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, Mycathy fan Cathy. She's gotta like go in all baby. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. Over eating cause job stress problem, overspending cause job stress problem, crankiness cause job stress problem, exhaustion, disorganization, wrinkles to decay, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, Mycathy fan Cathy. She's gotta like go in all baby. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. Over eating cause job stress problem, overspending cause job stress problem, crankiness cause job stress problem, exhaustion, disorganization, wrinkles to decay, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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.