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Speaker 1: Quick trigger warning. This episode contains descriptions of eating disorders

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Speaker 1: and themes surrounding them. Picture this. It's December two. Aladdin

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Speaker 1: is at the top of the box office, closely followed

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Speaker 1: by one of our most predatory presidents having a cameo

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Speaker 1: in home alone to one of our other most predatory presidents.

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Speaker 1: And that's really saying something had just been voted into

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Speaker 1: office and was preparing to take over from a bland, loser,

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Speaker 1: warmongering president whose garbage son would also be president on

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Speaker 1: the strength of nepotism alone and would later rebrand as

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Speaker 1: the world's most terrible artist. And in December nine two, Kathy,

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Speaker 1: the comic strip character was on the cover of a magazine.

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Speaker 1: I hear your question, which magazine? No Cosmo wasn't brave enough.

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Speaker 1: Kathy appeared on the cover of Wait Watchers magazine, wearing green,

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Speaker 1: red and gold for the season, declaring happy Holidays, Meet

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Speaker 1: the real Kathy and inside this issue we do The

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Speaker 1: piece by R. G. Marzuli reads as follows the cartoon.

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Speaker 1: Cathy's weight struggles and battles with the scale are legend,

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Speaker 1: so it was only natural for her to team up

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Speaker 1: with Weight Watchers. Her impish image, Grace's posters and brochures

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Speaker 1: and outwork meeting locations around the country, giving women a

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Speaker 1: chuckle as well as the reassured knowledge that they are

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Speaker 1: certainly not alone. Cathy's problem with her weight comes up

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Speaker 1: a lot because the general issue of self image is

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Speaker 1: a huge part of the strip. Guys White explains, it's

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Speaker 1: central to every woman's existence, even if we don't want

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Speaker 1: to say that it is. We live in a world

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Speaker 1: we're expected to look a certain way and where the

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Speaker 1: role models of perfection are astoundingly hard to achieve. In

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Speaker 1: our own way. We all struggle to be what the

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Speaker 1: world expects a woman to be. So this article was

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Speaker 1: more than just a spotlight on the Kathy character, whose

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Speaker 1: popularity had steadily risen during the years of feminist backlash

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Speaker 1: in the eighties. This article was a part of a

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Speaker 1: sponsorship deal. In the early nineties, Kathy appeared on number

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Speaker 1: of Weight Watchers posters, pins, and promotions. Also included in

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Speaker 1: these promotions were Mr Pinkley and Irving, complete with a

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Speaker 1: caption contest to win two tickets on a Caribbean cruise.

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Speaker 1: It was the nineties. You wouldn't understand, that's right, Kathy,

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Speaker 1: I wouldn't understand the nineties because I'm young and full

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Speaker 1: of life. But it's no surprise that the Kathy character

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Speaker 1: would become the literal poster child for a company whose

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Speaker 1: brand relied on regular people, mostly women, who were struggling

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Speaker 1: with their body image. After all, this had been the

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Speaker 1: Comic Strips brand for over fifteen years, and it's where

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Speaker 1: we hear the most persistent criticisms of Kathy. Some of

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Speaker 1: her crueler critics asked why she could never successfully lose weight,

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Speaker 1: and others disliked that she was so fixated on it.

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Speaker 1: Some got bored by Cathy's continual frustration with her own

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Speaker 1: reflection in a bathing suit, while others thought that her

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Speaker 1: annoyance with the changing fashion trends was whiny and repetitive.

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Speaker 1: They're lucky I wasn't a want to wear those hideous

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Speaker 1: clothes from the Instagram targeted ads. You know, I got that.

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Speaker 1: You're right, those are very upsetting, and I will grant

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Speaker 1: you that. But what was Kathy guys White really saying

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Speaker 1: about diet culture in her work and as promoting the

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Speaker 1: diet culture surrounding Weight Watchers magazine changed the message? Also,

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Speaker 1: who the funk won? That caption contest and was the

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Speaker 1: cruise fund. In today's episode, we're looking at the Kathy

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Speaker 1: body image complex. So let's get music. She passed into

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Speaker 1: the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at what, She's

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Speaker 1: out on dates, and she don't lack politics, from mama

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Speaker 1: and urban to feminist friends. And she's fighting all the

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Speaker 1: stands it with chocolate and hand Cathy. She's fighting back.

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Speaker 1: She stressed with success. Let's snack Cathy, Cathy, fun Cathy.

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Speaker 1: She's gotta luck go in all. The Kathy and Weight

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Speaker 1: Watchers collaboration was short lived, but touches on something we've

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Speaker 1: come up against quite a bit in this series. If

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Speaker 1: you scan eBay for remaining Cathy merchandise, you'll see more

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Speaker 1: of the stereotype of the character that Guys White created,

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Speaker 1: monetized and perpetuated. She can't lose weight, she's addicted to shopping.

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Speaker 1: She and her mom have an intense relationship, and on

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Speaker 1: and on and on the other side of that equation

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Speaker 1: is the actual material this merchandise was based on, which,

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Speaker 1: as well discussed today, contained far more nuanced and specific commentary.

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Speaker 1: You might remember from episode two, I asked Kathy, Guys

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Speaker 1: White about this period of intense merchandizing of her strip

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Speaker 1: in December ninety two when this magazine came out. Guys,

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Speaker 1: why it would have been writing the daily strip, raising

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Speaker 1: an infant as a single parent, and running an entire

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Speaker 1: merchandising company. In retrospect, she did have some regrets about

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Speaker 1: this time. Here's what she said, Well, the two big

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Speaker 1: licensing forces were Charles Schultz, who had, of course the

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Speaker 1: licensing empire, and Jim Davis, who created Garfield, and he

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Speaker 1: had a licensing empire. And I saw no reason why

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Speaker 1: a female cartoonist couldn't have a licensing empire, especially because

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Speaker 1: you know, we love to shop. Women loved the shop

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Speaker 1: and there we go. So that that was my plan.

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Speaker 1: My plan was to have my my female based licensing empire.

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Speaker 1: So that did not work out as planned, But I

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Speaker 1: spent decades trying to make a work. I mean, it's

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Speaker 1: from from where I was sitting. It felt like when

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Speaker 1: I was growing up, like Kathy was omnipotent. I yeah,

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Speaker 1: it was. That was hard at yeah, it just was

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Speaker 1: a lot. I mean I eventually had to have an

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Speaker 1: office full of people who worked also worked on the

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Speaker 1: licensing who were dead sales and marketing and all of

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Speaker 1: that eventually had to have some people helped draw the merchandise.

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Speaker 1: Uh oh boy, there's so much of that I would

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Speaker 1: not have done if I had it to do over again,

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Speaker 1: because a lot of it in in a lot of

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Speaker 1: that and a lot of like the pursuing, the greed

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Speaker 1: and glory of having my licensing empire, and a lot

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Speaker 1: of it I lost, like the like the essence of

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Speaker 1: Kathy and the heart and soul of Kathy, like my favorite,

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Speaker 1: my favorite of all the billion greeting cards we did,

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Speaker 1: my very favorite ones still are the ones I drew myself.

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Speaker 1: But I would need to agree to stuff just to like,

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Speaker 1: agreed to deals or endorsements, who uh is to fund

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Speaker 1: the office, And then it was kind of got into

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Speaker 1: that cycle. So, I mean, just as a business person,

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Speaker 1: I learned a lot about I learned a lot by doing,

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Speaker 1: you know, by making all the blunders that people make,

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Speaker 1: which is you know, getting a little bit getting too

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Speaker 1: big and not you know, and kind of losing touch

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Speaker 1: with what was good. But at the time, Jamie, I mean,

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Speaker 1: I was fueled by a woman's possibility to do everything.

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Speaker 1: So at the in the you know, in the nineties,

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Speaker 1: when the licensing was had gotten really big and we

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Speaker 1: were just built this this whole other office just got

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Speaker 1: designed for us to move into, and the comptrip was

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Speaker 1: doing great. That's and I had, I mean six waking

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Speaker 1: hours six six seconds you know, per day, where I

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Speaker 1: wasn't just completely overwhelmed. That's when it occurred to me

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Speaker 1: that I should adopt a baby. So it's pretty safe

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Speaker 1: to say that with this in mind, the Weight Watchers

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Speaker 1: sponsorship was more or less a cashion and that's absolutely

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Speaker 1: up for criticism on guys White and her company's part.

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Speaker 1: After all, the comic regularly indicated that diet culture was

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Speaker 1: prohibitively expensive and didn't work, and so for the Kathy

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Speaker 1: character to have actually endorsed a weight loss method as

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Speaker 1: something that works may have been surprising to longtime readers.

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Speaker 1: But American dieting culture far predated the Cathy and Weight

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Speaker 1: Watchers collab. Its legacy is baked right into the colonial

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Speaker 1: dumpster fire that is the American experiment. Let's go back

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Speaker 1: to that Weight Watcher's article really quick. In light of

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Speaker 1: Cathy's ongoing weight problems, guys White has her own personal

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Speaker 1: experience to draw from. At five one, she was once

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Speaker 1: more than fifty pounds overweight. She maintains her weight loss

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Speaker 1: through the skills she learned at weight watchers. Weight Watchers

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Speaker 1: showed me the whole concept of being able eat normal

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Speaker 1: food and proper portion sizes. It gave me a foundation

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Speaker 1: for living in a world filled with food. In the strip,

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Speaker 1: Cathy's weight problems stem from her love hate relationship with

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Speaker 1: food and the temptation to use it for all the

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Speaker 1: wrong purposes. Although she's been a student of the physical

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Speaker 1: fitness slash health movement for years, Cathy will succumb to

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Speaker 1: a cheesecake were a box of donuts. We all like

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Speaker 1: to think we're above those struggles, but most of us

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Speaker 1: begin or end every day of our lives with a

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Speaker 1: little food fight of our own. Guys White says, Cathy

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Speaker 1: is honest about those real personal moments that may not

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Speaker 1: be that cool to talk to people about. So it's

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Speaker 1: with this kind of aggressive merchandizing in the brief burst

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Speaker 1: of diet endorsements that a little bit of hypocrisy leaks through,

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Speaker 1: something that Guys White seems to understand pretty clearly today.

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Speaker 1: Why endorse a diet company when your work is about

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Speaker 1: how diets target and fail women. Some would argue hope

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Speaker 1: that Kathy character has no shortage of that when it

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Speaker 1: comes to modifying her body to meet the standards of

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Speaker 1: the day, but in practice, it's more likely, like guys

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Speaker 1: White said, that she made that choice to continue to

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Speaker 1: make enough money to keep her merchandizing company afloat. So

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Speaker 1: I want to pick apart what is exactly going on

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Speaker 1: with this predatory diet culture. The article mentions things like overweight,

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Speaker 1: proper portion sizes, normal food, and while these phrases are

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Speaker 1: very normalized and intuitive, I was curious what their origin

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Speaker 1: really was. Honestly, I have been dreading writing and recording

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Speaker 1: this episode because if there's one thing I hate talking about,

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Speaker 1: it is about my relationship with food and disordered eating.

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Speaker 1: And in a way, I kind of feel like a

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Speaker 1: hypocrite even like attempting this discussion, because so far in

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Speaker 1: my life, no matter how much information I learned, how

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Speaker 1: much empirically true evidence that exists that the way that

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Speaker 1: we are trained to see ourselves is rooted in dangerous bullshit,

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Speaker 1: I'm still nowhere close to deprogramming, shaking whatever, ring myself

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Speaker 1: from it. Failing. It's a vortex. So you're saying, I'm right.

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Speaker 1: We'll put a pin in that. And the more I

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Speaker 1: think about this frustration, this failure to like my own body,

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Speaker 1: and the deeply ingrained belief that women's bodies require this

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Speaker 1: constant maintenance, observation, improvement, the more I start to feel like,

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Speaker 1: and I'm looking at you, Kathy Comic. I mean, it's

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Speaker 1: not that bad. You're right, I'm protecting. So this isn't

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Speaker 1: a full history of diet culture, but I tried to

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Speaker 1: put together a crash course because maybe you need to

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Speaker 1: hear some of this the same way that I did.

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Speaker 1: The Cathy character's tendency to get frustrated with her body

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Speaker 1: and the expectations being forced on it take up as

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Speaker 1: much real estate in the history of the comic as

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Speaker 1: her relationship and workplace problems, if not more. It's one

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Speaker 1: of the themes that's most popularly associated and criticized about her.

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Speaker 1: For many people, the first association of a Kathy comic

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Speaker 1: is Kathy looking in the mirror at a department store

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Speaker 1: because she doesn't think she looks right. She thinks that

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Speaker 1: she's fat and feels that to be fat is to

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Speaker 1: be bad. Because the fashion trend of the moment, whether

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Speaker 1: it's nineteen seventy six, when the comics started, or when

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Speaker 1: it ended catered to real thin women and not actual bodies.

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Speaker 1: Here's one of my favorites on this subject from the

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Speaker 1: late nineteen nineties. Kathy is reading a magazine while working

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Speaker 1: out on her home elliptical machine in sweatpants. In the

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Speaker 1: past ten years, the amount of money spent on diet

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Speaker 1: programs has doubled to thirty five billion a year. In

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Speaker 1: the exact same tenure period, adult Americans have gained an

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Speaker 1: average of eight pounds eight Kathy looks stressed and gets

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Speaker 1: off the elliptical. The more money we spend on dieting,

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Speaker 1: the more weight we gain. The more weight we gain,

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Speaker 1: the more money we spend on dieting. In the final panel,

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Speaker 1: Kathy lies flat on her couch with the magazine covering

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Speaker 1: her face. She is defeated. When I speak of the millennium,

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Speaker 1: they're referring to the future span of our waistline, and

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Speaker 1: Kathy is using authentic statistics of the day for American

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Speaker 1: dieters here. While people loved to make fun of the

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Speaker 1: character for feeling, strips like this reveal that the system

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Speaker 1: was rigged to begin with So we've got to take

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Speaker 1: a look at that system with a brief, admittedly incomplete

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Speaker 1: history of how diet culture has affected American women and

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Speaker 1: not just the middle class working women that Kathy tends

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Speaker 1: to comment on. Again, this is a crash course, So

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Speaker 1: I quickly would like to shout out the three sources

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Speaker 1: I used most often in putting this episode together. Those

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Speaker 1: were Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings, This is

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Speaker 1: Big by Marissa Metzer, and the amazing Maintenance Phase podcast

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Speaker 1: from Audrey Gordon and Michael Hopps, And it is with

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Speaker 1: their sage guidance that I bring you back to ancient Greece. Seriously, Keathy,

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Speaker 1: I know you read like every book on personal health

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Speaker 1: from the nineteen seventies to the two thousand's, but you

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Speaker 1: need to like give me a chance, let the process work. Okay,

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Speaker 1: ancient grace, goodbye. She's not wrong, but bear with me

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Speaker 1: for a second, because the way we look at women's

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Speaker 1: bodies goes way back throughout history. A full female figure

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Speaker 1: has been the feminine ideal. But as time goes on,

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Speaker 1: that ideal, which is almost always formed by white men,

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Speaker 1: becomes slimmer and slimmer. But we're starting in ancient Greece,

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Speaker 1: because that is where the classical Venus figure comes from.

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Speaker 1: Maybe you can picture the statue that I'm talking about. Alread.

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Speaker 1: She's nude, she's covering one nipple and her pubic area.

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Speaker 1: She doesn't have a twentieth century supermodel body. She has

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Speaker 1: a body. She has meat on her arms and her

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Speaker 1: legs and her stomach. The statue, which was originally made

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Speaker 1: in the first century BC, came to prominence in the

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Speaker 1: modern sense in the sixteen hundreds when it was displayed

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Speaker 1: at the Via Medici in Rome, a property that was

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Speaker 1: run by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and overtime, this

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Speaker 1: statue became an icon, and the physical figure of Venus

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Speaker 1: was considered to be the ideal feminine form in Western

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Speaker 1: European culture, around a time where Western Europe was aggressively

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Speaker 1: colonizing around the world. This meant, among other things, that

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Speaker 1: this image of Venus was perpetuated across the globe very quickly,

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Speaker 1: and women from around the world with different skin tones, builds,

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Speaker 1: ages were compared against her this fictional statue. The book

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Speaker 1: Hearing the Black Body does an excellent job of unpacking

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Speaker 1: how these prominent standards of beauty were almost always created

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Speaker 1: and standardized like this. They were made up by white men.

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Speaker 1: They were enforced on white women to display white women

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Speaker 1: as the peak of femininity and to other non white women.

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Speaker 1: I'm going to let this book's incredible research and attention

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Speaker 1: to detail kind of guide us through this period in

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Speaker 1: history up until the second wave of feminism, where Kathy's

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Speaker 1: story begins. Author Zabrina Strings unpacks the Venus de Medici's

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Speaker 1: legacy and its role in establishing the ideal female form.

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Speaker 1: In Fearing the black body, she says this Venetian voluptuous

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Speaker 1: nous was united by the notion that beauty was found

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Speaker 1: in proportionality and that fleshiness was pleasing to the eye.

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Speaker 1: Strings also describes the absence of non white women in

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Speaker 1: popular European art during this time, with a few exceptions.

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Speaker 1: One of these exceptions was a seventeenth century sculpture, and

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Speaker 1: seventeenth century means that it's from the sixteen hundreds. That

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Speaker 1: has never not been confusing to me. So if you

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Speaker 1: knew that you're smarter than me, If you didn't, there

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Speaker 1: you go. A seventeenth century sculpture called the African Venus,

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Speaker 1: whose sculpture has been disputed over the years, but is

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Speaker 1: currently thought to be a Dutch guy named Johann Gregor

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Speaker 1: vander schardt vander Shart, vander Shart, It's very serious. He's

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Speaker 1: a serious letting an artist in his last name is

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Speaker 1: vander Shart. The statue looks very similar to the Venus

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Speaker 1: de Medici, but instead depicts a black woman's body. And

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Speaker 1: while the Venus de medici, a white woman is seen

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Speaker 1: looking away from her own body demurely, the African venus

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Speaker 1: holds a hand mirror where she views her own image.

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Speaker 1: And this is just one example of what I'd really

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Speaker 1: like to stress here, and that is that the way

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Speaker 1: we view bodies, particularly women's bodies, is very closely tied

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Speaker 1: to imperialism from every angle. To say that it's just

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Speaker 1: patriarchy is overly simplest stick because there's a lot of

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Speaker 1: factors at play here. There are differences in how women's

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Speaker 1: bodies are treated and viewed by race, by country of origin,

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Speaker 1: by time period, by build, and by trends of the day.

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Speaker 1: Basically all of these attitudes were shaped and enforced by

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Speaker 1: men of European and later American origin. Strings says this

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Speaker 1: of the African Venus's legacy. In a prelude to ideas

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Speaker 1: about Africans that would be developed over the next several centuries,

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Speaker 1: the African venus is lacking in shame, whereas the European

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Speaker 1: eyed venus putica covers her pubis and breasts. The African

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Speaker 1: venus is mesmerized by her own beauty as she gazes

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Speaker 1: wistfully at her own reflection. At this time, women's bodies

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Speaker 1: were viewed as property in many ways. This could be

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Speaker 1: through marriage or, as was the case for many African women,

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Speaker 1: actual enslavement by white people, and these body standards rarely,

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Speaker 1: if ever, have anything to do with health and sometimes

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Speaker 1: be directly harmful to health. At certain points in history,

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Speaker 1: women with fuller figures would be an indication that their

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Speaker 1: husbands could afford rich foods, and at other times, more

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Speaker 1: slender women that her husband restricted the intake of food

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Speaker 1: and drink in order to bring his family closer to God.

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Speaker 1: This constant recalibration and optimization of white women's bodies and

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Speaker 1: the mothering of non white women's bodies is a constant trend,

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Speaker 1: as was the European male tendency to only call black

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Speaker 1: and brown women beautiful when they had features that resembled

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Speaker 1: white European women. Women with bigger figures were celebrated in

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Speaker 1: a way that directly opposed with body standards imposed on men.

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Speaker 1: Fatness in men was thought to represent a lack of

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Speaker 1: self control and thinness, as Sabrina Strings put that represented

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Speaker 1: quote bodily proof of rationality and intelligence unquote. Okay, We're

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Speaker 1: going to fast forward a bit to a late Renaissance

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Speaker 1: flam artist named Peter Paul Rubens, who became very famous

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Speaker 1: for painting nudes of curvy white ladies lining up with

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Speaker 1: the voluptuous aesthetic popular at the time. To this day,

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Speaker 1: you still might hear women referred to as ruben esque

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Speaker 1: by a creepy uncle or a bad writer. Rubens himself

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Speaker 1: was extremely fixated on how he felt women should look,

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Speaker 1: to the extent that he wrote a long treatise on

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Speaker 1: what he considered to constitute beauty and ideal proportionality. He

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Speaker 1: included a whole chapter on looks that he thought were

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Speaker 1: specifically hot. Nothing weird going on here, Rubens says this.

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Speaker 1: The body must not be too thin or too skinny,

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Speaker 1: nor too large or too fat, but with a moderate

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Speaker 1: embondment following the model of the antique statues. The hip

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Speaker 1: or the tops of the thighs, and the thighs themselves

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Speaker 1: should be large and apple. The botics should be round

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Speaker 1: and fleshy, the knees should be fleshy and round. As

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Speaker 1: if anyone asked, that's what I'm saying, What the fuck so?

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Speaker 1: Rubens paintings ordinarily featured nude white women, and he would

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Speaker 1: sometimes feature black women in the portrait as a servant

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Speaker 1: or slave wearing clothing, as he did in paintings like Bath,

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Speaker 1: Shabbah and Venus in front of the Mirror. This, regretfully,

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Speaker 1: would have lined up with Ruben's life. He was living

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Speaker 1: in Antwerp, Belgium, a hub of imperialism and slave trade

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Speaker 1: during that time. In paintings like these, black women were

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Speaker 1: explicitly mothered and portrayed as inferior, while white women were

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Speaker 1: told by Ruben's images how to look in order to

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Speaker 1: be valuable to society. Sabrina Strings puts it like this.

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Speaker 1: In other words, whiteness stood not just for social supremacy,

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Speaker 1: but general superiority. This body standard held pretty firmly for

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Speaker 1: some time, but things began to shift by the late

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Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds and into the eighteen hundreds, and it was

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Speaker 1: during this time that European colonists continued an increasing rate

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Speaker 1: to wreak havoc and force white supremacy on a large

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Speaker 1: portion of the planet. There are very few countries that

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Speaker 1: have gone untouched by the imperialism of this era, and

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Speaker 1: in the case of many cultures, including indigenous Americans and

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Speaker 1: a steep increase in the forced enslavement of African people,

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Speaker 1: entire cultures were massacred and attempted to be erased entirely

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Speaker 1: in favor of European ideals and culture. And it was

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Speaker 1: during this time that the bodies of non white women

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Speaker 1: were further othered, and at times explicitly mothered by being

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Speaker 1: linked with fatness. A popular example of this lies in

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Speaker 1: the story of Sarah Bartman, a South African quake Koi

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Speaker 1: woman who became known by the cruel nickname of the

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Speaker 1: Hot and taught Venus while living in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Speaker 1: Bartman was brought to the UK by a Scottish military

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Speaker 1: surgeon to display her body as an exhibit, but the

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Speaker 1: more accurate term, based on how her image and body

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Speaker 1: was monetized, is more like a circus. Many details of

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Speaker 1: Bartman's life are unknown, and it's not clear whether she

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Speaker 1: went to the UK in eighteen ten voluntarily or not.

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Speaker 1: What is known she was toured across Europe because her

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Speaker 1: body looked different than European women, and she was marketed

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Speaker 1: with intense grotesque fixation put on her buttocks. White lookers

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Speaker 1: on could pay to poke and prod at her, and

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Speaker 1: Bartman was later brought to France and effectively enslaved while

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Speaker 1: being put on display before she died at forty of

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Speaker 1: unknown causes, many of said smallpox. There is a lot

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Speaker 1: more to discuss here about Sarah Bartman's life and much

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Speaker 1: that isn't known about it. Her legacy and her image,

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Speaker 1: which was generally illustrated, exaggerated, and disseminated by Europeans, is

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Speaker 1: historically connected to how black women's bodies are mothered, and

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Speaker 1: this is something that Saberena Strings sites to demonstrate that

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Speaker 1: as European beauty standards shifted to encourage white women to

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Speaker 1: become thinner, non white women were mothered in order to

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Speaker 1: show white women how not to be. Strings says this,

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Speaker 1: whether fact or fiction. The purported size of her bottom

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Speaker 1: and tandem with her presumed general rotundity placed Sarah beyond

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Speaker 1: the pale of fair skinned European norms of beauty. Racial

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Speaker 1: theories had linked fatness to blackness in the European imagination,

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Speaker 1: and they had also linked thinness to whiteness. I'll be

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Speaker 1: linking tomorrow about Sarah Bartman's life in the episode description.

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Speaker 1: As the eighteen hundreds continued, body standards began to shift,

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Speaker 1: Europeans across gender lines were encouraged to eat and drink

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Speaker 1: less to demonstrate their class, with a lot of pop

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Speaker 1: culture at the time reinforcing that fatness was linked with

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Speaker 1: African women, specifically during a time where race science became

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Speaker 1: a prominent and deeply harmful component of the European imperialist equation. Here,

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Speaker 1: according to Strings, is how it worked. Englishmen were seen

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Speaker 1: as arbiters of taste or those capable of creating the

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Speaker 1: guidelines for judging beauty. English women were treated as its representatives.

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Speaker 1: As the eighteen hundreds were on, thin white women gradually

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Speaker 1: became a symbol of not just white supremacy, but of

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Speaker 1: divine morality and closeness to God. And it's with this

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Speaker 1: mentality taking hold across the imperial world that early diet

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Speaker 1: culture began to rear its head. The idea of food

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Speaker 1: and drink restriction to force thinness was also originally tied

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Speaker 1: to Christianity, and it was this that motivated an early

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Speaker 1: unwitting diet guru named George Chain. Chain was a Scottish

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Speaker 1: born physician whose invention of a diet of milk, seeds,

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Speaker 1: and fruits not just helped him lose weight, but became

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Speaker 1: a lucrative diet among aristocratic women of the day. This

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Speaker 1: launched him into a prominent and comfortable life, even though

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Speaker 1: he was at the time deeply annoyed that women seemed

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Speaker 1: to be more drawn to his work than men. Boo who.

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Speaker 1: Here's a short history of diets in the eighteen hundreds,

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Speaker 1: all invented by European men. I know I'm being overly

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Speaker 1: cautious here, but I'm not endorsing these. Please don't do these.

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Speaker 1: Let's get some music going. The avoiding Swamps diet, which

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Speaker 1: claimed that living near a swamp caused obesity. Someone alert

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Speaker 1: Shrek and Donkey to this one. What are you doing

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Speaker 1: in my swamp? There was the Fletcherism diet, which instructed

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Speaker 1: that people chew food until it turned to liquid to

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Speaker 1: fool the body into thinking it was full. There was

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Speaker 1: the vinegar and water diet as pushed by Lord Byron,

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Speaker 1: the tapeworm diet which yep, and the first popularized low

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Speaker 1: carb diet by a British undertaker in William Banton. He

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Speaker 1: published one of the first ever popular diet book called

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Speaker 1: A Letter on Corpulence. Let's cut the music. Pushers of

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Speaker 1: fad diets have long targeted women specifically and are often

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Speaker 1: exposed to be total scammers, But their scammers with a

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Speaker 1: very consistent goal to make money and gain notoriety by

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00:27:18,760 --> 00:27:22,359
Speaker 1: encouraging women to alter their habits and bodies under the

428
00:27:22,359 --> 00:27:25,960
Speaker 1: assumption that it will make them healthier and more desirable

429
00:27:26,040 --> 00:27:30,560
Speaker 1: by society. Some of these diets simply supplemented less healthy

430
00:27:30,640 --> 00:27:34,560
Speaker 1: foods with more healthy foods, while others relied on dangerous

431
00:27:34,600 --> 00:27:39,200
Speaker 1: gimmicks or modified disordered eating. Diet Pills also started cropping

432
00:27:39,240 --> 00:27:41,760
Speaker 1: up in the late eighteen hundreds, which both did not

433
00:27:41,880 --> 00:27:46,760
Speaker 1: work and caused severe damage to users bodies. Another very

434
00:27:46,800 --> 00:27:50,800
Speaker 1: effective tool for enforcing these body standards goes back to

435
00:27:50,960 --> 00:27:55,040
Speaker 1: where we started in this episode. At mass distributed magazines

436
00:27:55,240 --> 00:27:59,840
Speaker 1: primarily directed at white girls and women, Sabrina Strings credits

437
00:27:59,840 --> 00:28:04,040
Speaker 1: and magazine called Goodie's Lady Book as an early pusher

438
00:28:04,160 --> 00:28:07,280
Speaker 1: of body norms in mass media. It was published from

439
00:28:07,359 --> 00:28:10,679
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty to eighteen seventy eight in Philadelphia and was

440
00:28:10,840 --> 00:28:13,400
Speaker 1: edited by a woman for forty years of its run,

441
00:28:13,680 --> 00:28:17,479
Speaker 1: a writer named Sarah Joseph Hale. But as people with

442
00:28:17,760 --> 00:28:20,320
Speaker 1: big old brains like you and me, No, you and

443
00:28:20,400 --> 00:28:24,000
Speaker 1: I the smartest people to ever live, a woman's involvement

444
00:28:24,080 --> 00:28:28,200
Speaker 1: in something does not mean that that's something is holy

445
00:28:28,320 --> 00:28:32,199
Speaker 1: pro women. Because while Sarah Joseph Hale did do some

446
00:28:32,320 --> 00:28:36,359
Speaker 1: cool stuff, including spotlighting women in the workforce as early

447
00:28:36,400 --> 00:28:40,040
Speaker 1: as the eighteen fifties, and hired first wave feminist Sarah

448
00:28:40,120 --> 00:28:44,040
Speaker 1: Jane Lippincott as an assistant editor before she was fired

449
00:28:44,080 --> 00:28:48,120
Speaker 1: by GODI for denouncing slavery in the magazine. But Sarah

450
00:28:48,200 --> 00:28:51,240
Speaker 1: Joseph Hale, as Sabrina Strings tells us, in Fearing the

451
00:28:51,240 --> 00:28:54,840
Speaker 1: Black Body, wanted to push the narrative of women as

452
00:28:54,920 --> 00:29:00,760
Speaker 1: more than housewives by reinforcing temperance, morality, and food restriction.

453
00:29:15,320 --> 00:29:19,320
Speaker 1: Goadie's Lady Book, as many modern magazines still do today,

454
00:29:19,600 --> 00:29:23,760
Speaker 1: pushed the idea of optimizing one's body. According to the

455
00:29:23,800 --> 00:29:26,800
Speaker 1: morality of the day and the day of Goadie's Lady

456
00:29:26,840 --> 00:29:31,800
Speaker 1: Book stated that American beauty was white, Anglo Saxon and

457
00:29:32,240 --> 00:29:37,920
Speaker 1: Protestant wasp city baby, some real Charlotte's walking around. All

458
00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:41,000
Speaker 1: this to say that many white women who were tastemakers,

459
00:29:41,040 --> 00:29:44,840
Speaker 1: even those who claimed to be feminists, were generally complicit

460
00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:48,880
Speaker 1: in this mindset. An example is a writer named Lee Hunt,

461
00:29:48,960 --> 00:29:52,360
Speaker 1: who once published a piece in Goadie's called Chapter on

462
00:29:52,560 --> 00:29:57,520
Speaker 1: Female Features. Sabrina Strings describes the piece like this, Hunt

463
00:29:57,600 --> 00:30:00,920
Speaker 1: makes it clear that excessive eating leads to a figure

464
00:30:00,960 --> 00:30:04,520
Speaker 1: that would be undesirable for cultivated white women. With more

465
00:30:04,560 --> 00:30:07,840
Speaker 1: than a hint of sarcasm, Hunt acknowledges that there are

466
00:30:07,920 --> 00:30:11,680
Speaker 1: fashions and beauty as well as dress. With this, she

467
00:30:11,800 --> 00:30:14,240
Speaker 1: is suggesting that in other parts of the world, different

468
00:30:14,280 --> 00:30:20,640
Speaker 1: standards of beauty apply. Goodie's Ladybook perpetuated and over time

469
00:30:21,080 --> 00:30:25,760
Speaker 1: adjusted what the concept of American beauty was. Originally, it

470
00:30:25,920 --> 00:30:29,719
Speaker 1: excluded most white immigrant women as well, at different times,

471
00:30:29,800 --> 00:30:34,000
Speaker 1: excluding Irish women, Italian women, Polish women, Catholic women, and

472
00:30:34,080 --> 00:30:39,360
Speaker 1: Jewish women by associating them with fatness. Over time, however,

473
00:30:39,680 --> 00:30:45,200
Speaker 1: most other white women were welcomed into the fold, while black, brown, Indigenous,

474
00:30:45,280 --> 00:30:49,200
Speaker 1: and any fat women remained firmly excluded from what the

475
00:30:49,360 --> 00:30:53,160
Speaker 1: term American beauty meant. What it boiled down to was

476
00:30:53,320 --> 00:30:57,080
Speaker 1: this image of delicate white supremacy, with the white women

477
00:30:57,200 --> 00:31:01,880
Speaker 1: representing the eventual reproduction of the race. Strings says that

478
00:31:01,960 --> 00:31:05,960
Speaker 1: it was the quote multiple and colliding factors of Protestant

479
00:31:06,000 --> 00:31:11,680
Speaker 1: asceticism scientific racism in the protoscience of health and beauty unquote.

480
00:31:11,920 --> 00:31:16,000
Speaker 1: After Godie's Lady Book folded Bye Bye, other magazines with

481
00:31:16,240 --> 00:31:20,760
Speaker 1: more familiar names took up the mantel. How about Harper's Bizaar.

482
00:31:21,120 --> 00:31:23,680
Speaker 1: It began in eighteen sixty seven in New York by

483
00:31:23,760 --> 00:31:27,240
Speaker 1: publishing Magnates the Harper Brothers, who marketed the magazine to

484
00:31:27,360 --> 00:31:30,440
Speaker 1: middle and upper class white women, and again a woman

485
00:31:30,560 --> 00:31:33,600
Speaker 1: served as the editor in chief for its formative years.

486
00:31:33,800 --> 00:31:36,840
Speaker 1: Mary Louise Booth edited the magazine from its beginning and

487
00:31:36,960 --> 00:31:40,560
Speaker 1: for the next sixteen years, and frequently included columns about

488
00:31:40,640 --> 00:31:44,880
Speaker 1: women's dietary habits. There was a column called for the

489
00:31:45,080 --> 00:31:49,320
Speaker 1: Ugly Girls that was about falling short of feminine expectations,

490
00:31:49,560 --> 00:31:54,400
Speaker 1: and unlike Godie's Lady Book, Harper's Bazaar was unequivocally a

491
00:31:54,720 --> 00:31:59,840
Speaker 1: fashion magazine. Fashion is a complicated and fascinating topic that

492
00:32:00,080 --> 00:32:02,200
Speaker 1: we'll get to a bit later in the episode, and

493
00:32:02,200 --> 00:32:05,800
Speaker 1: it's been used both really powerfully for self and cultural

494
00:32:05,880 --> 00:32:09,560
Speaker 1: expression as well as taken advantage of to enforce the

495
00:32:09,640 --> 00:32:13,880
Speaker 1: standards of patriarchy and imperialism. Harper's Bizarre from the beginning,

496
00:32:14,040 --> 00:32:18,280
Speaker 1: existed at this very tricky intersection. Saberena Strings says this

497
00:32:18,440 --> 00:32:22,480
Speaker 1: of the magazine, Harper's reflected a kindred preoccupation with the

498
00:32:22,560 --> 00:32:25,640
Speaker 1: right models of beauty, which were based on one's race

499
00:32:25,800 --> 00:32:29,280
Speaker 1: and class status. For this reason, the magazine denounced the

500
00:32:29,320 --> 00:32:33,280
Speaker 1: fatness of the savage races and exalted the more streamlined

501
00:32:33,280 --> 00:32:36,520
Speaker 1: aesthetic of the Germans. This sentiment was to be found

502
00:32:36,600 --> 00:32:39,880
Speaker 1: in an eighteen seventy nine article titled the Fixed Facts

503
00:32:39,920 --> 00:32:43,640
Speaker 1: of Beauty. In it, the author informs readers that it

504
00:32:43,760 --> 00:32:45,680
Speaker 1: is not to say that the laws of beauty are

505
00:32:45,720 --> 00:32:49,240
Speaker 1: not fixed, that because the turxy's beauty are not fixed,

506
00:32:49,480 --> 00:32:52,400
Speaker 1: that because the turxy's beauty only in the obese and

507
00:32:52,520 --> 00:32:55,600
Speaker 1: certain of the savages and the deformed, that therefore the

508
00:32:55,680 --> 00:32:59,160
Speaker 1: laws of beauty are arbitrary. It was in the late

509
00:32:59,160 --> 00:33:03,520
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred that Cosmo began publishing with a pretty similar

510
00:33:03,560 --> 00:33:08,320
Speaker 1: mission to Harper's. It featured articles by writers like Elizabeth Bisland,

511
00:33:08,520 --> 00:33:12,120
Speaker 1: who was actually a pretty fascinating character. She engaged in

512
00:33:12,160 --> 00:33:16,360
Speaker 1: a race around the world against pioneer investigative reporter Nellie Bligh.

513
00:33:16,600 --> 00:33:20,000
Speaker 1: But Bisland also wrote on the concept of American beauty,

514
00:33:20,240 --> 00:33:24,440
Speaker 1: talking about thinness as a type of exceptionalism. Here's how

515
00:33:24,440 --> 00:33:28,040
Speaker 1: Sabrina Strings characterizes her work. It is a type of

516
00:33:28,080 --> 00:33:31,800
Speaker 1: beauty possible only in the United States, where the best

517
00:33:31,960 --> 00:33:35,080
Speaker 1: of all races, those from Northern and Western Europe, had

518
00:33:35,160 --> 00:33:39,640
Speaker 1: arrived as immigrants. These desirable immigrants had mixed and mingled

519
00:33:39,720 --> 00:33:44,800
Speaker 1: to produce progeny who were tall, thin, and of unsurpassed beauty.

520
00:33:44,960 --> 00:33:48,640
Speaker 1: And while this mindset is aggressively bigoted, this wouldn't have

521
00:33:48,680 --> 00:33:52,080
Speaker 1: been surprising rhetoric for the time by a long shot.

522
00:33:52,400 --> 00:33:55,520
Speaker 1: In the early nine hundreds, eugenic race science was becoming

523
00:33:55,640 --> 00:33:59,920
Speaker 1: increasingly popular in the United States as a discriminatory tool.

524
00:34:00,560 --> 00:34:05,960
Speaker 1: In a New England, Puritan fancy guy named Charles Davenport

525
00:34:06,240 --> 00:34:11,120
Speaker 1: Okay founded the Eugenics Records Office in New York, further

526
00:34:11,239 --> 00:34:14,400
Speaker 1: pushing the idea that people of color as well as,

527
00:34:14,600 --> 00:34:19,160
Speaker 1: to quote Charles Davenport quote polls, Irish and Italians unquote,

528
00:34:19,280 --> 00:34:23,440
Speaker 1: were lesser than Eugenics attempted to accomplish this by drawing

529
00:34:23,480 --> 00:34:28,600
Speaker 1: attention to slight physical differences, often imagined to justify its

530
00:34:28,600 --> 00:34:34,080
Speaker 1: claims of superiority. Eugenics are still weaponized to this day.

531
00:34:34,480 --> 00:34:37,680
Speaker 1: By the time these magazines were popular, first wave feminism

532
00:34:37,840 --> 00:34:41,080
Speaker 1: was in full swing in the United States, and as

533
00:34:41,120 --> 00:34:46,520
Speaker 1: we investigated in episode three of this podcast, all the exclusionary, white,

534
00:34:46,560 --> 00:34:49,360
Speaker 1: middle and upper class dominated issues that came with the

535
00:34:49,440 --> 00:34:52,480
Speaker 1: time period led to women being granted the vote in

536
00:34:52,520 --> 00:34:56,960
Speaker 1: the US, and by that time the body standards in

537
00:34:57,000 --> 00:35:01,279
Speaker 1: the United States had firmly changed. While some areas of

538
00:35:01,320 --> 00:35:05,440
Speaker 1: the American South had previously celebrated fuller women's figures than

539
00:35:05,520 --> 00:35:09,320
Speaker 1: in the North, mass media had more or less perpetuated

540
00:35:09,400 --> 00:35:12,560
Speaker 1: the slender white ideal, to the point where articles of

541
00:35:12,640 --> 00:35:16,880
Speaker 1: the time said explicitly that the Venus di medici, once

542
00:35:17,280 --> 00:35:20,840
Speaker 1: the beauty standard, would now be considered too big to

543
00:35:20,880 --> 00:35:25,320
Speaker 1: be beautiful by the American standards. In the early nineteen hundreds,

544
00:35:25,480 --> 00:35:29,920
Speaker 1: Harper's Cosmo and advertising at large were overwhelmed with the

545
00:35:30,000 --> 00:35:33,799
Speaker 1: image of the Gibson Girl, which were illustrations of the

546
00:35:33,800 --> 00:35:39,560
Speaker 1: white lady ideal, drawn by you won't be shocked, some guy,

547
00:35:39,800 --> 00:35:44,120
Speaker 1: Charles Dana Gibson. While the Gibson girls varied in their fashions,

548
00:35:44,160 --> 00:35:48,240
Speaker 1: all Gibson girls were tall and descended from the British,

549
00:35:48,600 --> 00:35:53,960
Speaker 1: forming this image of white American exceptionalism. Nowadays, the Gibson

550
00:35:54,000 --> 00:35:58,280
Speaker 1: girl is more commonly associated with American flappers, what women

551
00:35:58,320 --> 00:36:01,239
Speaker 1: looked like around the time of an increased focus on

552
00:36:01,360 --> 00:36:05,880
Speaker 1: women's rights. But that wasn't necessarily their intent. Gibson himself

553
00:36:05,920 --> 00:36:09,120
Speaker 1: was quick to say that his illustrations, while iconic, were

554
00:36:09,120 --> 00:36:12,360
Speaker 1: meant to calcify the concept of American beauty and to

555
00:36:12,640 --> 00:36:16,320
Speaker 1: exclude women who did not fit its standard. He once

556
00:36:16,360 --> 00:36:20,040
Speaker 1: wrote this, what zeng Will calls the melting pot of

557
00:36:20,080 --> 00:36:23,320
Speaker 1: the races as resulted in a certain character. There beyond

558
00:36:23,360 --> 00:36:26,400
Speaker 1: question the loveliest of all their sex. Evolution has selected

559
00:36:26,440 --> 00:36:29,880
Speaker 1: the best things for preservation. Why should women not be beautiful? Increasingly,

560
00:36:29,960 --> 00:36:32,320
Speaker 1: why should it not be the fittest in form and features,

561
00:36:32,400 --> 00:36:34,600
Speaker 1: as well as mind and muscle, which survives? And where

562
00:36:34,600 --> 00:36:37,200
Speaker 1: should that fittest be? In evidence? Most strikingly in the

563
00:36:37,280 --> 00:36:39,880
Speaker 1: United States, of course, where natural selection has been going on,

564
00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:42,879
Speaker 1: as elsewhere, there has been a great variety to choose from.

565
00:36:43,040 --> 00:36:45,719
Speaker 1: The eventual American woman will be even more beautiful than

566
00:36:45,760 --> 00:36:48,399
Speaker 1: the woman of today. Her claims to that distinction will

567
00:36:48,440 --> 00:36:50,719
Speaker 1: result from a fine combination of the best points of

568
00:36:50,760 --> 00:36:53,560
Speaker 1: all those many races which have helped to make our population.

569
00:36:54,840 --> 00:36:58,400
Speaker 1: Other American men took a different tech on women's bodies,

570
00:36:58,480 --> 00:37:01,680
Speaker 1: which it's incredible to hear so many different perspectives on

571
00:37:01,760 --> 00:37:04,520
Speaker 1: something that is none of their business. The perspective I'm

572
00:37:04,560 --> 00:37:08,800
Speaker 1: talking about is that of John Harvey Kellogg, who, yes,

573
00:37:09,080 --> 00:37:13,600
Speaker 1: ultimately founded that breakfast cereal empire, but began as a

574
00:37:13,680 --> 00:37:18,640
Speaker 1: deeply religious and deeply racist eugenicist who feared that American

575
00:37:18,680 --> 00:37:21,520
Speaker 1: women had become so thin that they were no longer

576
00:37:21,640 --> 00:37:25,960
Speaker 1: adequately fertile to continue the white American race. Not all

577
00:37:26,000 --> 00:37:28,600
Speaker 1: women have uterus, as Mr Kellogg, not that you give

578
00:37:28,640 --> 00:37:30,719
Speaker 1: a ship. He's said, I don't know what I'm doing.

579
00:37:30,920 --> 00:37:33,839
Speaker 1: At the time, John Harvey Kellogg was very clear on

580
00:37:33,920 --> 00:37:37,480
Speaker 1: his views. He said, quote, the only hope for the

581
00:37:37,600 --> 00:37:41,080
Speaker 1: race is in the future of its girls unquote. He

582
00:37:41,200 --> 00:37:45,279
Speaker 1: rejected the physical frame of Gibson girls and flappers, and

583
00:37:45,400 --> 00:37:50,560
Speaker 1: encouraged women to eat well Kellogg's cereal to become, as

584
00:37:50,800 --> 00:37:54,400
Speaker 1: he told it, heartier and more fertile. There's an entire

585
00:37:54,440 --> 00:37:57,320
Speaker 1: book on the full picture by Dr Howard Markle called

586
00:37:57,440 --> 00:38:00,560
Speaker 1: the Kellogg's the battling Brothers of Battle Creek. That all

587
00:38:00,560 --> 00:38:04,800
Speaker 1: link in the description. It is a bizarre and disturbing legacy.

588
00:38:05,239 --> 00:38:08,480
Speaker 1: So Tony the Tiger part of the EU genesis legacy.

589
00:38:08,560 --> 00:38:11,160
Speaker 1: I don't make the facts, but it's my sacred duty

590
00:38:11,200 --> 00:38:16,160
Speaker 1: to report them. Snap crackle and pop Uron noticed the

591
00:38:16,239 --> 00:38:19,560
Speaker 1: Raisin brand's son sick. Oh, get them out of there?

592
00:38:19,920 --> 00:38:23,840
Speaker 1: And what good with these exceptionalist ideals? And magazines and

593
00:38:23,920 --> 00:38:28,280
Speaker 1: advertising be without rules and products with which to attain

594
00:38:28,719 --> 00:38:32,600
Speaker 1: the look. Beginning in nineteen thirteen, scales for the home

595
00:38:32,800 --> 00:38:36,760
Speaker 1: became consumer products so that people could monitor their bodies

596
00:38:36,840 --> 00:38:39,600
Speaker 1: from the comfort of their own bathroom. The concept of

597
00:38:39,640 --> 00:38:43,680
Speaker 1: calories became standard with a nineteen eighteen best seller called

598
00:38:43,800 --> 00:38:46,880
Speaker 1: Diet and Health with Key to the Calories by Lulu

599
00:38:46,960 --> 00:38:50,600
Speaker 1: Hunt Peter's Watch Your Weight. The cover warned and in

600
00:38:50,680 --> 00:38:56,000
Speaker 1: its pages Peters described fatness as a quote disease unquote.

601
00:38:56,040 --> 00:38:59,200
Speaker 1: The concept of body mass index came into play with

602
00:38:59,320 --> 00:39:04,280
Speaker 1: something called ideal weight tables, most popularly with tables circulated

603
00:39:04,280 --> 00:39:08,880
Speaker 1: by MetLife Insurance. The data these tables used were entirely

604
00:39:08,920 --> 00:39:13,319
Speaker 1: based off of white and disproportionately male bodies, and we're

605
00:39:13,400 --> 00:39:17,680
Speaker 1: not designed with mind towards actual bodily health, but instead

606
00:39:17,719 --> 00:39:20,520
Speaker 1: to be used by insurance companies in order to assess

607
00:39:20,640 --> 00:39:25,960
Speaker 1: risk on who qualifies for life insurance. Come on. The

608
00:39:26,040 --> 00:39:27,840
Speaker 1: b m I as we know it now came to

609
00:39:27,880 --> 00:39:31,040
Speaker 1: prominence in the US in nineteen seventy two, just four

610
00:39:31,120 --> 00:39:34,640
Speaker 1: years before the Cathy strip debuted in American newspapers. While

611
00:39:34,640 --> 00:39:37,560
Speaker 1: the b m I was just a modification of these tables,

612
00:39:37,680 --> 00:39:41,520
Speaker 1: which completely excluded non white people and many women, it

613
00:39:41,560 --> 00:39:47,000
Speaker 1: was eventually adopted by the NIH or National Institute of Health. Previously,

614
00:39:47,320 --> 00:39:51,799
Speaker 1: the nih had utilized those MetLife Life insurance tables. The

615
00:39:51,840 --> 00:39:55,719
Speaker 1: inherent racism of the body mass Index is well documented,

616
00:39:55,800 --> 00:39:58,200
Speaker 1: in spite of its popularity to this day. I will

617
00:39:58,239 --> 00:40:01,040
Speaker 1: link some resources in the descrip option and it's here

618
00:40:01,280 --> 00:40:05,080
Speaker 1: in the nineties seventies where our girl Cathy re enters

619
00:40:05,280 --> 00:40:08,279
Speaker 1: the picture. Now that you're up to speed on how

620
00:40:08,320 --> 00:40:11,880
Speaker 1: we arrived at the diet culture that the Kathy comic

621
00:40:12,080 --> 00:40:15,080
Speaker 1: was staring down the barrel of when the comics started.

622
00:40:15,320 --> 00:40:17,520
Speaker 1: We're going to pick up there in part two of

623
00:40:17,600 --> 00:40:23,360
Speaker 1: this episode later in the week. By back Cast is

624
00:40:23,400 --> 00:40:26,759
Speaker 1: an I Heart radio production. It is written, researched, and

625
00:40:26,800 --> 00:40:30,600
Speaker 1: hosted by me Jamie Loftus, Sophie Electuman is the world's

626
00:40:30,680 --> 00:40:35,200
Speaker 1: Greatest producer, Isaac Taylor is the world's greatest editor, Zoe

627
00:40:35,200 --> 00:40:38,720
Speaker 1: Blade writes the world best music, and Brandon Dickert wrote

628
00:40:38,719 --> 00:40:42,279
Speaker 1: the world best theme song. In today's episode, you heard

629
00:40:42,320 --> 00:40:46,800
Speaker 1: the vocal talents of Sharene Lana unas Maggie Cannon, Isaac Taylor,

630
00:40:47,080 --> 00:40:51,480
Speaker 1: and the Icon herself, Jackie Michelle Johnson as Kathy. We

631
00:40:51,640 --> 00:40:53,560
Speaker 1: will see you Wednesday,