaging in irresponsible copycat dieting. As for the wagon of fat, well, that was not only gratuitous and melodramatic (it made for great TV, of course), but because it was viscerally revolting, it seemed shaming, inviting the opposite of what Oprah spent most of her later career doing, which has been encouraging women to be their best selves. It seemed so obvious to me that I was right in my indignation, and maybe I was, but I couldn’t find any joiners. I tried to get other women in my touchy-feely, self-esteemy graduate program to get enraged along with me, but no one else seemed to think it was so bad. I suppose they were all on diets of their own and wished they had their own wagons of fat to parade around with. Did I mention it was 1988? Did you read the earlier chapter about the grapefruit diet and the Cheryl Tiegs?

The late 1980s and early 1990s offered several galvanizing television events, most of which were widely considered to be weightier and more culturally defining than Oprah’s fat wagon. The Clinton presidential campaign in 1992? I fell for it just as I had for the peanut butter and Pantene ads—smitten and bitten, hook, line, and sinker. MTV’s Rock the Vote. The media gloss, Fleetwood Mac, peace love and understanding, communing with my generation. I felt what they engineered me to feel, just like shopping in Crate & Barrel does with its manipulative simple-chic pussy willow centerpieces, even though my most vivid recollection of the campaign was watching the election victory on my tiny curvilinear television in my tiny apartment alone. It was an experience that could literally be distilled down into a little box. (Six years later I watched the impeachment hearings on CNN at the gym.) Other events of the era that spring to mind: the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Gulf War, Rodney King and the LA riots, and the more prurient Lorena Bobbitt and Pamela Smart cases. I recently listened to an interview with a

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