In Retrospect Transcripts Archives

In Retrospect - Episode 7

EPISODE 7 – HOT FOR TEACHER (PT 2): MARY KAY LETOURNEAU ENTERS THE CHAT

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Jessica Bennett (00:00):

Hey everyone, just to note that this is part two of our Hot for Teacher Dawson’s Creek episode. If you haven’t listened to part one yet, I recommend starting there. Otherwise, enjoy the show.

(00:10):

So, when I texted our high school friend group text chain and was like, “By the way, do you remember how in Dawson’s Creek, Pacey actually sleeps with his teacher?”

Rosie Bancroft (00:20):

Yeah. My first reaction when you texted that was, “Really?”

Jessica Bennett (00:26):

So, this is my high school friend Rosie Bancroft. As a reminder, Rosie is a mental health counselor in a public middle school in Seattle. But 25 years ago, Rosie was hosting Dawson’s Creek watch parties in her parents’ basement.

Rosie Bancroft (00:38):

And then I thought, “Oh, I guess I have some vague recollection of that,” but it was not impactful or something. It did not register, or we thought it was cool, or maybe that’s why I liked Pacey? Ew.

Jessica Bennett (00:52):

And this reaction she’s having perfectly encapsulates the emotional rollercoaster of being an adult now and realizing that your teenage self was totally obsessed with and maybe even kind of turned on by, in a gross way, a 15-year-old boy’s illicit relationship with his 36-year-old English teacher. A relationship that, in this case, mirrored the scandals going on in our own high school in Seattle, and in national headlines about Mary Kay Letourneau, which also happened to be in our hometown.

(01:24):

I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (01:26):

And I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (01:27):

And this is In Retrospect, where each week, we delve into a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Susie Banikarim (01:33):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett (01:35):

Today, we’re talking about Pacey’s relationship with this much older teacher on Dawson’s Creek, but we’re also talking about sex in the ’90s and how we understood it. This is part two of Hot for Teacher.

(01:51):

So, we’re talking about Dawson’s Creek and specifically the relationship between Pacey, one of the main characters, and his teacher, Tamara. And one of the interesting things that we’ve grappled with a bit, you and I, Susie, is how we talk about it.

Susie Banikarim (02:05):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (02:06):

Throughout our discussion, we’re sort of like, “Are we calling it an affair? Are we calling it a statutory rape?”

Susie Banikarim (02:10):

Is it an assault?

Jessica Bennett (02:11):

What is this? Is it an inappropriate relationship? And that’s interesting because, in the show itself, they don’t refer to it as inappropriate necessarily. They know that it is taboo, but Pacey himself describes it as falling in love. The official description of the episode on Hulu where it now streams, you can watch Dawson’s Creek, calls it an affair.

Susie Banikarim (02:34):

Yeah. And something that’s occurred to me is that the thing that we’re kind of grappling with is related to the fact that the show presents it in such a way that it makes it hard to see it as anything other than extremely consensual, right? Pacey is kind of the aggressor. Even the way that the townsfolk find out about the affair or assault or however we should be talking about it, is because Pacey and Dawson are having a conversation about it in the school bathroom, where Pacey is telling Dawson about how he’s had a conversation with his teacher that morning about wanting to have a more open relationship. And he says something hilarious like, “Once I get my learner’s permit, this woman is going to cave completely.”

Jessica Bennett (03:27):

Then it’s on.

Susie Banikarim (03:27):

Yeah, then it’s on. So, two things about that really struck me. One is that it’s a reminder that he can’t even drive. He doesn’t have his learner’s permit. That is really a child. And then, on top of that, that it’s again presented as he’s trying to get her to cave, he’s trying to persuade her. He is the aggressor and she is the one who is trying to protect them from peering eyes.

Jessica Bennett (03:56):

Right, right. And peering eyes, which are literally in the bathroom because there is another kid who’s smoking weed in the stall.

Susie Banikarim (04:03):

Yeah, yes.

Jessica Bennett (04:03):

Sort of crouched on top of the toilet so they can’t see his feet.

Susie Banikarim (04:07):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (04:07):

Who overhears the whole thing.

Susie Banikarim (04:08):

And that’s how they’re ultimately discovered, right? And again, it’s not presented as her suddenly realizing what she’s done and being mortified. She’s very angry at him because she’s like, “This relationship only required for you to be silent about it.” Right? “There was only one boundary, and that boundary was silence about this or not telling anyone.” And she literally says in that conversation, “The boundary wasn’t about sex.”

Jessica Bennett (04:38):

The dialogue in these scenes is just…

Susie Banikarim (04:41):

It’s wild.

Jessica Bennett (04:41):

Chef’s kiss.

Susie Banikarim (04:42):

Yeah, chef’s kiss. Exactly. So, I think we’re struggling with something real, which is that this was presented in such a way that it was almost impossible to see it as a negative or as a thing that was happening to him. It felt like he had a lot of agency.

Jessica Bennett (05:01):

And the other thing is, there’s sort of a tenderness. We are getting invested as viewers in this “relationship”.

Susie Banikarim (05:08):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (05:09):

We see Pacey get comfortable at her house. There’s a scene where he’s reading a magazine on her bed while she grades papers.

Susie Banikarim (05:16):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (05:16):

They have this banter. It is more than just a “triste”, and I think I said this before, but he describes it as falling in love with her.

Susie Banikarim (05:26):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (05:27):

And so, it’s interesting too because, outside of the show, the press is covering this. The New York Times calls the plot, “A sexual affair.”

Susie Banikarim (05:36):

Right.

Jessica Bennett (05:36):

And they get into the salacious and impropriety of it, but they still call it that. The president of the WB network actually says, in an interview with the Times in that story, that the plot ultimately sent a positive message.

Susie Banikarim (05:49):

I’m sorry, what?

Jessica Bennett (05:50):

Because Ms. Jacobs would go on to lose her job and Pacey would be sort of ostracized at school. Interestingly, the voices who are kind of objecting to this are the ones that we might not expect.

Susie Banikarim (06:03):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (06:03):

Such as the New York Post.

Susie Banikarim (06:04):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (06:05):

Who calls the plot line, “An immoral exploitation of youthful curiosity about sex.”

Susie Banikarim (06:10):

Well, did it feel like an immoral exploitation of the youthful curiosity about sex when you were watching with your friends?

Jessica Bennett (06:18):

I mean, I don’t think so. And honestly, the taboo was part of what the appeal was.

Susie Banikarim (06:23):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (06:23):

So look, all of this is happening kind of in parallel in some ways to the Mary Kay Letourneau case, including how we talked about it. So, as you’ll remember, Mary Kay Letourneau, this is a case happening in 1996, just a couple of years before Dawson’s premiered. It’s happening outside of Seattle where I was, as a teenager.

Clip (06:42):

The relationship that began when the boy was just 12 years old resulted in two pregnancies, and for Letourneau, a seven year sentence for child rape.

Jessica Bennett (06:51):

So that case would spark this whole media frenzy. But it was basically portrayed, if you dig back into articles at the time, about two people so in love that they just couldn’t keep their hands off each other. They couldn’t stay away from each other. They happened to meet at the wrong place and the wrong time.

Susie Banikarim (07:11):

Yeah. It has so many parallels. She’s also a very pretty young teacher. Even though she’s 34, she looks quite youthful. And she very much pushed this idea that he was the aggressor, which is ridiculous in retrospect, that this 12 year old child was pursuing her. But when I talk about that case, when I talk about that case with you or with friends, I don’t really struggle with saying that it just is so blatantly wrong. Right? It’s so clear to me that a 34-year-old woman shouldn’t be having sex with a 12-year-old boy. And I don’t call it an affair or a sexual encounter.

(07:50):

I’m like, “Oh yeah, when Mary Kay Letourneau obviously assaulted her 12-year-old student.” And so, it’s interesting that the reason we struggle with this is because we’ve watched the relationship play out in a way that really supports that idea.

Jessica Bennett (08:03):

And unfold.

Susie Banikarim (08:05):

And that is the idea that Mary Kay was really pushing in the press, and that the press kind of accepted her version of events because there was this bias that a 12-year-old boy would love to have sex with Mary Kay Letourneau because she was hot, and that is all the 12-year-old boys care about. But when you spend any time with a 12-year-old boy, that is a baby. 12 year old kids are still watching cartoons on Sunday morning.

(08:33):

It’s really hard to think about them as adults. But it’s easier when you’re watching Dawson’s Creek because Pacey is a 20 something year old actor, so he doesn’t look like a child. He doesn’t physically present as a child. But if you look at pictures of Vili, who is the child that Mary Kay Letourneau essentially assaulted, he looks really young. And so, it does put it into perspective, I think.

Jessica Bennett (08:59):

And the thing is, the media is really buying into this. They’re helping to wrap this narrative up and also to perpetuate.

Susie Banikarim (09:07):

Right.

Jessica Bennett (09:07):

So, MSNBC brings in a psychologist for a segment about it. The segment is titled Predator or Lover? And in this segment, they note that, “All of us are touched by the adolescent love between Mary Kay and Vili.” Are we, though?

Susie Banikarim (09:22):

Are all of us touched by that? Because I don’t see it as an adolescent love. She’s 34, she has a child the same age as Vili.

Jessica Bennett (09:30):

Right. But that’s so interesting because we are the journalists now. We would be the ones covering this case were it to happen now, and we would come at this very differently than the journalists did back then. All these articles were sort of quoting both sides of the debate, that both sides is-

Susie Banikarim (09:44):

Wild.

Jessica Bennett (09:45):

… that I feel like the New York Times is constantly being criticized for, and I get a million hate tweets about it all the time. But they’re very much doing that with this story. And so, in one article in the Chicago Tribune, they bring a Beverly Hills woman on who had run a dating club for older women and younger men.

Susie Banikarim (10:03):

But presumably men who were over the age of 18.

Jessica Bennett (10:06):

Yes, presumably.

Susie Banikarim (10:08):

Legal.

Jessica Bennett (10:08):

But she says, she is quoted in print in the Chicago Tribune in 1998 saying, “You don’t break up a loving couple. The male here is much more a man than someone older because he is committed to her.”

Susie Banikarim (10:20):

Wait, so commitment makes you a man because I’m pretty sure two 10-year-olds in a relationship can feel committed, but that doesn’t make them adults.

Jessica Bennett (10:28):

Right?

Susie Banikarim (10:28):

That’s such a weird way to define manhood.

Jessica Bennett (10:32):

But then, what happens next is, Mary Kay Letourneau gets out of prison in 2004. She is registered as a level 2 sex offender. Vili, the boy now man, then petitions the court to reverse a no contact order so they can see each other. They get married the following year, and Entertainment Tonight negotiates exclusive access to stream or broadcast from their wedding.

Susie Banikarim (10:56):

Wait, like a celebrity wedding? They treat it like a celebrity wedding?

Jessica Bennett (11:00):

Yep.

Susie Banikarim (11:01):

That’s wild. And then, they really lead into the narrative throughout their married life, right?

Jessica Bennett (11:07):

So Mary Kay and Vili, even before they’re married, they do things like co-author a book. This book was only published in France, which I guess can tell you something about France, but it’s called Only One Crime: Love. They then later, once she’s out of jail, host this special night at a bar in Seattle called Hot for Teacher Night, where he’s the DJ and she’s the special guest. They’re kind of turning this into a gimmick.

Susie Banikarim (11:35):

I mean, the thing that’s also interesting about the book, and maybe even the Hot For Teacher Night, is that he’s still really quite young, right? Because it started when he was 12. So, how much is he really co-authoring this book or making these decisions in their life? You have to imagine that their relationship is so odd because she was quite literally his teacher, and then she had two children, right, when he was 13?

Jessica Bennett (12:01):

Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing that almost makes me uncomfortable talking about this is that they do have two grown daughters now who are in their 20s.

Susie Banikarim (12:09):

I mean, she has since passed away from cancer, and her and Vili had gotten a divorce before that. But there is this absolutely wild interview that our researcher, Sharon found that I could not stop watching, that this channel in Australia did, Australia’s 7NEWS, at a time where Vili is now in his mid-30s, the age she was when they had this. I mean, it’s the thing, I don’t even know what to call it. I guess this relationship, right? And you see very clearly in these clips of them being interviewed, that he is deeply uncomfortable with what’s happened to him. There’s this really weird scene between them where the interviewer is actually being challenging and saying to her, “Wasn’t this inappropriate?”

Clip (12:53):

You were a teacher, Mary. You can’t say, “I was immature.”

Mary Kay Letourneau (12:55):

It doesn’t matter. But you don’t know him.

Clip (12:57):

No, but I don’t need to know him in this discussion. He’s the child.

Susie Banikarim (13:01):

And she is saying to Vili over and over again, “Well, who was the boss?”

Mary Kay Letourneau (13:05):

Who was the boss?

Vili (13:06):

What?

Mary Kay Letourneau (13:09):

Who was the boss back then?

Vili (13:10):

There was me pursuing you.

Mary Kay Letourneau (13:10):

Who was the boss back then?

Vili (13:10):

This is ridiculous.

Mary Kay Letourneau (13:10):

No, who was?

Clip (13:12):

This is ridiculous.

Mary Kay Letourneau (13:13):

Who was? Just say it.

Susie Banikarim (13:15):

She just keeps saying it over and over again. “But who was the boss?” And he literally says on camera…

Vili (13:20):

This is getting weird.

Susie Banikarim (13:22):

It just seems impossible that you wouldn’t have trauma, right? You’re a 12-year-old boy, you have two children at 13. Having two children at 13 even in and of itself is, I think, kind of a traumatic experience. And that then, the mother of his children is in prison and is acknowledged as a sex offender by the legal system, and that she continues to pursue the relationship while she’s in prison. So much so that when she gets out, again, we weren’t there, but I assume she really pushed the idea of them getting married.

(13:53):

So, it’s hard to imagine that their dynamic was not super weird every step of the way. And he’s actually pretty clear that now, being the age she was, that he would never do what she did, which I think is also interesting. It’s like, he is now able to see what their age difference was because he is a 30 something year old man who has daughters. So, you have to also assume that over the course of time, this thing has become clearer and clearer to him in a way that you can’t absorb when you’re 12. You think you’re an adult at 12. I remember being 12 and thinking, “Why do people treat me like a child? I’m an adult.” But 12 year olds are kids.

(14:39):

My niece and nephew were kids well past 12, to be honest. In good ways. I am happy for them that they got to be children. And it feels like he really didn’t get that.

Jessica Bennett (15:03):

So, both of these relationships, actually I shouldn’t even use that word. Let’s call them stories.

Susie Banikarim (15:09):

Right.

Jessica Bennett (15:09):

Mary Kay Letourneau and in Dawson’s Creek, the plot line of Ms. Jacobs and Pacey really get at this trope that is now familiar. This idea of the older woman seductress.

Susie Banikarim (15:23):

Right.

Jessica Bennett (15:24):

And it’s not as if Dawson’s is the first to do this. They mention in the show, The Graduate, this is the video that Ms. Jacobs is renting from Pacey in that very first scene. Do you remember that Hot for Teacher song?

Susie Banikarim (15:38):

Yep.

Jessica Bennett (15:38):

By Van Halen, 1984?

Susie Banikarim (15:40):

Yes, I do remember that. I mean, also, The Graduate was a very popular film. And also, the song from the film, Mrs. Robinson, which was a Simon & Garfunkel song, became really popular and it was about the older woman seductress. It was sort of glamorizing her.

Jessica Bennett (15:54):

So Dawson’s comes in ’98, and then comes American Pie in 1999 starring Jennifer Coolidge as Stifler’s mom who has sex with Stifler’s friend on the pool table on prom night, and basically cements into the zeitgeist, the term, MILF.

Clip: (16:13):

Single malt?

Jeanine Stifler (16:13):

Aged 18 years. The way I like it.

Susie Banikarim (16:19):

And I guess, for anyone who might not know what a MILF is, it’s an acronym for mother I’d like to fuck.

Jessica Bennett (16:26):

At some point, I will go down the rabbit hole of looking up the linguistic trends here because I bet there is a spike in usage of that term in books-

Susie Banikarim (16:34):

100%. It became very commonly used.

Jessica Bennett (16:37):

… searches. And weird fact that I know, it becomes one of the most popular searched porn terms.

Susie Banikarim (16:45):

Oh my God. That is a weird fact, but also fascinating.

Jessica Bennett (16:45):

It’s a whole sub category.

Susie Banikarim (16:46):

Right. I mean, it makes sense because, again, that relationship or whatever you call it, in American Pie, is presented in a way that you can really imagine the boys glamorize and hope for, that they start looking at their friend’s moms-

Jessica Bennett (17:01):

Oh my gosh, yeah.

Susie Banikarim (17:02):

… and being like, “Which one of these women is going to be my sexual awakening?”

Jessica Bennett (17:06):

The other thing I need to mention is the Fountains of Wayne song, Stacey’s Mom.

Susie Banikarim (17:12):

Oh, gosh. I remember Stacey’s Mom.

Jessica Bennett (17:15):

Which comes out in 2003 and has a really crazy music video. I mean, I can still, I know all the words-

Susie Banikarim (17:19):

Same. Yeah, same.

Jessica Bennett (17:20):

… to that song. I’m not going to sing here, but-

Susie Banikarim (17:22):

Yeah, I think for everyone’s sake, neither of us should sing on this podcast.

Jessica Bennett (17:30):

… The song lyrics are literally that Stacey’s mom has got it going on. She’s all I want, and I’ve waited for so long. I’m not the little boy that I used to be. I’m all grown up now, baby can’t you see?

Susie Banikarim (17:42):

So awkward for poor Stacey, this whole thing.

Jessica Bennett (17:45):

So awkward. Another Hot for Teacher pop culture reference I want to make sure to mention from around this time is actually from Saturday Night Live. So, Norm Macdonald does this bit for Weekend Update. This is when Mary Kate Letourneau pleads guilty, and he says that, “She’s been branded a sex offender.”

Norm Macdonald (18:03):

Or as the kids refer to her, “The greatest teacher ever.”

Jessica Bennett (18:07):

And honestly, LOL. It’s a good, funny bit. It comes not long after a South Park episode makes a similar joke.

Clip (18:16):

He’s totally underage. He’s taking advantage of him.

Clip (18:18):

You’re right. We’re sorry. We need to track this student down and give him his Luckiest Boy in America medal right away.

Jessica Bennett (18:24):

But essentially, what all of these things are saying is that to lose your virginity to an adult when you were a child, and a hot teacher in particular, is worthy of a medal.

Susie Banikarim (18:33):

Well, if you’re a boy.

Jessica Bennett (18:34):

Exactly.

Susie Banikarim (18:35):

And actually, this sentiment hasn’t really changed, honestly, as much as we’d hope. I saw a Fox News clip not that long ago about a female teacher in Colorado who’d been arrested for allegedly having sex with her 16-year-old student. And even now, this was the host’s response.

Clip (18:50):

This is what bothers me. Why did she-

Clip (18:53):

The fact that she had sex with a student?

Clip (18:54):

… No, that she went to jail for it.

Clip (18:57):

Okay.

Clip (18:57):

Come on. 16 year old? I would’ve died for that.

Jessica Bennett (19:00):

So, we’ll pause there. We’re going to talk more about what has or hasn’t changed and how Dawson’s Creek handles the plot line when one of the female characters has sex. After the break.

Susie Banikarim (19:25):

There’s another interesting thing that struck me, which is that at the same time that we’re seeing Pacey lose his virginity to this teacher, there’s this other pretty significant plot line where Dawson has a crush on this girl, Jen, who’s played by Michelle Williams. And at some point, she admits that she is not a virgin, and he rejects her over that. There’s a multiple sort of episode arc about how upset he is and how disappointed in her he is, and that he may not be able to continue to pursue a possible relationship with her because of her virginity. It’s a very gross storyline, to be honest. The level of shock he has around it, and the shame that she has to have around it, how terrible she feels about herself because she’s not a virgin. And that was so strange to me because-

Jessica Bennett (20:21):

It’s happening at the same time-

Susie Banikarim (20:21):

It’s happening at the same time.

Jessica Bennett (20:22):

… that we’re basically high-fiving Pacey.

Susie Banikarim (20:24):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (20:24):

And the other thing too is, you can criticize shows like this for showing that double standard, but also, it is still so prevalent.

Susie Banikarim (20:33):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (20:34):

That double standard exists. So I almost am like, “Well, at least they’re portraying it accurately.”

Susie Banikarim (20:38):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (20:38):

That probably is what happens still today. You high-five the kid who’s sleeping with the teacher and losing his virginity to her, and then you scorn the girl who is found out to not be a virgin.

Susie Banikarim (20:50):

But also, just not a virgin because she’s had sex with a person her own age. It’s like-

Jessica Bennett (20:54):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (20:54):

… she’s having a normal teenage relationship, something a lot of teenagers do, which is have sex in high school. That is not so uncommon. And yet, she’s portrayed as kind of this slut, and he’s portrayed as having the sexual awakening. It’s a really interesting contrast and very stark.

Jessica Bennett (21:11):

Yes, yes. I’m so glad you raised that, Susie, because there are all these kind of tiny nuggets hidden in episodes like this.

Susie Banikarim (21:18):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (21:19):

This is sort of what we wanted to do with this show, but these tiny nuggets that as I was delving into research and going down this rabbit hole, I kept noting like, “Oh, actually, this is telling us something larger about society today.”

Susie Banikarim (21:30):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (21:30):

This is showing us how little has changed.

Susie Banikarim (21:32):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (21:33):

One is the way that student teacher relationships have long been kind of minimized, but more so when it is the woman as perpetrator.

Susie Banikarim (21:42):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (21:42):

In one news segment, looking back on the Mary Kay Letourneau case, they actually refer to her as, “The last person you would suspect of being a molester of children.” And I just read that line and I was like, “Wait, why?” Because she’s a woman?

Susie Banikarim (21:56):

Because she’s an attractive woman.

Jessica Bennett (21:56):

Because she’s a mom?

Susie Banikarim (21:56):

Because she’s got children.

Jessica Bennett (21:57):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (21:57):

We just really struggle to see women as having the potential or the agency to be criminals, to do criminal things, to do things that we find ugly because for some reason, that just feels like it’s against the nature of how we’re supposed to perceive women. And we also struggle with seeing boys as victims, as vulnerable.

Jessica Bennett (22:18):

Right. Absolutely. And actually, it’s worth noting that these cases, and I’m talking about cases where the perpetrator is an older woman and the victim is often a boy, get more media coverage than the male equivalent.

Susie Banikarim (22:32):

100%.

Jessica Bennett (22:32):

And so, simultaneously, we’re high-fiving, but it’s extra salacious and it’s getting more media coverage. And there was this whole moment in the ’90s and early 2000s when this is all playing out, when it almost seemed like pretty female teachers molesting their underage male students was an epidemic because it was getting so much attention.

Susie Banikarim (22:54):

I also remember that there was a lot of discussion about why this wasn’t a good thing. It seemed like that needed to be explained over and over and over again. I remember, because I was quite young, that these stories were fascinating to me because I couldn’t wrap my head around why a woman would want to risk her whole life to have sex with a child, and that wasn’t ever really explored. It was always just kind of this salacious thing, like, “Here we go again. Here’s another teacher who’s done this thing.”

Jessica Bennett (23:28):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (23:29):

But there was not a lot of understanding of why these things happened.

Jessica Bennett (23:33):

And I think, another thing we’ve touched on is that the boys in these instances are often portrayed or perceived as older and more mature-

Susie Banikarim (23:44):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (23:44):

… and pursuing the older women. This we know was certainly the case in Dawson’s Creek with Pacey, also because that actor was much older in real life.

Susie Banikarim (23:52):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (23:52):

And it’s notable in that clip we heard earlier where Tamara says, “You’re not a boy,” to Pacey.

Susie Banikarim (23:57):

You’re a man.

Jessica Bennett (23:58):

LOL. Actually, he’s very much a boy. And in fact, the age of consent in Massachusetts where this supposedly takes place is 16, and he is aged 15.

Susie Banikarim (24:06):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (24:07):

So, he is very much a boy who cannot consent. But I think that this plays into the way that we sometimes take cases of men’s assault less seriously.

Susie Banikarim (24:16):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (24:16):

Because we assume that boys always want sex.

Susie Banikarim (24:19):

Yes. Didn’t Monica Hesse write a good piece in the Washington Post about this around when Mary Kay Letourneau died?

Jessica Bennett (24:26):

Yeah, actually, this was quite recently. She’s a columnist for the Washington Post who writes on gender issues, and she did this column about that case and the repercussions of it. And she has this line where she says, “Female students abused by male teachers have encountered their own measure of victim blame, but not usually accompanied by the same level of tittering, the implication that these horny teenage boys probably wanted it and were lucky to get it.”

Susie Banikarim (24:51):

Yeah, that really summarizes a lot of what we’re saying here.

Jessica Bennett (24:54):

The other thing, and in many ways this is the whole premise of our show, but there are real world consequences to the way we talk about this stuff. Even the little nuances and language that we keep getting at, like, “Is this a relationship? Is it an assault?” These actually have impact in the larger world. And so, while I was searching for studies on this, I found this 2013 analysis by the New Jersey Star-Ledger, where they looked at cases of teacher-student sex in New Jersey specifically. There were 97 of them, and they actually found that the men in those cases average longer jail terms than the women. Why is that? Well-

Susie Banikarim (25:33):

Yeah, because we see that as a real crime.

Jessica Bennett (25:35):

… Exactly, exactly. It’s like, women are victimized in so many ways and things are still unequal, but when we talk about this issue specifically, we are often minimizing the experiences of the boys. It wasn’t even until the year 2000 that all 50 states in the United States made the language of their statutory rape laws gender-neutral, meaning that there was a minimum age for girls to consent, but not for boys.

Susie Banikarim (26:01):

One thing we haven’t really talked about is that if you’re a boy consuming this, if you’re a teenage boy in your friend’s basement in Seattle watching the show with you, and you are going through something that is similar in some way and you have complex and not great feelings about it, you’re being taught that those feelings are completely invalid. You should just be psyched.

Jessica Bennett (26:22):

Right. You should be high-fiving your friends.

Susie Banikarim (26:23):

And this really gets at something, right, which is that we adultify boys when they are children, when they are boys, especially boys of color, to be clear, right? In this country, if you’re a Black boy, you’re a man. Right? But then, when men become older, when they become men who should be accountable-

Jessica Bennett (26:40):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (26:40):

… we dismiss their bad behavior as, “Oh, they’re just boys. Oh, boys will be boys,” and locker room talk-

Jessica Bennett (26:46):

Locker room talk.

Susie Banikarim (26:47):

… and all these ways in which we kind of dismiss their agency when it’s convenient for them to dismiss their agency. But when we actually should be giving them grace to make the same mistakes as other children, we refuse to accept that about them.

Jessica Bennett (27:02):

So, that brings us to, has anything changed? Maybe in fact, rewatching this was actually a good thing because it did force us to grapple with some of these complexities in how we perceive it.

Susie Banikarim (27:15):

I don’t feel like I understood the complexity of this show at all when I watched it the first time. Because you’re neutering it over that complexity as you present it, it kind of doesn’t have a real impact, right?

Jessica Bennett (27:27):

Right. And yeah, is it the responsibility of shows to send a real message? I don’t know. Do they have to get at that complexity and grapple with it? It is interesting though because I think shows now that approach this subject do have a little bit more complexity and nuance, and they pay some attention, in many cases, to the aftermath, and also the trauma.

Susie Banikarim (27:51):

Yeah, I mean, I think the thing is, obviously, there’s this idea or this concern now of how we take art from previous eras and deal with it, right? Because art is supposed to reflect the time it’s made in, right? So, I guess we don’t need it to explore that complexity because that was the culture. That is how people saw things in that moment, and part of why we consume art that was made at a certain time is to understand what views and culture and zeitgeist was in that time.

Jessica Bennett (28:23):

Well, and to be fair, actually, that probably is how many people would still perceive this.

Susie Banikarim (28:28):

Yeah. I don’t even know if that’s something that’s changed. I don’t know if you… Did you watch Pretty Little Liars? There was a student-teacher plot. In that case, it was a female student and a male teacher, but that was also presented as kind of a love story, and that wasn’t that long ago.

Jessica Bennett (28:41):

And Riverdale too, right?

Susie Banikarim (28:42):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (28:43):

This is the teen series. I think it just ended based on the Archie comics, where Archie has an affair with his teacher. And interestingly-

Susie Banikarim (28:49):

Which was not in the original comics, to be clear.

Jessica Bennett (28:52):

… Okay, okay. Good point. And the executive producer behind that show had actually worked on Dawson’s.

Susie Banikarim (28:58):

Oh, wow.

Jessica Bennett (28:59):

I don’t know if those two things are interconnected, but just interesting point.

Susie Banikarim (29:01):

But it is because these shows all feel like they’re kind of part of the same universe, right? These teen shows that were on the WB, which is now the CW, even ABC Family or Freeform or whatever it’s called now, they all do have very similar tropes and themes, and a very common trope that writers use is this teacher-student storyline, even now, right?

Jessica Bennett (29:22):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (29:22):

And I think that’s interesting that there’s still so much fascination with this concept. I think it’s because lots of people have crushes on their teachers, so it feels like a universal experience to sexualize your teachers.

Jessica Bennett (29:34):

Yes.

Susie Banikarim (29:34):

What shouldn’t be a universal experience is that your teachers are sexualizing you.

Jessica Bennett (29:39):

And remember my friend Rosie?

Susie Banikarim (29:41):

Of course.

Jessica Bennett (29:41):

I wanted to ask her what the teens she works with might think of this relationship today.

Rosie Bancroft (29:47):

So when I think back about Dawson’s and thinking about the kids that I work with, if they were to be watching it today, they would be appalled, in a good way. They would know that it was wrong. They would know that it’s still a problem, even if it’s a female teacher, which I feel like we were in the infancy of discovering. I also think they would be compelled by it being a boy and a woman, and him being tall and cute and allegedly having all of this sexual prowess. I think that it would still seem muddy to them.

(30:22):

The other thing that I feel like is different now in terms of the kids these days is that they have an awareness about sexual abuse, and they are inclined to come in and see us in the counseling center at our school, especially girls will come in and talk about things that have happened to them that make them really uncomfortable. And they will be received in a place that is like, “Yep, this is rough and we need to help you.” And yes, this is a product of a much larger system.

Jessica Bennett (30:58):

Okay. So, where does all this leave us? There is something about consuming these stories as teenagers that really does stay with you.

Susie Banikarim (31:07):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (31:07):

And I think my friends and millions of other teens felt like we too were kind of coming of age with these characters on Dawson’s, even though they might’ve been a few years older, and even though in real life, they were actually much, much older.

Susie Banikarim (31:21):

Yeah, right. I mean, I wonder, have the actors on Dawson’s Creek ever reflected on this in any way?

Jessica Bennett (31:26):

Yeah, actually they have. I mean, Joshua Jackson is interesting because he was obviously a little bit older, and he also grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is just a few hours north of Seattle, which is where the Mary Kay Letourneau case played out, at the same time he was recording and filming Dawson. So, I think he was very aware of it. And he was actually asked a couple of years ago, in an article, what he thought now looking back on that storyline in Dawson’s. And he was pretty thoughtful about it.

(31:57):

What he said was, “We still treat teenage female sexuality very differently than we teach or treat male teenage sexuality. Do we think that the show should have judged it differently? Maybe, because it’s part and parcel of that double standard. But on the other hand, I think it’s necessary to show storylines that have humans making mistakes.”

Susie Banikarim (32:16):

I guess he’s making a good point about the double standard, but is it true that this is just about humans making mistakes? It’s not really presented as that much of a mistake on the show, at least for him.

Jessica Bennett (32:26):

Yeah, that’s true. I mean, it’s complicated. I guess, in some ways, I sort of appreciate though that they didn’t turn it into a lesson. I don’t know that I would’ve responded to a kind of scoldy afterschool special.

Susie Banikarim (32:39):

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, that wouldn’t have worked. It’s not like that would’ve been popular. So, part of it is that you have to present messages in a way that’s appealing to the audience.

Jessica Bennett (32:47):

But I don’t know, maybe others have a different interpretation. I mean, the show’s all available online. I hope that those listening might go watch it and tell us what you think. You can email us at [email protected], or you can DM us on Instagram @inretropod. Thanks for tuning in.

Susie Banikarim (33:08):

This is In Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a cultural moment you can’t stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram @inretropod.

Jessica Bennett (33:23):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (33:28):

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett (33:37):

In Retrospect is a production of iHeart podcast and The Meteor. Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derrick Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim (33:49):

Our executive producer from The Meteor is Cindy Leive. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stumpf and Katrina Norvell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Additional editing help from Mary Do and Mike Coscarelli. Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (34:07):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

Susie Banikarim: It may have been fictional, but this wedding, a two-day television event, was celebrated by fans as the wedding of the decade. More people watched it than the real wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, which happened that same year. But what is often forgotten about this iconic soap opera couple, is that just a few years before this, Luke sexually assaulted Laura. [00:01:00] I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett: And I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim: This is In Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Jessica Bennett: And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Susie Banikarim: Today we’re talking about how one of TV’s most famous and beloved relationships started with a rape. But we’re also talking about the incredible powers soap operas once had in shaping public perception. For better and for worse.

Jessica Bennett: So Susie, I know nothing about soap operas except that there is one starring a woman named Jessica Bennett, who shares my name.

Susie Banikarim: Is that true?

Jessica Bennett: Uh, it’s called Passion. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: Oh, Passion. That was a short-lived, but very wild soap opera.

Jessica Bennett: She remains on Wikipedia. Anyway, were you a huge General Hospital fan, like, how- what led you to this moment?

Susie Banikarim: So I wasn’t a General Hospital fan, specifically. I did occasionally watch it, but I was a huge soap opera fan. I would come home in middle [00:02:00] school and watch soap operas every afternoon.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: I was a Days of Our Life-

Jessica Bennett: Girl.

Susie Banikarim: One Life to Live girl, which was kind of unusual, because it was split. Days of Our Lives was-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: … on NBC. Do you remember the tagline for Days of Our Lives?

Jessica Bennett: No.

Susie Banikarim: Like sands through the hourglass…

CLIP: Like sands through the hourglass…

Jessica Bennett: Oh, yeah, I do remember. Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … so are the days of our lives.

CLIP: … so are the days of our lives.

Susie Banikarim: I would come home from school and I would watch with a snack every afternoon and then eventually I went to boarding school for high school, but when I came home, it was, like, something I looked forward to. Like a summer or winter break indulgence. And I think that’s kind of why I wanted to focus on this subject, this relationship, because soap operas were just so influential for generations of American girls and women. I mean, also some boys, obviously, but they really were geared towards women and this particular plot line really came at the peak of their popularity. And so it seems worth exploring this [00:03:00] relationship that was seen as so romantic, but started with an assault.

Jessica Bennett: As you say that, I’m remembering that I mentioned this to my mother-in-law recently and she revealed that actually my husband, like, the first three years of his life, she would constantly have this show on in the background while they were just, I don’t know, hanging out doing baby stuff or whatever.

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: And, you know, guess what? She remembers this relationship between Luke and Laura as completely romantic.

Susie Banikarim: I think that’s what most people thought.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah, and they go on to have this decades long relationship, so that makes a lot of sense. I mean, Laura is still actually a character on the show, but for those who didn’t grow up on General Hospital, can you give us a little primer on what the show was?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. It was a soap opera that started in 1963.

CLIP: General Hospital.

Susie Banikarim: And had its heyday in the 1980s. It was just hugely popular. It was about two families living in the fictional town of Port Charles, New York, and their various trials and tribulations and not surprisingly, it was centered in a hospital. You might [00:04:00] say it was the original Grey’s Anatomy and what went on there, sometimes it would go off in weird adventures, but that’s really been the core of the show for the last 60 years.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, so Luke and Laura are characters who do not work in that hospital?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. No, they don’t work in the hospital. Not literally everyone on the show works in the hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Got it.

Susie Banikarim: They just live in Port Charles.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. And where should we begin in terms of their, can we call it a relationship?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, I mean, it’s not a relationship in the beginning, right? Because of the way it starts, but I actually want to begin with the wedding, because I think that that’s the moment that becomes such a cultural phenomenon.

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: It was a two-day event, so it’s two hours long.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: There’s, like, really long stretches of them just, like, driving up in cars.

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: Like, the bridesmaids, the groomsmen.

Jessica Bennett: Yup.

Susie Banikarim: And then there’s this really long stretch of them just, like, literally greeting the guests.

Jessica Bennett: It’s like an actual wedding.

Susie Banikarim: Which is why it’s fascinating that it was the most watched soap opera episode of all time.

Jessica Bennett: [00:05:00] Wow.

Susie Banikarim: Like, people loved it. They wanted to feel like they were there at this wedding, because they were obsessed with this couple.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. Why were people so obsessed with this couple? Like, what was the appeal?

Susie Banikarim: So, I mean, it’s hard to say. You- to some degree you don’t ever know why people become really attached to certain characters on television or certain storylines, but Laura’s actually kind of an interesting character-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … because she’s already become a pretty central character to General Hospital when Luke is introduced.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s because they’re trying to push towards younger audiences.

Jessica Bennett: Ah, okay.

Susie Banikarim: So she’s a teenager.

Jessica Bennett: Interesting.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the quotes I read from a fan was, like, we love her because she’s 16 like us, but she lives the life of a 28-year-old.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: That’s partially why I wanted to start with the wedding, because you kind of need to understand that this wasn’t just, like, a popular episode of television. It was literally the closest thing Americans had to a royal wedding. A- and just to prove that I’m not exaggerating-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … more people tuned in to watch this fake wedding than tuned in when Meghan Markle and Prince [00:06:00] Harry had their actual wedding in 2018.

Jessica Bennett: Whoa. What, that is wild.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. And, like, local news sent correspondents to viewing parties, like, all across Manhattan. From an office in Madison Avenue to a dorm at NYU.

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

NEWS CLIP: Fans all across the country watched for the big moment. To them it was their wedding.

NEWS CLIP: Of course we’re excited.

NEWS CLIP: Not a dry eye in the house.

NEWS CLIP: By the way, three years for them to get married, I feel like [inaudible 00:06:22].

NEWS CLIP: You like Luke?

NEWS CLIP: I love Luke.

NEWS CLIP: Why?

NEWS CLIP: Uh, he’s sexy. It’s time for them to get together.

NEWS CLIP: It’s been two years. It’s time for them to-

NEWS CLIP: You know, they’re very much in love and it’s really a beautiful thing.

Susie Banikarim: It was just this wildly popular thing, even among celebrities. Like, Elizabeth Taylor was such a fan of the show that she requested to be on it.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And made a guest appearance and you can kind of see her in-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … the background of many shots. She’s playing a villain who is cursing them-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay.

Susie Banikarim: … on their wedding day. And also, this is the year where Diana and Charles got married.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And they had a real wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But then this is such a big [00:07:00] moment that Diana sends champagne for this fake wedding. [laughs] She sends the actors-

Jessica Bennett: Whoa.

Susie Banikarim: … champagne to congratulate them on their fake wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow. Oh my God, okay.

Susie Banikarim: Which, like, an amazing little detail here is that Genie Francis is underage when this wedding happens.

Jessica Bennett: Genie Francis who plays Laura.

Susie Banikarim: Genie Francis who plays Laura Spencer is 20, and so they don’t-

Jessica Bennett: She can’t drink.

Susie Banikarim: … even give it to her. She doesn’t know about the champagne until years later when they’re doing an interview.

Jessica Bennett: What kind of champagne do you think it was?

Susie Banikarim: I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of champagne it was, but, um, I think Luke said he liked kept the bo- I mean, it-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: … imagine getting a bottle of champagne from who- what was, like, the most famous woman in the world at that time.

Jessica Bennett: So wha- okay, so the culture or the world is kind of treating this fake wedding like a real wedding.

Susie Banikarim: People took the day off work. And there’s, like, a note in the research that someone was, like, hey, I told my boss I was going to a wedding, because I was.

Jessica Bennett: Oh my God. [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: You know, like, bars played it. Like, people gathered around in bars at lunchtime in droves-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … to watch this wedding and, I mean, a thing that I think people sort of forget, [00:08:00] it’s hard now to remember what a stranglehold soap operas had on the culture-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … in the 80s.

Jessica Bennett: Or even television.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, and television. I mean, they also made the most money.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And like, I think part of the thing is, yes, a lot of people watch them, but more than that, for the networks, uh, ABC, for example, they made up 50% of revenue.

Jessica Bennett: Oh wow.

Susie Banikarim: So had an enormous amount of power.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s why suddenly you see all these actors, these famous actors who got their start on soap operas, it’s because soap operas have money to pay actors and prime time, you know, it had money, but not the way soap operas did. And that wasn’t always the case, right? Soap operas initially were kind of seen as this thing for women, made by women.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: This sort of silly ridiculous thing. And, you know, it could be silly and ridiculous and we can talk about that, but daytime was an enormously powerful arena at this point.

Jessica Bennett: I don’t think I fully appreciated that. That soap operas had huge power to shape culture and also that it was women both making and watching them.

Susie Banikarim: [00:09:00] Yeah. Initially soap operas were really watched by stay-at-home moms and that’s kind of why initially they’re dismissed.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But then this thing happens at the end of the 70s where a lot of women enter the workforce and there’s a dip in viewership.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But then the women who are staying at home start to allow their children to watch TV with them.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: That’s kind of like a shift. And so a lot of girls and boys who are home with their moms become addicted to these shows.

Jessica Bennett: I see.

Susie Banikarim: And then it becomes common to be a college student who gathers around-

Jessica Bennett: Right, this is why there’s viewing parties in these dorm rooms.

Susie Banikarim: Yes. You know, a common thing that was talked about amongst soap fans, is that they would schedule their classes around their soap operas.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. It’s such a different time.

Susie Banikarim: It’s, like, worth noting that even though soap operas aren’t that popular now, General Hospital is still on the air.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: I mean, people forget that.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: But it is the longest running scripted drama and the longest running American soap opera. I- I-

Jessica Bennett: How do you watch that now?

Susie Banikarim: It started airing in 1963. You can watch it on television. What do you mean? You watch it on ABC.

Jessica Bennett: Like, watch it, [00:10:00] you do?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. You could watch it in the afternoon on ABC. And by the way, two million people still do.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think the thing that’s different is there’s, like, a lot of options now.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: So it doesn’t seem as popular.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But two million people is not a paltry number. That’s way more than most cable shows get.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But we don’t think about it as a cultural phenomenon because it seems so low in comparison to the fact that in their heyday-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … one in fifteen Americans watched General Hospital.

Jessica Bennett: So we’re talking about a storyline on General Hospital involving the two most popular characters, Luke and Laura. These are characters America obsessed over in the 1980s. 30 million people tuned in to watch their wedding. But when you say out loud how that relationship [00:11:00] began, which is with Luke assaulting Laura, it almost feels like it can’t be true.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. It is hard to believe. And we’re about to walk you through the assault scene, which will make it feel unfortunately very real. But first I want to give you some background on how we get to that scene.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And I’m going to actually blow your mind-

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: … with so many things here, because to begin with, Luke is Laura’s boss.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Where did they work?

Susie Banikarim: Um, at a disco.

Jessica Bennett: They work at a disco.

Susie Banikarim: Laura is 17. Luckily for Laura she’s already married. She’s 17 and married.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Only a crime.

Susie Banikarim: So Laura and Scotty were actually, like, a pretty popular soap opera couple in their own right, but, you know, the whole thing on soap operas is if there’s a happy couple, they must face, like, an-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … extraordinary number of obstacles. Like they must get kidnapped, they must get cloned, so the obstacle that’s thrown in Laura’s and Scotty’s relationship is Luke. There is a nurse at the hospital that’s [00:12:00] obsessed with Scotty. So she asks her brother, Luke, to come to town and try and seduce Laura.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And Luke wasn’t even really supposed to be a major character on the show. He was just brought in as a temporary character who was going to be a bad boy, an obstacle in Laura’s relationship with her husband, Scotty. But the writers had planned from the beginning that he was going to rape her, because they wanted that storyline for ratings.

Jessica Bennett: Wild.

Susie Banikarim: Wild. The- the- the ratings have started to wane. You know, they’re making an effort to bring in younger viewers. It’s working a little bit with Laura, but this is the last rated TV show.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, so it’s not doing good at this time.

Susie Banikarim: At this time it’s not doing good. It’s the lowest rated soap opera on TV. It’s, like, number 12 or something.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And there’s so many soap operas on TV-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … at this time. And that’s actually what makes it so remarkable that within three years, it’s literally the number one show.

Jessica Bennett: Can you imagine being, like, ah, our show’s doing really bad. What can we do to- to get better ratings? I know-

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: … let’s stage a rape.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. [00:13:00] I mean, it is wild. But it does work.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the things that’s interesting is the executive producer that was brought in at that time came from TV movies where rape was a much more common topic.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But it was presented more from, like, the crime aspect. And so I think that’s why-

Jessica Bennett: Not a love story?

Susie Banikarim: Not a love story. And I think that’s why she has this idea to introduce this rape-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and knows that that is, like, popular with viewers. That must be kind of what she’s thinking when she introduces this character.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So this new 32-year-old character, Luke, ends up hiring 17-year-old Laura at his nightclub.

Susie Banikarim: Yes. So Laura has gone to Luke who runs the big disco in town to ask for a job and he hires her and meanwhile, he has some shady backdoor dealings with the mob. That’s why he’s, like, such a bad boy.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s his back story. So the context of this scene is that Luke has gotten mixed up with these mobsters who are forcing him to [00:14:00] kill a local politician-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and he feels like if he kills this other person, he will also be killed.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And so this scene picks up where she has seen him crying, because he is like, “I’m a dead man walking.”

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

CLIP Laura: How come you’re crying?

CLIP Luke: I wasn’t crying.

CLIP Laura: Yes, you were. And you didn’t know that I was here.

Jessica Bennett: At first I was, like, oh, that’s kind of progressive of them. Like, you’re showing tears.

Susie Banikarim: It’s not going to be so progressive.

CLIP Laura: Luke, I’m sure that whatever it is, it can be worked out in time.

CLIP Luke: Time is what I don’t have.

Jessica Bennett: They’re sort of setting it up that, like, if you don’t have time, then you must have the woman you love.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s definitely how the story plays, that he knows he’s running out of time, he’s so in love with her-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: That he must have her this one time.

Jessica Bennett: He ra- he has to act on this love lust.

CLIP Luke: I said I was going to be dead, killed, little lady. Can’t you get that through your head? Now get out of here.

Susie Banikarim: So [00:15:00] he’s pushing her away, because essentially the message is he can’t control himself. And then he professes his love.

CLIP Luke: Dammit, Laura. I’m in love with you.

CLIP Laura: No, I d- I don’t think it’s really love, Luke. I-

CLIP Luke: Oh, yes. It’s just what it is.

Susie Banikarim: And then randomly in the middle of all of this, Luke walks over dramatically to the record player, flips it on and a song comes on and he turns to her and says, “I can’t die without holding you in my arms just one time.”

CLIP Luke: Dance with me, Laura.

CLIP Laura: No.

Jessica Bennett: You really feel that the tension is building and then things clearly unravel.

CLIP Laura: Luke, let me call a taxi, please.

Jessica Bennett: And so you don’t see the rape itself.

CLIP Laura: No. Don’t, Luke, let me go.

Susie Banikarim: But it’s unambiguous.

CLIP Laura: No. No.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: You definitely hear a rape.

Jessica Bennett: So clothes are ripped. She’s looking upset. She’s crying.

Susie Banikarim: She’s cowering.

Jessica Bennett: She’s clearly said no ahead of time.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, she’s screaming no when it-

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: … starts and grows. It’s a kind of jarring moment because it happens pretty suddenly. Like, you go [00:16:00] from being, like-

Jessica Bennett: I actually do get goosebumps watching it.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. Because you’re sort of, like, oh, it’s going to be a seduction and then suddenly it’s a rape.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: And cut to disco lights. There’s a commercial break. We come back. We’re back on the disco lights. It’s, like, very-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … surreal kind of vibe. And then the thing that really drives home that this is a rape is she’s now lying on the ground. She is cowering.

Jessica Bennett: Her clothes are torn.

Susie Banikarim: She’s crying. Her clothes are torn. He is standing above her. He seems like he’s in a bit of a daze. And the phone rings and you sort of get the sense that that’s supposed to, like, break his reverie.

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: And she sneaks away.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s her husband, Scotty.

Susie Banikarim: And it’s her husband on the phone and he’s like, “Have you seen Laura?” And Luke lies about it. So that’s kind of the acknowledgement that he knows he’s done something wrong.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: Because he’s lying about whether or not she’s been there. And that’s the scene.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, that was a lot. But one other strange detail I have to mention is, [00:17:00] so that song that’s playing in the background when the assault occurs. This is the song that Luke kind of dramatically goes up to the record player and turns on and it’s this jazz funk instrumental hit. This is a real song. It’s called, Rise. And that song then goes on to become number one on the Billboard charts.

Susie Banikarim: I know, it’s crazy.

Jessica Bennett: And, like, for a jazz funk instrumental, that was as rare then as it is today.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s funny, actually. I don’t know if you remember this, you called me and I was in Palm Springs with a friend.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And, uh, you know, we had shopped, naturally-

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: … um, and… Yeah, exactly.

Susie Banikarim: That’s where either of us would be at any given moment.

Jessica Bennett: And we had just gotten out of the car where that song was playing. And this friend of mine who happens to have written her, like, college thesis on rape in soap operas-

Susie Banikarim: Amazing.

Jessica Bennett: … I know, maybe we should call her, is like, “Oh, do you know what this song is?” And she explains this to me and I’m like, “What?” And then you called me and you’re like, “Remember that moment in General Hospital?” Which of course I didn’t really remember, but this song goes on to be at the top of all of the charts [00:18:00] and actually, our younger listeners, uh, might recognize it because 20 years later, Puff Daddy actually puts a clip of it into Biggie’s song, Hypnotize.

Susie Banikarim: Oh yeah, excellent song, by the way.

Jessica Bennett: Which, like, I can hear that in the back of my mind as we’re listening to this. So it’s sampled in Hypnotize in 1997, because Puffy later says in an interview, like, this was the song of the summer when he was, like, 10 years old in New York. Like, all the kids-

Susie Banikarim: Everyone was listening to it.

Jessica Bennett: … were, like, jamming and rollerskating to this song. Which, of course, was popular because of this rape scene. How do we get from this clearly very traumatic scene between Luke and Laura, which happens in 1979, to then this star-studded royal level wedding two years later?

Susie Banikarim: That’s the crazy part, right? As I mentioned, Luke was supposed to be a temporary character. He was supposed to come on, you know, have this violent scene with [00:19:00] Laura and then he was supposed to be killed.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And what happens is, audiences respond so well to him and, again, let me acknowledge how wild that is, he was so immediately popular that producers decided they wanted to find a way to keep him on the show.

Jessica Bennett: Wait, and how did they know he’s so popular?

Susie Banikarim: Well, partially because the way soaps worked is, since they were being produced so quickly-

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: … and because they’re on every day-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … the network is able to gauge almost immediately audience sentiment.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: So they’re using actual data that’s showing them that Luke is quite popular.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So, like, we’ve got to keep Luke.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. This gets some coverage at the time. The ratings weren’t good before this. The ratings started to creep up, so they do not kill him off.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But that leaves them-

Jessica Bennett: With a problem.

Susie Banikarim: … with a bit of a conundrum, which is, if audiences are falling in love with Luke and really feel drawn to this romance between him and Laura-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … and want Laura to end up with Luke, not Scotty, [00:20:00] how do they reconcile that with the violent rape-

Jessica Bennett: That has occurred.

Susie Banikarim: … has occurred, and also that they have acknowledged as such. And just to really put a fine point on the fact that the show never really tried to make the rape ambiguous. Initially, she goes to crisis counseling after this, on the show.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: Like, they do not initially shy away from the fact that it’s a rape. They will eventually and we’ll get into all of that, but when it happens, it is really clear what’s happened. Tony Geary, the actor who played Luke-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … actually says in an interview at some point, we never expected the audience to be, like, on Luke’s side. And so, we did a rape and then the audience fell in love with Luke and that wasn’t our fault, so what were we supposed to do? And, like, maybe the thing you were supposed to do, was be, like, hey guys, rape is bad.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But instead, they are moving the needle over and over again.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: Until they literally re-shoot [00:21:00] the scenes. They literally go back-

Jessica Bennett: So that they can appear in flashbacks?

Susie Banikarim: So that the scenes they’re showing for flashbacks aren’t as disturbing.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: They’re literally softening the thing over and over and over again. And the characters being gaslit in real time, the audience is being gaslit in real time.

CLIP Luke: Maybe you should name me as the rapist.

CLIP Laura: They’ll put you in jail.

CLIP Luke: Maybe that’s where I belong.

CLIP Laura: No, don’t say that. You’re not a criminal.

Susie Banikarim: Then, by the time the wedding happens, the thing that’s kind of interesting is that by the time 30 million people are watching the wedding, a lot of those people have never seen the rape. They don’t even know-

Jessica Bennett: They don’t even know how the relationship began.

Susie Banikarim: Right, and they have only seen these sanitized, softened, more romantic flashbacks. And actually they even removed the song. They stopped playing the song, because the song is, like, so associated-

Jessica Bennett: Oh. Evokes…

Susie Banikarim: … with the rape.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Susie Banikarim: And when they’re, [00:22:00] like, re-shooting these scenes and softening them up, there’s a thing that happens that’s actually quite controversial for the people at the time who remember that it’s a rape. I mean, there is an audience that remembers.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And at one point Laura is narrating the scene and she describes it as the first time Luke and I made love.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: And there is a reaction. It’s not, like, a huge national reaction or anything, but there are people at that time who were, like, what is happening?

Jessica Bennett: And actually we know one of those people. One of our executive producers, Cindy Leive.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, Cindy is a journalist, the former editor of Glamour magazine and the co-founder of The Meteor. But most relevant to this conversation, she was a General Hospital super fan.

Cindy Leive: I started watching it probably in 1979 and watched it with varying levels of religious devotion until around 1984 or ’85. I was part of that generation X, so called latchkey kid generation [00:23:00] and so I used to come home and General Hospital was kind of my babysitter. Like, my parents were divorced and my mom worked and I would race home from school so that I could turn on ABC, Channel 7, and watch it at three o’clock. Usually with a humongous bowl of coffee ice cream. It was, like, a comfort hour for me.

Susie Banikarim: Why did you love it so much?

Cindy Leive: [laughs] Um, it was just fascinating. I just had never seen anything like it before. I remember these super adult plots. Prostitution, there was Bobby Spencer who used to be a quote, unquote, hooker and there were a lot of plots around infidelity. And then there was Luke and Laura. Laura was supposed to be sort of in her late teens, even though she seemed incredibly glamorous and grown up to me at the time.

Susie Banikarim: Do you remember what you initially thought when Luke showed up?

Cindy Leive: I have a vague memory that Luke Spencer was supposed to be a kind of bad boy character. He [00:24:00] ran a disco. Mostly I remember his kind of open neck shirts and his permed hair, although I didn’t know it was permed at the time. But he had kind of an allure.

Susie Banikarim: You’ve told me in the past that you were watching the episode when Luke raped Laura. Can you describe that experience?

Cindy Leive: So there’s this one Friday. I couldn’t tell you what time of year it was. I couldn’t tell you the month, but I know it was a Friday afternoon, which is when they always did the big happenings or cliffhangers. And I came home from school, I was watching by myself. And Luke was at his club, Luke’s place and Laura, she was there. And Luke is clearly in love with Laura and telling her how much he wants her. And then all of a sudden it clearly becomes a rape scene. And I don’t know if I even knew the word, rape, then. But I knew it was [00:25:00] violent. And it was really an unsettling scene, because they weren’t shying away from how violent it was.

He’s, like, pushing her down on the ground. She’s saying no. And the next scene, as I remember it, she’s walking around outside and she’s dazed. And she’s clearly been through a violent act. And yet, was it violent? Because the messed up thing is it’s also portrayed as romantic. Like, he wants her so much, he can’t stop himself. And he doesn’t stop himself. And he keeps going. That scene definitely led me to think that it had something to do with desire. It was a bad thing and it hurt her and that was clear. But it hurt her because he loved her so much, he couldn’t help but hurt her.

There’s also this sub-scene that she kind of pities him. [00:26:00] Because poor guy, you know, he can’t help it. And I think now seen in the cold light of day and a bunch of decades more experienced, like, that’s a very classic way that women are taught to think about bad men or violent men. That they can’t help it and are you really going to hold them accountable for their actions? Poor guys. They’ve suffered enough. But I didn’t see any of that at the time. I just sort of witnessed that they continued to fall in love. And that it was, like, heller romantic.

Susie Banikarim: Were you rooting for them?

Cindy Leive: I was totally rooting for them. I mean, not them that day of the rape, but as time went on and- and everybody was rooting for them. And, you know, it culminated in this wedding, which I was probably too young to really care about, but man, that wedding was a really big deal.

Susie Banikarim: Do you remember talking to your friends about it? Talking of- to them about the rape?

Cindy Leive: N- I don’t remember talking to any friends about it at the time. [00:27:00] But a couple of years after that scene aired on General Hospital, and it was still kind of the only reference point I had for rape, I was walking home from school and I was on this sort of, like, backwoods road and this guy pulled up next to me in a TransAm. I was probably 13 at the time and he had his pants down around his knees and, you know, was flashing me. Said something to me. I screamed, ran away, ran home, called my friend, and I said, “You’re not going to believe what just happened to me on the way home from school.” I was, like, shaking. I’m sure my voice was trembling. And she said, “Did you get raped?” And it was, like, we didn’t know enough to know how awful that would have been. Like, to her it was this dangerous, alarming, but still kind of hot thing that could have happened.

Susie Banikarim: Looking back on it now, how do you think about it?

Cindy Leive: [00:28:00] My friends and I talk about this all the time. Like, my friends who I grew up with. Like, can you believe that Luke raped Laura? Nope, still can’t believe that Luke raped Laura and that that’s what led to this relationship. And particularly over time, like, I stopped watching soap operas probably when I was in high school, but when I look back on it, it’s such a fundamental messing with how a whole generation of girls who weren’t really getting any kind of education around consent. All the things we talk about now with varying degrees of success, we weren’t talking about at all then. And it’s such a devastating message about what a guy will do if he loves you enough. Like, he’s going to hurt you. And, you know, you should forgive him for that because, poor guy.

Susie Banikarim: This storyline between Luke and Laura was obviously a [00:29:00] very serious subject matter, but one of the things that occurred to me when we started to work on this episode, is that now we’re sort of looking back on it and talking about it in a serious way, but the reason soap operas were often dismissed, is that they did have, and I just want to make sure we don’t lose sight of this, but man, have absolutely wild storylines, like demonic possession-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and, you know, clones, like, you would get in an accident. Someone would clone you. You’d have a baby, it would turn out to be the devil. There was, like, a storyline on One Life to Live where they time traveled. I mean, there were these just, like, insane storylines. And Luke and Laura weren’t an exception. They would go on these Raiders of the Ark type adventures. But then there is this period in the late 80s and 90s where it becomes quite fantastical.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: That is partially why soap operas get this rap as a silly, sort of cheesy thing.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But at the same time, there were a lot of social issues are introduced.

Jessica Bennett: [00:30:00] Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: Partially because women are not being hired to make prestige television. They’re not being hired on prime time shows. They are making these soap operas. They are hiring other women to be the writers. And so a lot of topics that those women are interested in gets discussed here.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, that’s really interesting. So this is the place that a woman show runner or a woman writer could actually thrive.

Susie Banikarim: And yeah, thrive and actually explore real issues that women were facing. Domestic violence, addiction. So you sort of have this idea, oh, it would have been handled more sensitively, but I think this just reflects how people genuinely think about rape.

Jessica Bennett: Right. And that’s- yeah, that’s interesting too. It’s, like, actually maybe this is more accurate to what we really did think of it at the time.

Susie Banikarim: Well, and also, maybe this was a sensitive handling for the time.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: Like, maybe the way this would have been handled in previous iterations is she wouldn’t have been believed or-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … she would have been dismissed. Like, there is an attempt made here to handle this with sensitivity. They have [00:31:00] Genie Francis and Tony Geary, the actors, meet with a social worker before they taped the scene. I mean, there is an acknowledgement-

Jessica Bennett: Prior to.

Susie Banikarim: … that this is a difficult-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … subject to tackle.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: It’s just interesting that even their version of sensitivity-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … is so baked in to the era that it represents-

Jessica Bennett: Yep.

Susie Banikarim: … that it still reveals these really outdated notions about rape.

Danielle Thompson: I can give you my perspective here.

Susie Banikarim: So, we did end up calling your friend, Danielle Thompson, who you mentioned at the top of the show.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, good. I’m so glad.

Danielle Thompson: The history of soaps is so vast and expansive that it’s like saying, let me tell you the history of the world in, like, five minutes.

Jessica Bennett: For those listening. This is Danielle Thompson. She’s a longtime television writer and- and researcher and the person that I basically go to whenever I have a really intricate question about TV of the past. So what did she say?

Susie Banikarim: Well, first she said that it wasn’t her thesis that she wrote about soaps and sexual assault. So you lied.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, whoops.

Susie Banikarim: But it [00:32:00] was a very long college essay, so you weren’t that far off.

Jessica Bennett: I mean, close enough.

Susie Banikarim: But besides being able to share what she learned about this very specific topic, she just has this crazy extensive knowledge about the topic and she was such a huge soap fan, so she really delivers.

Danielle Thompson: I think that you have to remember that soaps don’t just have love in the afternoon. In fact, that’s actually why I stopped watching soaps, because there is not enough romance. It’s kind of know for dealing with serious issues always. And sometimes they get it right and sometimes they don’t. But, like, in 1973, the first legal abortion on television showed on All My Children. The first gay teenager on TV, that was Billy Douglas, played by Ryan Phillippe on One Life to Live, 1992. You have the first gay marriage in 2009 in All My Children. The first transgender coming out storyline in 2006.

Soap operas are actually the place where serious issues are addressed. And so, just to, like, put Luke and Laura’s scene in context of the time. The [00:33:00] phrase, date rape, was not even coined until 1975 by Susan Brown Miller in her book, Against Her Will. And so for further context, it was 1982 when Ms. Magazine ran what was, like, a groundbreaking study about the subject of date rape, which was still not really known as a concept, because most people at the time thought of rape as being something that was committed by a stranger, not someone that was known.

So I think in that context, Luke and Laura is kind of radical because it’s bringing up an issue that was something people had not really understood or known that is of extreme relevance to its viewers, which are primarily women. And I think what’s interesting about Luke and Laura is that the character was never intended to be a romantic companion for her. This is definitely not the first act of sexual violence in soaps, but it is from my understanding, the first relationship where the relationship followed the act of sexual violence instead of preceded it. But I don’t necessarily think that it kind of sparked off [00:34:00] this new trope of sexual assaults in soap operas. I think if anything, it kind of broadened the conversation in a way that changed it and because awareness grew, I think that storylines about it became more pervasive.

Jessica Bennett: So one question I have is, all right, so multiple decades have past. It was actually just a couple of years ago that it was the 40th anniversary of the wedding and so there was all this sort of quote, unquote, in retrospect coverage of it and Genie Francis spoke about it. So, are those who were involved in the show at the time expressing different perspectives on it when they look back today?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, 100%. I think they’re expressing different perspectives and also admitting that they had different perspectives even at the time.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: It’s also worth noting that the show itself has acknowledged and revisited the assault a few times since it originally aired. Obviously, you know, we think about these things differently now and the show is aware of that. And so there have [00:35:00] been a few times in the show’s history where they tried to confront that. And there was this scene between Luke and Laura at some point where they discuss what happened and she confronts him many years later and he apologizes.

CLIP Laura: We should talk about what happened that night then. That one bad night 20 years ago.

Susie Banikarim: Eventually Luke and Laura are going to have kids, so, you know, as the show is evolving there’s also a confrontation between Luke and his son with Laura. Strangely their kid is named, Lucky, and he confronts Luke about assaulting his mother.

CLIP Luke: You’re not going anywhere until we have this out.

CLIP Lucky: What are you going to do, Dad? Why, if I walked out the door, what would you do? Force me to stay, why, because you’re stronger than me?

CLIP Luke: What do you know?

Susie Banikarim: And Luke, of course, apologizes again here because it’s always part of a redemption arc they’re trying to give him.

CLIP Luke: You were conceived, born and raised in love. Nothing but love.

Susie Banikarim: But, what’s also [00:36:00] happened, is that I think there was a lot of questions about this rape when the wedding occurred. It’s not like journalists who were covering the wedding at the time didn’t ask about it.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And the onus was really put, especially on Genie Francis, who was quite young. She would sort of explain this thing.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: She was often asked about it and she felt like she had to defend it and I think Tony Geary also felt that way and neither of them seem like they really appreciated being put in that position, to be honest.

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: They both left the show not long after the wedding and then returned.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, for those later storylines. Okay.

Susie Banikarim: For those later storylines. I mean, not just for those later storylines, but then they just returned to the show in the 90s. And she’s gotten to the point where she o- very openly now, even though she’s still on the show today, rejects having been put in this position. And has said, and I- I’ll read a quote from her. “As a young kid at 17, I was told to play rape and I played it. I didn’t even know what it was. But at 17 you follow the rules. You do as you are told and you aim to please. And now at 60 I don’t feel the need to defend that anymore. I [00:37:00] think that story was inappropriate. I don’t condone it. It’s been the burden that I’ve had to carry to try to justify that story. So I’m not doing that anymore.”

Jessica Bennett: That’s interesting. And, you know, to think about how these things play out differently. Today it was interesting you mentioned that at the time-

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: … the actors playing Luke and Laura actually saw a social worker to talk about the playing of this. But now you would have an intimacy coordinator on set.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. It would be a totally different ballgame. Or you’d hope that it would be a totally different ballgame. I think, look, Genie Francis is in her sixties now, right. She’s had 40 years to reflect on this thing that happened to her, but she was a 17-year-old girl playing with a 30-something year old actor.

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: Right? I mean, just the whole thing would be handled so differently now, because in addition to the rape, there would be the statutory issues. There just is, I think, a better understanding of how power dynamics work. Like, it wasn’t even really brought up at the time that he was her boss.

Jessica Bennett: It’s also, like, were the scene to play out today, there would be a concurrent dialogue happening on Twitter and elsewhere about how it was handled. [00:38:00] Immediately, in real time. And so you would be having to preemptively prepare for the criticism that you knew you were going to face and really make sure it was handled delicately.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. I mean, an interesting thing is, is did you The Accused when it came out?

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: That was sort of, like, one of the first depictions I ever saw of gang rape and now the dialogue around that movie has actually even shifted.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: Like, I think it’s kind of fascinating because I’ve seen dialogue about how it’s too violent. It’s presenting-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … and too drawing away. It’s not, it’s, like, triggering. And I think that’s really interesting because the reason that movie was so groundbreaking when it happened is because it was presented in so violent a way. It sort of forced you to face the reality of that violence.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah, yeah.

Susie Banikarim: But now if you played it so violently, they would say it was exploitative, right? Like, if you did that scene now, you would want to handle it with more sensitivity because we get that rape is violent. We don’t need to, like, shove it in your face that same way. But that cultural context is important. When that movie happened, people didn’t really understand how violent rape could be, so it had [00:39:00] to be so aggressive.

Jessica Bennett: I think now too, storylines are forced to grapple with the enduring trauma of something like that happening.

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: And- and that that has to be written in.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. And I think, let’s be honest, we’ve all or most of us have watched many years of Law & Order SVU.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And that has in many ways changed the way that rape is handled on other shows. That’s an interesting example of a show that not only has kind of moved the needle in terms of how a lot of us understand sexual assault, but has actually changed the way other shows handle it because it has really introduced a lot of ideas into the culture that are now very commonly acknowledged as facts. And those things continue to evolve.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So, I feel like we need to take a moment to just pause and re-acknowledge what we’re talking about. This show is about how we internalize these messages.

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: So look, like, 1981 I was not born when this hit. Like, [00:40:00] this was a little bit before our time, but when you think about the time when we were sexually coming of age, like, how the strands of this might have still impacted us in the way that we saw ourselves. And the culture, like, yes, was it okay for guys to be really aggressive when they wanted to pursue you?

Susie Banikarim: I mean, I definitely-

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: … thought that the answer to that was yes. I think I put up with a lot of things that now I see in my niece, like, that she would never put up with. You know, we just accepted a certain level of behavior that-

Jessica Bennett: We wouldn’t now.

Susie Banikarim: No. And now it’s understood that this is completely unacceptable.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But, you know, at that time, I think people just really didn’t understand what the boundaries were. Like, this reminds me of this crazy jarring anecdote that I read, which has really stayed with me. It’s that Tony Geary, the actor who plays Luke, told the story that when he would go to, like, soap opera conventions and events, [00:41:00] after the scene aired, women would come up to him and say, “Rape me, Luke.”

Jessica Bennett: Oh my God.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, and that’s like a thing that he would tell because he was so disturbed by it.

Jessica Bennett: But I think it says so much about what we’ve been talking about here, which is that there’s this underlying sense that a woman should, like, want to be found irresistible.

Susie Banikarim: Right. And it just introduces this idea that men express love or this, like, need through violence and then if you experience it as violence and not love, the problem is with you and not the thing that’s happened to you.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm. Right. I’d be really interested to hear from Cindy as someone who actually lived through this.

Cindy Leive: I think I learned that as a woman it’s incredibly flattering and important to be desired by a man and that even if that quote, unquote, desire is violent and hurts you or hurts other people, that, like, on some level that’s okay. I feel like in a way I’m a best case [00:42:00] scenario. I had a very feminist mom who did not truck with those kinds of stereotypes at all. I’m lucky that in those years after watching that on General Hospital I didn’t have any kind of rape experience myself, which is unusual, I think, for women.

But still on some level I think it just underlined this very present message in our culture that you’re kind of nobody unless a guy has overwhelming desire for you. I mean, when you think about it, General Hospital taught a whole generation of women like me, girls at the time, what relationships were. What family secrets were about, what infidelity was. And also what sexual violence is. And I don’t think it taught us accurately.

Susie Banikarim: This is In Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a cultural moment you can’t stop [00:43:00] thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram @inretropod.

Jessica Bennett: If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim: You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett: In Retrospect is a production of iHeart podcast and The Meteor. Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derrick Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim: Our executive producer from The Meteor is Cindy Leive. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stumpf and Katrina Norvell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Additional editing help from Mary Do and Mike Coscarelli. Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett: And Jessica Bennett. [00:44:00] We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

LEARN MORE ABOUT IN RETROSPECT

by Eli Garcia

In Retrospect - Episode 6

EPISODE 6 – HOT FOR TEACHER (PT 1): DAWSON’S CREEK’S WEIRD ‘ROMANCE”

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Clips (00:05):

Oh, my God, look at her.

Jessica Bennett (00:10):

This is a clip from the very first episode of Dawson’s Creek. I’m sure you remember it. This was the wildly popular television show that ran on the WB in the late 90s.

Clips (00:18):

Show some respect, man. She’s somebody’s mother.

(00:23):

I have been on pretty good authority that mothers have excellent sex lives, all right?

Jessica Bennett (00:29):

The two voices you hear are Pacey and Dawson, two best friends. They’re about to start their sophomore year in high school. They live in a fictional town called Cape Side, Massachusetts, and they’re working in a video store where they rent VHS tapes. The woman they’re ogling in this clip is about to become their high school English teacher. What is more is that 15 year old Pacey is going to lose his virginity to her just a few episodes later.

(01:05):

I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (01:07):

And I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (01:08):

This is In Retrospect, where each week we delve into a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Susie Banikarim (01:14):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett (01:16):

Today we’re talking about a teenager’s relationship with his much older teacher on Dawson’s Creek, but we’re also talking about sex in the nineties and how we understood it, as well as the case that was playing out in the background of it all, that of Mary Kay Letourneau. This is Hot For Teacher, part one.

Susie Banikarim (01:34):

So Jess, what made you want to talk about this moment in this week’s episode?

Jessica Bennett (01:38):

I wanted to talk about Dawson’s, because one, all of my high school friends were absolutely obsessed with it. We’d have these viewing parties every week in my friend’s basement. Her mother was really opposed to us watching it, but we persevered. But also, because the relationship we’re going to talk about here, one between student and teacher, is one that… And I know this is a little bit strange, but I totally shipped.

Susie Banikarim (02:04):

Wait, so for the people in the audience who don’t know what shipped means…

Jessica Bennett (02:08):

Yeah, shipping. It’s a fan term for when you’re rooting for a couple. Basically, we thought this relationship and this couple was totally hot.

Susie Banikarim (02:16):

Yeah, I very vaguely remember this storyline. This wasn’t the storyline that really stayed with me. Was this something that you really thought about over the years?

Jessica Bennett (02:25):

No, and it’s actually only been recently that I came back to this. I was thinking back to Dawson’s Creek, maybe it was around the 25th anniversary. I was like, wait, wasn’t there a student/teacher relationship in that? So I went back and I looked and then I started frantically texting my high school girlfriends to be like, “By the way, do you remember that in sophomore year when we were 15, 16 years old, we were watching this show obsessively where one of the main characters is sleeping with his teacher? Is that kind of weird?”

Susie Banikarim (02:55):

Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is, I really didn’t remember until you told me that this was a significant storyline.

Jessica Bennett (03:02):

It’s funny, because my job for a number of years was covering the Me Too movement. And so, so much about the cultural coverage there was looking back at shows, music, all of these things made in the past, that through a modern day lens are actually quite problematic, to use a word that I hate. But somehow I just completely missed Dawson’s in that. I forgot to think about it until recently.

Susie Banikarim (03:26):

Well, because it’s actually weirdly not treated like a very meaningful moment. I mean, he loses his virginity to her, but it’s not something that’s reflected on.

Jessica Bennett (03:34):

Right, and wasn’t that kind of nuts?

Susie Banikarim (03:37):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (03:38):

So, I started digging back into it. I started re-watching Dawson’s Creek and really thinking about what that plot line taught us about about what was okay in terms of student/teacher relationships, and kind of how that all plays now in our post-Me Too world.

Susie Banikarim (03:55):

I remember that this is an era where I started to become aware of this concept of attractive older female teachers having relationships with their students. There was the Mary Kay Letourneau and then there was the case that became To Die For, which was that Nicole Kidman movie. It seemed very much of the cultural moment and very rarely presented as predatory in terms of the woman.

Jessica Bennett (04:17):

Absolutely. And we’re going to get to all of that, but I want to just focus a minute on Dawson’s and why we’re talking about that show because it was a really big deal back then.

Susie Banikarim (04:26):

I remember, yeah.

Jessica Bennett (04:27):

And not just with me and my high school friends. It was created by this guy, Kevin Williamson. He’s the one who actually grew up near a real life, Dawson’s Creek. It was a place where the high school kids would go to make out in his town somewhere in the southern… It was North Carolina/South Carolina.

Susie Banikarim (04:42):

When people describe a lookout point? I didn’t know those were real things.

Jessica Bennett (04:45):

We totally had that.

Susie Banikarim (04:46):

You had that?. No, we didn’t have that. I went to boarding school, so we went made out in the cemetery. It was really cool.

Jessica Bennett (04:50):

I love that. Dark.

Susie Banikarim (04:51):

Yeah, dark. We were dark.

Jessica Bennett (04:53):

Kevin Williamson had made Scream. He had made, I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Susie Banikarim (04:56):

Both great movies, honestly.

Jessica Bennett (04:58):

Yeah. Kevin Williamson was basically this early two thousands teen TV whisperer. Among the shows that he sells that helped define this era is Dawson’s Creek, this coming of age drama about a group of pretty waspy high school friends. It’s named for Dawson, who’s the main character. Then the other characters are of course his best friend, Pacey, his maybe love interest Joey, and then the mysterious Jen who’s moved from the big city, aka New York. And Dawson’s is huge. It quickly becomes the number one show on the WB.

(05:31):

When it premieres in January 1998, this is when I was a sophomore in high school, 6.8 million people, including half of all teenagers who were watching TV that night, tune in to watch Dawson and his pals navigate hormones and friendships in this show. I actually still remember it aired at 9:00 PM right after Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m not sure that I personally own the soundtrack, but I know every line to every song on that soundtrack.

Susie Banikarim (05:59):

I remember the theme song. The theme song is very iconic. But I don’t remember anything else from the soundtrack.

Jessica Bennett (06:05):

You don’t remember Six Pence None The Richer, that band? And then the theme song was, I Don’t Want To Wait by Paula Cole.

Susie Banikarim (06:15):

Yes, that I remember.

Jessica Bennett (06:18):

And fun fact, producers originally wanted to have Alanis Morissette, the Song Hand in My Pocket, which I actually truly love, as a theme song, but apparently they couldn’t get the rights to it. So Dawson’s, if I haven’t expressed this, is huge. Kids are forming watch parties at their high schools, local newspapers are calling it a cult hit. Importantly, it actually allows the WB to reach this very popular but overlooked at that time and highly coveted audience, which was teen girls.

Susie Banikarim (06:47):

I feel like this is also coming after the popularity of Beverly Hills 90210, so people are trying to recreate that magic of a teen hit show.

Jessica Bennett (06:54):

Yes. Yes, absolutely. In re-watching it, it’s actually hilarious how heavy-handed it is. Literally everything is framed around sex.

Susie Banikarim (07:03):

I re-watched the first six episodes in preparing for this, and I really was shocked by how much sexual innuendo is in it. I don’t remember that at all from watching it the first time.

Jessica Bennett (07:14):

There was so much innuendo in part because they had to get it past the network,. So they would do things like talking about having long fingers. Like you’re supposed to know what that means. And food was described as orgasmic.

Susie Banikarim (07:27):

There’s that weird scene with Katie Holmes who plays, Joey, Dawson’s best friend and kind of a love interest for both characters. She says it in this sort of creepy way, she’s like, “It’s orgasmic.” I’m like, what is happening on this show?

Jessica Bennett (07:41):

Then later they’re talking about masturbation and they’re calling it Walking the Dog.

Clips (07:45):

How often do you walk your dog, huh? What time of day? How many times a week?

Jessica Bennett (07:48):

Ultimately, it’s then revealed that Dawson actually walks the dog to Katie Couric’s Morning News show.

Susie Banikarim (07:54):

Yeah, which is particularly weird because his mom is a news anchor.

Jessica Bennett (07:58):

And our producers used to work for Katie Couric.

Susie Banikarim (07:59):

And I used to work for Katie Couric.

Jessica Bennett (08:02):

Sorry, Katie.

Susie Banikarim (08:03):

Yeah, I’m sure that’s one of the more disturbing anecdotes.

Jessica Bennett (08:19):

To contextualize when this show was coming and why it made such a splash, let’s just tick through a few of the things that were going on at the time in 1990s culture. I want you to really smell the Axe Body spray that emanated in the culture during this time.

Susie Banikarim (08:38):

Was it just Axe body spray? Because I also have a significant memory of Drakkar Noir. Is that what it was called, Drakkar Noir?

Jessica Bennett (08:43):

And Polo Sport.

Susie Banikarim (08:44):

Oh, and Polo Sport.

Jessica Bennett (08:45):

I loved Polo Sport.

Susie Banikarim (08:46):

I feel like men or boys just drowned themselves in that stuff back then.

Jessica Bennett (08:50):

I’m a sophomore when the show comes out in 1998.

Susie Banikarim (08:52):

A sophomore in high school.

Jessica Bennett (08:53):

A sophomore in high school. It debuts in January of that year, which is the same month that Bill Clinton denies having sexual relations with “that woman”.

Susie Banikarim (09:03):

Monica Lewinsky.

Jessica Bennett (09:04):

Monica Lewinsky, which of course was not true. He had had sexual relations. This is also the era of Wild Things. Do you remember that movie?

Susie Banikarim (09:11):

Yes. Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (09:12):

It’s this erotic thriller with the threesome that basically everybody of our generation remembers.

Susie Banikarim (09:17):

Yeah, I mean, the only thing I know and remember about that movie is that Neve Campbell and Denise Richards kiss in it.

Jessica Bennett (09:22):

Exactly.

Susie Banikarim (09:23):

So there’s this very hot lesbian kiss.

Jessica Bennett (09:25):

Yes. And the other thing that’s happening is this whole question around feminism. Time Magazine has just published this cover story asking Is feminism dead? Along with a poll showing that the majority of American women don’t identify as feminists.

Clips (09:40):

Every three or four years, there’s been another round of declarations of, well, the death of feminism, the one in Time Magazine a few weeks ago, is feminism dead. All of which are highly ironic in a moment when internationally the women’s movement keeps growing.

Jessica Bennett (09:56):

Susie, that’s a news clip from a feminist convention from around that time where this was all very much top of mind.

Susie Banikarim (10:01):

That’s interesting. I kind of remember this, which is this idea that there was this backlash against using the word, I don’t need to say I’m a feminist. It’s sort of a version of I don’t see color. It’s like, no thanks, just acknowledge that you think women should have equal rights.

Jessica Bennett (10:15):

Yes. Then when you think about sexual consent, I mean, that was not a word that we even knew what it meant back then. And so certainly, we weren’t thinking about it in the context of Dawson’s Creek.

Susie Banikarim (10:26):

I think I did have some understanding of the concept of consent, but not in the way we think about it now. Not sort of a thing that happened in the moment between two people, but just like a thing that happened if you were being raped, if you said no or not. Right?

Jessica Bennett (10:42):

For what it’s worth, this was before there were widespread consent laws as well. Then there’s Mary Kay Letourneau. She was a 34 year old married mother of four who began a relationship with her 12 year old student. She had taught him in the second grade.

Susie Banikarim (10:58):

So creepy.

Clips (10:59):

The relationship that began when the boy was just 12 years old resulted in two pregnancies, and for Letourneau, a seven year sentence for child rape.

Susie Banikarim (11:08):

I do really remember this because this was one of the first really national cases of a teacher, like an attractive, fairly young teacher having an affair.

Jessica Bennett (11:16):

Female teacher.

Susie Banikarim (11:17):

Female teacher having an affair with an underage student. I think what I remember so distinctly is there was this real discussion around whether or not it even qualified as a sexual assault because a guy-

Jessica Bennett (11:27):

She was so hot?

Susie Banikarim (11:28):

… should just be so grateful. How lucky was he? His father was probably high-fiving him because he was able to pull this hot teacher. I just remember the time being so confused by that framing.

Jessica Bennett (11:42):

That’s so interesting.

Susie Banikarim (11:43):

Because he was such a little boy. I mean, he was 12 years old.

Jessica Bennett (11:46):

It actually parallels to Dawson’s Creek. Dawson’s Creek airs in January of 1998. Mary Kay Letourneau is pregnant with her child/lover’s baby number two.

Clips (11:59):

It is a story that continues to captivate and perplex many Americans. Incredibly, Mary Kay brought the boy to her home to have sex. The same home she shared with her husband and four children. During that time, they wrote love letters to each other. We obtained one of those letters. And in it she says, “I do know that you’ll love me forever.”

Jessica Bennett (12:18):

I think that’s why this became such a media frenzy too. It was so salacious in so many ways, but the idea that she’s pregnant with his baby as well.

Susie Banikarim (12:27):

Yeah, I think there was just a lot of chapters to that story, even if it would’ve been a media frenzy to start, it just went on and on and on.

Jessica Bennett (12:33):

I should also note, this is all happening right outside of Seattle, my hometown.

Susie Banikarim (12:37):

Oh, wow. So it’s in the ether.

Jessica Bennett (12:38):

It’s in the ether. It’s happening in the background at the same time we’re watching Dawson’s Creek, and basically hooking all of these teens like me. Let me just paint you a little picture. Nineties Seattle, I’m very much more of My So-Called Life girl.

Susie Banikarim (12:53):

I did love My So-Called Life.

Jessica Bennett (12:56):

I mean, very much the superior show, but that’s not what we’re talking about today. I was sort of like whatever on Dawson’s, it was like these lily-white kids in fictional Cape Side, Massachusetts with their little boats. They ride their little boats to each other’s-

Susie Banikarim (13:10):

It was definitely a little cheesy. It had a cheesy vibe, but I love cheesy things.

Jessica Bennett (13:13):

Totally.

Susie Banikarim (13:14):

So that wasn’t really a problem.

Jessica Bennett (13:15):

Well, and all of my friends were obsessed with it. So if I wanted to hang out, I had to watch this show. We used to go to my friend Rosie’s house. It was on Tuesdays at 9:00 PM She had this big basement. We had a lot of parties there. Lots of experiments went on-

Susie Banikarim (13:29):

Feels like very typical American suburbia. Was there wood paneling?

Jessica Bennett (13:33):

There actually was, but I mean, it wasn’t suburban. It was in the city, but there was wood paneling.

Susie Banikarim (13:37):

I love that.

Jessica Bennett (13:38):

I think. I think. At one point, the New York Times actually came to her house to report on the fact that there were these viewing parties going on. It must’ve been a local correspondent. Why was the New York Times at our [inaudible 00:13:51]-

Susie Banikarim (13:51):

That so interesting though.

Jessica Bennett (13:51):

… Seattle viewing party?

Susie Banikarim (13:53):

Did it feel like a really big deal? I feel like if the New York Times had showed up at my house at that age, I would’ve thought it was the biggest deal ever.

Jessica Bennett (13:59):

I don’t even remember it happening, to be honest. But let’s call up my friend Rosie and see what she remembers.

Rosie Bancroft (14:09):

In my recollection, that is The Seattle Times.

Jessica Bennett (14:12):

Mine too, honestly.

Rosie Bancroft (14:14):

Because how could it be the New York Times? And when we looked it up and realized it was the New York Times, I was like, they can’t have come to my parents’ basement with a stained pink carpet and actually been there.

Jessica Bennett (14:27):

This is my longtime pal, Rosie Bancroft. We went to middle and high school together in Seattle, and she’s now a clinical social worker at a public middle school, not unlike ours.

(14:37):

Okay, so let’s start with Rosie. What do you remember about Dawson’s Creek?

Rosie Bancroft (14:45):

I remember loving Pacey and hating Dawson. I remember it being so verbose. I mean, that is the first thing I think of every time is teenagers don’t talk like this, and we all know teenagers don’t talk like this. I think maybe we thought that it was painting us in a really good light or something at the time that we knew all these big words and were analyzing all these things. In retrospect, that is not how the world was seeing us.

Jessica Bennett (15:15):

So we all watched this together, right?

Rosie Bancroft (15:18):

Oh, yeah. Somehow I got the idea that I could invite people over to watch this, and for some reason my mom agreed, even though we were mostly an OTV household. I’m picturing 10 kids, maybe came, seven girls probably.

Jessica Bennett (15:35):

Describe where we were.

Rosie Bancroft (15:36):

We were down in our basement. You go down this cement stairwell and maybe my mom came in, maybe my brother came in occasionally and rolled his eyes at us in a jealous way. We were kind of all huddled around this couch and kids sitting on the floor and you had to watch it right when it was airing. I remember us having commentary and then people being like, “We’re going to miss some crucial plot point.”

Jessica Bennett (16:04):

And so that New York Times article about these watch parties, it actually quoted your mom. She basically says, with a major eye roll, “I wouldn’t choose it, but they feel strongly about the show. And so I’m letting them watch it.”

Rosie Bancroft (16:18):

I think she just was… It was like alcohol to her. It’s better to do it here than to do it somewhere else. That is what they included in the article was this generational divide about it and how we all were eating up this insanely unrealistic dribble.

Jessica Bennett (16:38):

When I was thinking back on this show and texted our high school friend group text chain and was like, “By the way, do you remember how in Dawson’s Creek, Pacey actually sleeps with his teacher?”

Rosie Bancroft (16:50):

Yeah. My first reaction when you texted that was, really? Then I thought, oh, I guess I have some vague recollection of that. And so I thought it might’ve been one episode, but it was not impactful or something. It did not register or we thought it was cool, or maybe that’s why I liked Pacey. Ew. Then when I went back and looked it up, I was like, this is A, several episodes long, and B, she is 36 years old. Not that that is worse than 22, but it was a big reach in terms of the storytelling, I feel like.

Jessica Bennett (17:30):

So Susie, I want to just pause Rosie for a second because I think you need a little context about our high school.

Susie Banikarim (17:34):

Okay.

Jessica Bennett (17:35):

We went to a pretty unique school in central Seattle called Garfield. It has a really interesting history. It was an amazing place to go, had an incredible jazz program, all of these things, but also a lot of underfunded public schools was also kind of a hot mess.

Susie Banikarim (17:51):

I’m just picturing Fame. The Fame high school.

Jessica Bennett (17:54):

Yes, I love Fame. For us, that first year that Dawson’s Creek aired, at our school, there were multiple student/teacher relationships that had come to light.

Rosie Bancroft (18:03):

When I look back at that and I think about that storyline and then what is it, six months, nine months later, all of these things start happening at our high school? First thing we find out about is the principal is sleeping with a cheerleader. That was a male principal so we could recognize it a little bit better. Then this other teacher had this long investigation about sexual abuse of all these young boys that had been going on for a really long time.

(18:38):

We recognized that it was a little bit questionable, but it took us a long time to decide that it reached the bar of talking to another adult about it or to think that it was worth saying anything about because he was a very popular, well-liked teacher. I don’t know that that was directly related to Dawson’s Creek, but the number of things that we were navigating as 15 year olds and we had no role models.

Susie Banikarim (19:13):

Well, what’s interesting about this is I feel like everybody has a high school story in this era at least. I went to boarding school, as I’ve said, and we had three incidents I can think of off the top of my head. We had one teacher who was fired for having sex with a student. I remember one day he just disappeared. And then we found out that that’s what had happened. There was another story that I don’t think ever came out publicly that this very cool girl was having an affair with one of the hot younger teachers.

(19:39):

I think one thing that’s a little complicated at boarding school is you’re isolated in the middle of nowhere. You’re 16, 17. A lot of the teachers have just come from college. So they’re like 22, 23. It’s still not good, but it’s a little closer in age than the sort of things we’re describing here. But there was also a very long affair that was eventually very public between a female teacher and a female student in my year. I think that was also very weirdly handled. There was a lot of homophobia in the ether, but the teacher was married to a male teacher also on staff.

Jessica Bennett (20:15):

Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim (20:15):

So it was very scandalous, but none of these things were scandalous to the point of being career-ending for any of the people involved or even becoming national stories. We just expected that there were teacher/student relationships and that was just a thing. I think when it started to get national attention is when it was female teachers and young male students.

Jessica Bennett (20:37):

I think that’s so true. The writer and creator of the show, Kevin Williamson, later said in interviews that this plot was of course based on something that happened in his own school. I think the other thing that’s interesting is that we’re aware of these things as they’re happening, but it wasn’t really until I started looking back that I really connected all these dots.

Susie Banikarim (20:56):

Oh, definitely.

Jessica Bennett (20:57):

This is happening in my own high school. It’s happening in this huge national story right outside of Seattle. It’s happening on this TV show, and yet we’re not seeing these things as interconnected.

(21:17):

So Susie, I want to get us back to the moment, the clip that we played at the top, the one with the bad saxophone, sexy music in the background.

Susie Banikarim (21:26):

You don’t want to wait for our lives to be over before we discuss this?

Clips (21:28):

Oh my God, look at her.

Jessica Bennett (21:34):

The show launched in 1998. This was the premier episode. This show followed a group of teenagers in fictional Cape Side, Massachusetts, a seaside town that is kind of like Martha’s Vineyard.

Susie Banikarim (21:45):

Very New England feeling, I remember.

Jessica Bennett (21:47):

Let me just give you a word about the characters. There’s Dawson, who the show is named after. He is a wannabe filmmaker. He is obsessed, obsessed with Steven Spielberg, and he is played by James Van Der Beek. Then there’s his best friend Joey played by Katie Holmes. She was kind of a tomboy. They were just best friends, no sex, whatever.

Susie Banikarim (22:07):

But she’s stunning, but okay.

Jessica Bennett (22:08):

And then suddenly she’s beautiful and there’s all this tension. Then there’s Jen played by Michelle Williams, who’s the new girl from New York City, and she’s sort of mysterious and is she not a virgin?

Susie Banikarim (22:20):

And also very pretty.

Jessica Bennett (22:22):

Yes. I mean, they’re all very attractive. Then there’s Pacey, who’s Dawson’s best friend and basically an extremely confident 15 year old played by Joshua Jackson, who’s about to have an affair with his teacher, Ms. Jacobs, aka Tamara.

Clips (22:39):

You new in town? Because I haven’t seen you in here before.

(22:43):

Yes, I am. My name’s Tamara. What’s yours?

(22:46):

Pacey, nice to meet you.

(22:47):

Well, there you go.

Susie Banikarim (22:50):

It’s just the breathiness that gets me every time.

Jessica Bennett (22:52):

I know. Okay, so that clip, let me just describe. Dawson and Pacey are working at the local video store and in walks this woman. It’s kind of hazy in the background. You, of course, have that saxophone playing.

Susie Banikarim (23:06):

Yeah, that sexy saxophone music.

Jessica Bennett (23:08):

She’s wearing a white sundress and she flips her hair and then says she wants to rent a video. And she’s “in the mood for romance”.

Susie Banikarim (23:17):

It seems like she should be in the mood for a cold shower. She’s very obviously flirting with these children, which is-

Jessica Bennett (23:23):

I mean, yes, that’s what it seems like. Yes.

Susie Banikarim (23:26):

I mean, but what is happening here?

Jessica Bennett (23:28):

Well, okay, and so what happens next is that Pacey is like, “Okay, how about a new release?” And she replies that, “No, she’s old school. She’s vintage all the way.” Another one of those little turns of phrase. Then she asks where she can find, wait for it, The Graduate.

Susie Banikarim (23:47):

Yeah, The Graduate, which great film, but also a lot of innuendo in just that choice.

Jessica Bennett (23:52):

Exactly. Oh, and by the way, Pacey is this scene is 15, in case anyone forgot, which means Tamara, the new English teacher to school is more than twice his age.

Susie Banikarim (24:03):

She’s like 35 or something.

Jessica Bennett (24:05):

We’ll later learn that. But still, this is definitely presented as a meet cute. Before that expression existed, it’s one of the primary openers to this series.

Susie Banikarim (24:14):

So what happens next?

Jessica Bennett (24:16):

Basically, a couple of days after they’re at the video store, they go to school and guess what? Tamara, Ms. Jacobs is Pacey’s English teacher. She says to him, “Call me Ms. Jacobs during school hours.”

Susie Banikarim (24:31):

You’re going to spend a lot of time in not school.

Jessica Bennett (24:33):

Exactly, exactly. So Pacey is totally smitten. He begins flirting with her, pursuing her, and pretty aggressively.

Susie Banikarim (24:42):

There’s a sort of pretense of resistance, like a very mild resistance from her.

Jessica Bennett (24:45):

Yes, there’s lot of-

Susie Banikarim (24:46):

But it feels inevitable.

Jessica Bennett (24:47):

“We can’t, it’s wrong.” This is over the course of a few episodes, but him saying “Sometimes it’s right to do the wrong thing.”

Susie Banikarim (24:54):

Barf.

Jessica Bennett (24:54):

That kind of dialogue. They quickly share their first kiss, which we actually see on the show. I want to play you this clip because I feel like it captures so much. Basically the setup here is that Pacey has decided to crash a date that Tamara has gone on with another teacher at the school, one her age, and this ends in him kind of sheepishly walking home after being rejected, along the water as you do in Cape Side, where lo and behold, he then somehow runs into Tamara. And so she says, “I’m so sorry.” He tells her really pretty dramatically, “You should be, because you’re a liar. How can you say you were just renting a movie?”

Susie Banikarim (25:36):

Which she didn’t know he existed. What else was she doing?

Jessica Bennett (25:40):

So Tamara says, “Because it’s the truth.” Then Pacey… Okay, this is what you have to listen to.

Clips (25:45):

The truth is, you are a well put together, knock out of a woman who’s feeling a little insecure about hitting 40. So when a young virile boy, such as myself, flirts with you, you enjoy it. You entice it. You fantasize about what it would be like to be with that young boy on the verge of manhood. Because it helps you stay feeling attractive. Makes the aging process a little more bearable. Well, let me tell you something, you blew it, lady, because I’m the best sex you’ll never have.

Jessica Bennett (26:14):

Okay, and so then the next line is key. Tamara says back to him, “You’re wrong about one thing. Pacey. You’re not a boy.”

Susie Banikarim (26:22):

Okay, that’s great because he is like a man?

Jessica Bennett (26:24):

And then she leans in and kisses him. And so this is their first kiss.

Susie Banikarim (26:30):

Can we just go back for a moment? The fact that he says “I’m the best sex you’ll never have.”

Jessica Bennett (26:35):

Right, because he’s 15.

Susie Banikarim (26:36):

Because he’s a 15 year old boy who’s never had sex.

Jessica Bennett (26:39):

It’s amazing. It’s amazing.

Susie Banikarim (26:41):

I’m 100% certain it’s not the best sex she’ll never or ever have.

Jessica Bennett (26:44):

I mean, awards for writing here. Honestly.

Susie Banikarim (26:47):

I would rather die than have sex with a 15 year old boy.

Jessica Bennett (26:51):

Well, good. I mean, good. It’s on the record.

Susie Banikarim (26:53):

Great. So then what happens?

Jessica Bennett (26:55):

Okay, so a few days later… I mean actually, I don’t know how long it is, but within a course of one episode, he will lose his virginity too.

Susie Banikarim (27:03):

Wow.

Jessica Bennett (27:04):

We don’t actually see them have sex. That probably would’ve been too raunchy for the network, but it’s very clear that they do. In the last minute of episode three, we see them lying down somewhere outdoors. They’re naked under a blanket.

Susie Banikarim (27:16):

Oh, they had sex outside.

Jessica Bennett (27:17):

They’re cuddling. I should note that throughout different points in the show, they do go to lengths to point out that this is illegal.

Susie Banikarim (27:24):

Oh, like the characters pointed it out?

Jessica Bennett (27:26):

Yes. At one point Tamara even says, “Quick reminder, this is a felony.” She probably doesn’t say it in that-

Susie Banikarim (27:32):

As a way to dissuade him?

Jessica Bennett (27:33):

… voice, but it’s sort of a hint to the viewer that at least the filmmakers know that this is not something that is okay necessarily.

Susie Banikarim (27:41):

But you’re still kind of rooting for it.

Jessica Bennett (27:43):

Well, that’s the thing. None of that really stuck with me. I didn’t remember that they said any of those things. The fact that this was taboo made it kind of hot. I was rooting for them.

Susie Banikarim (27:53):

I think everybody was.

Jessica Bennett (27:54):

Honestly, it wasn’t just us. I look back at all these fan message boards from the time, and people were saying things like, “I found their relationship to be a model of true love. If I could have a relationship like theirs, I would die happy.”

Susie Banikarim (28:08):

Wow.

Jessica Bennett (28:09):

Someone compared them to Romeo and Juliet. So there’s this real sense that this is a forbidden romance, a forbidden love affair, not a relationship between a boy and an adult.

Susie Banikarim (28:19):

Like a 35 year old woman.

Jessica Bennett (28:21):

Yep. And that’s the thing too, it’s an adult woman and it’s an adult seduction. Now, one of the jokes we had growing up was that all of the actors on this show were basically in their twenties. They were old.

Susie Banikarim (28:32):

Nobody looked… I mean, I think in general in that era, all the teenage characters were played by adults.

Jessica Bennett (28:37):

By 20-somethings. They’re talking like 20-somethings, not like 15 year olds, which fine, but this whole thing is painted as very adult. It’s sexy. Pacey is the clear aggressor. “This is the best sex-“

Susie Banikarim (28:50):

He’s seducing her.

Jessica Bennett (28:51):

“… you’ll never have.” How does he know? He’s a child. He repeats again and again throughout the show how he’s an adult capable of making his own decisions. At one point he says, “I may just be 15, but I’m well beyond the age of accountability.”

Susie Banikarim (29:07):

What is he accountable for? It’s like-

Jessica Bennett (29:09):

Right. It’s like a misunderstanding of accountability. But also, no, you’re literally 15.

Susie Banikarim (29:13):

15.

Jessica Bennett (29:14):

Okay, so to close this arc, so by episode three they have sex, and then by episode six they actually get found out. It’s discovered that they’re having this affair, and so that Tamara doesn’t get in trouble, he, Pacey, claims that he made up the whole thing.

Susie Banikarim (29:29):

Yeah, that’s sort of like a heroic moment for him.

Jessica Bennett (29:32):

And she basically has to leave town at that point, so she is moving to Rochester, New York for whatever reason.

Susie Banikarim (29:38):

That’s a beautiful place to end up.

Jessica Bennett (29:39):

And last words they say to each other are him, “I hope you enjoy Rochester.” Her, “I hope you enjoy high school.”

Susie Banikarim (29:47):

Yeah, it’s a lot. I mean also how specific? Why Rochester? Why didn’t you move back to New York? Bizarre.

Jessica Bennett (29:54):

I know. I know. Maybe she got another teaching job there. They’re a haven for-

Susie Banikarim (30:01):

Seems where she’ll find another high school boy to molest. I mean, what do we actually call this? I mean, I think the thing that’s hard about this is if it was a male teacher and a female student, we would just say it was a sexual assault.

Jessica Bennett (30:13):

Call it assault.

Susie Banikarim (30:14):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (30:14):

I mean, that is interesting and we both sort keep being, uh.

(30:20):

Let’s pause here. We’re going to continue to dissect this awkward language around Pacey and Tamara in part two. There’s so much more to talk about. We’re going to dive into Mary Kay Letourneau more, that parallel. We’re going to talk about Hollywood’s obsession with the older woman seductress. And so much more.

Susie Banikarim (30:39):

I can’t wait. That’s in part two, which is already in your feed.

(30:45):

Jessica Bennett (31:00):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (31:10):

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett (31:19):

Susie Banikarim (31:31):

Jessica Bennett (31:49):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

Jessica Bennett: And I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim: This is In Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Jessica Bennett: And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett: So Susie, I know nothing about soap operas except that there is one starring a woman named Jessica Bennett, who shares my name.

Susie Banikarim: Is that true?

Jessica Bennett: Uh, it’s called Passion. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: Oh, Passion. That was a short-lived, but very wild soap opera.

Jessica Bennett: She remains on Wikipedia. Anyway, were you a huge General Hospital fan, like, how- what led you to this moment?

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: I was a Days of Our Life-

Jessica Bennett: Girl.

Susie Banikarim: One Life to Live girl, which was kind of unusual, because it was split. Days of Our Lives was-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: … on NBC. Do you remember the tagline for Days of Our Lives?

Jessica Bennett: No.

Susie Banikarim: Like sands through the hourglass…

CLIP: Like sands through the hourglass…

Jessica Bennett: Oh, yeah, I do remember. Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … so are the days of our lives.

CLIP: … so are the days of our lives.

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: And, you know, guess what? She remembers this relationship between Luke and Laura as completely romantic.

Susie Banikarim: I think that’s what most people thought.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. It was a soap opera that started in 1963.

CLIP: General Hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, so Luke and Laura are characters who do not work in that hospital?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. No, they don’t work in the hospital. Not literally everyone on the show works in the hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Got it.

Susie Banikarim: They just live in Port Charles.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. And where should we begin in terms of their, can we call it a relationship?

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: It was a two-day event, so it’s two hours long.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: There’s, like, really long stretches of them just, like, driving up in cars.

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: Like, the bridesmaids, the groomsmen.

Jessica Bennett: Yup.

Susie Banikarim: And then there’s this really long stretch of them just, like, literally greeting the guests.

Jessica Bennett: It’s like an actual wedding.

Susie Banikarim: Which is why it’s fascinating that it was the most watched soap opera episode of all time.

Jessica Bennett: [00:05:00] Wow.

Susie Banikarim: Like, people loved it. They wanted to feel like they were there at this wedding, because they were obsessed with this couple.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. Why were people so obsessed with this couple? Like, what was the appeal?

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … because she’s already become a pretty central character to General Hospital when Luke is introduced.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s because they’re trying to push towards younger audiences.

Jessica Bennett: Ah, okay.

Susie Banikarim: So she’s a teenager.

Jessica Bennett: Interesting.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the quotes I read from a fan was, like, we love her because she’s 16 like us, but she lives the life of a 28-year-old.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … more people tuned in to watch this fake wedding than tuned in when Meghan Markle and Prince [00:06:00] Harry had their actual wedding in 2018.

Jessica Bennett: Whoa. What, that is wild.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. And, like, local news sent correspondents to viewing parties, like, all across Manhattan. From an office in Madison Avenue to a dorm at NYU.

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

NEWS CLIP: Fans all across the country watched for the big moment. To them it was their wedding.

NEWS CLIP: Of course we’re excited.

NEWS CLIP: Not a dry eye in the house.

NEWS CLIP: By the way, three years for them to get married, I feel like [inaudible 00:06:22].

NEWS CLIP: You like Luke?

NEWS CLIP: I love Luke.

NEWS CLIP: Why?

NEWS CLIP: Uh, he’s sexy. It’s time for them to get together.

NEWS CLIP: It’s been two years. It’s time for them to-

NEWS CLIP: You know, they’re very much in love and it’s really a beautiful thing.

Susie Banikarim: It was just this wildly popular thing, even among celebrities. Like, Elizabeth Taylor was such a fan of the show that she requested to be on it.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And made a guest appearance and you can kind of see her in-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … the background of many shots. She’s playing a villain who is cursing them-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay.

Susie Banikarim: … on their wedding day. And also, this is the year where Diana and Charles got married.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And they had a real wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But then this is such a big [00:07:00] moment that Diana sends champagne for this fake wedding. [laughs] She sends the actors-

Jessica Bennett: Whoa.

Susie Banikarim: … champagne to congratulate them on their fake wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow. Oh my God, okay.

Susie Banikarim: Which, like, an amazing little detail here is that Genie Francis is underage when this wedding happens.

Jessica Bennett: Genie Francis who plays Laura.

Susie Banikarim: Genie Francis who plays Laura Spencer is 20, and so they don’t-

Jessica Bennett: She can’t drink.

Susie Banikarim: … even give it to her. She doesn’t know about the champagne until years later when they’re doing an interview.

Jessica Bennett: What kind of champagne do you think it was?

Susie Banikarim: I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of champagne it was, but, um, I think Luke said he liked kept the bo- I mean, it-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: … imagine getting a bottle of champagne from who- what was, like, the most famous woman in the world at that time.

Jessica Bennett: So wha- okay, so the culture or the world is kind of treating this fake wedding like a real wedding.

Susie Banikarim: People took the day off work. And there’s, like, a note in the research that someone was, like, hey, I told my boss I was going to a wedding, because I was.

Jessica Bennett: Oh my God. [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: You know, like, bars played it. Like, people gathered around in bars at lunchtime in droves-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … to watch this wedding and, I mean, a thing that I think people sort of forget, [00:08:00] it’s hard now to remember what a stranglehold soap operas had on the culture-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … in the 80s.

Jessica Bennett: Or even television.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, and television. I mean, they also made the most money.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And like, I think part of the thing is, yes, a lot of people watch them, but more than that, for the networks, uh, ABC, for example, they made up 50% of revenue.

Jessica Bennett: Oh wow.

Susie Banikarim: So had an enormous amount of power.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: This sort of silly ridiculous thing. And, you know, it could be silly and ridiculous and we can talk about that, but daytime was an enormously powerful arena at this point.

Jessica Bennett: I don’t think I fully appreciated that. That soap operas had huge power to shape culture and also that it was women both making and watching them.

Susie Banikarim: [00:09:00] Yeah. Initially soap operas were really watched by stay-at-home moms and that’s kind of why initially they’re dismissed.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But then this thing happens at the end of the 70s where a lot of women enter the workforce and there’s a dip in viewership.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But then the women who are staying at home start to allow their children to watch TV with them.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: That’s kind of like a shift. And so a lot of girls and boys who are home with their moms become addicted to these shows.

Jessica Bennett: I see.

Susie Banikarim: And then it becomes common to be a college student who gathers around-

Jessica Bennett: Right, this is why there’s viewing parties in these dorm rooms.

Susie Banikarim: Yes. You know, a common thing that was talked about amongst soap fans, is that they would schedule their classes around their soap operas.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. It’s such a different time.

Susie Banikarim: It’s, like, worth noting that even though soap operas aren’t that popular now, General Hospital is still on the air.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: I mean, people forget that.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: But it is the longest running scripted drama and the longest running American soap opera. I- I-

Jessica Bennett: How do you watch that now?

Susie Banikarim: It started airing in 1963. You can watch it on television. What do you mean? You watch it on ABC.

Jessica Bennett: Like, watch it, [00:10:00] you do?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. You could watch it in the afternoon on ABC. And by the way, two million people still do.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think the thing that’s different is there’s, like, a lot of options now.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: So it doesn’t seem as popular.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But two million people is not a paltry number. That’s way more than most cable shows get.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But we don’t think about it as a cultural phenomenon because it seems so low in comparison to the fact that in their heyday-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … one in fifteen Americans watched General Hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And I’m going to actually blow your mind-

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: … with so many things here, because to begin with, Luke is Laura’s boss.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Where did they work?

Susie Banikarim: Um, at a disco.

Jessica Bennett: They work at a disco.

Susie Banikarim: Laura is 17. Luckily for Laura she’s already married. She’s 17 and married.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Only a crime.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Wild.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, so it’s not doing good at this time.

Susie Banikarim: At this time it’s not doing good. It’s the lowest rated soap opera on TV. It’s, like, number 12 or something.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And there’s so many soap operas on TV-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … at this time. And that’s actually what makes it so remarkable that within three years, it’s literally the number one show.

Jessica Bennett: Can you imagine being, like, ah, our show’s doing really bad. What can we do to- to get better ratings? I know-

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: … let’s stage a rape.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. [00:13:00] I mean, it is wild. But it does work.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the things that’s interesting is the executive producer that was brought in at that time came from TV movies where rape was a much more common topic.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But it was presented more from, like, the crime aspect. And so I think that’s why-

Jessica Bennett: Not a love story?

Susie Banikarim: Not a love story. And I think that’s why she has this idea to introduce this rape-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and knows that that is, like, popular with viewers. That must be kind of what she’s thinking when she introduces this character.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So this new 32-year-old character, Luke, ends up hiring 17-year-old Laura at his nightclub.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s his back story. So the context of this scene is that Luke has gotten mixed up with these mobsters who are forcing him to [00:14:00] kill a local politician-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and he feels like if he kills this other person, he will also be killed.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And so this scene picks up where she has seen him crying, because he is like, “I’m a dead man walking.”

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

CLIP Laura: How come you’re crying?

CLIP Luke: I wasn’t crying.

CLIP Laura: Yes, you were. And you didn’t know that I was here.

Jessica Bennett: At first I was, like, oh, that’s kind of progressive of them. Like, you’re showing tears.

Susie Banikarim: It’s not going to be so progressive.

CLIP Laura: Luke, I’m sure that whatever it is, it can be worked out in time.

CLIP Luke: Time is what I don’t have.

Jessica Bennett: They’re sort of setting it up that, like, if you don’t have time, then you must have the woman you love.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s definitely how the story plays, that he knows he’s running out of time, he’s so in love with her-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: That he must have her this one time.

Jessica Bennett: He ra- he has to act on this love lust.

CLIP Luke: I said I was going to be dead, killed, little lady. Can’t you get that through your head? Now get out of here.

Susie Banikarim: So [00:15:00] he’s pushing her away, because essentially the message is he can’t control himself. And then he professes his love.

CLIP Luke: Dammit, Laura. I’m in love with you.

CLIP Laura: No, I d- I don’t think it’s really love, Luke. I-

CLIP Luke: Oh, yes. It’s just what it is.

CLIP Luke: Dance with me, Laura.

CLIP Laura: No.

Jessica Bennett: You really feel that the tension is building and then things clearly unravel.

CLIP Laura: Luke, let me call a taxi, please.

Jessica Bennett: And so you don’t see the rape itself.

CLIP Laura: No. Don’t, Luke, let me go.

Susie Banikarim: But it’s unambiguous.

CLIP Laura: No. No.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: You definitely hear a rape.

Jessica Bennett: So clothes are ripped. She’s looking upset. She’s crying.

Susie Banikarim: She’s cowering.

Jessica Bennett: She’s clearly said no ahead of time.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, she’s screaming no when it-

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: … starts and grows. It’s a kind of jarring moment because it happens pretty suddenly. Like, you go [00:16:00] from being, like-

Jessica Bennett: I actually do get goosebumps watching it.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. Because you’re sort of, like, oh, it’s going to be a seduction and then suddenly it’s a rape.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: And cut to disco lights. There’s a commercial break. We come back. We’re back on the disco lights. It’s, like, very-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … surreal kind of vibe. And then the thing that really drives home that this is a rape is she’s now lying on the ground. She is cowering.

Jessica Bennett: Her clothes are torn.

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: And she sneaks away.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s her husband, Scotty.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: Because he’s lying about whether or not she’s been there. And that’s the scene.

Susie Banikarim: I know, it’s crazy.

Jessica Bennett: And, like, for a jazz funk instrumental, that was as rare then as it is today.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s funny, actually. I don’t know if you remember this, you called me and I was in Palm Springs with a friend.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And, uh, you know, we had shopped, naturally-

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: … um, and… Yeah, exactly.

Susie Banikarim: That’s where either of us would be at any given moment.

Jessica Bennett: And we had just gotten out of the car where that song was playing. And this friend of mine who happens to have written her, like, college thesis on rape in soap operas-

Susie Banikarim: Amazing.

Susie Banikarim: Oh yeah, excellent song, by the way.

Susie Banikarim: Everyone was listening to it.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Wait, and how did they know he’s so popular?

Susie Banikarim: Well, partially because the way soaps worked is, since they were being produced so quickly-

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: … and because they’re on every day-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … the network is able to gauge almost immediately audience sentiment.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: So they’re using actual data that’s showing them that Luke is quite popular.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So, like, we’ve got to keep Luke.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. This gets some coverage at the time. The ratings weren’t good before this. The ratings started to creep up, so they do not kill him off.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But that leaves them-

Jessica Bennett: With a problem.

Susie Banikarim: … with a bit of a conundrum, which is, if audiences are falling in love with Luke and really feel drawn to this romance between him and Laura-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … and want Laura to end up with Luke, not Scotty, [00:20:00] how do they reconcile that with the violent rape-

Jessica Bennett: That has occurred.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But instead, they are moving the needle over and over again.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: Until they literally re-shoot [00:21:00] the scenes. They literally go back-

Jessica Bennett: So that they can appear in flashbacks?

Susie Banikarim: So that the scenes they’re showing for flashbacks aren’t as disturbing.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: They’re literally softening the thing over and over and over again. And the characters being gaslit in real time, the audience is being gaslit in real time.

CLIP Luke: Maybe you should name me as the rapist.

CLIP Laura: They’ll put you in jail.

CLIP Luke: Maybe that’s where I belong.

CLIP Laura: No, don’t say that. You’re not a criminal.

Jessica Bennett: They don’t even know how the relationship began.

Jessica Bennett: Oh. Evokes…

Susie Banikarim: … with the rape.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And at one point Laura is narrating the scene and she describes it as the first time Luke and I made love.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: And there is a reaction. It’s not, like, a huge national reaction or anything, but there are people at that time who were, like, what is happening?

Jessica Bennett: And actually we know one of those people. One of our executive producers, Cindy Leive.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, Cindy is a journalist, the former editor of Glamour magazine and the co-founder of The Meteor. But most relevant to this conversation, she was a General Hospital super fan.

Susie Banikarim: Why did you love it so much?

Susie Banikarim: Do you remember what you initially thought when Luke showed up?

Susie Banikarim: You’ve told me in the past that you were watching the episode when Luke raped Laura. Can you describe that experience?

Susie Banikarim: Were you rooting for them?

Susie Banikarim: Do you remember talking to your friends about it? Talking of- to them about the rape?

Susie Banikarim: Looking back on it now, how do you think about it?

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: That is partially why soap operas get this rap as a silly, sort of cheesy thing.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But at the same time, there were a lot of social issues are introduced.

Jessica Bennett: [00:30:00] Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, that’s really interesting. So this is the place that a woman show runner or a woman writer could actually thrive.

Jessica Bennett: Right. And that’s- yeah, that’s interesting too. It’s, like, actually maybe this is more accurate to what we really did think of it at the time.

Susie Banikarim: Well, and also, maybe this was a sensitive handling for the time.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: Like, maybe the way this would have been handled in previous iterations is she wouldn’t have been believed or-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: Prior to.

Susie Banikarim: … that this is a difficult-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … subject to tackle.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: It’s just interesting that even their version of sensitivity-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … is so baked in to the era that it represents-

Jessica Bennett: Yep.

Susie Banikarim: … that it still reveals these really outdated notions about rape.

Danielle Thompson: I can give you my perspective here.

Susie Banikarim: So, we did end up calling your friend, Danielle Thompson, who you mentioned at the top of the show.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, good. I’m so glad.

Danielle Thompson: The history of soaps is so vast and expansive that it’s like saying, let me tell you the history of the world in, like, five minutes.

Susie Banikarim: Well, first she said that it wasn’t her thesis that she wrote about soaps and sexual assault. So you lied.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, whoops.

Susie Banikarim: But it [00:32:00] was a very long college essay, so you weren’t that far off.

Jessica Bennett: I mean, close enough.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, 100%. I think they’re expressing different perspectives and also admitting that they had different perspectives even at the time.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

CLIP Laura: We should talk about what happened that night then. That one bad night 20 years ago.

CLIP Luke: You’re not going anywhere until we have this out.

CLIP Lucky: What are you going to do, Dad? Why, if I walked out the door, what would you do? Force me to stay, why, because you’re stronger than me?

CLIP Luke: What do you know?

Susie Banikarim: And Luke, of course, apologizes again here because it’s always part of a redemption arc they’re trying to give him.

CLIP Luke: You were conceived, born and raised in love. Nothing but love.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And the onus was really put, especially on Genie Francis, who was quite young. She would sort of explain this thing.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: They both left the show not long after the wedding and then returned.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, for those later storylines. Okay.

Jessica Bennett: That’s interesting. And, you know, to think about how these things play out differently. Today it was interesting you mentioned that at the time-

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: … the actors playing Luke and Laura actually saw a social worker to talk about the playing of this. But now you would have an intimacy coordinator on set.

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. I mean, an interesting thing is, is did you The Accused when it came out?

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: That was sort of, like, one of the first depictions I ever saw of gang rape and now the dialogue around that movie has actually even shifted.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: Like, I think it’s kind of fascinating because I’ve seen dialogue about how it’s too violent. It’s presenting-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Bennett: I think now too, storylines are forced to grapple with the enduring trauma of something like that happening.

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: And- and that that has to be written in.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. And I think, let’s be honest, we’ve all or most of us have watched many years of Law & Order SVU.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So, I feel like we need to take a moment to just pause and re-acknowledge what we’re talking about. This show is about how we internalize these messages.

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Susie Banikarim: I mean, I definitely-

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Jessica Bennett: We wouldn’t now.

Susie Banikarim: No. And now it’s understood that this is completely unacceptable.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Oh my God.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, and that’s like a thing that he would tell because he was so disturbed by it.

Jessica Bennett: But I think it says so much about what we’ve been talking about here, which is that there’s this underlying sense that a woman should, like, want to be found irresistible.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm. Right. I’d be really interested to hear from Cindy as someone who actually lived through this.

Susie Banikarim: You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett: And Jessica Bennett. [00:44:00] We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

LEARN MORE ABOUT IN RETROSPECT

by Eli Garcia

In Retrospect - Episode 5

EPISODE 5 – THE WORD WE WON’T USE ON THIS SHOW

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Jessica Bennett (00:04):

It is really easy to shut down a conversation by saying, what you just said is problematic, like end of story, move on. There is no need to explain why something is problematic and actually grapple with it.

(00:18):

I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (00:19):

And I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (00:21):

This is In Retrospect where we delve into cultural moments that shaped us.

Susie Banikarim (00:24):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett (00:27):

Most of the time we’ll be talking about the past, but sometimes we just want to talk about what’s happening in the present.

Susie Banikarim (00:34):

Okay. So Jess, can we talk about the word problematic, which I know is a pet peeve of yours?

Jessica Bennett (00:39):

I do hate the word problematic.

Susie Banikarim (00:42):

Okay. Tell us why.

Jessica Bennett (00:44):

Okay, so here’s the thing. When we started this podcast, we’re looking at all of these things in the past, and it is so easy to just write them all off as, quote unquote problematic, and then kind of scold each other and move on. And so I actually wanted to create a buzzer for this podcast where we couldn’t use the word problematic. We actually had to find a descriptive word to use, though I also recognize that I have used it.

Susie Banikarim (01:11):

Yeah. It’s actually my favorite part because when you said that, when you were like, we’re going to have a buzzer, I was like, oh my God, I’m going to be the one who messes this up all the time. But actually, I just want to say for the record that you’re the one who has said problematic multiple times.

Jessica Bennett (01:22):

You’re actually tallying?

Susie Banikarim (01:24):

Well, just because now every time you say it, I’m like, oh my God. She said problematic and I didn’t, so yay.

Jessica Bennett (01:28):

Okay, well, then we ask our producers to cut it. But anyway, but my point is, it has become very in vogue in the culture of late to dismiss things that are, I don’t know, not politically correct, racist, sexist, sometimes just make you uncomfortable as-

Susie Banikarim (01:48):

Wait, I’m going to pause for a second.

Jessica Bennett (01:49):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (01:49):

I think it’s different than what you’re, I’m going to correct you about your own opinion like a man would, I mean, obviously we agree that racist and sexist things are bad. That’s not what you’re objecting to really. What you’re concerned about is that it just sort of blends everything together. So something legitimately racist and something kind of mildly offensive become the same thing. It flattens the discussion.

Jessica Bennett (02:13):

Exactly. And it is really easy to shut down a conversation by saying what you just said is problematic. End of story, move on. There is no need to explain why something is problematic and actually grapple with it, and there’s no learning. There’s no way to say, oh, okay, I’m sorry. What about that was problematic? Let’s correct it. Let’s move on. Or was that really problematic though? Did it really make you uncomfortable? Why so? It just immediately shuts down conversation in a time when I feel like people are unable to talk to each other.

Susie Banikarim (02:46):

Well, to me it’s like if something offends me, I’m going to tell you it’s offensive. I don’t actually use the word that often because it’s not a pet peeve of mine, but because it feels like a nothing word, you know what I mean?

Jessica Bennett (02:57):

Well it is a nothing word.

Susie Banikarim (02:58):

It’s like a nothing word.

Jessica Bennett (03:00):

And that’s what I see as the problem with problematic, is that it is a nothing word. It tells you nothing. It just shuts down whatever you are about to say, and it makes a person who you’re accusing of being problematic, uncomfortable, or the piece of, I don’t know, art or whatever it might be. And this is in the news right now as we’re recording this, because there’s this big exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum about Pablo Picasso. It’s curated-

Susie Banikarim (03:24):

Pablo-matic.

Jessica Bennett (03:25):

Exactly. It’s curated by Hannah Gadsby. It’s the 50th anniversary of his death, and it’s all about the ways that Picasso was problematic, yada yada, his treatment of women, and it’s supposed to elevate these women artists in the process, but it’s basically being panned by critics who are saying it’s almost doing the opposite of what it’s set out to do,

Susie Banikarim (03:43):

well, I think also because it’s facile, the criticism has been that it’s not grappling with the real issues. It’s just poking fun at it in a way that’s actually diminishing the women’s art that is also part of the exhibit. But I feel like we should take a step back for those who don’t know where the word comes from or the context, what does problematic actually mean to you, or do you think means in the zeitgeist?

Jessica Bennett (04:05):

Well, so it’s a word that comes from the French actually, and it means something that has a problem, most basic format. But I think what it has come to mean in recent years is, and this is not Merriam-Webster, this is not Oxford, this is Urban Dictionary that I’m about to quote you because I actually think-

Susie Banikarim (04:21):

We go high low here, we go Urban Dictionary.

Jessica Bennett (04:24):

They do it the best, but it’s become this catchall for something you don’t like, but can’t really describe or don’t really want to be pressed to describe why or here are some of the other definitions, a code word for anything considered to be politically incorrect. I think that’s pretty true. Also, this one, lol, a catchall insult used to negatively describe something you don’t like but can’t describe why.

Susie Banikarim (04:45):

Yeah, it does feel really muddy. Although, by the way, I just want to say that I think politically incorrect is a problematic thing to say.

Jessica Bennett (04:52):

It’s also a vague thing to say.

Susie Banikarim (04:54):

Yeah, I think it’s vague, and also I feel like it’s become the same thing as woke. It’s lost all meaning. It’s just a way that you signal if you are conservative in some way, that something is to be dismissed outright, and so that’s why I don’t like to use that either.

Jessica Bennett (05:08):

Well, and I think using some of these terms has become a way of signaling who you align with, who you may be, who you don’t want to align with, and it almost has become more performance than proactive. We are labeling things problematic and thus shutting down any opportunity to engage with why they might be and what can be done.

Susie Banikarim (05:30):

This kind reminds me actually, of something you said, which is we were talking about how they changed the lyrics in Little Mermaid, which I mean, it honestly felt silly to me because the original lyrics were not-

Jessica Bennett (05:40):

Problematic.

Susie Banikarim (05:41):

Offensive to me or problematic. But you said something interesting, which I really thought about, which is it allows Disney to do this sort of, for lack of a better term, whitewashing of things, but it doesn’t solve any real problems in this area at Disney. What’s happening on Disney’s board? Let’s focus on that, not on whether or not the appropriate amount of consent is built into the word Kiss the Girl, you know what I mean?

Jessica Bennett (06:05):

That’s the thing too. It’s like a lot of this language policing often fails to deal with the actual issue at hand and is more about these little linguistic ways that we can show that we are woke or whatever.

Susie Banikarim (06:17):

This kind reminds me actually, of what’s been going on with Elizabeth Gilbert. Have you been following that?

Jessica Bennett (06:41):

Oh, a little bit, yes.

Susie Banikarim (06:42):

Yeah, so she’s the author of Eat, Pray, Love. That’s what she’s sort of most famous for, although little known fact about her, she was also the person who wrote the article that became Coyote Ugly.

Jessica Bennett (06:51):

Okay. I didn’t know that.

Susie Banikarim (06:52):

Just in case you were wondering. Yeah. It’s a fun little detail about her. I did an interview with her when I was at ABC years and years ago. She was actually genuinely lovely, which I would not say about a lot of celebrities, just FYI, and she recently pulled her latest book because it’s set in Russia, and a bunch of people responded by saying it was insensitive to the war in Ukraine.

Jessica Bennett (07:14):

Did they use that word or did they say it was problematic?

Susie Banikarim (07:17):

I don’t know if they said problematic. I don’t know what language they used, but there was this kind of outpouring of concern, which is kind of weird because the book is set in Russia, but it’s about a bunch of people who remove themselves from Russia. It’s not celebrating Russia today.

Jessica Bennett (07:31):

Of course.

Susie Banikarim (07:31):

But she’s actually a pretty sensitive person, so she just indefinitely withdrew the book. But I feel like that’s happening with a lot of books. There are examples of this thing that happens where before a book is even released, people review bomb it on Goodreads. That’s been an ongoing problem, and there’s a lot of concern about pre-judging art, but I feel like the thing I worry about is, and especially because of what we’re thinking about on this podcast, is changing historical art to sanitize it, because the whole point of looking back on art is that it reflects the time it was in, and those times were often sexist and racist. I don’t think removing those things actually helps people get a real understanding of where we were in society at that time.

Jessica Bennett (08:18):

I mean, it’s complicated is the thing. All of these things are complicated, which is why a word like problematic just dismisses the conversation. But yet, I mean, look, statues are being removed, and in some cases we are having discussions about why and what occurred at these places and who this character was.

Susie Banikarim (08:36):

Well and to me, that actually feels like a real thing. I’m like, I don’t want to go to a school named after a terrible person or live in a town that has this person, a slave owner-

Jessica Bennett (08:47):

A slave owner, yes.

Susie Banikarim (08:47):

But I think the different thing is removing language from a book. This has actually happened a long time ago. In 2011, they removed any of the racial slurs in Twain’s books. And on the one hand, I really understand that because kids read those books, and so it’s complicated. But on the other hand, I remember as a child reading those books, and it was one of the first times I think I encountered the N word and just realizing how prevalent racism must have been in society. For me, that was a real learning moment about American history, and so I really worry about that because I think it’s better to grapple with it than to pretend like that’s not what was going on. And in a weird way, it feels like an inverse of what’s going on in Florida and Texas where they’re removing all these books about racism and sexism and transphobia and homophobia, and they don’t want kids to know how bad things were in this country. They’re removing books about civil rights, right?

Jessica Bennett (09:44):

Yes.

Susie Banikarim (09:44):

And so in a weird way, it’s a circle that’s ending up in the same place.

Jessica Bennett (09:48):

And sometimes the performance or indication, or what was the word you used earlier?

Susie Banikarim (09:55):

Signaling.

Jessica Bennett (09:56):

Signaling.

Susie Banikarim (09:57):

I was like, what word did I use? What fascinating thing did I say earlier?

Jessica Bennett (10:01):

In some cases, the performance or the signaling almost feels so benign. Do you remember what happened recently with the Roald Dahl books?

Susie Banikarim (10:10):

No.

Jessica Bennett (10:11):

There were basically various passages considered to be problematic and sensitive, and so they brought in a consulting firm, I believe, to change a bunch of the language. And what did they do? They changed language such as one of the characters is no longer called fat. Instead, he has described as enormous instead.

Susie Banikarim (10:31):

I mean, is that better though?

Jessica Bennett (10:32):

Well that’s the thing.

Susie Banikarim (10:33):

I feel like if someone called me enormous, I wouldn’t be less insulted.

Jessica Bennett (10:35):

That’s the thing, instead of being called small men, Oompa Loompas are now small people. Okay. I guess they’re not, you don’t know their gender identity, but is this really helpful? Other things? Okay, remember the book, the Witches and of course the movie, and there was a more recent movie that came out, and as you might remember, the witches don’t have hair. They’re bald beneath their wigs, and they wear these wigs to pretend that they’re not witches, but they added this line saying, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. It just feels like there are real problems and inequalities in the world and is going back and changing this minutiae in the work of Roald Dahl really helping anyone?

Susie Banikarim (11:19):

I mean, I think also the thing to me that’s interesting about this is that it’s less instructive, I think. If you’re teaching kids and there’s something in the book that needs to be discussed, you should discuss it and actually deal with it.

Jessica Bennett (11:33):

Which to be fair, not every school district is doing.

Susie Banikarim (11:36):

But, they are doing this with some movies. A good example of this is with Gone With the Wind, which obviously there’s a lot of slavery depicted in Gone With the Wind. It’s a very problematic movie.

Jessica Bennett (11:48):

But you said why, which I appreciate.

Susie Banikarim (11:50):

Which I said why? But I think also the way they handled it, instead of actually changing the movie, they’ve just added a slate at the beginning that explains to you why it reflects the time.

Jessica Bennett (12:01):

Interesting, and why they’ve kept it in.

Susie Banikarim (12:03):

And what the issues might be, and our producer, Lauren was saying that she watches Disney movies with her kids, and that is also something they’re doing in front of some of the Disney movies. To me, that feels like giving people a warning or a prompt to have a discussion with their children or with each other about what they’re watching. That feels to me like a better solution than just taking things away and pretending that we don’t live in the society we live in, which still is steeped in racism, sexism, transpho-

Jessica Bennett (12:29):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (12:30):

It’s still steeped in all these issues.

Jessica Bennett (12:32):

Wasn’t there in The Little Mermaid something funny that they added about her voice? I mean, the whole premise of The Little Mermaid, of course, is that she is giving up her voice to find Prince Charming. So arguably that in and of itself is quote unquote problematic.

Susie Banikarim (12:45):

The thing is, it’s like the whole point is it’s supposed to be empowering. She’s finding her voice, so it’s like a metaphor. But in the movie, I guess, in Poor Unfortunate Souls, which is to be clear, oh, the song sung by a villain by Ursula, who’s a villain, she says some things about how people prefer for girls to be quiet. And I think they changed the lyrics because they were like, we don’t want to make girls feel they shouldn’t talk. And it’s like, I mean-

Jessica Bennett (13:08):

Okay, well, one, she’s a villain, and two, that is actually so true.

Susie Banikarim (13:12):

That is what we expect of girls. Yes. And I mean, we shouldn’t expect that of girls. And girls should be like, Hey, mom, I feel like the ideal scenario is that you’re watching that with your kid, and your kid says to you, is that true? And you correct it, or you’re watching with your kids and you say to your kid, listen, that is bullshit, but I feel like this idea of these warnings kind of makes me think of how you feel about trigger warnings. So I feel like we should talk about it.

Jessica Bennett (13:36):

Yeah, I mean, problematic is kind of cousin to call out culture and maybe sibling to trigger warnings in a way, and we’ve discussed in putting together this podcast and figuring out how it’s going to play. Do we want to have trigger warnings at the top?

(13:52):

Journalistically, I don’t really believe in trigger warnings. We don’t use them at the New York Times. The world is an extremely triggering place, and you’re not going to get a trigger warning when you’re out in the world, and you’re probably going to be hard pressed to find a safe space too.

Susie Banikarim (14:08):

Well, I think this is an interesting point because journalistically, I totally understand it. I think as journalists, we’re often talking about really difficult things, and I don’t really know where to draw the line. Do we put in a trigger warning here, but not here? Most of what we’re talking about involves some kind of thing that you probably don’t want to encounter.

Jessica Bennett (14:28):

I mean, the news is hard to watch today.

Susie Banikarim (14:31):

I mean, it’s about bad things. It’s about war and famine and whatever it’s about. But I feel a little more conflicted about the trigger warning thing, only because I feel like, especially on this podcast, we’re going to talk about some tough things like sexual assault and things that can feel really overwhelming if you’re not expecting it, and I think you go to The Times expecting a certain kind of journalism.

Jessica Bennett (14:56):

That’s interesting. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (14:58):

But here, when you’re throwing on a podcast.

Jessica Bennett (15:01):

Where do you throw it on? Your Walkman?

Susie Banikarim (15:02):

On my record player, yeah. I think it’s a little different. You want to kind of give people a sense of what they’re about to get themselves into. So we’ve erred on the side of doing that here, but it’s definitely been something we’ve had to discuss because we do want this to feel journalistic, and that is not common in places where they take journalism very seriously. I guess we don’t take ourselves that seriously, so that works out in our favor.

Jessica Bennett (15:27):

I mean, I think we want people to feel comfortable, of course, but it is an interesting point. How do you decide what is triggering and what is not? This language, I mean, I think I am a word person. I am a student of words, and I teach words, and so I am highly conscious and cognizant of the way we use language, and so terms trigger or problematic or even the way we talk about trauma these days, or toxic, it’s like every relationship is toxic now if you go on the internet, that is the impression you’ll get. Everything’s a red flag or a gray flag or whatever.

Susie Banikarim (16:03):

You did a great piece on this in The Times. There’s this really complicated thing with trauma, which is if everything is trauma, then you’re sort of, again, there’s a flattening of a real, it feels like there needs to be a different word.

Jessica Bennett (16:14):

Well there’s a term called-

Susie Banikarim (16:15):

You can’t can call them all the same thing.

Jessica Bennett (16:16):

Linguistic Creep, which is this idea that the meanings of words often change. But I think what can also happen is, like you said, this flattening where it comes to mean everything, small things, big things like problematic, can span the scale of something that made you feel mildly uncomfortable personally, but may have not made someone else feel that way to something really egregious. And so are there more specific words we can use? And I guess that’s really my thing here. It’s like, can we be specific?

Susie Banikarim (16:46):

Well, and I think that is what we’re trying to do here. To bring it back to the podcast, I feel like what we’re really trying to do here is engage with things that might be considered quote unquote problematic.

Jessica Bennett (16:56):

Problematic.

Susie Banikarim (16:57):

And to explore them and to sort of look at them in the context of when they were created, not in a scolding way, but to sort of ask ourselves why it was the way it was then and how we would think about it now?

Jessica Bennett (17:07):

And what can we learn from it?

Susie Banikarim (17:08):

And what can we learn from it?

Jessica Bennett (17:09):

And what has changed? What can we learn from it? But what we’re not doing is telling you not to engage or not to consume a thing. I just don’t feel like that’s our place.

Susie Banikarim (17:16):

No, I feel like we’re telling to consume things.

Jessica Bennett (17:18):

But it’s the whole art versus artist thing. If you believe that Pablo Picasso is a misogynist, are you not allowed to consume his art? And that’s a complicated question.

Susie Banikarim (17:27):

I mean, that’s a whole other conversation.

Jessica Bennett (17:28):

A whole other conversation.

Susie Banikarim (17:29):

I feel like I really struggle with that in some cases,

Jessica Bennett (17:31):

But we’re going to punt and say, Do what you want. We’re not here to criticize. We’re just here to talk through the issues. Does that make sense?

Susie Banikarim (17:38):

Yes. That makes sense to me. Whether or not it makes sense to the audience, I guess we’ll find out.

Jessica Bennett (17:42):

Do you think we’re going to get canceled for this episode?

Susie Banikarim (17:44):

I just live in fear of that, so we’ll see what happens.

Jessica Bennett (17:46):

Great, well, okay. I mean, it’s a rite of passage, so.

Susie Banikarim (17:49):

Right, right, right. This is In Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a cultural moment you can’t stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram @inretropod.

Jessica Bennett (18:17):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (18:28):

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett (18:37):

Susie Banikarim (18:49):

Jessica Bennett (19:07):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

Jessica Bennett: And I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim: This is In Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Jessica Bennett: And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett: So Susie, I know nothing about soap operas except that there is one starring a woman named Jessica Bennett, who shares my name.

Susie Banikarim: Is that true?

Jessica Bennett: Uh, it’s called Passion. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: Oh, Passion. That was a short-lived, but very wild soap opera.

Jessica Bennett: She remains on Wikipedia. Anyway, were you a huge General Hospital fan, like, how- what led you to this moment?

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: I was a Days of Our Life-

Jessica Bennett: Girl.

Susie Banikarim: One Life to Live girl, which was kind of unusual, because it was split. Days of Our Lives was-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: … on NBC. Do you remember the tagline for Days of Our Lives?

Jessica Bennett: No.

Susie Banikarim: Like sands through the hourglass…

CLIP: Like sands through the hourglass…

Jessica Bennett: Oh, yeah, I do remember. Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … so are the days of our lives.

CLIP: … so are the days of our lives.

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: And, you know, guess what? She remembers this relationship between Luke and Laura as completely romantic.

Susie Banikarim: I think that’s what most people thought.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. It was a soap opera that started in 1963.

CLIP: General Hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, so Luke and Laura are characters who do not work in that hospital?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. No, they don’t work in the hospital. Not literally everyone on the show works in the hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Got it.

Susie Banikarim: They just live in Port Charles.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. And where should we begin in terms of their, can we call it a relationship?

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: It was a two-day event, so it’s two hours long.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: There’s, like, really long stretches of them just, like, driving up in cars.

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: Like, the bridesmaids, the groomsmen.

Jessica Bennett: Yup.

Susie Banikarim: And then there’s this really long stretch of them just, like, literally greeting the guests.

Jessica Bennett: It’s like an actual wedding.

Susie Banikarim: Which is why it’s fascinating that it was the most watched soap opera episode of all time.

Jessica Bennett: [00:05:00] Wow.

Susie Banikarim: Like, people loved it. They wanted to feel like they were there at this wedding, because they were obsessed with this couple.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. Why were people so obsessed with this couple? Like, what was the appeal?

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … because she’s already become a pretty central character to General Hospital when Luke is introduced.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s because they’re trying to push towards younger audiences.

Jessica Bennett: Ah, okay.

Susie Banikarim: So she’s a teenager.

Jessica Bennett: Interesting.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the quotes I read from a fan was, like, we love her because she’s 16 like us, but she lives the life of a 28-year-old.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … more people tuned in to watch this fake wedding than tuned in when Meghan Markle and Prince [00:06:00] Harry had their actual wedding in 2018.

Jessica Bennett: Whoa. What, that is wild.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. And, like, local news sent correspondents to viewing parties, like, all across Manhattan. From an office in Madison Avenue to a dorm at NYU.

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

NEWS CLIP: Fans all across the country watched for the big moment. To them it was their wedding.

NEWS CLIP: Of course we’re excited.

NEWS CLIP: Not a dry eye in the house.

NEWS CLIP: By the way, three years for them to get married, I feel like [inaudible 00:06:22].

NEWS CLIP: You like Luke?

NEWS CLIP: I love Luke.

NEWS CLIP: Why?

NEWS CLIP: Uh, he’s sexy. It’s time for them to get together.

NEWS CLIP: It’s been two years. It’s time for them to-

NEWS CLIP: You know, they’re very much in love and it’s really a beautiful thing.

Susie Banikarim: It was just this wildly popular thing, even among celebrities. Like, Elizabeth Taylor was such a fan of the show that she requested to be on it.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And made a guest appearance and you can kind of see her in-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … the background of many shots. She’s playing a villain who is cursing them-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay.

Susie Banikarim: … on their wedding day. And also, this is the year where Diana and Charles got married.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And they had a real wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But then this is such a big [00:07:00] moment that Diana sends champagne for this fake wedding. [laughs] She sends the actors-

Jessica Bennett: Whoa.

Susie Banikarim: … champagne to congratulate them on their fake wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow. Oh my God, okay.

Susie Banikarim: Which, like, an amazing little detail here is that Genie Francis is underage when this wedding happens.

Jessica Bennett: Genie Francis who plays Laura.

Susie Banikarim: Genie Francis who plays Laura Spencer is 20, and so they don’t-

Jessica Bennett: She can’t drink.

Susie Banikarim: … even give it to her. She doesn’t know about the champagne until years later when they’re doing an interview.

Jessica Bennett: What kind of champagne do you think it was?

Susie Banikarim: I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of champagne it was, but, um, I think Luke said he liked kept the bo- I mean, it-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: … imagine getting a bottle of champagne from who- what was, like, the most famous woman in the world at that time.

Jessica Bennett: So wha- okay, so the culture or the world is kind of treating this fake wedding like a real wedding.

Susie Banikarim: People took the day off work. And there’s, like, a note in the research that someone was, like, hey, I told my boss I was going to a wedding, because I was.

Jessica Bennett: Oh my God. [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: You know, like, bars played it. Like, people gathered around in bars at lunchtime in droves-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … to watch this wedding and, I mean, a thing that I think people sort of forget, [00:08:00] it’s hard now to remember what a stranglehold soap operas had on the culture-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … in the 80s.

Jessica Bennett: Or even television.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, and television. I mean, they also made the most money.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And like, I think part of the thing is, yes, a lot of people watch them, but more than that, for the networks, uh, ABC, for example, they made up 50% of revenue.

Jessica Bennett: Oh wow.

Susie Banikarim: So had an enormous amount of power.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: This sort of silly ridiculous thing. And, you know, it could be silly and ridiculous and we can talk about that, but daytime was an enormously powerful arena at this point.

Jessica Bennett: I don’t think I fully appreciated that. That soap operas had huge power to shape culture and also that it was women both making and watching them.

Susie Banikarim: [00:09:00] Yeah. Initially soap operas were really watched by stay-at-home moms and that’s kind of why initially they’re dismissed.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But then this thing happens at the end of the 70s where a lot of women enter the workforce and there’s a dip in viewership.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But then the women who are staying at home start to allow their children to watch TV with them.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: That’s kind of like a shift. And so a lot of girls and boys who are home with their moms become addicted to these shows.

Jessica Bennett: I see.

Susie Banikarim: And then it becomes common to be a college student who gathers around-

Jessica Bennett: Right, this is why there’s viewing parties in these dorm rooms.

Susie Banikarim: Yes. You know, a common thing that was talked about amongst soap fans, is that they would schedule their classes around their soap operas.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. It’s such a different time.

Susie Banikarim: It’s, like, worth noting that even though soap operas aren’t that popular now, General Hospital is still on the air.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: I mean, people forget that.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: But it is the longest running scripted drama and the longest running American soap opera. I- I-

Jessica Bennett: How do you watch that now?

Susie Banikarim: It started airing in 1963. You can watch it on television. What do you mean? You watch it on ABC.

Jessica Bennett: Like, watch it, [00:10:00] you do?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. You could watch it in the afternoon on ABC. And by the way, two million people still do.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think the thing that’s different is there’s, like, a lot of options now.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: So it doesn’t seem as popular.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But two million people is not a paltry number. That’s way more than most cable shows get.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But we don’t think about it as a cultural phenomenon because it seems so low in comparison to the fact that in their heyday-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … one in fifteen Americans watched General Hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And I’m going to actually blow your mind-

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: … with so many things here, because to begin with, Luke is Laura’s boss.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Where did they work?

Susie Banikarim: Um, at a disco.

Jessica Bennett: They work at a disco.

Susie Banikarim: Laura is 17. Luckily for Laura she’s already married. She’s 17 and married.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Only a crime.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Wild.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, so it’s not doing good at this time.

Susie Banikarim: At this time it’s not doing good. It’s the lowest rated soap opera on TV. It’s, like, number 12 or something.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And there’s so many soap operas on TV-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … at this time. And that’s actually what makes it so remarkable that within three years, it’s literally the number one show.

Jessica Bennett: Can you imagine being, like, ah, our show’s doing really bad. What can we do to- to get better ratings? I know-

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: … let’s stage a rape.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. [00:13:00] I mean, it is wild. But it does work.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the things that’s interesting is the executive producer that was brought in at that time came from TV movies where rape was a much more common topic.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But it was presented more from, like, the crime aspect. And so I think that’s why-

Jessica Bennett: Not a love story?

Susie Banikarim: Not a love story. And I think that’s why she has this idea to introduce this rape-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and knows that that is, like, popular with viewers. That must be kind of what she’s thinking when she introduces this character.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So this new 32-year-old character, Luke, ends up hiring 17-year-old Laura at his nightclub.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s his back story. So the context of this scene is that Luke has gotten mixed up with these mobsters who are forcing him to [00:14:00] kill a local politician-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and he feels like if he kills this other person, he will also be killed.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And so this scene picks up where she has seen him crying, because he is like, “I’m a dead man walking.”

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

CLIP Laura: How come you’re crying?

CLIP Luke: I wasn’t crying.

CLIP Laura: Yes, you were. And you didn’t know that I was here.

Jessica Bennett: At first I was, like, oh, that’s kind of progressive of them. Like, you’re showing tears.

Susie Banikarim: It’s not going to be so progressive.

CLIP Laura: Luke, I’m sure that whatever it is, it can be worked out in time.

CLIP Luke: Time is what I don’t have.

Jessica Bennett: They’re sort of setting it up that, like, if you don’t have time, then you must have the woman you love.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s definitely how the story plays, that he knows he’s running out of time, he’s so in love with her-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: That he must have her this one time.

Jessica Bennett: He ra- he has to act on this love lust.

CLIP Luke: I said I was going to be dead, killed, little lady. Can’t you get that through your head? Now get out of here.

Susie Banikarim: So [00:15:00] he’s pushing her away, because essentially the message is he can’t control himself. And then he professes his love.

CLIP Luke: Dammit, Laura. I’m in love with you.

CLIP Laura: No, I d- I don’t think it’s really love, Luke. I-

CLIP Luke: Oh, yes. It’s just what it is.

CLIP Luke: Dance with me, Laura.

CLIP Laura: No.

Jessica Bennett: You really feel that the tension is building and then things clearly unravel.

CLIP Laura: Luke, let me call a taxi, please.

Jessica Bennett: And so you don’t see the rape itself.

CLIP Laura: No. Don’t, Luke, let me go.

Susie Banikarim: But it’s unambiguous.

CLIP Laura: No. No.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: You definitely hear a rape.

Jessica Bennett: So clothes are ripped. She’s looking upset. She’s crying.

Susie Banikarim: She’s cowering.

Jessica Bennett: She’s clearly said no ahead of time.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, she’s screaming no when it-

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: … starts and grows. It’s a kind of jarring moment because it happens pretty suddenly. Like, you go [00:16:00] from being, like-

Jessica Bennett: I actually do get goosebumps watching it.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. Because you’re sort of, like, oh, it’s going to be a seduction and then suddenly it’s a rape.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: And cut to disco lights. There’s a commercial break. We come back. We’re back on the disco lights. It’s, like, very-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … surreal kind of vibe. And then the thing that really drives home that this is a rape is she’s now lying on the ground. She is cowering.

Jessica Bennett: Her clothes are torn.

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: And she sneaks away.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s her husband, Scotty.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: Because he’s lying about whether or not she’s been there. And that’s the scene.

Susie Banikarim: I know, it’s crazy.

Jessica Bennett: And, like, for a jazz funk instrumental, that was as rare then as it is today.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s funny, actually. I don’t know if you remember this, you called me and I was in Palm Springs with a friend.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And, uh, you know, we had shopped, naturally-

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: … um, and… Yeah, exactly.

Susie Banikarim: That’s where either of us would be at any given moment.

Jessica Bennett: And we had just gotten out of the car where that song was playing. And this friend of mine who happens to have written her, like, college thesis on rape in soap operas-

Susie Banikarim: Amazing.

Susie Banikarim: Oh yeah, excellent song, by the way.

Susie Banikarim: Everyone was listening to it.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Wait, and how did they know he’s so popular?

Susie Banikarim: Well, partially because the way soaps worked is, since they were being produced so quickly-

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: … and because they’re on every day-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … the network is able to gauge almost immediately audience sentiment.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: So they’re using actual data that’s showing them that Luke is quite popular.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So, like, we’ve got to keep Luke.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. This gets some coverage at the time. The ratings weren’t good before this. The ratings started to creep up, so they do not kill him off.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But that leaves them-

Jessica Bennett: With a problem.

Susie Banikarim: … with a bit of a conundrum, which is, if audiences are falling in love with Luke and really feel drawn to this romance between him and Laura-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … and want Laura to end up with Luke, not Scotty, [00:20:00] how do they reconcile that with the violent rape-

Jessica Bennett: That has occurred.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But instead, they are moving the needle over and over again.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: Until they literally re-shoot [00:21:00] the scenes. They literally go back-

Jessica Bennett: So that they can appear in flashbacks?

Susie Banikarim: So that the scenes they’re showing for flashbacks aren’t as disturbing.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: They’re literally softening the thing over and over and over again. And the characters being gaslit in real time, the audience is being gaslit in real time.

CLIP Luke: Maybe you should name me as the rapist.

CLIP Laura: They’ll put you in jail.

CLIP Luke: Maybe that’s where I belong.

CLIP Laura: No, don’t say that. You’re not a criminal.

Jessica Bennett: They don’t even know how the relationship began.

Jessica Bennett: Oh. Evokes…

Susie Banikarim: … with the rape.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And at one point Laura is narrating the scene and she describes it as the first time Luke and I made love.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: And there is a reaction. It’s not, like, a huge national reaction or anything, but there are people at that time who were, like, what is happening?

Jessica Bennett: And actually we know one of those people. One of our executive producers, Cindy Leive.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, Cindy is a journalist, the former editor of Glamour magazine and the co-founder of The Meteor. But most relevant to this conversation, she was a General Hospital super fan.

Susie Banikarim: Why did you love it so much?

Susie Banikarim: Do you remember what you initially thought when Luke showed up?

Susie Banikarim: You’ve told me in the past that you were watching the episode when Luke raped Laura. Can you describe that experience?

Susie Banikarim: Were you rooting for them?

Susie Banikarim: Do you remember talking to your friends about it? Talking of- to them about the rape?

Susie Banikarim: Looking back on it now, how do you think about it?

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: That is partially why soap operas get this rap as a silly, sort of cheesy thing.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But at the same time, there were a lot of social issues are introduced.

Jessica Bennett: [00:30:00] Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, that’s really interesting. So this is the place that a woman show runner or a woman writer could actually thrive.

Jessica Bennett: Right. And that’s- yeah, that’s interesting too. It’s, like, actually maybe this is more accurate to what we really did think of it at the time.

Susie Banikarim: Well, and also, maybe this was a sensitive handling for the time.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: Like, maybe the way this would have been handled in previous iterations is she wouldn’t have been believed or-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: Prior to.

Susie Banikarim: … that this is a difficult-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … subject to tackle.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: It’s just interesting that even their version of sensitivity-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … is so baked in to the era that it represents-

Jessica Bennett: Yep.

Susie Banikarim: … that it still reveals these really outdated notions about rape.

Danielle Thompson: I can give you my perspective here.

Susie Banikarim: So, we did end up calling your friend, Danielle Thompson, who you mentioned at the top of the show.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, good. I’m so glad.

Danielle Thompson: The history of soaps is so vast and expansive that it’s like saying, let me tell you the history of the world in, like, five minutes.

Susie Banikarim: Well, first she said that it wasn’t her thesis that she wrote about soaps and sexual assault. So you lied.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, whoops.

Susie Banikarim: But it [00:32:00] was a very long college essay, so you weren’t that far off.

Jessica Bennett: I mean, close enough.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, 100%. I think they’re expressing different perspectives and also admitting that they had different perspectives even at the time.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

CLIP Laura: We should talk about what happened that night then. That one bad night 20 years ago.

CLIP Luke: You’re not going anywhere until we have this out.

CLIP Lucky: What are you going to do, Dad? Why, if I walked out the door, what would you do? Force me to stay, why, because you’re stronger than me?

CLIP Luke: What do you know?

Susie Banikarim: And Luke, of course, apologizes again here because it’s always part of a redemption arc they’re trying to give him.

CLIP Luke: You were conceived, born and raised in love. Nothing but love.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And the onus was really put, especially on Genie Francis, who was quite young. She would sort of explain this thing.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: They both left the show not long after the wedding and then returned.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, for those later storylines. Okay.

Jessica Bennett: That’s interesting. And, you know, to think about how these things play out differently. Today it was interesting you mentioned that at the time-

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: … the actors playing Luke and Laura actually saw a social worker to talk about the playing of this. But now you would have an intimacy coordinator on set.

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. I mean, an interesting thing is, is did you The Accused when it came out?

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: That was sort of, like, one of the first depictions I ever saw of gang rape and now the dialogue around that movie has actually even shifted.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: Like, I think it’s kind of fascinating because I’ve seen dialogue about how it’s too violent. It’s presenting-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Bennett: I think now too, storylines are forced to grapple with the enduring trauma of something like that happening.

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: And- and that that has to be written in.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. And I think, let’s be honest, we’ve all or most of us have watched many years of Law & Order SVU.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So, I feel like we need to take a moment to just pause and re-acknowledge what we’re talking about. This show is about how we internalize these messages.

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Susie Banikarim: I mean, I definitely-

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Jessica Bennett: We wouldn’t now.

Susie Banikarim: No. And now it’s understood that this is completely unacceptable.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Oh my God.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, and that’s like a thing that he would tell because he was so disturbed by it.

Jessica Bennett: But I think it says so much about what we’ve been talking about here, which is that there’s this underlying sense that a woman should, like, want to be found irresistible.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm. Right. I’d be really interested to hear from Cindy as someone who actually lived through this.

Susie Banikarim: You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett: And Jessica Bennett. [00:44:00] We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

LEARN MORE ABOUT IN RETROSPECT

by Eli Garcia

In Retrospect - Episode 4

EPISODE 4 – OPRAH’S LITTE RED WAGON

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Susie Banikarim (00:01):

There’s an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show from 1988 that I always think about because it touches on so many things I’ve also struggled with. It’s her highest rated episode of all time, and in it, a svelte Oprah, in tight Calvin Klein jeans, dramatically reveals to her audience that she has just lost 67 pounds and tells them how she did it.

Clips (00:25):

What I did was I fasted, without cheating, for a solid six weeks.

Susie Banikarim (00:31):

And to demonstrate how much weight that is, Oprah will wheel out a visual aid, a classic child’s red wagon that holds a giant clear plastic bag filled with fat, 67 pounds of animal fat to be precise.

(00:51):

I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (00:52):

And I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (00:54):

This is In Retrospect where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Jessica Bennett (00:59):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Susie Banikarim (01:01):

Today we’re talking about Oprah’s little red wagon of fat, but we’re also talking about the literal weight we all carry and the pressure women feel to be perfect.

Jessica Bennett (01:18):

So, okay, Susie. There must be thousands of potential Oprah moments we could unpack here. Why the little red wagon of fat?

Susie Banikarim (01:28):

So I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’ve always been a huge Oprah fan. I loved her show and I watched it whenever I could growing up. And while I didn’t watch this particular moment, because it happened in 1988 and I would’ve been pretty young, I’ve seen it so many times because it was just this very famous episode and it’s shown in all of her retrospectives. And I think the reason I wanted to talk about it is there’s something she said at the time when she revealed that she’d lost this weight. And what she said was, “This is the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life. It is my greatest accomplishment.”

Jessica Bennett (02:01):

Wow. Her greatest accomplishment?

Susie Banikarim (02:04):

Yeah. I mean, that’s obviously not the case, right?

Jessica Bennett (02:06):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (02:06):

I mean, she’s accomplished so much since and she had accomplished so much even at that point. So it’s a complicated statement and definitely one she’s walked back since. But it resonates for me because I think for a lot of women, myself included, this sense that you’re measured by your physical weight is really pervasive, something you kind of struggle with your whole life. And we’ll get into that. But I’m curious, just before we start, were you an Oprah fan?

Jessica Bennett (02:31):

No, honestly, I think I’m more familiar with today’s Oprah, like media mogul, first Black woman billionaire, trailblazer in so many ways. And of course someone who can always score the first sit down. But I wasn’t an acolyte. I didn’t grow up watching her. I wasn’t the type of person that would rush home every day after school and turn on Oprah. But, Susie, were you that kind of Oprah fan?

Susie Banikarim (02:57):

Yeah. I mean, I think it was just sort of an appointment. Oprah was on at 4:00 PM every day, and especially when I was in school, you come home, you turn on the TV, you do your homework, whatever. But that’s something that feels kind of ever present.

(03:10):

When I eventually would have a DVR, I would DVR the show.

Jessica Bennett (03:14):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (03:14):

And I remember once having a guy friend over and him being like, “Do you DVR Oprah?” And being really embarrassed about it.

Jessica Bennett (03:23):

Really?

Susie Banikarim (03:23):

Yeah. I mean, because it’s like-

Jessica Bennett (03:25):

This is in high school?

Susie Banikarim (03:26):

No, this was in my 20s.

Jessica Bennett (03:27):

Oh.

Susie Banikarim (03:28):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (03:28):

All right.

Susie Banikarim (03:28):

And I was really defensive. I was like, “I have to watch it for work.” And he was like, “What do you mean? You’re a news journalist.” And I was like, “Yeah, I mean, but I work at ABC and I have to know what’s happening on Oprah.” And by the way, we did cover Oprah a lot on World News Tonight where I worked at that time.

Jessica Bennett (03:42):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (03:43):

It was in fact true that it was useful for me to watch Oprah because things would happen on Oprah and we would cover them. She covered serious topics and sometimes she would have guests that news outlets hadn’t gotten.

Jessica Bennett (03:54):

Yeah, that no one else could get. Yes. And I think worth mentioning, celebrities didn’t have a direct line to their fans back then. If you wanted to do an interview or promote a thing or get something out or try to recover from whatever shitty thing you’d done that you were groveling over.

Susie Banikarim (04:08):

Yeah,.

Jessica Bennett (04:08):

You would have to go sit on Oprah’s couch.

Susie Banikarim (04:11):

And that was considered a great booking.

Jessica Bennett (04:13):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (04:13):

If you were a celebrity, you wanted to be able to go to Oprah. That was as much a boon to you as it was to her, which I don’t think there’s really a comparison to that now.

Jessica Bennett (04:22):

No, absolutely not. I mean, I still always think about the Tom Cruise jumping on her couch moment, even though that was much later.

Susie Banikarim (04:28):

Oh, yeah, that’s such an infamous moment.

Jessica Bennett (04:30):

Right, so all these celebrities would go sit on her couch, and that was a big component of this. But there was also something for the audience about community in watching that show. Isn’t that right? People would gather. You were part of a, I don’t know, would you call it a family?

Susie Banikarim (04:45):

Yes. You were part of this Oprah family. She really drew you in. Eventually there was the famous book club. The idea was you were reading a book with her, you were experiencing bra shopping with her. Her episode about being properly fitted for bras was a really big success for her. She was basically just telling you how to live, as she would put it, your best life. And there were lots of different ways she was teaching you to do that. You could read this book The Secret that was really popular at the time, or The Law of Attraction, and you could manifest things in your life. And specifically you can manifest money, which I think was very appealing to people.

Jessica Bennett (05:25):

Still pretty appealing.

Susie Banikarim (05:26):

Yeah. And I think it’s something you see a lot on TikTok now. It’s part of the vernacular.

Jessica Bennett (05:30):

But we should also state the obvious, which is that it wasn’t just manifesting that got her to where she was. She was a trailblazer in so many ways. Oprah was the first Black female host of a national talk show, and when she became that, she completely broke the mold for what a “traditional” TV host looked like, which was still usually white and mostly male.

Susie Banikarim (05:52):

Yeah, I mean, Oprah tells this story in interviews about how when she was first offered this talk show, she reportedly said to the man who was offering her the job, “But I’m Black and I’m fat.”

Jessica Bennett (06:05):

Wow.

Susie Banikarim (06:05):

So she’s so aware, not just of the racism, which lets be honest, that could be a whole other show. But she’s also aware that thinness is a really essential part of being seen as a public figure at this time. And so she feels the need to say that even as she’s being offered this huge opportunity.

Jessica Bennett (06:21):

Okay. But she takes the job, obviously.

Susie Banikarim (06:23):

Yeah, she takes the job and it’s a huge success. Her local talk show gets national syndication and she becomes a household name. But really from the moment she starts to get this national coverage, she gets so much attention around her weight.

Jessica Bennett (06:38):

So her weight essentially becomes part of the story.

Susie Banikarim (06:40):

Yeah, it’s always part of her story. And there’s a great example of this. In 1986, she does an interview with Mike Wallace, so it’s right after she’s gone national, and Mike Wallace is on 60 Minutes, which at the time is just this huge show. 23 million people tune in every Sunday night to watch it. I remember we would get together as a family and watch it on Sundays, and this is how that interview unfolds.

Clips (07:03):

When she was 22, she moved to Baltimore, and became an anchor woman on a local TV news show.

Clips (07:08):

This was 60 pounds ago.

Clips (07:11):

You mean you were 60 pounds lighter?

Clips (07:12):

60 pounds ago. I think of my life in terms of my thighs.

Jessica Bennett (07:16):

Wow.

Susie Banikarim (07:17):

This is just one example of how Oprah has always had to be very public about her weight. It’s almost impossible to tell how much the conversation was driven by media coverage and how much she just decided to share it to preempt kind of all this criticism she knew was coming. And I think it’s also partially why she’s so successful. She’s really vulnerable and relatable, but that comes with a cost.

Jessica Bennett (07:57):

So I want to get back into the moment itself, the little red wagon, of that moment.

Susie Banikarim (08:01):

Do you have any memory of it? Is this something that jogs a memory for you?

Jessica Bennett (08:06):

It’s funny because I don’t know this exact moment, but I do have this very ’80s image in my mind of Oprah standing looking very svelte in a black turtleneck and these kind of chic mom jeans, high-waisted kind of mom jeans.

Susie Banikarim (08:22):

Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (08:23):

So I must’ve seen that image in magazines or in retrospectives.

Susie Banikarim (08:27):

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s just one of those images that really follows her around for the rest of her life. And this episode is still to this day, the highest rated one. And I’m going to walk you through it just because it’s fascinating on so many levels.

Jessica Bennett (08:40):

Okay, I’m ready.

Susie Banikarim (08:41):

So this episode airs in November and there’s already been a lot of buildup because when she returned for her show that season in September, she is noticeably thinner.

Jessica Bennett (08:51):

Okay. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (08:51):

She has already lost 30 or 40 pounds.

Jessica Bennett (08:54):

Okay, so people are noticing.

Susie Banikarim (08:54):

Everyone has been asking, “How did she lose the weight? How did she lose the weight?”

Jessica Bennett (08:57):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (08:57):

And so she keeps assuring the audience that she’s going to tell them how she does it. And so the AP sends a reporter.

Jessica Bennett (09:03):

Oh wow.

Susie Banikarim (09:04):

Who then makes-

Jessica Bennett (09:04):

To the show?

Susie Banikarim (09:05):

To the show.

Jessica Bennett (09:05):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (09:06):

It’s become a national story. And because Oprah-

Jessica Bennett (09:06):

It’s already a national story.

Susie Banikarim (09:09):

It’s already a national story. And, Oprah, because she’s a genius, is like, “I will not tell you until sweeps, which is when-“

Jessica Bennett (09:16):

What’s sweeps?

Susie Banikarim (09:17):

Sweeps is when Nielsen does its annual kind of assessment of ratings.

Jessica Bennett (09:22):

Oh, okay.

Susie Banikarim (09:22):

So your advertising dollars are connected to who watches the show in sweeps. And she is a smart woman, so she’s like, “I will tell you when it is most cost-effective for me.”

Jessica Bennett (09:31):

Of course.

Susie Banikarim (09:31):

So the show starts and Oprah is wearing a red coat.

Clips (09:36):

That is the last time I was in the Calvin Klein size 10 jeans until today.

Susie Banikarim (09:46):

And she’s like, “Ta-dah!” She dramatically flings off this coat.

Jessica Bennett (09:52):

Wow.

Susie Banikarim (09:52):

To reveal her new-

Jessica Bennett (09:54):

Svelte look.

Susie Banikarim (09:55):

-weight. Svelte look. This black turtleneck. And she’s wearing these Calvin Klein jeans that she hasn’t been able to fit into for years. She saved-

Jessica Bennett (10:03):

Oh, they’re her jeans that’s she’s had.

Susie Banikarim (10:04):

They’re her jeans that she’s saved. They’re her thin jeans.

Jessica Bennett (10:09):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (10:09):

And she was like, “I will fit into these again.”

Jessica Bennett (10:10):

Yup.

Susie Banikarim (10:11):

And now she can fit into them. And she’s tucked her jeans into these kind of cool high heeled-

Jessica Bennett (10:18):

Oh, yeah. They were tucked.

Susie Banikarim (10:18):

-boots.

Jessica Bennett (10:19):

Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim (10:20):

So it becomes this very iconic image of her.

Jessica Bennett (10:22):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (10:22):

So this is kind of this wild moment in the studio. The audience goes wild. They’ve been given pompoms. They’re shaking pompoms.

Jessica Bennett (10:31):

Wow.

Susie Banikarim (10:31):

They’re like, “Yay.”

Jessica Bennett (10:33):

Yep.

Susie Banikarim (10:33):

It’s so exciting.

Jessica Bennett (10:34):

They’ve all been given pompoms. That’s amazing.

Susie Banikarim (10:36):

Yeah, they’ve all been given pompoms.

Jessica Bennett (10:37):

And then the wagon is behind her.

Susie Banikarim (10:39):

So this is the first segment of the show.

Jessica Bennett (10:41):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (10:41):

She comes out, she reveals this weight loss.

Jessica Bennett (10:41):

So we’re like, “Rah rah.”

Susie Banikarim (10:44):

And then she’s like commercial. Again because she’s a genius.

Jessica Bennett (10:46):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (10:47):

And she’s not going to give you everything up front.

Jessica Bennett (10:51):

It’s great to have your TV knowledge in the background of this because I don’t think about these things.

Susie Banikarim (10:55):

Oh, yeah.

Jessica Bennett (10:56):

Of course, you wait until after the commercial break to keep people there.

Susie Banikarim (10:58):

Right. You’re just constantly trying to keep people reasons to continue to tune in or stay tuned in.

Jessica Bennett (11:02):

Yep.

Susie Banikarim (11:02):

She gives you the reveal at the top, which becomes a very common talk show trope, this body reveal.

Clips (11:08):

Judy has lost a total of 12 pounds. Judy, let’s see the new you.

Clips (11:11):

Today, Junior can proudly say he lost the most weight of anyone on today’s show. Let’s bring out the new Junior.

Susie Banikarim (11:19):

Eventually it actually becomes pretty common to do these kinds of reveals in a bathing suit. And there’s actually another really famous episode of Oprah with Kirstie Alley where she also does this big reveal.

Clips (11:30):

Exactly one year ago, Kirstie vowed to walk on our stage in a bikini once she reached her goal weight and she did it.

Jessica Bennett (11:38):

Okay. okay.

Susie Banikarim (11:38):

That was a very famous one, but there was a lot of very famous kind of examples of this.

Jessica Bennett (11:42):

Yep.

Susie Banikarim (11:43):

And so here she is, she’s lost all this weight. There’s a cut to a commercial break. And she knows that she’s got to keep you entertained.

Jessica Bennett (11:48):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (11:49):

So what is the idea she has had for the second segment of the show? It is that she comes out and she’s wheeling this little red wagon full of fat.

Jessica Bennett (11:58):

I didn’t think it was a literal wagon of fat.

Susie Banikarim (12:01):

No, it’s like a literal red wagon, like a child’s wagon. Her staff has gone to a local barbecue joint.

Jessica Bennett (12:08):

Oh my gosh.

Susie Banikarim (12:08):

And I’m going to tell you the name of the joint because I discovered it in my research. I had never heard this before.

Jessica Bennett (12:12):

In Chicago?

Susie Banikarim (12:13):

In Chicago. It is called Moo and Oink.

Clips (12:18):

(Singing).

Susie Banikarim (12:20):

That’s the name of the place where they get the fat.

Jessica Bennett (12:23):

Okay. So that’s fine for the name of a barbecue joint.

Susie Banikarim (12:26):

It is.

Jessica Bennett (12:26):

It’s just only made weird by-

Susie Banikarim (12:27):

But in the context of it being like, “This is the weight I’ve lost.”

Jessica Bennett (12:30):

Well, yes. Right.

Susie Banikarim (12:31):

It’s literally in some weird way referring to yourself as a cow or a pig. I don’t know why. It just really struck me as unfortunate that that’s the name, Moo and Oink. So she wheels out this wagon with this clear plastic garbage bag filled with animal fat. And she’s standing next to it addressing the audience.

Clips (12:49):

I have lost, as of this morning, 67 pounds since July 7th. 67 pounds.

Susie Banikarim (12:55):

I think this is the first time she gives you the actual number

Jessica Bennett (12:58):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (12:59):

Because, again, she’s trying to keep you engaged. And she also ticks through her measurements and says.

Jessica Bennett (13:06):

Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim (13:06):

“I’ve lost 30 inches.”

Clips (13:08):

30 inches from my bust, my waist, and my hips.

Susie Banikarim (13:11):

And then she gives you the specifics, seven on my bust, 12 on my waist, 11 on my hips. She’s like pointing.

Clips (13:17):

And this, this, is what 67 pounds of fat looks like.

Susie Banikarim (13:20):

And she’s literally like, “Look at this. I used to carry this around.”

Clips (13:24):

I can’t lift it.

Susie Banikarim (13:24):

“And I can’t even lift it up down.” And she tries to lift it up-

Jessica Bennett (13:27):

So she tries to lift it, okay.

Susie Banikarim (13:27):

She’s like, “It’s so disgusting.”

Clips (13:29):

Is this gross or what?

Susie Banikarim (13:31):

I mean, she’s really inviting the audience to examine and stare at her body in a way that I personally would never choose, and I think is just a super interesting fact about this. Celebrities in general, female celebrities, especially, their bodies are under such a microscope, and in this case, she has kind of embraced that and is putting her own body under this microscope for the audience.

Jessica Bennett (13:57):

Okay, so what comes next?

Susie Banikarim (13:58):

So what comes next is a segment where Stedman, her boyfriend at the time, calls in to congratulate her. But Stedman himself is kind of an interesting character in this because he’s her longtime partner. They are still together. They never got married. But later on, she will say he is the reason she embarked on this particular weight loss journey.

Jessica Bennett (14:19):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (14:20):

It will be reported at some point that over dinner one night she asked him if it ever bothered him that she was overweight and that there’s this long pause and he says something along the lines of, “Well, it’s an adjustment.”

Jessica Bennett (14:35):

Oh God, this makes me so sad.

Susie Banikarim (14:37):

Yeah. And she sort of feels this as a gut punch. I think she says at some point, “My instinct was I don’t want to be somebody’s personal growth journey.” Which is just a way of saying, “You’ve basically told me I’m not enough.”

Jessica Bennett (14:52):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (14:52):

“Or I’m an adjustment,” which is just a horrible thing to say to someone. And so shortly after that conversation, she embarks on this very intense diet that leads us to this particular moment.

Jessica Bennett (15:03):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (15:04):

And another thing that happens in this particular episode is that she reads from her journal entries.

Jessica Bennett (15:08):

Oh.

Susie Banikarim (15:09):

And I’m going to read you a little piece of this section of her journal that she reads. “What is the bigger issue here? Self-esteem. I realize this fat is just a blocker. It is like having mud on my wings. It keeps me from flying. It has been a way of staying comfortable with other people. My fat puts them at ease, makes them less threatened, makes me insecure. So I dream of walking into a room one day where this fat is not the issue. And that will happen this year because the bigger issue for me is making myself the best that I can be.”

Jessica Bennett (15:40):

It is very vulnerable.

Susie Banikarim (15:41):

It’s very vulnerable.

Jessica Bennett (15:43):

I mean, you can imagine the audience, mostly women probably, who have probably struggled in one way or another because haven’t we all?

Susie Banikarim (15:49):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (15:50):

Really feeling like this resonates.

Susie Banikarim (15:53):

Yeah, I mean this obviously resonates for me. I’m someone who’s struggled with my weight my whole life, and I think a lot of women and a lot of men also can really relate to this feeling of, “If I just lost 10 pounds everything would be perfect. If I just lost five pounds, everything would be perfect.” There’s this sense that our weight is very defining for us and it is always this nagging thing we are trying to fix in ourselves. But I think also this vulnerability that Oprah demonstrates is why should she becomes such a big success.

Jessica Bennett (16:23):

That’s so interesting. I’ve never thought about it that way.

Susie Banikarim (16:26):

I mean, I admire her ability to be so vulnerable because I’ve always found it really hard to talk about this subject. I mean, I can talk about a lot of things, but I gained a lot of weight in my late 20s and early 30s, and I was diagnosed with PCOS, which is polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is now something people have heard of, but it wasn’t really well known when I was diagnosed. And even now it’s still pretty poorly understood by the medical establishment. So, honestly, I didn’t tell anyone at the time or even really talk about it with my friends, much less announce it to the whole world. It’s really a lot.

Jessica Bennett (17:01):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (17:02):

To go out and reveal so much about yourself.

Jessica Bennett (17:04):

In some ways that’s so different from what we tend to see now, especially on social media where this vulnerability, or I don’t know, faux vulnerability, is almost a currency in some ways. But it sounds like that was definitely not the case back then and certainly not in the talk show landscape in the 1980s. How common was that at the time?

Susie Banikarim (17:25):

It was pretty uncommon. I mean, even Oprah’s initial shows were pretty tabloidy.

Jessica Bennett (17:29):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (17:30):

The talk show atmosphere in general was much more tabloidy. It was like Phil Donahue and Sally Jesse Raphael.

Jessica Bennett (17:38):

You’re not the father.

Susie Banikarim (17:39):

You’re not the father. But that becomes a trope a little bit later on. But she is kind of elevating the medium in a way and she will slowly do that over time until there comes a point where The Oprah Show is actually seen as kind of a premium product rather than what it initially is, which is kind of like a tabloidy talk show.

Jessica Bennett (17:59):

Okay,.

Susie Banikarim (18:00):

And one of the ways in which she does that is by being really vulnerable about these things in her life.

Jessica Bennett (18:04):

Okay. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (18:04):

Like about her sex abuse. She experiences a child. About her weight. She really pioneers a thing that now is so common because of reality shows and social media, which is that if you open up your own experiences, people feel much more connected to you.

Jessica Bennett (18:22):

Yep.

Susie Banikarim (18:22):

And she leads on a dialogue that’s just not very common at that time. She’s talking about sex abuse when that’s still a very taboo subject. She’s acknowledging these issues with her weight when I don’t know how common it was to just say that you’re fat and you’re trying to lose weight.

Jessica Bennett (18:37):

Yes.

Susie Banikarim (18:38):

She will go on to talk about mental health issues, about race. She’ll do these really difficult race shows where she will have on racists who will say terrible things to her face, and she will explore that. So this is kind of where you start to see that shift happening.

Jessica Bennett (18:55):

Oh, okay. But this episode isn’t intended to be particularly serious, right? It sounds like it was pretty festive. Does she end up getting into the details of how she actually lost the weight?

Susie Banikarim (19:06):

Yeah, she does talk about that. She essentially starves herself to lose this weight. She drinks protein powder shakes of roughly 400 calories a day. If you’re trying to lose weight-

Jessica Bennett (19:17):

Oh my God, wow.

Susie Banikarim (19:18):

-and you’re a woman who’s like, she’s like 5’6″, I think, the usual standard is that you’re eating somewhere between 1200 and 1400 calories.

Jessica Bennett (19:27):

Yeah. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (19:27):

That’s to lose weight, you’re eating that.

Jessica Bennett (19:29):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (19:29):

She is medically supervised. It’s a medically supervised diet.

Jessica Bennett (19:33):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (19:33):

But I think it also just reveals the way that the medical establishment approached weight for a long time in this country was pretty barbaric. They would never give you this diet now. It’s insane. But she not only kind of says, “Here’s how I did it.” She literally pulls up the protein shakes and the company that makes-

Jessica Bennett (19:54):

Yeah, were they sponsored?

Susie Banikarim (19:55):

It wasn’t sponsored.

Jessica Bennett (19:55):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (19:56):

I mean, I think that’s before people realize that you could get sponsors for stuff like this.

Jessica Bennett (19:59):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (19:59):

But she shows it and their sales go through the roof.

Jessica Bennett (20:03):

Oh my God. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (20:03):

I mean, everything crashes for them. It’s a big day.

Jessica Bennett (20:06):

And then later on, she’s not able to keep the weight off.

Susie Banikarim (20:10):

No, she can’t keep the weight off. So she basically does this for four months. She says later on, “I literally starved myself. I did not eat anything, basically. I didn’t have a morsel of food.” And then she will say at some point that this just basically shot her metabolism and that two weeks after she returned to eating food, she had already gained 10 pounds.

Jessica Bennett (20:30):

I mean, that’s not a surprise, right?

Susie Banikarim (20:32):

No. I mean this kind of thing is unsustainable. You can’t just drink shakes for the rest of your life. So now they’ll tell you that you have to do it in a different kind of way. But back in the ’80s, there was just this idea that losing weight in any way, no matter how drastic, was always good.

Jessica Bennett (20:48):

Okay, so I feel like it’s worth pausing for a moment to talk about what was going on in the world at this time.

Susie Banikarim (20:56):

Yes. I would love to know more about that.

Jessica Bennett (20:57):

It’s 1988. There’s no Lizzo, body positivity, big girls show. There’s no, “I love my curvy wife guy.”

Susie Banikarim (21:07):

Yeah, I mean, and thank God that guy wasn’t around.

Jessica Bennett (21:09):

Totally. We’re not having debates about whether fat or curvy or plus size or overweight is the right and most inclusive terminology.

Susie Banikarim (21:20):

Right.

Jessica Bennett (21:22):

This is the ’80s. This is the era of Jane Fonda and leotards.

Clips (21:27):

Jane Fonda’s workouts are constantly improving the science of staying fit.

Jessica Bennett (21:31):

And SlimFast, which had been pulled from the shelves in the 1970s, is now back on the market.

Clips (21:36):

Give us a week, we’ll take off the weight.

Jessica Bennett (21:38):

Jenny Craig has launched, which was another subscription weight loss.

Susie Banikarim (21:43):

Oh, I’m aware. I’m pretty sure my mom did Jenny Craig.

Clips (21:44):

We help you lose weight and teach you what you need to know to keep it off.

Jessica Bennett (21:47):

Lean Cuisine.

Susie Banikarim (21:48):

Yes.

Jessica Bennett (21:49):

Those disgusting TV dinners that were on suburban American TV trays all across America.

Susie Banikarim (21:54):

Why are you describing that to me as if I’ve never had Lean Cuisine?

Jessica Bennett (21:56):

Because maybe our audience is younger than us.

Clips (22:01):

It’s not just the calories that count, it’s the taste.

Susie Banikarim (22:02):

But I also want to tell you that in my most anorexic phase, my best friend from college, Claire, remembers and always talks about this moment when I was really, really having disordered eating. Which was not an expression I knew at the time. And she spent a weekend with me and I ate half a Lean Cuisine pizza and was like, “Yum. I’m so full.”

Jessica Bennett (22:22):

Wow.

Susie Banikarim (22:22):

And she was like, “There’s no way you’re full from that tiny piece of bread you just consumed.”

Jessica Bennett (22:27):

Fascinating.

Susie Banikarim (22:28):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (22:29):

Which brings me to this is also five years after Karen Carpenter, who was one half of the folk duo The Carpenters, had died from complications related to anorexia, basically.

Susie Banikarim (22:42):

Yeah.

Clips (22:42):

Karen Carpenter died this morning, the victim of cardiac arrest. The Grammy Award-winning singer was only 32 years old.

Jessica Bennett (22:48):

So we’re sort of just waking up to this idea that diet culture is a thing.

Susie Banikarim (22:54):

I don’t know even if it’s that or if it’s just that we’re slowly beginning to realize that not all weight loss is just an objective good.

Jessica Bennett (23:01):

Yes. Yes.

Susie Banikarim (23:02):

I think up until this point, it’s just losing weight is an objective good. And that is really part of housewife culture for a long time. But I think what happens in the ’80s is that it becomes just a broader national obsession where everyone’s learning to exercise.

Jessica Bennett (23:16):

Well, and it’s health.

Susie Banikarim (23:16):

It’s health.

Jessica Bennett (23:17):

There’s a Senate report put out in the late 1970s that basically says, “Americans need to stop eating so much fat.”

Susie Banikarim (23:23):

I have such a connection to that because my mom was always trying to lose weight. So I just remember all of these diets. I remember kind of the intensity of that in the ’80s, how much we were constantly being bombarded by these images of, “You need to lose weight, you need to lose weight.”

Jessica Bennett (23:38):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (23:38):

“And here are the ways in which you could be doing that.”

Jessica Bennett (23:41):

In that context, honestly, Oprah’s diet doesn’t seem that shocking.

Susie Banikarim (23:44):

Yeah. And the thing we know now is that Oprah will struggle with her weight, and this will be an ongoing topic of discussion for her for the rest of her life.

Jessica Bennett (23:51):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (23:55):

That kind of leads us back to the point I mentioned at the top, which is the reason we’re talking about this, which is that she says, and I’ll quote, “This is her greatest accomplishment.”

Jessica Bennett (24:05):

I think it’s worth pausing to just review some of Oprah’s accomplishments. Because at this point, she’s starred in The Color Purple.

Susie Banikarim (24:14):

Yes.

Jessica Bennett (24:14):

Which was nominated for an Oscar.

Susie Banikarim (24:16):

She was nominated for an Oscar. She was actually, for her particular role. And it was a Steven Spielberg movie. So even if she hadn’t been nominated for an Oscar, just being in a Steven Spielberg movie is a huge accomplishment. It’s like something to be proud of. Also, she’s just launched this talk show. It’s only been two years when this episode airs and she’s already getting 16 million people who regularly watched the show. I mean, that’s a huge number, even by those standards. That would be an insane number today, but at that time even, it was a wildly successful number. And on top of that, The New York Times reported that the year that she made this episode, she made $25 million.

Jessica Bennett (24:56):

Wow.

Susie Banikarim (24:57):

She will also go on to become the first Black female billionaire in 2003. There’s really not many people who can say they’ve accomplished as much as Oprah. But let’s pause here and do what Oprah would do, which is pick up after the break.

Jessica Bennett (25:21):

Okay, Susie, so I want to talk a bit more about your personal connection to this moment. You mentioned earlier on in the show that you struggled with your weight and that was part of why you wanted to take this subject on.

Susie Banikarim (25:32):

Yeah. I mean, listen, I think weight was always a big topic in my house. It was always a big issue, I think, because my mom struggled with her weight.

Jessica Bennett (25:39):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (25:40):

And I sort of first became conscious of weight in relationship to her and the struggles she was having and how much she was constantly kind of trying to lose weight. And much like the Stedman story, I think some of that did come from my father and her sense that he might in some ways be displeased by her not being as thin as she once was. And then slowly over time, I took in those messages and then eventually I turned them on myself. And what’s fascinating is when I go back and look at pictures of her from this time, she was by no objective measure fat.

Jessica Bennett (26:15):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (26:15):

But she kind of was teaching me, unintentionally because it was something she was struggling with herself, that what she looked like was unacceptable. And so I remember being like, “Oh, she is fat.” Kind of accepting her version of what she was. And in some ways, that’s why I try never to talk about my issues with my weight.

Jessica Bennett (26:34):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (26:35):

You and I have never really talked about this particular thing for me because I think one thing I have very consciously done as an adult is try not to project this struggle outwards because I don’t want everyone to kind of be focused on my weight.

Jessica Bennett (26:54):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (26:54):

And I feel like if I’m talking about it all the time, I’m inviting.

Jessica Bennett (26:56):

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yes.

Susie Banikarim (26:58):

It’s kind of like the Oprah thing, right?

Jessica Bennett (26:58):

It’s Oprah, yeah.

Susie Banikarim (26:58):

I’m inviting everyone to have an opinion about my situation. And I think also, I had gained a bunch of weight right before middle school, and then my dad actually died right before I was in middle school. And I remember my mom saying to me, “He was really worried about your weight.”

Jessica Bennett (27:13):

Oh wow.

Susie Banikarim (27:13):

And I think that’s when it really started to take hold for me where I was like, I started to always be on a diet.

Jessica Bennett (27:19):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (27:19):

And then I went to boarding school, and I think there’s this period, this relative period, where I’m fine. I don’t remember kind of obsessing. I was pretty thin at boarding school. The focus at boarding school was on why I wasn’t blonde and blue-eyed. So it was like I wasn’t constantly obsessing about my weight. But then slowly after college, I started to gain weight again. And probably in my late 20s and early 30s, I really struggled. And I think in some ways that’s why I picked this moment, because I was always aware of this moment, and I was always aware of how much Oprah’s weight was part of her kind of journey. But I think as I got older and I started to feel those same feelings, that nothing I did would ever really be a success unless I also could take control of my weight. I really felt a lot of shame about it. I really struggled with dating, which I had not really struggled with before, because I really saw it as a personal failing in myself that I had started to gain this weight. Even though there were very clear medical reasons.

Jessica Bennett (28:24):

Right, right.

Susie Banikarim (28:24):

It’s not rational, but I had this really intense sense that I was failing in this really big way, and that is why nothing else in my life was perfect.

Jessica Bennett (28:41):

It’s so interesting the way you put that, because it both feels so closely aligned to what Oprah said about this being her, “greatest accomplishment.” But also how this is something of a universal experience among women.

Susie Banikarim (28:55):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (28:55):

If it’s not our weight, it is something else we feel holds us back from, I don’t know, maybe as Oprah would put it, living our best life.

Susie Banikarim (29:04):

Yeah. Nothing is ever quite enough. So it’s like I’m hugely successful, but I never had kids. I’m hugely successful, but I’m fat. I’m hugely successful, but I never got married or I’m divorced. You’re always looking for the thing in yourself that is the flaw that keeps you from being able to feel-

Jessica Bennett (29:20):

Perfect.

Susie Banikarim (29:21):

Perfect and whole and successful. And as the years have gone on, this moment has resonated for me more and more, as I’ve re-seen it, as I’ve sort of had the context for it.

Jessica Bennett (29:32):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (29:32):

I sort of go back and re-look at this moment and re-examine it and re-watch it because it really starts to feel like a thing I can see myself having done in her position.

(29:46):

There is a lot of ways in which we could look back and say, “Oprah contributed to diet culture.” And she did. But she was a victim of that culture, right?

Jessica Bennett (29:54):

Yes.

Susie Banikarim (29:55):

She made people feel less alone in that journey, but she also reinforced these ideas.

Jessica Bennett (29:59):

Yeah, that they needed that journey,

Susie Banikarim (30:00):

That they needed that journey.

Jessica Bennett (30:02):

It sounds like she was trying to make this her story. People could come cover this event, whatever, but it was going to be her event. She was going to kind of control this narrative.

Susie Banikarim (30:11):

Definitely.

Jessica Bennett (30:11):

Or at least profit on it.

Susie Banikarim (30:12):

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s definitely the case. But what it also does is instead of giving her ownership over the story, which may have been what her intention was.

Jessica Bennett (30:20):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (30:20):

She actually completely loses control of the story.

Jessica Bennett (30:23):

Okay. And you said before that this episode was super successful, right?

Susie Banikarim (30:27):

Yeah. I mean, 18 million people watched this episode. It was the most watched episode ever in her 25 year run.

Jessica Bennett (30:33):

Oh wow.

Susie Banikarim (30:34):

But then she is for months and months after this, just absolutely hounded by paparazzi.

Jessica Bennett (30:42):

Oh, who want to see if she’s keeping it off.

Susie Banikarim (30:42):

Who want to take pictures of what she’s eating.

Jessica Bennett (30:43):

Oh wow.

Susie Banikarim (30:43):

Who want to comment on whether or not she’s continuing to gain weight again.

Jessica Bennett (30:47):

Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim (30:47):

There is just this huge ongoing conversation in the media with nutritionists and doctors and commentators talking about, “Was this a healthy way to lose weight? Can she keep the weight off? What will happen?” And so instead of actually taking control of the story, she’s kind of given the story over in a way.

Jessica Bennett (31:05):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (31:06):

And it spins wildly out of her control. And she does really resent that. I mean, she says later on how harmful it felt to her to have this conversation about her all the time. And all this coverage kind of prompts this real defensiveness in her.

Jessica Bennett (31:22):

Right. How could it not?

Susie Banikarim (31:23):

Where she is saying things like, “I never was happy being fat. I’ll never be fat again. Never.” She becomes really irritated when people are commenting on this stuff and she says things like, “Asking me if I’ll keep the weight off is like asking me ‘Will you ever be in a relationship again where you allow yourself to be emotionally battered?’ I’ve been there and I don’t intend to go back.”

Jessica Bennett (31:44):

She talks about herself almost as if it was her former fat self and her present skinny self. She has severed these two parts of herself.

Susie Banikarim (31:52):

Yeah, 100%. It is just this real distinction she draws where she talks about that person with disdain. She’s like, “I am now fixed. This is an inflection point. I will never go back to being that person.”

Jessica Bennett (32:06):

Which, if you think about it, so then when you do go back to being that person, because everybody fluctuates.

Susie Banikarim (32:11):

Yes.

Jessica Bennett (32:12):

And you’ve completely publicly said that that person is disgusting.

Susie Banikarim (32:16):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (32:17):

What does that do to your psyche?

Susie Banikarim (32:18):

Right. You’ve describe this version of yourself as a bad version of yourself.

Jessica Bennett (32:22):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (32:23):

And then you do eventually go back to that version. And at the same time, you’re dealing with your own internal struggle with the fact that you clearly hate this version of yourself, so much that you wanted to hold up a bag of animal fat and be like, “This was me.” But at the same time, you’re also being inundated with headlines about, “Look, you’ve gained weight again. Look what your weight is. Why are you gaining weight? What did you do wrong?”

Jessica Bennett (32:51):

“What are you eating?”

Susie Banikarim (32:51):

And that messaging, which I mean I cannot imagine with my own weight issues, having that layered on top. I mean, that has to feel insane. And there’s this fascinating quote in the BBC from this profile in 2011 that I found where it literally says, “If Oprah is remembered for anything, it will be her body shape, which mirrored America’s obsession with its own body shape.” How can that be what she will be remembered for? She is quite literally one of the most successful women on the planet.

(33:22):

You know what we’ve never talked about though, is I don’t actually think I know anything about your relationship to your weight or weight loss or body issues.

Jessica Bennett (33:30):

I mean, I feel like to some extent, growing up in ’80s, ’90s, was it possible to come out of that with a healthy body image?

Susie Banikarim (33:39):

I certainly did not.

Jessica Bennett (33:40):

I had come up in this sort of ’90s Seattle-

Susie Banikarim (33:43):

Grunge.

Jessica Bennett (33:44):

Grunge.

Susie Banikarim (33:45):

Right.

Jessica Bennett (33:45):

Kind of like waify-

Susie Banikarim (33:46):

Heroin chic.

Jessica Bennett (33:47):

Yes. Basically heroin chic.

Susie Banikarim (33:49):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (33:49):

And I remember specifically having this tag from a pair of Calvin Klein underwear. I wasn’t allowed to buy name brand stuff. I had saved my money to get, do you remember those Calvin Klein underwear that had the band on the top?

Susie Banikarim (34:01):

Yes, yes.

Jessica Bennett (34:01):

And they would sort of show above your jeans.

Susie Banikarim (34:05):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (34:05):

And Kate Moss was the model for them.

Susie Banikarim (34:07):

Yep.

Jessica Bennett (34:08):

And so she was on the tag, and it was her and the underwear and her perfect waify, probably anorexic stomach.

Susie Banikarim (34:16):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (34:16):

And I kept that tag in my underwear drawer so I could look at it and compare how my stomach was compared to that.

Susie Banikarim (34:25):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (34:25):

My parents would be horrified. Had they found that they would’ve had to have a serious conversation with me about weight. And I was thin, so it wasn’t a concern. We didn’t really talk about it. But, yeah, we all dabbled in starving ourselves.

Susie Banikarim (34:40):

So I think it really was impossible to be a girl in this country. Or maybe it’s still impossible.

Jessica Bennett (34:47):

Well, that’s the question. So, okay, now we talk about dieting as health and wellness. And now we just want to be healthy.

Susie Banikarim (34:57):

We just want to be healthy.

Jessica Bennett (34:57):

And our intermittent fasting is because it’s actually better for our brains and whatever.

Susie Banikarim (35:02):

Yeah, it’s hacking. It’s like bio-hacking now.

Jessica Bennett (35:03):

Yes.

Susie Banikarim (35:04):

All the Silicon Valley dudes are dieting, but they don’t call it dieting. They call it bio-hacking.

Jessica Bennett (35:07):

Yes.

Susie Banikarim (35:09):

And that makes it more acceptable because it’s less feminine.

Jessica Bennett (35:12):

Right. Right, right, right. Totally.

Susie Banikarim (35:12):

It’s like, “Diets are for girls.”

Jessica Bennett (35:14):

And we can celebrate that all body types are wearing crop tops now.

Susie Banikarim (35:17):

Yes.

Jessica Bennett (35:18):

And then if you actually look into the data, you find that, yeah, rates of anorexia have not gone down.

Susie Banikarim (35:24):

No, they’ve gone up actually.

Jessica Bennett (35:25):

Yes. So it’s like we’ve packaged it.

Susie Banikarim (35:27):

Yeah, we’ve just repackaged it in a way to make it less embarrassing to talk about.

Jessica Bennett (35:31):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (35:31):

One of the things that drives me crazy is that we just replaced the word diet with fasting. And fasting is acceptable. Like, “Oh, I’m going on a liquid fast.” It’s like, “No, that’s not good for you.”

Jessica Bennett (35:38):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (35:40):

Drinking juice for four or five days or whatever is not actually good for you. And anyone who knows anything about nutrition will say to you, “That is a terrible way to lose weight.” But because we call them cleanses, juice cleanses.

Jessica Bennett (35:52):

Right, it’s a cleanse.

Susie Banikarim (35:53):

No one can say to you, “Hey, is that a good idea?” Because it’s like you’re just trying to be healthier and who could argue with that? But it is this really complicated thing because on the one hand, we’re like body positivity, and on the other hand, Selena Gomez goes to an award show and then is inundated with comments about how she looks like she’s gained weight. So I don’t think celebrities feel less scrutiny about this.

Jessica Bennett (36:19):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (36:19):

I think we just pretend there’s less scrutiny.

Jessica Bennett (36:22):

It’s interesting too, so it’s like then once you become a celebrity who is larger, the culture turns on you if you do lose the weight, like Adele.

Susie Banikarim (36:32):

I mean, sort of similar to what happened to Oprah. When she lost the weight, there was a little bit of a backlash to it, and when she started to gain it back, people in the audience would be like, “We love you fat.”

Jessica Bennett (36:42):

Right, right.

Susie Banikarim (36:43):

That is kind of this complicated thing. Adele lost a bunch of weight, and I feel like there was this real sort of complicated relationship with it.

Jessica Bennett (36:49):

Oh, yeah.

Susie Banikarim (36:50):

But the most notable example of that is I think Lizzo is vegan now, and at some point she shared on her TikTok this shake she was having and there was this enormous backlash. “You’re supposed to be body positive, you’re promoting unhealthy eating,” et cetera, et cetera, and that also feels unfair.

Jessica Bennett (37:07):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (37:07):

Because Lizzo is allowed to make decisions about her body without being judged.

Jessica Bennett (37:13):

Well, it’s sort of like all diets have been framed as wellness, but then when a person is actually doing it for health, we criticize them for dieting.

Susie Banikarim (37:22):

100%.

Jessica Bennett (37:23):

And now of course, we’re in the age of Ozempic. This is the diabetes turned weight loss drug.

Susie Banikarim (37:28):

Yes.

Jessica Bennett (37:28):

It’s on magazine covers, seemingly everyone is on it, and there’s all this backlash to celebrities who are believed to be taking it.

Susie Banikarim (37:34):

So I think the Ozempic conversation is interesting because it just shows another way in which we want to control how women deal with their bodies. We want our celebrities to be thin, but not if they’re not doing the hard work getting thin.

Jessica Bennett (37:49):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (37:50):

You have to earn thinness. Thinness is something to attain, to work hard at, and it’s felt like it’s cheating to take this diet drug. There is this sense in America that you should be able to overcome your problems just with sheer toughness. And so that’s how we feel about mental health, and that’s also how we feel about weight loss.

Jessica Bennett (38:07):

I think that’s so right.

Susie Banikarim (38:09):

Yeah, and what’s interesting is we’ve been working on this episode for a while and thinking about these issues.

Jessica Bennett (38:14):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (38:14):

And then Oprah just recently released this special on her site, Oprah Daily, and the special is called The Life You Want Class: The State of Weight, and it’s about Ozempic and Mounjaro and these class of drugs.

Jessica Bennett (38:27):

Oh. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (38:27):

And she talks about this exact thing that we think about weight as a matter of willpower, but really it’s a medical issue.

Clips (38:35):

One of the things I carry so much shame because I was publicly shamed about it, and even when I first started hearing about the weight loss drugs at the same time I was going through knee surgery and I felt, “I’ve got to do this on my own. I’ve got to do this on my own because if I take the drug, that’s the easy way out.”

Jessica Bennett (38:54):

It’s so interesting to hear her say that because there’ve been so many rumors that she of late is on Ozempic. Does she address that directly in the special?

Susie Banikarim (39:04):

She doesn’t address it directly. And I think she doesn’t have to. It’s like those are just rumors. She doesn’t have to explain to the world how she is or isn’t losing weight. I mean, that’s very much the thing she’s been fighting against, right?

Jessica Bennett (39:14):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (39:15):

But what’s so interesting about the special to me is that it really focuses on how we’re just now as a culture really coming to understand that obesity is a disease. It’s not this behavioral thing. And even though the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease 10 years ago, that really hasn’t taken shape.

Jessica Bennett (39:38):

Yeah, we didn’t really get that. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (39:40):

On the special, there are these doctors from Harvard and NYU Langone, and there’s actually the CEO of Weight Watchers because even they now need to understand that it’s not just a matter of keeping track of points.

Jessica Bennett (39:54):

That’s so interesting because wasn’t Oprah at one point a spokesperson or an investor in some way at Weight Watchers?

Susie Banikarim (40:00):

Yeah, so I think she owns a stake in Weight Watchers and that’s mentioned in the sort of conversation with the Weight Watchers person, but I think that is the issue, is that for years, if you did Weight Watchers, lost weight, and then regained the weight, you thought that the problem was you.

Jessica Bennett (40:15):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (40:16):

But in fact that these are actually your genetics at play or your brain. There’s lots of scientific reasons why you may struggle with weight loss and also with maintaining weight loss. And even for Oprah, who has followed this for so long, she says that it’s an idea that even she is now just starting to embrace.

Clips (40:37):

One of the things that I’ve been so ashamed, shamed myself about, and was shamed in the tabloids every week about for 25 years is not having the willpower.

Jessica Bennett (40:49):

It’s just crazy to hear her say that because it truly has followed her. That’s what we’ve been talking about here, throughout her career.

Susie Banikarim (40:56):

Yeah, it really feels like this moment, this red wagon moment, is something that set a tone for the way people felt like they could talk about her and her weight. And it’s something she looks back on with a lot of regret. Over the years, when she talks about this episode, this red wagon episode, she says, it’s hard to watch, and when she watches it, she wants to say to herself, “Don’t do it, even though it’s a great TV moment.” And that really gets to the heart of this story. I think this is one of the most watched episodes in arguably the most popular talk show of all time.

Jessica Bennett (41:31):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (41:31):

But it’s definitely not something Oprah would now say was one of her greatest accomplishments. Which makes sense. It opened up a conversation about her that she was then plagued by.

Jessica Bennett (41:43):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (41:43):

And I want to let her have the last word on how she thinks about it all now. Here’s what she said in her recent special.

Clips (41:50):

Whatever your choice is for your body and your weight health, it should be yours to own and not to be shamed about it. As a person who’s been shamed for so many years, I’m just sick of it. I’m just sick of it. I’m just sick of it. And I hope this conversation begins the unshaming,

Susie Banikarim (42:11):

Jessica Bennett (42:25):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (42:35):

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett (42:44):

Susie Banikarim (42:57):

Jessica Bennett (43:15):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

Jessica Bennett: And I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim: This is In Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Jessica Bennett: And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett: So Susie, I know nothing about soap operas except that there is one starring a woman named Jessica Bennett, who shares my name.

Susie Banikarim: Is that true?

Jessica Bennett: Uh, it’s called Passion. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: Oh, Passion. That was a short-lived, but very wild soap opera.

Jessica Bennett: She remains on Wikipedia. Anyway, were you a huge General Hospital fan, like, how- what led you to this moment?

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: I was a Days of Our Life-

Jessica Bennett: Girl.

Susie Banikarim: One Life to Live girl, which was kind of unusual, because it was split. Days of Our Lives was-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: … on NBC. Do you remember the tagline for Days of Our Lives?

Jessica Bennett: No.

Susie Banikarim: Like sands through the hourglass…

CLIP: Like sands through the hourglass…

Jessica Bennett: Oh, yeah, I do remember. Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … so are the days of our lives.

CLIP: … so are the days of our lives.

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: And, you know, guess what? She remembers this relationship between Luke and Laura as completely romantic.

Susie Banikarim: I think that’s what most people thought.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. It was a soap opera that started in 1963.

CLIP: General Hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, so Luke and Laura are characters who do not work in that hospital?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. No, they don’t work in the hospital. Not literally everyone on the show works in the hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Got it.

Susie Banikarim: They just live in Port Charles.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. And where should we begin in terms of their, can we call it a relationship?

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: It was a two-day event, so it’s two hours long.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: There’s, like, really long stretches of them just, like, driving up in cars.

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: Like, the bridesmaids, the groomsmen.

Jessica Bennett: Yup.

Susie Banikarim: And then there’s this really long stretch of them just, like, literally greeting the guests.

Jessica Bennett: It’s like an actual wedding.

Susie Banikarim: Which is why it’s fascinating that it was the most watched soap opera episode of all time.

Jessica Bennett: [00:05:00] Wow.

Susie Banikarim: Like, people loved it. They wanted to feel like they were there at this wedding, because they were obsessed with this couple.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. Why were people so obsessed with this couple? Like, what was the appeal?

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … because she’s already become a pretty central character to General Hospital when Luke is introduced.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s because they’re trying to push towards younger audiences.

Jessica Bennett: Ah, okay.

Susie Banikarim: So she’s a teenager.

Jessica Bennett: Interesting.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the quotes I read from a fan was, like, we love her because she’s 16 like us, but she lives the life of a 28-year-old.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … more people tuned in to watch this fake wedding than tuned in when Meghan Markle and Prince [00:06:00] Harry had their actual wedding in 2018.

Jessica Bennett: Whoa. What, that is wild.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. And, like, local news sent correspondents to viewing parties, like, all across Manhattan. From an office in Madison Avenue to a dorm at NYU.

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

NEWS CLIP: Fans all across the country watched for the big moment. To them it was their wedding.

NEWS CLIP: Of course we’re excited.

NEWS CLIP: Not a dry eye in the house.

NEWS CLIP: By the way, three years for them to get married, I feel like [inaudible 00:06:22].

NEWS CLIP: You like Luke?

NEWS CLIP: I love Luke.

NEWS CLIP: Why?

NEWS CLIP: Uh, he’s sexy. It’s time for them to get together.

NEWS CLIP: It’s been two years. It’s time for them to-

NEWS CLIP: You know, they’re very much in love and it’s really a beautiful thing.

Susie Banikarim: It was just this wildly popular thing, even among celebrities. Like, Elizabeth Taylor was such a fan of the show that she requested to be on it.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And made a guest appearance and you can kind of see her in-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … the background of many shots. She’s playing a villain who is cursing them-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay.

Susie Banikarim: … on their wedding day. And also, this is the year where Diana and Charles got married.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And they had a real wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But then this is such a big [00:07:00] moment that Diana sends champagne for this fake wedding. [laughs] She sends the actors-

Jessica Bennett: Whoa.

Susie Banikarim: … champagne to congratulate them on their fake wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow. Oh my God, okay.

Susie Banikarim: Which, like, an amazing little detail here is that Genie Francis is underage when this wedding happens.

Jessica Bennett: Genie Francis who plays Laura.

Susie Banikarim: Genie Francis who plays Laura Spencer is 20, and so they don’t-

Jessica Bennett: She can’t drink.

Susie Banikarim: … even give it to her. She doesn’t know about the champagne until years later when they’re doing an interview.

Jessica Bennett: What kind of champagne do you think it was?

Susie Banikarim: I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of champagne it was, but, um, I think Luke said he liked kept the bo- I mean, it-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: … imagine getting a bottle of champagne from who- what was, like, the most famous woman in the world at that time.

Jessica Bennett: So wha- okay, so the culture or the world is kind of treating this fake wedding like a real wedding.

Susie Banikarim: People took the day off work. And there’s, like, a note in the research that someone was, like, hey, I told my boss I was going to a wedding, because I was.

Jessica Bennett: Oh my God. [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: You know, like, bars played it. Like, people gathered around in bars at lunchtime in droves-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … to watch this wedding and, I mean, a thing that I think people sort of forget, [00:08:00] it’s hard now to remember what a stranglehold soap operas had on the culture-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … in the 80s.

Jessica Bennett: Or even television.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, and television. I mean, they also made the most money.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And like, I think part of the thing is, yes, a lot of people watch them, but more than that, for the networks, uh, ABC, for example, they made up 50% of revenue.

Jessica Bennett: Oh wow.

Susie Banikarim: So had an enormous amount of power.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: This sort of silly ridiculous thing. And, you know, it could be silly and ridiculous and we can talk about that, but daytime was an enormously powerful arena at this point.

Jessica Bennett: I don’t think I fully appreciated that. That soap operas had huge power to shape culture and also that it was women both making and watching them.

Susie Banikarim: [00:09:00] Yeah. Initially soap operas were really watched by stay-at-home moms and that’s kind of why initially they’re dismissed.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But then this thing happens at the end of the 70s where a lot of women enter the workforce and there’s a dip in viewership.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But then the women who are staying at home start to allow their children to watch TV with them.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: That’s kind of like a shift. And so a lot of girls and boys who are home with their moms become addicted to these shows.

Jessica Bennett: I see.

Susie Banikarim: And then it becomes common to be a college student who gathers around-

Jessica Bennett: Right, this is why there’s viewing parties in these dorm rooms.

Susie Banikarim: Yes. You know, a common thing that was talked about amongst soap fans, is that they would schedule their classes around their soap operas.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. It’s such a different time.

Susie Banikarim: It’s, like, worth noting that even though soap operas aren’t that popular now, General Hospital is still on the air.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: I mean, people forget that.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: But it is the longest running scripted drama and the longest running American soap opera. I- I-

Jessica Bennett: How do you watch that now?

Susie Banikarim: It started airing in 1963. You can watch it on television. What do you mean? You watch it on ABC.

Jessica Bennett: Like, watch it, [00:10:00] you do?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. You could watch it in the afternoon on ABC. And by the way, two million people still do.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think the thing that’s different is there’s, like, a lot of options now.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: So it doesn’t seem as popular.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But two million people is not a paltry number. That’s way more than most cable shows get.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But we don’t think about it as a cultural phenomenon because it seems so low in comparison to the fact that in their heyday-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … one in fifteen Americans watched General Hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And I’m going to actually blow your mind-

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: … with so many things here, because to begin with, Luke is Laura’s boss.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Where did they work?

Susie Banikarim: Um, at a disco.

Jessica Bennett: They work at a disco.

Susie Banikarim: Laura is 17. Luckily for Laura she’s already married. She’s 17 and married.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Only a crime.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Wild.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, so it’s not doing good at this time.

Susie Banikarim: At this time it’s not doing good. It’s the lowest rated soap opera on TV. It’s, like, number 12 or something.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And there’s so many soap operas on TV-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … at this time. And that’s actually what makes it so remarkable that within three years, it’s literally the number one show.

Jessica Bennett: Can you imagine being, like, ah, our show’s doing really bad. What can we do to- to get better ratings? I know-

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: … let’s stage a rape.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. [00:13:00] I mean, it is wild. But it does work.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the things that’s interesting is the executive producer that was brought in at that time came from TV movies where rape was a much more common topic.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But it was presented more from, like, the crime aspect. And so I think that’s why-

Jessica Bennett: Not a love story?

Susie Banikarim: Not a love story. And I think that’s why she has this idea to introduce this rape-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and knows that that is, like, popular with viewers. That must be kind of what she’s thinking when she introduces this character.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So this new 32-year-old character, Luke, ends up hiring 17-year-old Laura at his nightclub.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s his back story. So the context of this scene is that Luke has gotten mixed up with these mobsters who are forcing him to [00:14:00] kill a local politician-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and he feels like if he kills this other person, he will also be killed.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And so this scene picks up where she has seen him crying, because he is like, “I’m a dead man walking.”

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

CLIP Laura: How come you’re crying?

CLIP Luke: I wasn’t crying.

CLIP Laura: Yes, you were. And you didn’t know that I was here.

Jessica Bennett: At first I was, like, oh, that’s kind of progressive of them. Like, you’re showing tears.

Susie Banikarim: It’s not going to be so progressive.

CLIP Laura: Luke, I’m sure that whatever it is, it can be worked out in time.

CLIP Luke: Time is what I don’t have.

Jessica Bennett: They’re sort of setting it up that, like, if you don’t have time, then you must have the woman you love.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s definitely how the story plays, that he knows he’s running out of time, he’s so in love with her-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: That he must have her this one time.

Jessica Bennett: He ra- he has to act on this love lust.

CLIP Luke: I said I was going to be dead, killed, little lady. Can’t you get that through your head? Now get out of here.

Susie Banikarim: So [00:15:00] he’s pushing her away, because essentially the message is he can’t control himself. And then he professes his love.

CLIP Luke: Dammit, Laura. I’m in love with you.

CLIP Laura: No, I d- I don’t think it’s really love, Luke. I-

CLIP Luke: Oh, yes. It’s just what it is.

CLIP Luke: Dance with me, Laura.

CLIP Laura: No.

Jessica Bennett: You really feel that the tension is building and then things clearly unravel.

CLIP Laura: Luke, let me call a taxi, please.

Jessica Bennett: And so you don’t see the rape itself.

CLIP Laura: No. Don’t, Luke, let me go.

Susie Banikarim: But it’s unambiguous.

CLIP Laura: No. No.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: You definitely hear a rape.

Jessica Bennett: So clothes are ripped. She’s looking upset. She’s crying.

Susie Banikarim: She’s cowering.

Jessica Bennett: She’s clearly said no ahead of time.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, she’s screaming no when it-

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: … starts and grows. It’s a kind of jarring moment because it happens pretty suddenly. Like, you go [00:16:00] from being, like-

Jessica Bennett: I actually do get goosebumps watching it.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. Because you’re sort of, like, oh, it’s going to be a seduction and then suddenly it’s a rape.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: And cut to disco lights. There’s a commercial break. We come back. We’re back on the disco lights. It’s, like, very-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … surreal kind of vibe. And then the thing that really drives home that this is a rape is she’s now lying on the ground. She is cowering.

Jessica Bennett: Her clothes are torn.

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: And she sneaks away.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s her husband, Scotty.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: Because he’s lying about whether or not she’s been there. And that’s the scene.

Susie Banikarim: I know, it’s crazy.

Jessica Bennett: And, like, for a jazz funk instrumental, that was as rare then as it is today.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s funny, actually. I don’t know if you remember this, you called me and I was in Palm Springs with a friend.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And, uh, you know, we had shopped, naturally-

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: … um, and… Yeah, exactly.

Susie Banikarim: That’s where either of us would be at any given moment.

Jessica Bennett: And we had just gotten out of the car where that song was playing. And this friend of mine who happens to have written her, like, college thesis on rape in soap operas-

Susie Banikarim: Amazing.

Susie Banikarim: Oh yeah, excellent song, by the way.

Susie Banikarim: Everyone was listening to it.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Wait, and how did they know he’s so popular?

Susie Banikarim: Well, partially because the way soaps worked is, since they were being produced so quickly-

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: … and because they’re on every day-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … the network is able to gauge almost immediately audience sentiment.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: So they’re using actual data that’s showing them that Luke is quite popular.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So, like, we’ve got to keep Luke.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. This gets some coverage at the time. The ratings weren’t good before this. The ratings started to creep up, so they do not kill him off.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But that leaves them-

Jessica Bennett: With a problem.

Susie Banikarim: … with a bit of a conundrum, which is, if audiences are falling in love with Luke and really feel drawn to this romance between him and Laura-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … and want Laura to end up with Luke, not Scotty, [00:20:00] how do they reconcile that with the violent rape-

Jessica Bennett: That has occurred.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But instead, they are moving the needle over and over again.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: Until they literally re-shoot [00:21:00] the scenes. They literally go back-

Jessica Bennett: So that they can appear in flashbacks?

Susie Banikarim: So that the scenes they’re showing for flashbacks aren’t as disturbing.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: They’re literally softening the thing over and over and over again. And the characters being gaslit in real time, the audience is being gaslit in real time.

CLIP Luke: Maybe you should name me as the rapist.

CLIP Laura: They’ll put you in jail.

CLIP Luke: Maybe that’s where I belong.

CLIP Laura: No, don’t say that. You’re not a criminal.

Jessica Bennett: They don’t even know how the relationship began.

Jessica Bennett: Oh. Evokes…

Susie Banikarim: … with the rape.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And at one point Laura is narrating the scene and she describes it as the first time Luke and I made love.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: And there is a reaction. It’s not, like, a huge national reaction or anything, but there are people at that time who were, like, what is happening?

Jessica Bennett: And actually we know one of those people. One of our executive producers, Cindy Leive.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, Cindy is a journalist, the former editor of Glamour magazine and the co-founder of The Meteor. But most relevant to this conversation, she was a General Hospital super fan.

Susie Banikarim: Why did you love it so much?

Susie Banikarim: Do you remember what you initially thought when Luke showed up?

Susie Banikarim: You’ve told me in the past that you were watching the episode when Luke raped Laura. Can you describe that experience?

Susie Banikarim: Were you rooting for them?

Susie Banikarim: Do you remember talking to your friends about it? Talking of- to them about the rape?

Susie Banikarim: Looking back on it now, how do you think about it?

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: That is partially why soap operas get this rap as a silly, sort of cheesy thing.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But at the same time, there were a lot of social issues are introduced.

Jessica Bennett: [00:30:00] Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, that’s really interesting. So this is the place that a woman show runner or a woman writer could actually thrive.

Jessica Bennett: Right. And that’s- yeah, that’s interesting too. It’s, like, actually maybe this is more accurate to what we really did think of it at the time.

Susie Banikarim: Well, and also, maybe this was a sensitive handling for the time.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: Like, maybe the way this would have been handled in previous iterations is she wouldn’t have been believed or-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: Prior to.

Susie Banikarim: … that this is a difficult-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … subject to tackle.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: It’s just interesting that even their version of sensitivity-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … is so baked in to the era that it represents-

Jessica Bennett: Yep.

Susie Banikarim: … that it still reveals these really outdated notions about rape.

Danielle Thompson: I can give you my perspective here.

Susie Banikarim: So, we did end up calling your friend, Danielle Thompson, who you mentioned at the top of the show.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, good. I’m so glad.

Danielle Thompson: The history of soaps is so vast and expansive that it’s like saying, let me tell you the history of the world in, like, five minutes.

Susie Banikarim: Well, first she said that it wasn’t her thesis that she wrote about soaps and sexual assault. So you lied.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, whoops.

Susie Banikarim: But it [00:32:00] was a very long college essay, so you weren’t that far off.

Jessica Bennett: I mean, close enough.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, 100%. I think they’re expressing different perspectives and also admitting that they had different perspectives even at the time.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

CLIP Laura: We should talk about what happened that night then. That one bad night 20 years ago.

CLIP Luke: You’re not going anywhere until we have this out.

CLIP Lucky: What are you going to do, Dad? Why, if I walked out the door, what would you do? Force me to stay, why, because you’re stronger than me?

CLIP Luke: What do you know?

Susie Banikarim: And Luke, of course, apologizes again here because it’s always part of a redemption arc they’re trying to give him.

CLIP Luke: You were conceived, born and raised in love. Nothing but love.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And the onus was really put, especially on Genie Francis, who was quite young. She would sort of explain this thing.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: They both left the show not long after the wedding and then returned.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, for those later storylines. Okay.

Jessica Bennett: That’s interesting. And, you know, to think about how these things play out differently. Today it was interesting you mentioned that at the time-

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: … the actors playing Luke and Laura actually saw a social worker to talk about the playing of this. But now you would have an intimacy coordinator on set.

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. I mean, an interesting thing is, is did you The Accused when it came out?

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: That was sort of, like, one of the first depictions I ever saw of gang rape and now the dialogue around that movie has actually even shifted.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: Like, I think it’s kind of fascinating because I’ve seen dialogue about how it’s too violent. It’s presenting-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Bennett: I think now too, storylines are forced to grapple with the enduring trauma of something like that happening.

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: And- and that that has to be written in.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. And I think, let’s be honest, we’ve all or most of us have watched many years of Law & Order SVU.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So, I feel like we need to take a moment to just pause and re-acknowledge what we’re talking about. This show is about how we internalize these messages.

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Susie Banikarim: I mean, I definitely-

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Jessica Bennett: We wouldn’t now.

Susie Banikarim: No. And now it’s understood that this is completely unacceptable.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Oh my God.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, and that’s like a thing that he would tell because he was so disturbed by it.

Jessica Bennett: But I think it says so much about what we’ve been talking about here, which is that there’s this underlying sense that a woman should, like, want to be found irresistible.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm. Right. I’d be really interested to hear from Cindy as someone who actually lived through this.

Susie Banikarim: You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett: And Jessica Bennett. [00:44:00] We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

LEARN MORE ABOUT IN RETROSPECT

by Eli Garcia

In Retrospect - Episode 3

EPISODE 3 – PAMELA ANDERSON AND THAT ICONIC RED SWIMSUIT

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Jessica Bennett:

In the mid 1990s when Pamela Anderson was at the height of her fame, she sat down for an interview with talk show host Regis Philbin. He was the co-host of Live with Regis and Kathie Lee. And Pam was there to promote Baywatch, which was rated number one in the world at that time. Regis was asking her about the sudden and wild popularity of that show where she played CJ Parker, a veteran lifeguard who patrols the beaches of Southern California in a cherry red one-piece swimsuit. And that suit, well, that suit was what Regis and seemingly all of America really wanted to talk about.

Regis Philbin:

And I love your red bathing suit.

Pamela Anderson:

Oh, thank you. I don’t think they’re the most flattering.

Regis Philbin:

But there’s something about those one piece suits.

Pamela Anderson:

Yeah. Oh, I like one piece suits better than bikinis.

Regis Philbin:

Excuse me.

Jessica Bennett:

What you can’t see and what gets that laugh at the end is the face Regis makes after he says that. He’s biting his thumb like a horny teenage boy who just can’t contain himself thinking about that swimsuit. And you know what? He wasn’t entirely alone. There was something about that swimsuit. I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim:

And I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett:

This is In Retrospect where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Susie Banikarim:

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett:

This week we’re talking about a swimsuit, a very specific swimsuit worn by Pamela Anderson on Baywatch, that classic and [inaudible 00:01:34] lifeguard drama, but we’re also talking about what that swimsuit represented, which was a particular view of sexuality that defined 1990s America, which happens to be the era we grew up in.

Susie Banikarim:

So Jess, we’re talking about that famous red swimsuit, but like everything else on this show, it’s not just a swimsuit.

Jessica Bennett:

Right. That suit became one of these key artifacts of 90s culture. We all remember it. It hung on posters in bedrooms of teenagers all across America and the world. It eventually was like plastered onto beer cozies and beach towels. I was going down the rabbit hole on eBay. There’s calling cards. Remember calling cards when you would’ve to go a payphone and dialed?

Susie Banikarim:

Oh yeah.

Jessica Bennett:

So that swimsuit with Pam in it was on calling cards.

Susie Banikarim:

That’s weird.

Jessica Bennett:

It was on pinup calendars, basically anywhere you could put an image and sell it. There was Pam in that suit. And side note, she never made a dime from any of those.

Susie Banikarim:

Because she didn’t have any rights to her own image. The image was all owned by Baywatch.

Jessica Bennett:

Correct.

Susie Banikarim:

That’s wild too. So what made you think about that suit now?

Jessica Bennett:

Yeah, so you’ll remember that she released a memoir recently and she was also the subject of a Netflix documentary that was actually produced by her son all about her life. So late last year, I traveled to Canada and basically got snowed in at Pamela Anderson’s house.

Susie Banikarim:

That sounds amazing.

Jessica Bennett:

In Ladysmith, Canada, where she grew up, which is where she now lives in order to write a profile of her. And at one point, to tie this back to the suit, I found myself in Pamela Anderson’s attic, as you do, and it’s fascinating. It’s full of old magazines, interviews she’s done, all of her Playboy covers. She’s very into scrapbooking, so it’s like scrapbooks she made for her kids who are now grown, old report cards. There was a wedding scrapbook album she had made for Tommy Lee, her ex-husband at one point.

Susie Banikarim:

He’s married to someone else now, right?

Jessica Bennett:

But who’s the father of her children. They co-parent. And I also uncovered an old Baywatch Barbie. Do you remember there was a Baywatch Barbie?

Susie Banikarim:

I mean, I don’t know that I remember it, but I can immediately conjure up the image of it. So I must have been aware of it in some way.

Jessica Bennett:

So it’s not specifically branded as the Pamela Anderson Baywatch Barbie, but of course she looks like Barbie and Barbie looks like her.

Susie Banikarim:

I mean, she is the quintessential Barbie.

Jessica Bennett:

Exactly. So the Barbie’s wearing the red suit, the Barbie has the lifeguard buoy. There’s a little dolphin, which is very Pam also.

Susie Banikarim:

That’s adorable.

Jessica Bennett:

She’s an animal rights activist. And to show the impact of this suit, but also the show, this is one of the top selling Barbies of all time.

Susie Banikarim:

Really?

Jessica Bennett:

It’s another little data point that tells you about the impact of that swimsuit and that suit on that show.

Susie Banikarim:

Interesting.

Jessica Bennett:

So we’re talking about the swimsuit, but for those who need a little refresher, Baywatch, what was Baywatch? Susie, do you have a recollection of Baywatch?

Susie Banikarim:

I mean, I knew that Baywatch was a lifeguard show. It felt like it was on TV all the time in the 90s.

Jessica Bennett:

It was. It ran from 1989 to 1999. And the show was about a group of lifeguards who patrolled the beaches of LA County. The action usually revolved around dramatic water rescues, so lifeguards diving into waves or even jumping from helicopters into the open ocean. But there were also, as you can imagine, really dramatic things such as shark attacks, earthquakes, like hot affairs and even murder. So your usual beach day drama.

Susie Banikarim:

Okay. And I remember it as really being a show that starred Pam Anderson, although I also remember that David Hasselhoff was a big character on the show, right?

Jessica Bennett:

A big buff character.

Susie Banikarim:

Character on the show. He was like the captain of the team or something.

Jessica Bennett:

Something like that.

Susie Banikarim:

Is it a lifeguard team? I don’t know.

Jessica Bennett:

That is all true. But while Pam, universal sex icon of the 90s, and some could argue still today was indeed a big part of it, she didn’t actually join until the third season.

Susie Banikarim:

Really?

Jessica Bennett:

Yep.

Susie Banikarim:

I had no idea. I mean, I just think of that show as so tied to her. I can’t imagine that show without her.

Jessica Bennett:

And the thing about Pam Anderson in that show is that it was really her who took this swimsuit and cemented it into the American psyche in this way that none of us will ever forget. But of course, that is how we feel now. And I was really curious how Pam felt about it back then. So I went back to Pam and I asked her what it was like to act in that suit.

Pamela Anderson:

I guess that’s a difficult question to ask. I was just doing what I was told, wearing the costume, and I would’ve been on the beach anyway. So it was fun to act in a swimsuit. I was getting a tan and doing a job at the same time. I know a lot of the girls kind of complained about wearing a swimsuit all the time, but I actually really enjoyed it. It was either the red swimsuit or the black swimsuit where we did all of our workouts in, all of our slow motion montages. People always ask me, how did you stay in such good shape on that show? And I thought, well just wear a bathing suit every single day, and you just don’t eat that bagel.

Susie Banikarim:

I love hearing her voice, but unfortunately I do eat the bagel. Is that bad? But yeah, it really is amazing that you can immediately conjure up what that swimsuit looks like.

Jessica Bennett:

I was trying to remember if there was one image of that suit that really crystallizes this, and it’s almost like there’s dozens of moments. So if you look back at the show itself, you see Pam in the red suit grabbing her buoy and running towards the water. We see Pam in the suit bent over, sexily lotioning up with sunscreen.

Susie Banikarim:

As one does.

Jessica Bennett:

We see Pam and her swimsuit on the jet ski. We see Pam going to save a drowning man. But turns out the guy isn’t really drowning, he just wants Pam and the red swimsuit to save him.

Susie Banikarim:

I mean, that must’ve been a lot of the case.

Pamela Anderson:

Prompting a false rescue is a crime.

Clip:

You can’t bust me for that. I love you.

Jessica Bennett:

And so much slow motion running, like slow motion from every angle from back, below, side, top, any angle you could possibly do slow motion. But the show’s opening credits are really what I remember. The Baywatch theme song, I’m Always Here, sung by the 80s, hair metal band, Cobra.

Susie Banikarim:

I loved hair metal bands in the 80s.

Jessica Bennett:

Plays in the background. And so as the opening credits play on, you see these scenes of sunny California beach sand, babes in bikinis, sun, umbrellas, kids laughing. And then you meet CJ Parker. She’s got her hands on her hips. The camera slowly pans from her very perfect and very tan legs up to the top of her cherry red swimsuit, and then up to her face. And we see that that suit is extremely low cut on the top, very high cut on the hips, and basically side boob is in full effect.

Susie Banikarim:

So obviously a very functional lifeguard suit.

Jessica Bennett:

Totally functional suit.

Susie Banikarim:

And so wait, you’re telling me that there’s more to the opening than just Pam, because I remember the entire opening is just being Pam running down the beach.

Jessica Bennett:

I love that that’s the way you remember it, because that’s what I think most people’s takeaway was. But actually it introduces all the characters. There’s all sorts of beach scenes. It’s giving us a glimpse into Southern California beach life. But what do we remember? We remember Pam.

Susie Banikarim:

Pam. What do we actually know about the swimsuit? I mean, it really does not seem like a functional lifeguard swimsuit.

Jessica Bennett:

Okay. So funny you should raise that because the original suit… So I mentioned that Pamela only joined in season three. So the original suit was inspired by real California lifeguards. It had like an official LA County lifeguard patch, like the real kind. And the creators of the show, one of them had actually started out as a lifeguard in California. So they were quoted at the time talking about how they wanted these suits to be “practical and actually work in the surf.” They wanted to have good support in the bust. They wanted to have minimal creep in the back. And as one of them said, it was all about athletics and functionality.

Susie Banikarim:

Wait, so the original swimsuits were standard issue like lifeguard swimsuits?

Jessica Bennett:

Yes. They were truly based on real lifeguarding. They wanted to replicate what actual lifeguards wore. At one point, one of the co-creators of the show had this whole description about how they wanted the suits to work in the water, in big surf. They were talking about how if you’re a real lifeguard, you have multiple victims that can be grabbing onto your hair, your suit, your arms, your legs, and they could easily rip off a swimsuit if they’re desperate enough. They’re drowning. So they couldn’t have two piece swimsuits. It was too risky. These needed to be legit swimsuits.

Susie Banikarim:

I think this is taking things a little literally for a TV show. No? I mean…

Jessica Bennett:

Okay, here’s the thing. This was a show that began as something that was meant to be a serious lifeguard show. This was at a time, early 90s. This was the era of LA Law, Law and Order, NYPD Blue, ER, all of these shows about doctors, cops, whatever.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, I see.

Jessica Bennett:

Where we were going inside behind the scenes and seeing how they really worked.

Susie Banikarim:

The high stake life of lifeguarding.

Jessica Bennett:

Exactly.

Susie Banikarim:

Got it.

Jessica Bennett:

So the original conceit for Baywatch was to be a “serious lifeguard show.” And in fact, the title Baywatch, that’s actually a real name of the rescue boats that patrol Southern California beaches.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, really?

Jessica Bennett:

Did you know that?

Susie Banikarim:

No, I did not know that.

Jessica Bennett:

I had no idea.

Susie Banikarim:

And I grew up in California.

Jessica Bennett:

So what happened was Baywatch was canceled. The serious Baywatch was canceled after its first season on NBC, and then it was basically saved by a syndication deal. In the process, the production budget was slashed by a third, and a lot of the original cast members either quit or were fired. They basically rethought the show. It got a little bit sexier. They took themselves a little bit less seriously.

Susie Banikarim:

That makes sense.

Jessica Bennett:

They didn’t have as much money. This is actually how the slow motion run gets put into the show because they were trying to save money and take up more airtime.

Susie Banikarim:

That’s amazing.

Jessica Bennett:

So they were like, let’s just slow it down. So that run actually came from one of the creators of the show. His name’s Greg Bonann. He was the one who was a lifeguard. So he sort of thought he knew everything about lifeguarding.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah. I mean, he might’ve known everything about lifeguarding.

Jessica Bennett:

I mean, possible.

Susie Banikarim:

It also seems beside the point, but okay.

Jessica Bennett:

He also got his start as a TV producer for the Olympics.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, interesting.

Jessica Bennett:

So he would film the athletes in slow motion to show their athleticism.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, interesting.

Jessica Bennett:

And so he brought that idea over to Baywatch to show their athleticism and questionable. And later on, David Hasselhoff, he goes on to become an executive producer of the show, and he’s basically made it seem like the sexiness was kind of an accident.

Susie Banikarim:

Really?

Jessica Bennett:

He told Men’s Health in 2012, we didn’t have enough financing to finish the show, so we found a way to fill the hour by shooting people running in slow motion.

Susie Banikarim:

What?

Jessica Bennett:

We said, well, girls in bathing suits look good running in slow motion. So let’s just shoot that.

Susie Banikarim:

And they just put in huge chunks of that.

Jessica Bennett:

I mean, someone should do a study of this to actually figure out how much of that show percentage wise is just running in slow motion. It’s probably more than dialogue.

Susie Banikarim:

That is a fascinating way to fill time.

Jessica Bennett:

So anyway, then in 1982, in its third season, this is when Pamela Anderson is cast. She actually replaces another actor who quit because she didn’t like the new direction of the show.

Susie Banikarim:

The slow mo or the sexiness?

Jessica Bennett:

I mean, I think they go hand in hand, but Pam takes on the role of CJ Parker, who was supposed to be the most experienced lifeguard on the show.

Susie Banikarim:

Fancy.

Jessica Bennett:

She was a character who was actually partially based on Pam, the real life Pam.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, really?

Jessica Bennett:

She was a dreamer. She was really into new agey stuff and crystals and mindfulness.

Susie Banikarim:

I love the idea that they were like, we should meet with Pam and see what she cares about, write it into character.

Jessica Bennett:

She was into animal rights.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah, because it’s like it’s important for this to feel really authentic. Method acting.

Jessica Bennett:

Exactly. And she was constantly falling in love. So they also redid the bathing suits.

Susie Banikarim:

But the bathing suits got redone for Pam?

Jessica Bennett:

They didn’t just redo the suits for Pam, they redid them for everyone. But this was kind of part of this sexier rebrand. So what happens? Well, the new suits have a much lower scoop in the front. They have high cut legs on the sides to kind of show or fake the appearance of height. They often have this really low back, though some of them had cross backs. And it actually is funny. There’s quotes from different actors over the years talking about that swimsuit. Kelly Packard, who didn’t join until much later, but she played lifeguard April in seasons eight and nine. She once said that her swimsuit was so far up her butt that she started crying.

Susie Banikarim:

Because it was painful?

Jessica Bennett:

Yip. At a certain point, as this rebrand is happening, actually putting on the swimsuit is part of the audition, but I don’t think anyone knows this in advance. So years later, Carmen Electra has a story. She tells the New York Times about how she showed up without having shaved her legs, and she was like, oh God, I hope they don’t notice.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah. I mean, I feel like that is something you should warn someone about, but it really does feel like it has the potential to lead to some awkward situations. It’s so objectifying.

Jessica Bennett:

Right. You’re being asked to put on the swimsuit. Well, it’s interesting because a few years ago, Esquire brought together all of the original actors and did this oral history of the show. And Traci Bingham, who played the first black Baywatch babe, she came on in ’96. So that gives you an idea of how white the show was. It started in ’89.

Susie Banikarim:

So white, I remember that show as being so white.

Jessica Bennett:

She describes being in her trailer and one of the producers coming in and asking her to put on her suit and then basically touching underneath her breasts to make sure she wasn’t padding them.

Susie Banikarim:

That’s not okay. Does Pam ever talk about that, about sort of those experiences?

Jessica Bennett:

So it’s interesting because Pam got her start in Playboy, so it sort of sets up this tone. She was discovered in her small town where she grew up in Canada. She was in her early 20s. She was at a football game, and the Jumbotron camera pans over to her and she’s wearing this crop top with Labatt’s, that beer brand on it. And so of course, Labatt’s is like, who is this woman?

Susie Banikarim:

Amazing, who gets discovered this way?

Jessica Bennett:

Let’s hire her to be our [inaudible 00:16:00] model. And so she goes on to become Playboy’s most photographed cover model of all time.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, wow.

Jessica Bennett:

But that takes a few years. So at this time, she was working as the tool time girl in Home Improvement.

Pamela Anderson:

I don’t think so Al.

Jessica Bennett:

The whole role of the tool time girl was not to speak, but just to look cute in a pair of Daisy Dukes and have a tool belt on and hand over the tools. And so that was the period she was in when she auditioned for Baywatch.

Susie Banikarim:

It’s interesting because I do really think of Playboy and Pam as very intrinsically connected. To me, when I think of the classic Playboy cover model, I do think of Pam.

Jessica Bennett:

And that’s so interesting too, because actually Baywatch and Playboy are intrinsically connected in some way.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, really?

Jessica Bennett:

Playboy became this kind of natural casting choice for Baywatch at the time. Also, a side note, it was often jokingly referred to as Babe Watch.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah, that feels right.

Jessica Bennett:

So in season one, the actress who played Shauni McClain, this was a character who was on the first two seasons. She had previously posed for Playboy, then came Pam as CJ Parker, later on Carmen Electra, who played Lani McKenzie, Kelly Monaco, who made several appearances. Playboy even did a Babes of Baywatch issue in the late 90s.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, interesting.

Jessica Bennett:

So they were going to Playboy in some ways to recruit actors for Baywatch. And in that same oral history I mentioned for Esquire, it’s funny because one of the producers basically says in front of all the other actors that they basically hired a bunch of hot women who would look good in a swimsuit but couldn’t act.

Susie Banikarim:

I mean, that makes sense because looking good in a magazine has nothing to do with being able to deliver dialogue, but they sure could run.

Jessica Bennett:

I didn’t realize how big Baywatch was until I was researching this.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, right, yes you mentioned that.

Jessica Bennett:

It was one of the first TV shows to be syndicated, which meant that basically they could run it on multiple channels, which probably explains what it seems like it was on all the time.

Susie Banikarim:

It makes sense. It was on all the time.

Jessica Bennett:

At its height it had billions of viewers, literally billions. It was the most watched TV show in the world. And actually at a certain point, it was literally shown in every country in the world.

Susie Banikarim:

Every country?

Jessica Bennett:

Yep.

Susie Banikarim:

How is that even possible?

Jessica Bennett:

I fact check this.

Susie Banikarim:

Okay. I mean, I believe you. It’s just…

Jessica Bennett:

Some of the foreign syndications eventually started including what Pam calls the Pamela Clause, which meant that they wouldn’t buy the episodes unless she appeared in them.

Susie Banikarim:

Om my God.

Jessica Bennett:

She of course didn’t get paid any extra for that.

Susie Banikarim:

Of course, but that’s impressive.

Jessica Bennett:

And then one of the most interesting things I found was that there’s actually an economic theory name for Baywatch having something to do with the export of culture into foreign countries called the Baywatch Effect.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, so that’s interesting because it’s not really even just an economic export, right? It’s like the way we think about America, the way other people in other countries think about us must be so shaped by this sort of quintessential California show. I mean, I grew up in a large part in California, so I always sort of had this image of the quintessential California girl, but that becomes just the American girl in most places.

Jessica Bennett:

Absolutely. Which actually reminds me of Borat.

Borat:

All I could think about was this lovely woman in her red water panties. Who was this CJ?

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, right. Because in that movie, he’s going looking for Pam Anderson. He’s here to marry Pam, and then he tries to kidnap her. It’s such a huge theme.

Jessica Bennett:

Because that’s all that he knows of America.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. And it’s interesting because I do really think for most of the world, that sort of blonde Barbie girl is what America represents to them in some ways, this sort of carefree, sunny lifestyle.

Jessica Bennett:

And of course, I grew up in Seattle, which is the opposite of the sunny, happy lifestyle. It’s the suicide capital of the world.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, interesting. Did not know that.

Jessica Bennett:

Strangely I also grew up watching Pamela Anderson on Baywatch awkwardly with my… God, I distinctly remember this with my two younger brothers who are twins. They’re three years younger, and my dad in our dingy TV room.

Susie Banikarim:

Together as a family?

Jessica Bennett:

As a family. And how did that happen? I do remember my mom always kind making remarks about how this was trash TV.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah. I mean, it’s trashy.

Jessica Bennett:

And I think there was just not a lot else on. We didn’t have cable. There weren’t that many options. And this was on NBC, so it was supposedly a family friendly show. Okay. Pam joined that show in 1992. I was in middle school. I was insecure, hated my body. I had just taken part in a protest called Skirt Fest at my middle school.

Susie Banikarim:

What did that protest?

Jessica Bennett:

My seventh grade boyfriend had been kicked out of class for wearing my skirt. This was the era… Do you remember those long flowy skirts that everyone was wearing kind of hippie, grungy kids?

Susie Banikarim:

It was the original Boho chic.

Jessica Bennett:

Yes, exactly. But not chic at all. Anyhow, he got in trouble for wearing a skirt to class and got kicked out of class. And so we staged a walkout and we picketed in front of Washington Middle School.

Susie Banikarim:

I love that for you.

Jessica Bennett:

And we got the high schoolers to come, and they supported us, and we made the local newspaper. But how does this relate to Pam? I mean, we were never wearing swimsuits because it’s dark and dreary in Seattle all the time. So the idea of us in a red swimsuit would never happen. Also, bright colors, we don’t do that in Seattle.

Susie Banikarim:

Interesting.

Jessica Bennett:

It’s gray only, and it rained every day. And yet we all knew who she was. We all knew of the sex goddess in the red swimsuit. We all, I think subconsciously still compared our bodies to that.

Susie Banikarim:

Of course. Yeah, I think it would’ve been impossible to be a preteen or teen girl in this era and not compare yourself to what was so obviously the ideal. You and I are both brunettes, for example, and I was obviously conscious of that growing up in California. I think it’s a very natural thing as a woman to see kind of what the idealized female form is in culture. And then especially as you’re sort of trying to understand your relationship with your body, ask yourself in what ways you differ from that or what ways you aspire to that. And I think most girls would’ve felt that way.

Jessica Bennett:

I mean, even in my grungy skirt in rainy, dark, depressing Seattle, that red swimsuit became synonymous with sex and the ideal. And in many ways, it was a straight male fantasy of the ideal.

Susie Banikarim:

The distillation of that fantasy.

Jessica Bennett:

It’s like, what is the impact of a swimsuit? It’s such a tiny thing. You can really dig into this and say, okay, what did that teach us about bodies? To wear a swimsuit like this one had to have absolutely bionic unmovable breasts.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah. I mean, one thing I have thought of is that when you’re watching that slow mo run, if you were…

Jessica Bennett:

A normal…

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah, with natural breasts, your breasts would just be bouncing like crazy.

Jessica Bennett:

And Pam Anderson has talked at length about regretting her breast implants, and she got them at this time, and then she got them removed and she got them again. So it’s not like she would deny this either. But yes, that is not a swimsuit that a person with natural breasts can wear.

Susie Banikarim:

Or run in at least.

Jessica Bennett:

Or run in. The high cut… You have to be completely waxed to wear a swimsuit that high cut.

Susie Banikarim:

And that’s interesting. I feel like now, or well, now there’s a backlash, but there was this period where Brazilian bikini waxes became very ubiquitous, but when we were in the 90s, that was not super common.

Jessica Bennett:

It’s so funny because we were all getting those in high school.

Susie Banikarim:

You were?

Jessica Bennett:

Yes.

Susie Banikarim:

Wow, much more advanced than I was.

Jessica Bennett:

But actually we can’t talk about all this in a vacuum. You have to understand what was happening culturally at the time. So this is mid 90s. It’s kind of like the height of [inaudible 00:23:54] feminism. We’ve come so far toward equality that now we can objectify ourselves and it’s totally fine.

Susie Banikarim:

This is like the girls gone wild era.

Jessica Bennett:

Yes, girl’s gone wild. It’s like spring break. This is also when the breastaurant Hooters becomes a thing.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, well, certainly I think one of the most popular sort of moments for breastaurants, as they call them, the Hooters of the world, were very much part of the mainstream cultural conversation.

Jessica Bennett:

And also shows the man show, which has male comics, and then a sideshow of women in bikinis jumping on trampolines.

Clip:

Now girls jumping on trampolines.

Jessica Bennett:

So as I was trying to think through what was happening in the culture at the time, I called up Susan Douglas. She’s a professor of media studies at the University of Michigan and the author of a book called Enlightened Sexism. And that book is fascinating because it basically makes the argument that this kind of raunchy objectification is coming on the heels of, or at the same time really as serious gains in women’s rights.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, that’s interesting because it feels like it’s kind of a backlash to the 80s image of the Wall Street working girl with her business suit and her nude pantyhose.

Jessica Bennett:

White sneakers.

Susie Banikarim:

White sneakers with her pumps in her bag.

Jessica Bennett:

Exactly. And so in a way, this objectification is almost like a reaction to feminism and to too many or allegedly too many gains.

Susie Banikarim:

Yes because we’re always getting too ahead of ourselves.

Jessica Bennett:

And so this is what she calls, what she charms, enlightened sexism, which is essentially this idea of like, hey, full equality has been achieved. We have that Wall Street woman who is breaking the glass ceiling. So sexual objectification of women like Pamela Anderson can’t really hurt us anymore, right?

Susie Banikarim:

No, it’s progress.

Jessica Bennett:

We can be feminist and sexy. Anyway, here’s Susan, who will describe it much better than I can.

Susan Douglas:

I think it’s easy to forget what a swirl the 90s was of feminist revolt, girl power, third wave on the one hand, and the increasing objectification of women, and also the discovery of teenage girls as a really, really important niche market. So you do have this kind of revival of feminism at the same time that you have a backlash against it. And this is what made Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash a smash bestseller. And you were also getting the increased sexualization of women and girls, which started back when in the 80s with Brooke Shields and those Calvin Klein ads. And so you start getting this kind of ironic sexism where of course full equality has been achieved. So it’s really not possible to hurt women anymore with sexist depictions in the media because everything is allegedly equal when of course it wasn’t.

Susie Banikarim:

It’s so interesting because I feel like this is a thing we’re kind of seeing again now. And I mean, obviously history repeats itself, but every time it feels like there’s some sort of conversation that makes men uncomfortable like Me Too, then there’s this backlash that’s like, no, it’s too far. It’s gone too far.

Jessica Bennett:

Another thing I wanted to mention, and I don’t want to give it too much credit, but that swimsuit literally spawned a generation of plastic surgery. Pam Anderson has talked, she famously got implants. She’s talked many times and she’s very open about it, about regretting it. She called it a vicious cycle that she could never break out of. Side note, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, at one point, offered to put her removed implants on display in its museum. She said no.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah, good for her.

Jessica Bennett:

But cosmetic surgeons over the years have talked about how she truly ushered in this era of plastic surgery that made them rich. Like her body…

Susie Banikarim:

Another economic impact.

Jessica Bennett:

Exactly. Her body became the reference point. And specifically, people would come into plastic surgery offices with photos of her in that red swimsuit and say, I want that body.

Susie Banikarim:

That body specifically. So liposuction, whatever it would take to make your body look like that.

Jessica Bennett:

Lifted, sculpted, liposuction to perfection.

Clip:

Do you have any pictures of about the size that you might want to be?

Clip:

I have a picture of Pamela Anderson with me.

Jessica Bennett:

So that’s a clip from this MTV show. You might remember it. It’s from the early 2000s called I Want a Famous Face. And it shows you exactly what I’m talking about. This young woman is using Pamela Anderson as the literal reference point for the plastic surgery that she wants.

Susie Banikarim:

I mean, it kind of makes sense. Pam is beautiful. If you’re trying to get plastic surgery, it’s like a smart reference point, I guess.

Jessica Bennett:

And so of course, that show is extreme, but I actually found some pretty stunning data about plastic surgery from that time. So Pam joined Baywatch in 1992, and with the data shows is that in the next 10 years, so from 1992 to 2002, breast augmentations in America went up by 500%.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh my God. I mean, people won’t be able to see my face, but I did a comically shocked face just now.

Jessica Bennett:

It’s a huge number. And in one article I was reading about those stats, there’s this plastic surgeon quoted, who basically says, we were blessed with Baywatch.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh my God.

Jessica Bennett:

It was like an hour long plastic surgery commercial.

Susie Banikarim:

They should have given her a kickback.

Jessica Bennett:

And the funny thing is, based on my conversations with her and things she’s said over the years, as all of that is happening, she herself does not feel good about her own body.

Susie Banikarim:

That is really the true female experience. It’s like no matter how much other people admire your body, you can still find the flaws.

Jessica Bennett:

And interestingly, in Pam’s case, that’s even more complicated because so many people have literally seen her naked.

Susie Banikarim:

I mean, we haven’t even really gone into the sex tape yet.

Jessica Bennett:

Okay, so we do need to talk about the sex tape. Pam is on Baywatch. She starts dating the rockstar Tommy Lee, and during their honeymoon, they start filming. It’s what has been called in the popular culture, a sex tape. But actually it’s like a very long VHS with tender moments of them getting together and then them on their honeymoon. And yes, there are a few minutes in this very long tape of them having sex, that sex tape gets stolen from their home, from a safe in their home and distributed. And basically, Pam now talks about this as the great humiliation of her life.

Susie Banikarim:

Right. Totally without their consent. I mean, I think the popular culture now sort of assumes most sex tapes are leaked by the people in the sex tape. But in Pam’s case, it genuinely was just this personal memento that they had made of their romance, and then somehow somebody got their hands on it.

Jessica Bennett:

And this, of course, there have been podcasts done just on this tape. But yes, this is the start of online pornography. She sues them, they lose in court. But this is all happening during Baywatch. And so it connects because for a time after the tape went public foreign distributors and the networks began demanding that Pam be taken off the air. They thought this was going to be too controversial for the show. But interestingly, and maybe not that surprisingly, it actually helps Baywatch.

Susie Banikarim:

Well, now it’s not surprising because we know that Kim Kardashian’s entire career was kicked off by a sex tape. But back then, I can see how executives might’ve thought that there may be some sort of backlash against it.

Jessica Bennett:

And why are we talking about this? So the thing is, there’s this connection between that swimsuit and what would happen to her in her later life and the way that she was kind of set up as this object in many ways. She starts in Playboy where she poses nude. She goes on to be this bombshell on Baywatch that is spread across beach towels and calendars and everything else. And then there’s this sex tape, which is distributed without her consent. And it’s not just her nude, it’s pornography.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah, it’s pornography. And there’s this real sense that her body belongs to the public.

Jessica Bennett:

Right. One of the oddest things to me in spending time with her and researching her and reading every interview she’s done, watching the documentary is this sense in truly an anecdote after anecdote after anecdote, that she almost becomes a public commodity in some way. People feel entitled to her in almost a physical sense.

Susie Banikarim:

Physical way.

Jessica Bennett:

There are a few clips where you can really hear it. She goes on Howard Stern ostensibly to talk about her career, and he ends up spending the whole time talking about how cute her private parts are.

Howard Stern:

No, you’re not going to be [inaudible 00:32:45]. Let me just look at you. Oh, perfect. Let me soak you in for a second. Come on, don’t sit down so quick.

Jessica Bennett:

Matt Lauer, who goes on to be fired for sexual misconduct, does an interview with her where the first question is asking her about her breasts.

Matt Lauer:

May we talk briefly about your breasts?

Susie Banikarim:

Oh my God. I mean, that’s so crazy because Matt Lauer was a serious journalist, like that would’ve been in a news interview.

Jessica Bennett:

Yeah, that’s a really good point. There’s another example. At one point, she takes part in a roast on Comedy Central. And so she’s agreed to do this, so in some way she’s in on the joke, but again, it’s her ex-husband, Tommy Lee, who’s roasting her. And this is the way the monologue begins.

Tommy Lee:

This is actually a special time for Pam to be here because she just turned 38 and her tits just turned 14.

Jessica Bennett:

And it’s almost like this becomes weirdly physical in a sense. People or fans feel like they’re entitled to her physical space.

Susie Banikarim:

They claw at her at events. They’re trying to get to her a lot of the time.

Jessica Bennett:

And so in her book, she has a couple of different stories. One about Tim Allen, who was a star of Home Improvement, where she was the tool time girl. And on her first day on the set, she walks out and he’s in a robe and they’re outside of the dressing rooms, and he flashes her and he says, now you’ve seen me naked too. He’s since denied that, of course, but it’s in her book. There’s another scenario that she talks about also in her memoir where she’s traveling to Uruguay for some sort of fan event, and she gets out and the car is surrounded by teen boys, hundreds and hundreds of teenage boys, and they’re shouting for her, and then suddenly they’re clawing at her, and her bodyguard has to literally throw her over his shoulder and get out of there. And by the time she gets back to the truck or the SUV or whatever, her clothes have been physically torn off of her.

Susie Banikarim:

That sounds terrifying.

Jessica Bennett:

There’s this other story she told me, which she also writes about in her book, but basically she comes home one day to Malibu when she’s living there and a deranged fan has broken into her home, is in the basement and has fallen asleep in the swimsuit.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh my God.

Jessica Bennett:

And they basically have no idea how long she’s been there.

Susie Banikarim:

God, there’s so much invasion of her autonomy.

Jessica Bennett:

Personal space. For what it’s worth, the suit is now in a safe in her son’s home.

Susie Banikarim:

It should really be in the Smithsonian.

Jessica Bennett:

It really should actually.

Susie Banikarim:

Yeah. I mean, seriously.

Jessica Bennett:

Even as late as 2003, you remember that book, the Chuck Closterman book? Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.

Susie Banikarim:

Of course.

Jessica Bennett:

He writes about Pamela Anderson in there, and there’s this quote, am I physically attracted to Pamela Anderson? Of course. But the more I see her, the more I realize I’m not looking at a person I’d like to sleep with. I’m looking at America.

Susie Banikarim:

That really is the thing, right? So intrinsically tied up with the idea of America for so many people, she becomes almost like a symbol rather than a person.

Jessica Bennett:

Right. She’s like a souvenir that everybody wants to own a piece of. And I mean, look, Pamela Anderson is certainly not the first woman in our culture to become a sexual commodity or even to own her part in that. I mean, I was thinking back to… There’s Britney Spears, Marilyn Monroe to a large degree, even I think Lil Kim in the 90s to some degree, but I’m trying to think about what the difference is for Pam. Maybe the difference is those people had careers first to fall back on before it became about their bodies, before it became about the physicality or sex. And with her, that’s what she was from the beginning, she didn’t have anything to fall back on. She was established as a sex object.

Susie Banikarim:

Like a one dimensional pinup. So people didn’t really see her as human in many ways. They don’t see her as a living, breathing human. They just really see almost this image of her in their minds that they disassociate with her as a person, and now she’s sort of taking control of her narrative. She’s written this book, she’s doing all this.

Jessica Bennett:

She’s inserting some of the complexity back in. I don’t know how much time you’re spending on TikTok these days.

Susie Banikarim:

Well, I do spend a lot of time on TikTok. An embarrassing amount.

Jessica Bennett:

There’s this whole hashtag pam core. It is a full aesthetic. It is back.

Susie Banikarim:

I haven’t seen that.

Jessica Bennett:

People are doing the thin penciled eyebrows, the lip liner, the tousled bun on the top of the head, the bangs.

Susie Banikarim:

Is this part of the bimbo core thing?

Jessica Bennett:

It’s a little bit bimbo core. It’s a little bit Barbie core. And Pam is back. But I have to tell you this other story actually, which is that when I was with her at her home in Canada, we were sitting in her kitchen. We were baking Christmas cookies.

Susie Banikarim:

Oh, that sounds nice. It’s like a celebrity Hallmark movie.

Jessica Bennett:

Totally. And actually, she’s an amazing cook. So I’m recording all of this, obviously, because I was doing this profile of her, and so we’re hanging out in the kitchen. Her assistant, Jonathan was near us. He’s sort of helping out. And I pull out my phone to show her this TikTok filter that lets you basically put 90s Pam onto your 2023 human not Pam face. And so Pam is not on social media, so she’d never seen this. And she literally screamed.

Pamela Anderson:

Oh, that’s so funny. What the fuck? That’s insane. You got to do this one. What the hell? I mean, my kids know about this. This is insane. This is the extent of my… That’s hysterical.

Susie Banikarim:

That’s such a sweet and funny moment. It’s really lovely to hear her finally getting to enjoy some of this attention and actually be able to laugh at all the absurdity of it.

Jessica Bennett:

Yeah, I mean, I was actually thinking about that. It kind of wraps up the idea for this episode perfectly. There are certainly parts of Pamela Anderson’s life in retrospect, that she wants to stay in the past. She doesn’t want to be that cartoonish, 90s version of herself, and she has said that, but at least now she’s getting to decide what she wants to embrace and what she wants to leave behind. And in some ways, the suit actually is a happy memory for her. Here’s what she said when I asked her about it recently.

Pamela Anderson:

It just represents a time in my history, one of my favorite times, just to be so carefree on the beach working. When my sons were just born, putting on that red swimsuit just a couple of months after I gave birth. I still had to get back in the suit. I don’t know. It makes me feel happy to think about it. It was really a beautiful time in my life.

Susie Banikarim:

That really does feel like a perfect place to end it.

Jessica Bennett:

Yeah, it really does. So I guess that’s our show for this week. See you next week.

Susie Banikarim:

Jessica Bennett:

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim:

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett:

Susie Banikarim:

Jessica Bennett:

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

Jessica Bennett: And I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim: This is In Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Jessica Bennett: And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett: So Susie, I know nothing about soap operas except that there is one starring a woman named Jessica Bennett, who shares my name.

Susie Banikarim: Is that true?

Jessica Bennett: Uh, it’s called Passion. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: Oh, Passion. That was a short-lived, but very wild soap opera.

Jessica Bennett: She remains on Wikipedia. Anyway, were you a huge General Hospital fan, like, how- what led you to this moment?

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: I was a Days of Our Life-

Jessica Bennett: Girl.

Susie Banikarim: One Life to Live girl, which was kind of unusual, because it was split. Days of Our Lives was-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: … on NBC. Do you remember the tagline for Days of Our Lives?

Jessica Bennett: No.

Susie Banikarim: Like sands through the hourglass…

CLIP: Like sands through the hourglass…

Jessica Bennett: Oh, yeah, I do remember. Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … so are the days of our lives.

CLIP: … so are the days of our lives.

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: And, you know, guess what? She remembers this relationship between Luke and Laura as completely romantic.

Susie Banikarim: I think that’s what most people thought.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. It was a soap opera that started in 1963.

CLIP: General Hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, so Luke and Laura are characters who do not work in that hospital?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. No, they don’t work in the hospital. Not literally everyone on the show works in the hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Got it.

Susie Banikarim: They just live in Port Charles.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. And where should we begin in terms of their, can we call it a relationship?

Jessica Bennett: Right, right.

Susie Banikarim: It was a two-day event, so it’s two hours long.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: There’s, like, really long stretches of them just, like, driving up in cars.

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: Like, the bridesmaids, the groomsmen.

Jessica Bennett: Yup.

Susie Banikarim: And then there’s this really long stretch of them just, like, literally greeting the guests.

Jessica Bennett: It’s like an actual wedding.

Susie Banikarim: Which is why it’s fascinating that it was the most watched soap opera episode of all time.

Jessica Bennett: [00:05:00] Wow.

Susie Banikarim: Like, people loved it. They wanted to feel like they were there at this wedding, because they were obsessed with this couple.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. Why were people so obsessed with this couple? Like, what was the appeal?

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … because she’s already become a pretty central character to General Hospital when Luke is introduced.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s because they’re trying to push towards younger audiences.

Jessica Bennett: Ah, okay.

Susie Banikarim: So she’s a teenager.

Jessica Bennett: Interesting.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the quotes I read from a fan was, like, we love her because she’s 16 like us, but she lives the life of a 28-year-old.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … more people tuned in to watch this fake wedding than tuned in when Meghan Markle and Prince [00:06:00] Harry had their actual wedding in 2018.

Jessica Bennett: Whoa. What, that is wild.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. And, like, local news sent correspondents to viewing parties, like, all across Manhattan. From an office in Madison Avenue to a dorm at NYU.

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

NEWS CLIP: Fans all across the country watched for the big moment. To them it was their wedding.

NEWS CLIP: Of course we’re excited.

NEWS CLIP: Not a dry eye in the house.

NEWS CLIP: By the way, three years for them to get married, I feel like [inaudible 00:06:22].

NEWS CLIP: You like Luke?

NEWS CLIP: I love Luke.

NEWS CLIP: Why?

NEWS CLIP: Uh, he’s sexy. It’s time for them to get together.

NEWS CLIP: It’s been two years. It’s time for them to-

NEWS CLIP: You know, they’re very much in love and it’s really a beautiful thing.

Susie Banikarim: It was just this wildly popular thing, even among celebrities. Like, Elizabeth Taylor was such a fan of the show that she requested to be on it.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And made a guest appearance and you can kind of see her in-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … the background of many shots. She’s playing a villain who is cursing them-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay.

Susie Banikarim: … on their wedding day. And also, this is the year where Diana and Charles got married.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And they had a real wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But then this is such a big [00:07:00] moment that Diana sends champagne for this fake wedding. [laughs] She sends the actors-

Jessica Bennett: Whoa.

Susie Banikarim: … champagne to congratulate them on their fake wedding.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow. Oh my God, okay.

Susie Banikarim: Which, like, an amazing little detail here is that Genie Francis is underage when this wedding happens.

Jessica Bennett: Genie Francis who plays Laura.

Susie Banikarim: Genie Francis who plays Laura Spencer is 20, and so they don’t-

Jessica Bennett: She can’t drink.

Susie Banikarim: … even give it to her. She doesn’t know about the champagne until years later when they’re doing an interview.

Jessica Bennett: What kind of champagne do you think it was?

Susie Banikarim: I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of champagne it was, but, um, I think Luke said he liked kept the bo- I mean, it-

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: … imagine getting a bottle of champagne from who- what was, like, the most famous woman in the world at that time.

Jessica Bennett: So wha- okay, so the culture or the world is kind of treating this fake wedding like a real wedding.

Susie Banikarim: People took the day off work. And there’s, like, a note in the research that someone was, like, hey, I told my boss I was going to a wedding, because I was.

Jessica Bennett: Oh my God. [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: You know, like, bars played it. Like, people gathered around in bars at lunchtime in droves-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … to watch this wedding and, I mean, a thing that I think people sort of forget, [00:08:00] it’s hard now to remember what a stranglehold soap operas had on the culture-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … in the 80s.

Jessica Bennett: Or even television.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, and television. I mean, they also made the most money.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And like, I think part of the thing is, yes, a lot of people watch them, but more than that, for the networks, uh, ABC, for example, they made up 50% of revenue.

Jessica Bennett: Oh wow.

Susie Banikarim: So had an enormous amount of power.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: This sort of silly ridiculous thing. And, you know, it could be silly and ridiculous and we can talk about that, but daytime was an enormously powerful arena at this point.

Jessica Bennett: I don’t think I fully appreciated that. That soap operas had huge power to shape culture and also that it was women both making and watching them.

Susie Banikarim: [00:09:00] Yeah. Initially soap operas were really watched by stay-at-home moms and that’s kind of why initially they’re dismissed.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But then this thing happens at the end of the 70s where a lot of women enter the workforce and there’s a dip in viewership.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But then the women who are staying at home start to allow their children to watch TV with them.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: That’s kind of like a shift. And so a lot of girls and boys who are home with their moms become addicted to these shows.

Jessica Bennett: I see.

Susie Banikarim: And then it becomes common to be a college student who gathers around-

Jessica Bennett: Right, this is why there’s viewing parties in these dorm rooms.

Susie Banikarim: Yes. You know, a common thing that was talked about amongst soap fans, is that they would schedule their classes around their soap operas.

Jessica Bennett: Wow. It’s such a different time.

Susie Banikarim: It’s, like, worth noting that even though soap operas aren’t that popular now, General Hospital is still on the air.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, right.

Susie Banikarim: I mean, people forget that.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: But it is the longest running scripted drama and the longest running American soap opera. I- I-

Jessica Bennett: How do you watch that now?

Susie Banikarim: It started airing in 1963. You can watch it on television. What do you mean? You watch it on ABC.

Jessica Bennett: Like, watch it, [00:10:00] you do?

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. You could watch it in the afternoon on ABC. And by the way, two million people still do.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think the thing that’s different is there’s, like, a lot of options now.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: So it doesn’t seem as popular.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But two million people is not a paltry number. That’s way more than most cable shows get.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But we don’t think about it as a cultural phenomenon because it seems so low in comparison to the fact that in their heyday-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … one in fifteen Americans watched General Hospital.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And I’m going to actually blow your mind-

Jessica Bennett: [laughs]

Susie Banikarim: … with so many things here, because to begin with, Luke is Laura’s boss.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Where did they work?

Susie Banikarim: Um, at a disco.

Jessica Bennett: They work at a disco.

Susie Banikarim: Laura is 17. Luckily for Laura she’s already married. She’s 17 and married.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, okay. Only a crime.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Wild.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, so it’s not doing good at this time.

Susie Banikarim: At this time it’s not doing good. It’s the lowest rated soap opera on TV. It’s, like, number 12 or something.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And there’s so many soap operas on TV-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: … at this time. And that’s actually what makes it so remarkable that within three years, it’s literally the number one show.

Jessica Bennett: Can you imagine being, like, ah, our show’s doing really bad. What can we do to- to get better ratings? I know-

Susie Banikarim: Right.

Jessica Bennett: … let’s stage a rape.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. [00:13:00] I mean, it is wild. But it does work.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And I think one of the things that’s interesting is the executive producer that was brought in at that time came from TV movies where rape was a much more common topic.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: But it was presented more from, like, the crime aspect. And so I think that’s why-

Jessica Bennett: Not a love story?

Susie Banikarim: Not a love story. And I think that’s why she has this idea to introduce this rape-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and knows that that is, like, popular with viewers. That must be kind of what she’s thinking when she introduces this character.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So this new 32-year-old character, Luke, ends up hiring 17-year-old Laura at his nightclub.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s his back story. So the context of this scene is that Luke has gotten mixed up with these mobsters who are forcing him to [00:14:00] kill a local politician-

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: … and he feels like if he kills this other person, he will also be killed.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: And so this scene picks up where she has seen him crying, because he is like, “I’m a dead man walking.”

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

CLIP Laura: How come you’re crying?

CLIP Luke: I wasn’t crying.

CLIP Laura: Yes, you were. And you didn’t know that I was here.

Jessica Bennett: At first I was, like, oh, that’s kind of progressive of them. Like, you’re showing tears.

Susie Banikarim: It’s not going to be so progressive.

CLIP Laura: Luke, I’m sure that whatever it is, it can be worked out in time.

CLIP Luke: Time is what I don’t have.

Jessica Bennett: They’re sort of setting it up that, like, if you don’t have time, then you must have the woman you love.

Susie Banikarim: And that’s definitely how the story plays, that he knows he’s running out of time, he’s so in love with her-

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: That he must have her this one time.

Jessica Bennett: He ra- he has to act on this love lust.

CLIP Luke: I said I was going to be dead, killed, little lady. Can’t you get that through your head? Now get out of here.

Susie Banikarim: So [00:15:00] he’s pushing her away, because essentially the message is he can’t control himself. And then he professes his love.

CLIP Luke: Dammit, Laura. I’m in love with you.

CLIP Laura: No, I d- I don’t think it’s really love, Luke. I-

CLIP Luke: Oh, yes. It’s just what it is.

CLIP Luke: Dance with me, Laura.

CLIP Laura: No.

Jessica Bennett: You really feel that the tension is building and then things clearly unravel.

CLIP Laura: Luke, let me call a taxi, please.

Jessica Bennett: And so you don’t see the rape itself.

CLIP Laura: No. Don’t, Luke, let me go.

Susie Banikarim: But it’s unambiguous.

CLIP Laura: No. No.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: You definitely hear a rape.

Jessica Bennett: So clothes are ripped. She’s looking upset. She’s crying.

Susie Banikarim: She’s cowering.

Jessica Bennett: She’s clearly said no ahead of time.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, she’s screaming no when it-

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: … starts and grows. It’s a kind of jarring moment because it happens pretty suddenly. Like, you go [00:16:00] from being, like-

Jessica Bennett: I actually do get goosebumps watching it.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. Because you’re sort of, like, oh, it’s going to be a seduction and then suddenly it’s a rape.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: And cut to disco lights. There’s a commercial break. We come back. We’re back on the disco lights. It’s, like, very-

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: … surreal kind of vibe. And then the thing that really drives home that this is a rape is she’s now lying on the ground. She is cowering.

Jessica Bennett: Her clothes are torn.

Jessica Bennett: Yes, yes.

Susie Banikarim: And she sneaks away.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s her husband, Scotty.

Jessica Bennett: Yes.

Susie Banikarim: Because he’s lying about whether or not she’s been there. And that’s the scene.

Susie Banikarim: I know, it’s crazy.

Jessica Bennett: And, like, for a jazz funk instrumental, that was as rare then as it is today.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And it’s funny, actually. I don’t know if you remember this, you called me and I was in Palm Springs with a friend.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And, uh, you know, we had shopped, naturally-

Susie Banikarim: [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: … um, and… Yeah, exactly.

Susie Banikarim: That’s where either of us would be at any given moment.

Jessica Bennett: And we had just gotten out of the car where that song was playing. And this friend of mine who happens to have written her, like, college thesis on rape in soap operas-

Susie Banikarim: Amazing.

Susie Banikarim: Oh yeah, excellent song, by the way.

Susie Banikarim: Everyone was listening to it.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Wait, and how did they know he’s so popular?

Susie Banikarim: Well, partially because the way soaps worked is, since they were being produced so quickly-

Jessica Bennett: Uh-huh.

Susie Banikarim: … and because they’re on every day-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: … the network is able to gauge almost immediately audience sentiment.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: So they’re using actual data that’s showing them that Luke is quite popular.

Jessica Bennett: Okay. So, like, we’ve got to keep Luke.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. This gets some coverage at the time. The ratings weren’t good before this. The ratings started to creep up, so they do not kill him off.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: But that leaves them-

Jessica Bennett: With a problem.

Susie Banikarim: … with a bit of a conundrum, which is, if audiences are falling in love with Luke and really feel drawn to this romance between him and Laura-

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: … and want Laura to end up with Luke, not Scotty, [00:20:00] how do they reconcile that with the violent rape-

Jessica Bennett: That has occurred.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Jessica Bennett: Right.

Susie Banikarim: But instead, they are moving the needle over and over again.

Jessica Bennett: Okay.

Susie Banikarim: Until they literally re-shoot [00:21:00] the scenes. They literally go back-

Jessica Bennett: So that they can appear in flashbacks?

Susie Banikarim: So that the scenes they’re showing for flashbacks aren’t as disturbing.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: They’re literally softening the thing over and over and over again. And the characters being gaslit in real time, the audience is being gaslit in real time.

CLIP Luke: Maybe you should name me as the rapist.

CLIP Laura: They’ll put you in jail.

CLIP Luke: Maybe that’s where I belong.

CLIP Laura: No, don’t say that. You’re not a criminal.

Jessica Bennett: They don’t even know how the relationship began.

Jessica Bennett: Oh. Evokes…

Susie Banikarim: … with the rape.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah.

Susie Banikarim: And at one point Laura is narrating the scene and she describes it as the first time Luke and I made love.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim: And there is a reaction. It’s not, like, a huge national reaction or anything, but there are people at that time who were, like, what is happening?

Jessica Bennett: And actually we know one of those people. One of our executive producers, Cindy Leive.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, Cindy is a journalist, the former editor of Glamour magazine and the co-founder of The Meteor. But most relevant to this conversation, she was a General Hospital super fan.

Susie Banikarim: Why did you love it so much?

Susie Banikarim: Do you remember what you initially thought when Luke showed up?

Susie Banikarim: You’ve told me in the past that you were watching the episode when Luke raped Laura. Can you describe that experience?