In Retrospect Transcripts

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):

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 (18:49):

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 Dooe and Mike Coscarelli. Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (19:07):

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

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):

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 (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):

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 (42:57):

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 Dooe and Mike Coscarelli. Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (43:15):

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

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:

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:

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 Dooe and Mike Coscarelli. Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett:

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

EPISODE 2 – MEET YOUR HOSTS (HI!)

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Susie Banikarim: [00:00:00] I just love that your memory of this is us locking eyes across a crowded room.

Jessica Bennett: Yes. [inaudible 00:00:08].

Susie Banikarim: Like it really is like a romantic moment.

Jessica Bennett: Yes. 

Jessica Bennett: I’m Jessica Bennett.

 And I’m Susie Banikarim.

 And this is In Retrospect, where each week we delve into cultural moments that shaped us.

Susie Banikarim: And that we just can’t stop thinking about. Today, we thought we’d take some time to introduce ourselves. I think it would be fun to introduce each other.

 Okay.

Jessica Bennett: So let’s try it.

 Yeah, actually, that’s a good idea, because I feel like it’s easier to brag on behalf of someone else than it is to brag about yourself, and you have a really impressive bio.

Susie Banikarim:  Well same. I think it’s really fun to look at friend’s bios, because I’m always like, “Wow. You’re so much more impressive-“

 [laughs]

 “Than even I think you are.” So I’ll do yours first.

 Okay.

 So Jessica Bennett started her career at Newsweek. I mean, you started your career a little bit before that, but-

Jessica Bennett: Yep.

Susie Banikarim: That’s where you had your first big writing job.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: And was a culture writer there for a long time.

Jessica Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Susie Banikarim: [00:01:00] And then went and ran content for Tumblr for a short period of time, when Tumblr was like really hot.

Jessica Bennett: Before… I guess, I mean, Tumblr’s sort of back now, right?

 It’s a little back.

 But Tumblr was like… Tumblr was trying to do journalism for a hot second.

 Yep.

 It was the cool, hot place to be, and everyone was there. And then it became just porn.

 Yeah. [laughs] For a long time.

 And now, and now maybe it’s kind of back and retro and…

 I think it’s like a 

Susie Banikarim: retro thing now.

 Cool again.

 But I remember being very impressed when you got that job.

 It 

Jessica Bennett: was ve-

 It was a cool job.

 And it was a job that had never existed before.

 Yeah.

 Anyhow.

 I was like, “Oh, 

Susie Banikarim: of course Jess got that job. She’s so cool.”

 [laughs]

 And then you went to the New York Times, and I think a thing most people know about you is that you were the first gender editor ever at the Times.

 Mm-hmm.

 Which is very impressive. And then I think they don’t have the gender editor role anymore, right?

 No. There is no 

Jessica Bennett: longer a gender editor.

Susie Banikarim: Which I think is interesting. I mean, I think it shows sort of the evolution of thinking around gender, so it’s sort of just the word-

 And even interesting.

 Yeah. The word, and also the idea that lots of things [00:02:00] involve gender coverage. It shouldn’t this like isolated silo, but-

 Yes. [inaudible 00:02:03].

 It was still really important when you got that job, and I remember feeling like it was a really important step, and now you’re a columnist for the New York Times.

 Mm-hmm.

 I think one thing that’s important about your career, at least I think so, is that you started a genre that’s now very prevalent but that at the time was a relatively new way to think about the world, which is that you did the first big interview with Monica Lewinsky.

 Hm.

 Sort of reframing her and thinking about what it meant that we thought of her in a certain way.

 Mm-hmm.

 And that you’ve done that a lot in your career, that you’re sort of able to take something that everyone takes as common wisdom and-

 Mm-hmm.

 Turn it on its head and really explore it in a more meaningful way. I really admire that.

 Thanks. 

Jessica Bennett: Uh, yeah. I’ve always joked that at a certain point, I became the scorned woman beat.

 Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

 And so, rehabilitating scorned women, which is now kind of everywhere.

 Yeah [

Susie Banikarim: inaudible 00:02:56].

 Everyone’s doing that now.

 It’s everywhere. Now it’s like a cottage industry. I feel like there’s like a whole industry of people [00:03:00] just trying to-

 And people, 

Jessica Bennett: in fact, that maybe don’t deserve to be rehabilitated.

 Yeah. [laughs] Some 

Susie Banikarim: people who don’t deserve it. But also, I think what’s important about the way you did it, and I will die on this hill, is that a lot of these women have not participated-

 Right.

 In the retelling of their own stories. And in some ways, that is really complicated, because we’re trying to say that the media exploited Britney, but then at the same time, a new batch of people are choosing to sort of mine Britney’s story without her consent or participation.

 Right.

 And so it’s a little bit of a complicated dynamic and I think what’s really important about your work is that you’ve always sort of involved the women at the center of the stories and given them an opportunity to tell their version.

 Yeah. They were, 

Jessica Bennett: they were instrumental to the 

Susie Banikarim: pieces.

 Yes. And I think that’s really important. And also just very journalistic. I really admire that you’re a very solid journalist, which-

 Thanks, Susie.

 I would say that, everyone.

 [laughs]

 And I think it’s important to note that you wrote a great book [00:04:00] called Feminist Fight Club.

 Mm-hmm.

 About an actual feminist fight club you were in, so I’ll let you describe that so I don’t butcher it, but that book was amazing, and was a bestseller. And then you wrote another book with the Times, right? Called This is 18.

Jessica Bennett: Yeah, the photography book where we documented the lives of 18 year old girls around the world.

 Oh, 

Susie Banikarim: amazing. I think I saw the New York Times piece, but-

 Yes.

 Like a bad friend-

Jessica Bennett:  It was the-

 I didn’t read that.

Jessica Bennett:  It was fine.

 [laughs]

 It was a piece that then turned into an international photography exhibit, and then ultimately became a book with interviews with 

the girls.

Susie Banikarim: Oh, amazing. Um, now I feel like I should pick that up. But I have two copies of Feminist Fight Club, I would like to add-

 Hm. Appreciate that.

 I sent it to like everyone I know, so…

 [laughs]

 Um, it’s a great book and if you have not seen it or you have a daughter or a niece or someone in your family who you think is coming into their own, I think it’s like a great book to give someone-

 Thanks.

 Whose trying to figure out how to operate in the world.

 And in the 

Jessica Bennett: working world, specifically

Susie Banikarim: In the working world, specifically. And that’s my little [inaudible 00:04:55].

Jessica Bennett: That’s great! That was great.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, was that good? How’d I do?

Jessica Bennett: I feel like I don’t know that you even… Oh, I guess the only thing you missed is [00:05:00] that I now teach journalism at NYU.

Susie Banikarim:  Oh, right.

Jessica Bennett: To graduate students. A class called Reporting the Zeitgeist.

Susie Banikarim:  Yes.

Jessica Bennett: Which is very fun, because I learn as much about the Zeitgeist from my students as I think they learn about reporting it from me.

Susie Banikarim: Yes. And actually, I just think it’s like a fun topic. I also taught like two classes at some point.

 Mm-hmm.

 And it was really fun to teach. I think eventually I want to do that again.

 Yeah.

 But I, I-

 Jessica Bennett: The pay is nothing.

Susie Banikarim: It pays nothing.

 Jessica Bennett: But it’s really fun.

 So-

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

You have to really be at a stage in your life. I remember because it paid nothing, I took on two classes at once. You know, I had taught like LSAT when I was much younger, but-

 Jessica Bennett: This was at Harvard?

Susie Banikarim: I never taught like a real school. Yes. It was when I finished my fellowship at Harvard.

 Okay.

 And they asked us if we wanted to teach at the extension school. And I did

Jessica Bennett: Let’s go into your bio.

Susie Banikarim: Oh, okay, yeah.

Jessica Bennett: I feel… I don’t want to start your bio with Harvard, ’cause it sounds so snotty.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: And that’s not who you are.

Susie Banikarim: And also it’s a very small percentage of my career.

Jessica Bennett: So let’s just, let’s like put that on pause.

 [laughs]

Jessica Bennett: We’ll come back to it. Okay. So Susie, you and I met about a decade ago, and we’ll get to our whole meeting story.

 Um, cute.

 Uh, yes. [inaudible [00:06:00] 00:06:00] cute. But you are a really seasoned producer. You began your career at World News Tonight. You had produced for Diane Sawyer, and then you actually went on to become a media executive.

 Yes.

 Like maybe that’s a… Feels like a weird term, but whenever I’m describing you to friends, I’m like, “Yeah, my friend Susie’s run like every newsroom.”

Susie Banikarim:  I mean, that is not true, but I have run-

Jessica Bennett: But a lot of newsrooms

Susie Banikarim: What someone once described as two of the most notorious asylums in media.

 Oh, 

Jessica Bennett: that’s great. So Gizmodo media.

Susie Banikarim: Gizmodo media group.

 And Vice.

 So yeah, so Gizmodo media group is all the former Gawker sites. When Gawker went bankrupt, Univision bought all the sites by Gawker, so-

 Okay.

 Sites like Jezebel, Gizmodo-

 Yep.

 Dead Spin. Kotaku.

 Okay.

 [inaudible 00:06:43]. The Root.

 Okay. Yeah.

 I don’t want to forget [inaudible 00:06:44]. So I did that, and then I did run the newsroom at Vice for one year. But you… Actually, my first job in journalism was not-

 Oh yeah. 

Jessica Bennett: Fun fact.

Susie Banikarim: Fun fact. Well so, my first job in journalism was actually at NBC. I went to journalism school to change careers. I had been a [00:07:00] management consultant.

 Oh, that’s right.

 And then I was like, “I need to do something meaningful with my life.”

 Yeah.

 And I went to journalism school for a year. And I got hired into this diversity program at NBC.

 Mm-hmm.

 And they would rotate you through all the shows.

 Okay.

 So I went to The Today Show, and I worked the Nightly News.

 Okay.

 And at the end of year, it was really low pay. It was like… Even back then, it was so low. It was like $30,000.

 Yeah.

 Which, I just remember going into credit card debt that year.

 Yeah.

 And when the year was over, they offered me a job at the Today Show, but it was like for $35,000 or something.

 Yeah.

Or something like, I was just like, “That’s untenable for me.”

Jessica Bennett: Yeah. Yeah. In New York.

 And somehow, I got connected to someone who was starting a new show called Wife Swap.

 [laughs]

 And I worked as an associate producer on the first year of Wife Swap.

Jessica Bennett:  Wife Swap, yes.  That’s great. You have real… There’s a lot of high, low in your bio.

 Yes. There’s a lot 

Susie Banikarim: of high, low. And you know, it’s funny because sometimes in my career, there have been points in my career where people have told me not to talk about the low. Like where people have been like-

 [inaudible 00:07:58].

“Maybe you don’t want to tell people about Wife Swap.”

 Yeah, yeah.

 [00:08:00] And I’ve always rejected that, because I think it’s part of what makes me an interesting producer and an interesting journalist.

 Yeah.

 Is that I really embrace a lot of variable-

 Yes, yes.

 Projects.

Jessica Bennett: Yes. And I actually think that’s one of the subjects that we bond over. Like, that’s a lot of what we’re trying to do here.

 Yeah.

 Which we’ll talk a little bit more about. But it’s looking at some elements of “low culture” in a smart way.

 Yes.

 And a meaningful way. Okay, let’s not forget the documentary that you produced and directed about Donald Trump and the political press called Enemies of the People.

Susie Banikarim:  Yeah, so I did this fellowship at Harvard, which all my friends are going to die that that’s how we started this conversation, because they just love to give me shit about this.

 Uh-huh.

 Like, they’re like, “Oh, is this your Harvard magazine?”

 Yeah.

 Like, “Where’s your Harvard mug?”

 [laughs]

 They just think it’s so funny, ’cause I’m not actually the kind of person you would associate with that, I don’t think?

 You went to Barnard, right?

 I went to Barnard undergrad. I went to Columbia for grad school. We’re like a Barnard Columbia family through and through.

 Okay.

 Which I guess is also obnoxious. I mean, I [00:09:00] just come from a family. Like, we’re an immigrant family.

 Yes.

 So those things were so important to my family.

 Yes.

 You know?

 Immigrants from Iran.

 Immigrants from Iran. I’m Iranian. So I did this fellowship, and then I came back to New York, and I had my first executive job or management job-

 Mm-hmm.

 Is probably more correct. And I was working at this small place, and it was like the vanity project for like a very nice, rich Israeli billionaire. [laughs]

 Okay.

 I mean, I’m sure some people don’t think he’s very nice, because I don’t know how you become a billionaire-

 Mm-hmm.

 By being very nice, but who, you know, had just started this project and was paying us pretty good money and we had a lot of really cool people who were working with us, people I still keep in touch with and who’ve had amazing careers. That shop was called Vocative. It no longer exists.

Jessica Bennett: Right. I remember that.

 And-

 I was a… Wasn’t I a consultant there for like one second?

 I think you were. Yeah. Yeah.

 Yeah. I don’t know that 

Susie Banikarim: I can actually-

 You actually introduced me to the person who 

Jessica Bennett: hired me there.

 Okay. I don’t think I actually-

 [inaudible 00:09:51].

 Consulted on anything, but um-

 Yeah. [laughs]

 Or received a paycheck. Anyway.

Susie Banikarim: um, but so that was winding down. It became clear that he was [00:10:00] like-

 Yeah.

 “Oh, wait, you can’t make any money in media.”

 Nope.

 And I was like, “Could have told you that, but-“

 Yep.

 Thank you for keeping me employed for a few years. And I had a friend who was running the Shorenstein Center.

 Mm-hmm.

 At Harvard. [laughs] And I just love how many times I’ve had to say that word.

Jessica Bennett: Which is a media… Explain what that is.

Susie Banikarim: It’s like a media and politics policy center-

 Okay.

 That they have. And he approached me and asked if I was interested in doing a project.

 Okay.

 And initially I pitched an oral history, like a written oral history.

 Hm.

 Because we had been covering the Trump campaign kind of tangentially. Like, we were really focused on technology in that newsroom, so-

 Mm-hmm.

 We weren’t like a general politics shop.

 Yep.

 And we didn’t send someone out to cover it. And I just watched all these people I knew making really hard decisions about how to cover that campaign.

 Yeah.

 And I just did not think I would necessarily have done a better job. Like, it just seemed so hard to cover that campaign.

 Yeah.

 And know how to do it, because Trump just changed the playbook so much.

 Right.

 And people were constantly playing catch up. And I was just curious. It was in 2017.

 Mm-hmm.

 [00:11:00] And I was genuinely curious to just interview all these people I knew about what it felt like.

 Yep.

 To be in the eye of that storm. Because so many things happened every day during the Trump presidency.

 Yeah.

 That it was easy to like forget what had happened the week before.

 Right.

 And so, this friend of mine came back to me and said, “What if we made a film?” And so that’s how the documentary happened-

 Yeah.

 It was like very lucky, to be honest. Like, I feel really lucky to have had that opportunity and-

Jessica Bennett: And people can still watch it.

Susie Banikarim: Mm-hmm. So Enemies of the People on YouTube. And I think what’s sort of interesting about it is I did talk to people like Jeff Zucker and Jake Tapper and also like-

 Mm-hmm.

Jessica Bennett: Maggie Haberman.

Susie Banikarim: Maggie, yeah.

 Like lots of people who were covering it at the time for newspapers and for TV. And I think the thing that’s interesting is now we’re getting to another election.

 Yeah.

 And it feels like people are just making the same mistakes again.

 Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 And that has been really hard to watch, I have to say.

 That’s-

 People who were in the movie… [laughs]

 Yeah.

 Have said things where I’m like, “But you-“

 Now you’re doing that [00:12:00] again.

 “Are just doing the same thing.”

 Ugh.

 It’s very hard to watch. And so, I feel like maybe, um, it didn’t make as big a dent as I hoped it would. [laughs]

Jessica Bennett:  All right. So maybe you need a part two.

 [laughs]

 Or maybe we need to re-promote it a little bit and get people to watch it.

 Yeah.

 Let’s talk about how we met. So I was at Newsweek. And that was my first real job out of college. I had done like, as you did back then, a bunch of unpaid internships. I was working at a bar to actually pay my rent. And then I finally got hired at Newsweek, and I spent a number of years there. And then at a certain point, Newsweek, which then was like still a real magazine-

 A very important magazine.

 Respected magazine.

 Yeah, yeah.

 It had one time been my dream job. It got put up for [00:13:00] sale. It was put up for sale by the Washington Post company, which owned it, and it was sold to a 90 year old man named Sydney Harmon for one dollar plus debt.

 I remember that.

 And then he died.

 Right.

 And so, it was like, “Do we have jobs? Do we not have jobs?” And then Tina Brown came forward and was going to edit the magazine. And Tina Brown was running the Daily Beast. Had you worked at the Daily Beast at that point?

Susie Banikarim:  No.

 Okay.

 So what happened was I interviewed at the Daily Beast-

 Uh-huh.

 And then I turned in notice at ABC News, which is where I was at the time.

 Uh-huh.

 And by the time I started my job like a month later-

 [laughs]

 [inaudible 00:13:37].

Jessica Bennett: Okay. And so, it was always referred to as like this marriage of brands.

 Yeah.

 And all of the Newsweek reporters who had to add Daily Beast into their email addresses, so like I was [email protected], and then suddenly I was [email protected]. Try spelling that out to someone who needs to email you.

 Yeah.

 They’re like, “What in the hell is this?” We were like, “We hate this.”

Susie Banikarim: [00:14:00]  Yeah.

 [laughs]

 It was definitely like not a happy marriage.

Jessica Bennett:  It was not a happy marriage. But in my recollection, I don’t know, it was like a couple of weeks after this merger occurred. We were now all in the same office, and Tina Brown was putting on her Women in the World conference, which was this big event, live journalism event. It was at Lincoln Center, I think?

Susie Banikarim:  No. So the year we did it-

 Okay.

 Eventually it would be at Lincoln Center, but the year we did it it was at like some hotel in midtown called like The Millennium.

Jessica Bennett:  Oh, that’s right. Okay.

Susie Banikarim:  Like across from like a barbecue place.

Jessica Bennett:  And, well-

 [laughs]

 So I specifically remember being in like some sad, small hotel room where all the producers were. And it was absolute chaos.

 Chaos.

 Someone was crying, there were papers being thrown, someone had dropped out. I was being asked to produce the live journalism thing. Like, I didn’t know anything about production at that point.

 [laughs]

 And you were in there, and at one point, we didn’t know each other, and we just looked at each other, and we’re like, “What the fuck?”

 [laughs]

 Like, is this as crazy as it seems?

Susie Banikarim:  I just love that [00:15:00] your memory of this is us locking eyes-

 Yes.

 Across a crowded room.

 Totally.

 But it really is like a romantic moment.

Jessica Bennett:  Yes. And then I think we… Well, you might remember it differently, but then in my recollection, we left this room, and we’re like, “Do you want to get coffee?”

 [laughs] Yes.

 Can we talk about how insane this is?

Susie Banikarim: So the slight difference, I think that is kind of how I remember it, although I don’t have quite as romantic a moment. But what I remember is that I started, and literally I had to go to the Newsweek offices, which I had never seen.

 Okay.

 For my first day, to get my paperwork. And on my way up to get my paperwork, I was like in an elevator with two people who had just been laid off from the tech [inaudible 00:15:32].

 Oh, wow.

 Very-

 Dark.

 Intense. And I get there, and this guy introduces himself to me who would be Ramin Setoodeh, one of our close friends who is now the editor in chief of Variety, but at that time was your work husband.

 Mm-hmm.

 And a writer at Newsweek. And he was like, “Are you Iranian?” And we bonded over that.

 Okay.

 And then he was like, “Oh, are you going to Women in the World? You have to find Jess. She’ll make everything better.”

 [laughs]

 And I was like, “Okay.” And so, I do know that at some point we met, and I was like, “Oh, [00:16:00] you’re Jess.”

 Right.

 So like I was looking for you, but I don’t think you were looking for me.

Jessica Bennett:  Oh my god, but I didn’t know I was looking for you.

 

Susie Banikarim:  You didn’t  know. You didn’t know. But you were!

 Oh, wow.

 [laughs] This is so embarrassing for us. It’s like, get a room.

 [laughs]

 But also, I do remember getting there and being like, “Everyone is like crying and screaming.”

 Yes.

 It was a very, like-

 Screaming, crying, 

Jessica Bennett: like everything.

 Crazy atmosphere.

 Yes. Things being thrown.

 Yeah.

 Really, really wild.

Susie Banikarim:  But for some reason that conference just made everybody crazy.

Jessica Bennett:  It was true. It was like a pressure cooker. And all around it, people were being laid off. The magazine was… It was like, “Are we going to even print any more? What is going on? What is my job?” When I started there, I hit kind of the tail end of it in that, you know, we were still in the old building. It had this beautiful view of Central Park. I had my own office when I got a promotion. It had a view of the park. We had town car rides home-

Susie Banikarim: Yes.

Jessica Bennett: If you stayed past I think 7 PM. On Thursday nights there was this like beautiful catered dinner that would be-

Susie Banikarim:  Oh my god.

Jessica Bennett: Up on the 18th [00:17:00] floor with a view of the city, and it was like wine and ch- Whatever. Drinks. And-

Susie Banikarim:  I did not witness that.

 A three course meal, like foie gras. Like, whatever.

Susie Banikarim:  Yeah. I definitely did not get any of that.

Jessica Bennett: That got cut very quickly, but for a moment, it was really crazy. [laughs]

 Yeah. 

Susie Banikarim: It also, like at magazines, the editors used to have their own standing like town car-

 Yes.

 That would take them to and from-

 Yes.

 Their jobs and in TV, it was the same way. Like, the hosts and the executives all had cars waiting outside. Like now, they don’t do it that way.

 It’s just totally-

Jessica Bennett:  But  I feel like-

 I mean, yeah. That was the only office I will ever ha- The only private office I will ever have.

 Ever have, right?

 As I like sadly work from my bed now.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah. I mean, even when I like ran things, I didn’t have my own office. That’s just not the world we live in any more. So let’s talk a little bit about what we’re both doing.

Jessica Bennett:  The world we do live in now.

Susie Banikarim: We do live in now. We’re kind of where we are. So-

Jessica Bennett: Yeah. What are we doing now? I mean, we both work from home.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah.

Jessica Bennett: I have a dog.

 [laughs] Yes.

 And I’m sort of torn, as we’ve discussed, between my former ambitious self and wanting to be a [00:18:00] freelancer and do different things and this podcast is part of that. I’m just like kind of chill.

 Yeah, so it’s 

Susie Banikarim: interesting, because I always think of you as more ambitious than I am. I don’t think was 

Jessica Bennett: always true.

 It’s so funny, because you were like an executive.

 I know. [laughs]

 Like an actual executive.

 I know. 

Susie Banikarim: I know, it’s a really weird thing-

Jessica Bennett: I’m just like a writer.

Susie Banikarim: About me. I know, but like I feel like you have like ambitious goals and like things you want to do, and I feel like I kinda just rode this wave, you know?

 [laughs]

 Like I never had a plan. I just went from thing to thing. And hoped for the best. And sometimes it was the best, and sometimes it was the very worst. But I definitely feel like I have shifted and changed a lot. I mean, I think a lot of people say that about the pandemic-

 Mm-hmm.

 And I think the pandemic was part of it, but you know, I think also running news rooms in this media environment is really heartbreaking.

 Yeah.

 You know? It’s like-

Jessica Bennett: Your job is to cut and-

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, your job is to cut. And I’ve had to do layoffs almost every year of my career for the last like-

 Oof.

 I don’t know, five or six years. Maybe longer.

 Yeah.

 [00:19:00] So it is hard to imagine having the heart for that any more.

 Yeah. [inaudible 00:19:05].

 Which is why I’m doing other things. I work with The Meteor, which is also the executive producer of this show.

 Mm-hmm.

 Um, which is a company started by Cindi Lieve, who is a former editor of Glamour and it’s a gender equity media organization. I’m an editor at large there, and I’m doing this podcast. And I love this, because I feel like I’m actually doing something creative.

 Yeah.

 Like I’m actually trying to make something and it’s new and it’s challenging.

 Yeah.

 And it’s hard, which I, I like.

Jessica Bennett:  But you’re in it. I mean, I think we’ve talked about this before, but after being an editor for a number of years, I was just like, “I don’t want to be in management.”

 Right.

 Like that’s not, it’s not my skill set. That’s not what I want to do. I have a lot of problems of my own.

 [laughs]

 And solving other people’s problems is like not a thing that I love or am particularly good at.

 Yeah.

 But okay, so this, of course, led us both to this [00:20:00] 

Susie Banikarim: podcast.

Jessica Bennett:Let’s  talk about the podcast. I recall that I was in Palm Springs on vacation with a couple of friends, and we were in a marijuana shop, as you do.

 [laughs]

 And I got a call.

 As one would be, in California.

 As one would be. Although now New York also. Um-

 But not as good.

 Not… True.

 [laughs]

 And, and not at that time. And my friend Susie called, and I was in the check out line. [laughs]

 [laughs]

 And you were like, “Hey, I’ve been talking about this idea, and you know, you’ve done all of these stories about taking characters in the present and looking at the way that we talked about them and framed them in the past. And I was thinking it could be really interesting to look at specific pop culture moments from the past, and what if we called it In Retrospect?”

 [laughs]

 [00:21:00] And I said, “Oh my god. That’s the perfect name for this thing that I’ve been kind of trying to articulate-“

 [inaudible 00:21:08] yeah.

 It had been swirling around and I’ve been really interested in. And I had just been in the car with this friend that I was in Palm Springs with, where a song came on the radio, and she said, “Oh my god, do you know this song?” And I was like, “No, I don’t know what this is.” And she’s like, “This is the like disco song that was playing in the background when Luke raped Laura on General Hospital.”

 Oh my god.

 And you, when you called me, were like, “I was talking to Cindi about it, and we thought that Luke and Laura on General Hospital who ultimately get married. But what most people forget is that actually he originally raped her. That’s how the relationship began. Could be an interesting first episode.” And so, it was sort of like all of these things came toge- You know.

 Yeah.

 The weed shop, my gummies, you on the phone, Luke and Laura-

 [laughs]

 The disco track.

Susie Banikarim:  It’s like another moment of fate that brought us together.

Jessica Bennett: Exactly.

Susie Banikarim:  Yeah. I think the thing is is that I really wanted to do this with you because [00:22:00] I felt like you bring something that I just do not bring to this, which is like a much more intellectual point of view.

Jessica Bennett: Oh, thank you.

Susie Banikarim: To be honest, like, you know me. I like love Bravo and the Real Housewives.

 Mm-hmm.

 And I watch Hallmark movies.

 Mm-hmm.

 Don’t tell anyone.

 [laughs]

 I have like a very low sensibility, and also, you know, I like some other things, but I’m definitely not as deeply embedded in sort of the intellectual space-

 [laughs]

 That we are going to occupy. And I also feel like, you know, there was this thing that we really both embraced about it, which is, it’s not just important to look at what happened to these women, although that’s really important. But it’s also important to sort of turn that lens around and be like, “What did we learn?”

 Yeah.

 As girls, and women. Growing up and seeing-

Jessica Bennett: Consuming these things.

Susie Banikarim: Yeah, consuming these things, seeing what happened to people, and kind of what messages it told us about how we were supposed to operate in the world.

 Mm-hmm.

 And what it meant if [00:23:00] we struggled in any of these various ways.

 Mm-hmm.

 And like, what that said about us. So I really love that we’re getting to do this together. It really… I sound so cheesy, but it’s true. And it’s really hard for me to say nice things, so-

 [laughs]

 Just like don’t expect this a lot, 

Jessica Bennett: but-

 Which is one of the things I love. I mean, I think one of the reasons we are friends and this works for us is that we’re both pretty blunt.

 Yeah.

 Like, we say it how it is. I grew up in Seattle, which is like the most passive aggressive place imaginable.

 [laughs] I can’t imagine.

 You can’t even honk at someone without it being seen as like a major affront, so-

 An aggression.

 I feel so refreshed by people who will just state the thing. And I think we both want to do that.

 Yeah, we’re both like that.

 While at the same time wanting to like leave some room for gray area and not just take all of these moments and pop culture things and subjects that happened in the past and proclaim them “problematic”-

 Yeah.

 And thus forward, nobody [00:24:00] shall enjoy them ever again. Like it’s not-

 Yeah.

 That simple.

Susie Banikarim:  It’s not, and I think also I’m very much a product of the pop culture I consumed.

 Yes.

 And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

 Yeah.

 You know? Like I’m sure there are some messages I internalized that… Well I know there are some messages I internalized that I shouldn’t have, but on the other hand, like I was an immigrant girl from Iran. I came to this country when I was four. It’s a lot of how I learned what it meant to be an American.

 Yeah.

 Like if I had not had that, I would have been even more confused than I already was.

 Yeah.

 Like we went from Iran to Paris, and then to this very suburban town in California in the East Bay of San Francisco.

 Mm-hmm.

 And I definitely was not the norm. You know?

 Yeah.

 So that’s like how I kinda learned about the world around me. So it’s complicated, our relationship with these things. Like, you can love something like Bravo-

 Mm-hmm.

 But also understand the ways that it’s not always been great.

 Yeah.

 And maybe is not great, although I will die on the hill that I think Bravo is a women’s workplace drama. And that we should respect it-

Jessica Bennett: Oh.

Susie Banikarim: As [00:25:00] such.

Jessica Bennett: Okay, well, we should unpack that.

Susie Banikarim: We shall, we shall-

 [inaudible 00:25:03].

 Unpack that eventually.

Jessica Bennett: And I think that’s really what we want to do here. Every week, we will take a cultural moment, whether it’s a news headline that we remember from the time, or an episode of Dawson’s Creek.

 Yeah.

 Which I grew up on, or some word that was catapulted into the Zeitgeist. And we will unravel what was happening at the time, the cultural context, and how we interpreted it and internalized it and what repercussions or impact that has, if any, on where we are today.

Susie Banikarim: So we would love it if you went on this journey with us.

Jessica Bennett: Susie, you’re so cheesy, but I agree.

Susie Banikarim: [laughs] 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 at Inretropod.

 If you love this 

Jessica Bennett: podcast, please [00:26:00] 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 at Jessica Bennett, and at Susie B. NYC. Also, check out Jessica’s books: Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

 In 

Jessica Bennett: Retrospect is a production of I Heart Podcasts and The Meteor. Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clemence is our engineer and sound designer. Shiran Atsia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim: Our executive producer from The Meteor is Cindi Lieve. Our executive producers from I Heart are Anna Stumpf, and Katrina Norbell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Additional editing help from Mary Dooe and Mike Coscarelli. Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim-

Jessica Bennett: And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out Inretropod.com. See you next week.[00:27:00]