Episode 314: What a Tangled Sociocultural Web We Weave with Tressie McMillan Cottom
Doree and Elise talk to celebrated cultural critic, sociologist, and award-winning writer Tressie McMillan Cottom, who brilliantly deconstructs everything from Ozempic and Oprah to Bama Rush — and shows the interconnectedness of it all.
Photo Credit: Molly Cranna
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Transcript
Doree: Hello and welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir and
Elise: I'm Elise Hugh. And we are just two friends who like to talk a lot about serums,
Doree: And today we have, I mean, I always hesitate to be like this was one of our best conversations because I genuinely enjoy all of our conversations with our guests and think that they all bring so much. But this conversation in particular to me, goes into the Forever35 Hall of Fame.
Elise: It's just one mic drop after another after another. So much insight. I needed to have this conversation when we did because we have been going through such a turbulent summer. It's like I aged 10 years in one week. Totally. And we got to speak to our guest today.
Doree: Oh, she was just so wonderful. So we are just going to get right into it. I'm going to introduce her and then we will get into our conversation. It was so great. I don't want to waste another second. So today we are talking to Tressie McMillan Cotton Woo-hoo. She is a trenchant cultural critic, celebrated sociologist and award-winning writer. She is known for rearranging your brain in the span of a carefully turned phrase. And I would say she did keep track of how many times your brain gets rearranged. In the course of this conversation, I'm just going to say she does. Her breath is truly phenomenal. It moves from the racial hierarchy of beauty standards and the class codes of dressing for work to the predation of for-profit colleges and the stain of racial capitalism on our plural democracy, all while re-imagining the essay form for the 21st century. As she goes, Tressie is a professor with the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at UNC Chapel Hill, a New York Times columnist, and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Also her excellent 2019 collection of essays thick was a National book Award finalist. So good. Her fans call her essays, tres essays.
She's just so great. She's a great TikTok follow. She's just so wonderful.
Elise: I just feel honored that we got to have an hour to just ask her whatever we
Doree: Wanted. Same
Elise: Because at one point I was just like, Tressie, what do we do?
Doree: I know. It was really funny. Also, her Forever35 questionnaire for those of you on Patreon, is also very enjoyable. That'll come out tomorrow. So head on over to Patreon at patreon.com/forever three five to check that out because it's really delightful. Before we get to Tressie, just a reminder, our website is Forever35 podcast.com. We have links there to everything we mentioned on the show. We are an Instagram at Forever35 podcast. Again, our Patreon is at patreon do com slash forever three five. We have our newsletter at Forever35 podcast.com/newsletter, and we love to hear from you. We love to hear your thoughts about episodes, guest suggestions, questions, comments, concerns. You can call or text us at (781) 591-0390. You can email us at Forever five Podcast at gmail com.
Elise: I particularly love Product Rex because y'all have such great ones, and that's not just for serums and essences and moisturizers or anything. It's also like Trader Joe's products and Costco products.
Doree: Totally
Elise: Send in your recommendations if there are things that you love. And just a reminder for our new listeners, our schedule is to drop episodes like this one longer conversation interviews on Mondays. And then on Wednesdays we have mini apps where we hear from you and we play your voicemails and share your texts and share your emails and share your recs. And if you have questions, we answer those in the minis on Wednesdays. And then we're also dropping fresh shows on Fridays, our casual chats where Doreee and I just chop it up. We just chop it up on Fridays. And that's just for our Patreon subscribers. And of course if you're on Patreon, you could also get ad free episodes too. So Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Mondays interviews, Wednesdays mini apps, Fridays casual chats.
Doree: Yes. And our monthly pop culture recommendation apps as well.
Elise: Yeah, that's on the Patreon also.
Doree: Yeah. Alright, so here is Tressie. Well, sometimes people ask Who's your dream guest? And I got to say, Tressie, you have been on that list for quite some time, so I am so thrilled to have you on Forever35. Welcome to the show.
Tressie: Thank you for having me. You know what, I don't even care how true that is. It is so lovely to hear and I really appreciate it. Thank you. I do a lie. She doesn't ever say that. Seriously. I actually do think that about you, by the way, from what I know of you from socials for years, which is how we know each other. I've followed you and Reggie for years. No, actually don't think you would lie about it. No,
Doree: I just wouldn't say anything. That's what she
Tressie: Does. Yeah, that does seem like you.
Doree: Yeah, so no, but in all honesty, I've just been such a fan of yours for so long and on multiple platforms and it's just so great to get to talk to you. So thank you for coming on.
Tressie: It's a pleasure. I really am happy to be here.
Doree: Oh, good. Well, as I think we like to start our guest interviews by asking about a self-care practice, even though we know you have a little beef with the term.
Tressie: I was about to say, we're going to have to be elastic with it.
Elise: Let's talk about that. Right, exactly. So how you're taking care of yourself, however you define it.
Tressie: Yep. Listen, a lot of boundary making and learning to embrace the boundaries that I make because setting them is one thing. Embracing them as right and proper and that I deserve them is something else entirely. And it's an ongoing project. But I really do think if I compare how I make boundaries today, with even just a year ago, much less five years ago, I think I'm a different person. I still fall into automatic guesses. I can still be a little passive aggressive about things. I don't want to do things like that. But I think it's a lot less. And the effect that it's had on the quality of my life is really demonstrable. I can tell. And you know what? I'm taking a lot of vitamin D.
Doree: Me too doctor's orders
Tressie: Though. Yeah, yeah.
Doree: Same.
Tressie: And I'm even taking a little, are doing this high dose and I am telling almost every woman in my life, especially every woman of color, a black woman, especially because we're chronically have vitamin D deficiencies. The impact it has had on me that's so interesting is wild. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So vitamin D,
Elise: That's great. Yeah. In Korea, all the babies and the toddlers have to get it because there's just not enough sunshine. You're not getting it enough naturally during the winter months. But I remember when I moved to Southern California, doctors were like, oh, you're getting enough vitamin D anyway, just from being outside. Are you taking a walk outdoors? Are you jogging? And then it was somehow All right. But you're in North Carolina, right? Isn't it
Tressie: Pretty? Yeah, I'm in North Carolina, and yes, we do have sun, but one, it can be too hard to be in our sun. We also have humidity. Oh, right. What is that? Even if you, I know you're Southern California people, I'll try to describe it to you later so you can be outside, but maybe not be out as long as you would like. And even with that though, just the way we kind of live mean, unless you, and I'm very fortunate, I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is a super green place and super walkable,
Which is why I choose to live here. So in my daily life, I walk to the store and that's a little more sunshine, but in regular life. And I think how most people live, even if it's sunny outside, what you're in an office building, you are going from parking lot to parking lot. So even I think when the weather is conducive to getting enough sunshine, I think being more deliberate about it is probably a good thing. And I don't know the stats off my head. I just remember them being overwhelming and ridiculous. I know it's like over 50% of black people in America anyway have a vitamin D deficiency. And I suspect that's not just about sunshine. Yeah. We probably should be giving all of us a vitamin D supplement.
Elise: So we're glad you're getting your vitamin D.
Doree: Yeah. You said in the last five years you've gotten so much better at holding your boundaries. Can I ask how you did that? And was there a moment where you felt there was a shift or it was just sort of a gradual thing?
Tressie: It is gradual. I don't know that it's a hard before and after, but one of the things boundary making, what I've come to understand is that boundary making really is just a reflection of how you think about yourself and not necessarily self-esteem, all of that's part of it, but it's like accepting who you are in the world, accepting your place in the world, accepting your responsibilities. And over time mostly I've just been exhausted by not having the boundaries. And it really became critical that I figure something out. Because if your mind doesn't tell you that you need the boundaries, your body really will.
And it was clear that I was chronically tired. It was clear that and the place, I can get really sensitive about it. I don't care about bodies, I don't care about my body, but my creative energies I care about a lot. So when it became difficult to write or more challenging to write and I'm just not a good happy person when that happens to me, and it was clear that I was spending more time doing things that I didn't have to do. Now that's the big one, realizing the difference between what I wanted to do and what I had to do was about me accepting that, oh, my life has changed. And just checking in with myself every once in a while and going, oh no, I don't have to do that anymore. That was a responsibility for a different time in my life or my career, or people don't need this from me anymore. They have aged out, they've matured, they have gone on. I have that problem often with my students hanging on a little too long. So just reflecting and making the time to go, okay, where are we in the world right now? And I think a lot right now about my time in a pie over time, over six months or so. And I'm like, okay, over the last six months how much of what I have done is something that gave something back to me versus the things that I did out of obligation that I really didn't get much from.
And I'm constantly recalibrating that at about, I try to do it every six months or so.
Elise: This relates to our next question because obviously we like to say that this show is about how we take care of ourselves. And so we'd love to hear you talk about the difference between consumerist, commodified, self-care in the form of baths or essential oils or God bless the baths, exercise clubs, and the kind of self-care that really makes a difference in your life or in women's lives.
Tressie: And here's the thing, I'm a Libra and was raised an only child, and I say all of that to say this. I love stuff. I love pretty things, sparkly things that fizz and a bat. So all of that just fine. I want to put that out there to say I'm not a hater of the lush bath bomb or whatever it is. Just what my challenge here. I interviewed Puja lmi once for New York Times. She has this wonderful book of real self-care. And reading her book actually crystallized some things that I often thought and it picked up from other places, but she really gave me a language for it, which is there's a difference between consuming the things that pacify us when we aren't taking care of ourselves. So calgon taking me away at the end of the day is really just about the fact that you needed to be home earlier from that job. It's compensating, maybe it's pacifying, but is it really giving you more capacity to feel good? Right? So real self-care require buying anything, even though buying it makes you feel good, that's fine. But I think we can get caught up in the panic of feeling drained. And then you'll take anything. I'll take any planner, I'll take anything you've got. I'll take anything because I'm desperate.
But the next day, your life is still the same. And so real self-care is creating spaces where you can say no when you want, have time to reflect on your priorities and your boundaries, and when you get to do the things that you care about. And a bath bomb doesn't really do that.
Elise: We are speaking to you at a particularly turbulent time. Tell
Tressie: Me about
Elise: It. Who, boy, following a recent assassination attempt, and as America faces a very likely possibility that President Trump returns for another term and following some really monumental Supreme Court decisions. So Tressie, as one of America's foremost sociologists and cultural critics, we just want to know how do we cope and how are you coping?
Tressie: Okay, so I'm going to start with the second one because I feel like I need to figure that one out before I can tell other people how they should be coping. Listen, I've got a sort of strict time limit on how much I can consume every day. I mean, we go from consuming mass death and political disenfranchisement to just straight up authoritarianism in a matter of days. And I truly believe that the human mind, we have evolved into where we are now. Maybe we'll be something else in the future. We just are not built to consume all of this. I don't think you are prepared or capable of processing all of the horrible things that human beings do to each other all across a great big wide world. But technology makes it so that we can see that, right?
Elise: Yeah,
Tressie: I can see Dafo, I can see Palestine, and I can also see Seattle, and I can also see climate change in the Antarctic. All of that is in my face constantly. And I don't think this is a real good solution because probably what we need is we need better filtering of higher quality filtering of information to help us decide what we need to know versus what people want to put before us to make us scared or to manipulate us. So I think a lot of what we do and call now information, right? Making an informed public is really about manipulating how people feel. Politically real information, I think would tell you what stuff means. You can see a headline about climate change, but it doesn't tell you what you're supposed to do. It doesn't tell you what it means. And I think we just feel chronically helpless, and that's politically convenient, but really bad for human beings. And so until we figure out a way to do I think more high quality information, we have to do it for ourselves. We got to do it at the individual level, which is always just a sign of failure anyway. To my mind. I'm a sociologist. I want big solutions, but time limits on what you consume, being realistic about how things affect you. So for example, I cannot do dead children. It's my thing. And so no matter how politically committed I am
Elise: To
Tressie: Any cause if it involves dead children, the deal I have with myself is I will not consume that.
It is not worth what it will do to me for days on end. It isn't worth triggering myself. And to say that doesn't make me any less politically committed, it's just I'm not sure what benefit the world gets from me being in a corner crying. Every organizer and sort of spiritual person that I respect pretty much says the same thing. They say, choose the thing you can do in the world and do that. That's the thing you actually can't solve. Climate change and homelessness and poverty, you have to choose your thing, do the best you can at it with other people and hope and pray. Other people are doing that on the other subjects. But I think we don't get to that unless we put time limits on what we consume. We'd be really honest about what we can and cannot do. And then I also try to make spaces when I'm feeling really bad. So yesterday actually was one of those I called a friend who is an organizer in Kentucky. And because talking to somebody who is doing something important makes me feel better. One of the best tonics for feeling helpless is watching people do something together. Some of the most hopeful spaces I've been in are places that I suspect the general public thinks of as depressing. I did an interview once with abortion doulas, for example.
You would think they are super serious and speak like this because they do this really hard thing during really hard times. I was talking to them right after Dobbs. Instead, I walked into their space and the music was bumping. They were eating tacos and laughing with women on the phone who are calling them to get help to travel across state lines to get an abortion. They are having a ball. They're having a great time. I see the same thing with housing advocates. I go in and there are these people who say to me, yeah, my landlord trying to evict me again. It's like the third time. And they're all sitting around telling this story and having a good time. They actually do not feel helpless and depressed. And it is because they feel like they have agency. And so when I am feeling my most fragile and like, oh my God, what are you supposed to do? I try to talk to people who I think are actually doing something. And then of course, the better thing, of course is go do something yourself. Yeah.
Elise: Okay, let's take a break and we will be right back.
Doree: First of all, I love following you on TikTok. Me too. It's truly such a delight. And one of my favorite tiktoks of yours is your bad wig theory. TikTok.
Tressie: Oh yeah. Okay. This thing I can never anticipate what will hit with people. I get asked about this so much.
Elise: Okay, this one hit. Can you sum up what your bad wig
Tressie: Theory is?
Elise: Oh,
Tressie: Man,
Elise: I know it takes six minutes in the video.
Tressie: It does because you, because it's a response to something. It's one of these social media things where you need the lore, right? You need all this backstory so quickly. The backstory is there is a joke with a little bit of, I think, critical truth to it, which is that there's this idea and the black community among black women that whenever your hair looks the worst, white men find you the most attractive. And so this starts as a joke where black women were like, I know it's time to get my braids done because a white man told me today he liked my hair. So this starts, and then somebody starts to overlay that with this really, I don't know, odd form of content that's this genre of content on TikTok of interracial couples where they literally tag it. That's their whole brand.
They are interracial couple someone, by the way, needs to write that thing. That is so odd to me. 2024, your whole brand can be, you are an interracial couple. I just find that very strange. Anyway, but it's very popular on the social media. And people started pointing out that in a lot of these interracial couples, the joke was among black women married to non-black men, they would go, see, she has on a bad wig. That's how she got her white man. All right, so this is the joke. You kind of need to know this. And so what was happening is that people were jokingly putting on bad wigs and saying, well, this is the night I'm going out. I'm choosing who I want to talk to because I'm put on my bad wig. And a bad wig would be a hard wig, one that doesn't flow. That's where it comes hard wig. If you wear hard wig, you have a better chance at a soft life was the joke, right? That's right. A soft life of greater privilege and ease. And so I see this, and again, I'm fascinated by all of these little things. I'm like, I think interracial content is weird. I love the thing about the hair critique because I think we do a lot of our popular discourse about race through beauty.
If you're not comfortable talking about race, you tend to couch it in things about beauty and dating and relationships. And so I found that really interesting. And I promised off the top of my head, I was riffing on this literature that I just know because I have taught feminist sociology before about why and how people, especially men, value women who perform a beauty ritual. And there's this really interesting study. You would think, oh, of course they like it because you look better. They like that you wear makeup prettier. They like that you wear high heels because you look sexier.
Elise: You would think,
Tressie: You'd think, but then that then hard wig wouldn't make sense. But this great study, which has shown and been validated in a couple of different ways since then, there some people who are still working on it, but the sociologists found using national survey data. I just think that's important to say they did this whole, it was quantitative for the people who care about such things, and they found that no, what it is is that men and women, to a slightly lesser extent, value women who perform beauty rituals, even if the beauty ritual doesn't make them more attractive. So even when your makeup is busted, even when the hair is wrong, what they were really giving women credit for was effort,
Elise: The labor
Tressie: Of performing. And in fact, the more they could see that you had made the effort the better, which flies in the face of doing a natural makeup look right? No men want to see the red lip and the eyeliner and the streak and the
Doree: Feel like we just saw this recently with, there was a lot of discourse around the love island contestants on
Tressie: Social. I have read this. I haven seen the show, but I've read about this,
Doree: And I think a lot of people, the discourse was sort of like, they look so old, but they're only 24 or whatever. And it was kind of what you were saying. They clearly had had so much either plastic surgery or fillers or Botox that their faces looked so overdone that I think to a lot of people, it was like, oh, they look old, but it sounds to me like they were performing this.
Tressie: What you are saying when you do that is, I am signing up to be a particular kind of wife. Let's just be honest. I'm signing up to be a full-time Pilates wife. And the deal, when you make one of those marriage deals, the implicit contract, sometimes explicit, but the implicit contract is you'll stay thin. You'll manage your diet and your appearance, and you'll remain a consumable asset to your male partner.
Elise: And so you are working, your work is just on your body. It's aesthetic labor, it's display labor.
Tressie: Yes, yes. You are working your butt off. In fact, quite literally, sometimes in Pilates class,
Elise: It's about regimenting your body and it's really about a lot of intervention, especially as you get older, because you have to stay in general age group of appearing as if you're somewhere between the ages of 18 and 35,
Tressie: And that you are concerned about aging,
Elise: Right?
Tressie: So you also need to be in this posture of fear,
Which as we know, again from lots of men, like women who are afraid, they like to scare us. So a woman who is anxious about aging even and showing that she's going to try to fend that off, all of that is attractive. Now, I do think that what happens in the case of the love island contestants, which just happens, I think on a lot of the reality shows, there was this wonderful piece I read once that showed reality contestants from 15 years ago compared to the reality contestant, how much normal they looked 15 years ago compared to now. So I think it's just a phenomenon across reality tv, but I'm not sure that men are actually sexually attracted to it. They're just attracted to the power dynamic on display. Right.
Doree: Well, and I know the particular TikTok that you stitched when you talked about bad wig theory, I mean, it was a seemingly very wealthy, older white man. I don't know how old the woman was, but she seemed younger. And it seemed like there was just totally that dynamic at play
Tressie: For my friends who do friends who write kink literature, and they're like, all these people are doing is performing like kink 24 hours. They have this power dynamic relationship. But it is, yes. So the TikTok was she chose a life of ease with an older wealthier partner, which is the goal for many people. And part of being perceived by him was that she had to show the labor she was willing to do. And when you are a black woman, that labor has to be even more obvious because there are already questions about your femininity. And so being ultra feminine means an ultra performance. That's why the hair would need to be exaggerated. You would need to exaggerate certain features and performances so that someone who isn't used to looking at or observing or consuming black beauty or how black women look will notice it. And so if your hair is really nice, but understated, I'm already not used to seeing that. I don't look at a lot of black women, and I doubt that black women can be super feminine, and I'm probably conditioned to want the exact opposite. So you got to work really hard. Thus the hard wig, the hard wig personifies really captures all of that labor that a black woman has to do to be legible
To the type of white male partners that some people think of as pasta and lobster being better. Get my pasta and lobster. Yeah.
Elise: Let's stay on this topic of the work that we have to do on our bodies or that women are expected to do on our bodies. Because now it's obviously not just limited to any particular sex. Everybody is having to regiment our bodies because we're living in these digital worlds and constantly on front of screens, and we are in yet another summer of Ozempic for Americans. So I'm just curious now that there has been so much discourse about it, where have you landed on the ozempic ation of those who can afford it?
Tressie: I love that, those simplification. You may see that again. Okay. So the simplification of the culture, which is, I mean, we're undergoing in some ways something that is historically continuous. We have been doing this thing with diets that are going to fix bodies, especially women's bodies. We've been doing this now for almost a hundred years. So on one side, like Ozempic and GLP ones or whatever are just part of that, except if you do, like I've done and you talk to medical professionals and you talk to researchers,
Elise: They
Tressie: Are quite serious about the science of these being different than anything we've seen before,
Which were actually, while they may have been popular, were kind of blunt tools. So you think about something like gastric bypass that's just blunt. It was like a mechanical intervention. They're just going in there and changing your engine. And yeah, it worked, but it's super, it's not changing the science of how your body works. What they are excited about here is that no ozempic and GLP ones seem to scientifically actually change how your body performs physiologically. And that's apparently great and good, and I believe them, right? I'm not equipped to disagree, but that is not the same thing as saying that it is a magic pill for obesity. And so what has happened in our culture is we have conflated those two because we want to make money off of it. You got to figure out how to sell it to people. And nothing sells in this country quite as well as a promise that you can be thinner, because to be thinner is to be richer, is to be better, is to be perceived as nicer. We tie up so much status into being thinner that just by promising it, ozempic would've already been a big seller, but then it seems to actually work, and that's even worse.
So where I land on this is it's hard to talk to as many people as I have who are so happy about taking GLP ones. It's changed their lives. There are women who've been able to get pregnant. There are women who are beating PCOS. There are just so many happy consumers of it. So if I'm going to believe women, I got to believe 'em when they say they're happy, right? But then I also got to think about how you can be happy with something that's structurally pretty bad, or that's structurally unfair, we should say. And I do think that with Ozempic and the way it's been promoted, advertised, and especially priced, the healthcare financing of it, access means that we have a system that is poised to, I think just create more inequality instead of solving a site of real inequality in our culture, which is we still have a fat bias, anti-fat bias. And that Ozempic will only fix that, not just if the fat people who want to take it can access it and afford it, but if we stop associating fatness with morality, both of those things have to happen for ozempic to be like a radical game changer. You don't end obesity by getting rid of fat people. I think you end obesity by getting rid of stigma about obesity.
Elise: Yeah. It's similar to Botox. It could individually relieve anxieties for those who are anxious about aging or signs of aging and want to remove creases or frown lines and things like that. But is it good for the community?
Tressie: Yeah.
It doesn't change that ageism is real. It doesn't change that your income potential goes down as you get older. It doesn't change that you become more vulnerable and weaker in our society, something we don't like as you age. Yeah. It can make you feel better, and there's some value to that, but is it valuable enough for us to invest a ton of public money, a ton of research, a ton of advertising, a ton of people's lives and health in it? I think a drug has to be far more radical socially for us to give it as much credit as we are giving ozempic right now.
Elise: And you wrote about Oprah and Ozempic and how complicated this was in particular, because if Oprah can't fall in love with her body at any size or shape, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
Tressie: Listen,
Elise: And I want to know what should we even have the right to expect of Oprah or expect from Oprah too?
Tressie: Yeah. I feel like I've become the Oprah defender in the culture, and I don't know how that happened. So I think a couple of things were happening. I was a little surprised as a Gen X when I'm late Gen X, and I was a little taken aback by how much anger and resentment, maybe millennials and maybe a little bit of Gen Z, but especially millennial women had for Oprah Winfrey. It was just stunning to me. So Oprah does this special to confess even that we say confess, right? I think that's so weird. But to publicly announce that yes, she had lost weight using, she doesn't use the brand name. She just says she took one of the GLP ones, and there was a ton of mostly critical response. And so much of it coming from a place of personal animus, people were personally offended. And I thought that was really strange because I didn't see Oprah that way.
Yes, I know Oprah spent years talking about her body, and I know she promoted Dr. Oz and the running guy and the other guy, I get it right. She had platformed all of these people, but I didn't think of her as responsible for diet culture, but millennial women absolutely do. And so I started thinking about why that was, why there could be such a difference in how I remembered it and how they had consumed her, and whether or not it was fair to think of Oprah as being the person responsible for dying, really. I mean, yeah, she was a very big deal. I mean bigger than I think even people born after her time can understand because media has changed. They don't know what it means to be Oprah Winfrey in 1999. That's just nothing is as big as that right
Doree: Now. They don't know about you get a car,
Tressie: They don't know. And you know what? They also don't know. I show it sometimes in one of my classes. They don't know why we think Tom Cruise is crazy. They know that. Yeah. They don't know that
Elise: Katie, that episode. They dunno about the couch.
Tressie: Well, he jumps on the couch. They have no idea.
Elise: Wow.
Tressie: Anyway, I know. I know. It's fascinating. I was like, oh, wow. Then you don't know why we think Tom Cruise is dead behind the eyes. It's because he had this moment on Oprah Winfrey.
Elise: Yes.
Tressie: Yeah. So Oprah, she's the pinnacle of achievement for a lot of women, especially of a certain age, I think, especially for black women. And part of the way she became that was that, yes, she talked about bodies, but here's the difference. I think Oprah Winfrey was mostly talking about her body and because of her celebrity, her mega celebrity at that millions of women projected
Their feelings of their body onto Oprah Winfrey. But Oprah has just been struggling with being, frankly, an overweight black woman in a racist, sexist society and trying to figure out why becoming a billionaire didn't fix all of that for her. And frankly, I'm empathetic to that. Right? You have a billion dollars and you mean to tell me you can't buy your way out weight stigma. You can't just force people to call you pretty, I don't know. Isn't that what Bezos did? He just got enough money and made people agree that he was attractive. And you mean to tell me do they agree? Do they agree? They do. When he's standing there,
Doree: I think, well, and I mean bring it back to performing beauty. He is with a woman who
Tressie: That performance honey.
Doree: Yeah, that's
Tressie: Labor.
Doree: She shows her work. She shows her work, and his ex-wife does not. So you really see how wanting the dynamics you're talking about
Elise: Yeah. At
Doree: Work or at play.
Tressie: Yep.
Doree: Yes.
Tressie: Yeah. It's the status symbol of extreme wealth, right? Yeah. I think that type of the expectation that that type of woman is who you should be with, I think comes with the Maserati, the yacht. It's like a package you go to.
Doree: Totally.
Tressie: Yeah, totally. He's got the billionaire package, but a billionaire woman doesn't have that package. A billionaire black woman especially, doesn't have
Doree: That package.
Tressie: And yeah, hold her accountable for being a billionaire. Listen, I, I'm on a board with that, do all that stuff, but I don't think you can blame Oprah Winfrey for the fact that your mom took you watchers. I get that. I think you're blaming Oprah Winfrey because you don't want to. I get that.
Doree: Yeah. So we're just going to take a short break and we will be right back. Well, I think that's actually a good segue to the next topic I'd love to cover, which is we are coming up on the new season of Bama Rush, which is something you have written quite trenchantly about and talked about. And I'm curious why the first season of Bama Rush was 2021. So we're now three years into this. We're now on our fourth season. People are still somehow obsessed with it. And this sort of reminds me of what you were saying about how reality stars didn't look the same 15 years ago. Now you have these young women who are going into Bama Rush with, this is how I need to look for Bama Rush. There's a Bama rush look, and with this full awareness that they're being watched from outside the universities in addition to being judged inside the sorority houses. So I'd love to just hear your thoughts on how you think Bama Rush has made an impact on the culture.
Tressie: Bama Rush is like wives is all of the women on the dating shows. Yes. It's about the look of a particular kind of GOP wife. It's about the ascendance of wanting to be a stay at home mom. All of that is just a response to powerful interests wanting to claw back some power over women. And I think the ban were rush phenomenon just happened to hit at that moment. We had the technology to do it, and we had people willing to participate in it. A lot of people were at home and had been at home for a while. So you were like, all of us were getting comfortable with being voyeurs in this sort of way to keep ourselves entertained. And we love consuming young women. We love consuming young women. And so the Bama Rush is just as perfect stew for that.
Elise: And crucially, these women don't have an issue with performing in this way. They want to, and they find it empowering.
Tressie: Oh, I got tons of letters from like, yeah, you act like we're paper dolls. One of them said, you didn't give us credit for our autonomy. I was like, no, I actually gave you credit for it. Because I start from the position that these are willing participants, which says to us that whatever it is they are doing to themselves, subjecting themselves to being judged, being shunned, being evaluated, being found, wanting whatever they are subjecting themselves to the possible rewards are so great to them that they're willing to do it. So my question was, well, what are those rewards? What's the payoff for being a Bama rush girl? And the payoff is not to be a Bama rush girl. It is to be a future Bama Rush wife. It is about their proximity to men in a really powerful system in the University of Alabama that is that incubates that state's power elite, the politicians, the financial class, all of that.
And so pledging is just a sort of way station on the way to becoming that. And so just like saying, I'm willing to do Pilates and get my Botox, I'm willing to stand in front of a phone and evaluate my style for millions of people as being my self worth. Yes, you're choosing it, but that's because the rewards, you perceived them as being pretty great. And it's pretty weird that in 2000, 21, 22, those rewards are pretty much what their grandmother's rewards were. So yeah, these are just really elite finishing schools for access to elite society, which for women still really hinges on only two things. The family you're born into and the man you marry, that's dark. I know
Doree: When you start thinking about all, and I know this is literally what you do, but when you start thinking about the web of connections and how all this stuff is so interrelated, it can really get you down.
Tressie: It does. I take those, some pleasure in, it gets me down. But I feel like if I can sometimes capture this Bama rush is like this moving phenomenon, I can capture something like that and show in this really concrete way how all of those things are interrelated. I get some satisfaction from maybe making visible something that derives a lot of its power from being invisible. So when people are feel convicted because they are consuming those young women, which a lot of my friends did by the way they told me, I made them feel bad. I was like, I'm sorry. But if it means we take a moment and go, yeah, what am I doing? Exactly? Why am I a 45-year-old woman watching a 20-year-old? Tell me about her David Urman bracelet. What's happened here? I think that's worth it. I hope it's hanging a lot of my hat on it being worth
Elise: It. Yeah, it makes your work so important. Just naming it, labeling, helping create containers for what we're seeing.
Tressie: I love containers. Containers are my favorite thing. Thank you. Well, and
Elise: That's why we love you. You co-hosted a podcast for a long time with Roxanne Gay here to Slay. And I'm curious, do you have other plans to be podcasting again regularly? And if not, oh goodness. What did you learn from yourself or about yourself in that podcasting journey? And from those conversations,
Tressie: We had a lot of fun, Roxanne and I doing here to slay talk about, I think just capturing a moment. I think the podcast, us doing this just captured a moment. When we first started talking about doing it, it was really just about two people who liked and respected each other. And every time we saw each other, we had a good time and we said, Hey, we should do more of that. And podcasts were happening. So we were like, oh, that's a way to do more of that. But then the world changed almost. I mean, we'd only been recording four months or so before Covid fallout from Trump. All of that was happening. And so it was just a moment, and I don't know that I could recreate that, but I did learn a few things. As you all well know, it's hard. It is hard work making interesting, relevant audio content, and you have to figure it out on the fly because there's really no real guidebook. So one, I have an immense amount of respect for people who do it. So thank You'all. I also think it is super important that more women do it, because a lot of what we tried to do is hire women to be on our show, especially women of color and queer women. And it was really hard to find them, and that is because the system doesn't apprentice them.
There's not a good pipeline, especially on the No, there is not, especially on that technical side. And so I learned that, and that's become one of my pet issues. I also think I learned another way to tell stories, which I really love. I trying to, again, take these things that can be really hard to think about, to consume, and making them maybe a little bit more digestible, and for people to feel a little less alone about trying to figure it out. I'm not sure we have enough journalism or media that helps us figure stuff out. Yeah, we got a lot that sells us or brands it, but I don't think we have enough that helps us figure stuff out.
Doree: Well, Tressie, before we let you go, is there anything that you feel like is bringing you hope or joy in the present moment?
Tressie: Yeah, I'm pretty sure there is. I've been trying to spend as much time sort of in nature and outside as I possibly can. One of the things that media does is it lowers your sight line.
You're just looking in the phone, you're looking at the tv, the computer, and just the act of going up and looking at the horizon really does change my perspective a little bit about things. I find it helps with my anxiety and my stress level to do that, which is not news. Doctors have been telling us that forever. I just finally figured out for myself. But I think during these times, it's more important probably than ever. As I've said, I get a lot of sort of vicarious thrill and comfort from the people I meet during the course of my work who are doing really important work and somehow make it look fun and easy. There's an elderly black woman in Louisville, Kentucky named Ms. Donna. I actually just got her phone number yesterday from my friend. I said, I'm feeling bad. I need to talk to Ms.
Donna. Ms. Donna is just this woman who has lived more life than anybody, has a right to live, been through enough where she could check out and nobody would blame her. She's lost her children to violence. She's dealt with predatory landlords. She survived the civil rights movement. I mean, just by being elderly and black. She won. She's been through a lot. And when I talked to Ms. Donna, she's so future focused at like 68, 70 years old. She is organizing people in section eight housing or subsidized housing for better living conditions. Most of them overwhelmingly young women with children. And she's not doing that. And she'll tell me, I'm not doing it. I'm not going to live to see it. She's like, I'm not doing this for me. I'm done. She's like, I just want to get it done before she goes. I want to get it done before I die. So I can see the young girls in my apartment complex win. She wants to see them win. She wants them to taste winning before she dies. And when I talk to people like that, I go, well, I've got some nerve.
And so I get a lot of vicarious comfort from the fact that I think they're probably a lot more Ms. Donna's out there than we know. And if you are fortunate enough to find one, checking in with them and being in relationship with them, I think really can give you a little hope. And I'm kind of hopeful by the student movements. I know they have taken a lot of flack in the media, some of it earned, but a lot of it unearned because no matter what, I have a position that I never judge protestors. If my butt's not the one out there. I don't judge 'em. So I never judge protest tactics unless I'm part of the protest. So you can do that as much as you want, but if they are protesting, it means they, they're paying attention. And I'm very hopeful about anybody right now who is paying attention because I think we better be.
Elise: Well, here's to Ms. Donna and all the Miss Donnas.
Tressie: Yeah. Shout out to all the Ms. Donnas,
Elise: And thank you again to you, Tressie, for being such a clarifying voice.
Tressie: Oh, thank y'all for thinking. I'm clarifying. I really appreciate it. I do.
Doree: I feel like that is going to be one of the episodes that I go back to. I don't to Forever35 episodes generally as a rule. This one though. But this one I feel like is a listener for sure.
Elise: I love what she said about what she's doing to take better care of herself too, just the boundaries and that you don't have to say yes to the same things that you would have last year or two years ago
Doree: Or five
Elise: Years ago because your life has changed and you have changed, or your capacities have changed. And I have trouble with that. So
Doree: Yes, very wise, very wise. Well, Elise, let's get into intentions.
Elise: Okay.
Doree: Last week I said I was going to do my tennis elbow exercises, and I'm happy to report that I have been doing them. I've been keeping this little two pound weight on my desk, and so I can just rest my hand on the armrest of my chair and just do the exercises as I'm talking, which is nice. I actually saw my doctor today, and he was like, you're doing great. Yeah, it's going great. He did say, tennis elbow is very sneaky, and just when you think everything is cool, it can come back. So he definitely keep doing the exercises, just stay the course, essentially. But that was a nice, that's great news. Follow up. Yes, it was great news. And then this week, we are going on a trip soon. I know that you have had a crazy travel summer. We're
Elise: All in July. Yes.
Doree: Yes. But this is my first and only trip of the summer, and I've become a little obsessed with the subreddit, her one bag. Are you familiar?
Elise: No.
Doree: You're familiar with the concept of one bagging, right?
Elise: I assume so. Does that mean just everything into one bag?
Doree: Yeah, one bag in a personal item.
Elise: Oh, yeah, of course. That's my whole life.
Doree: Yes. So I guess there is a bigger subreddit for everyone, but then women found that they had special hacks, hacks or unique needs. And so there's a special subreddit just for women, female identifying people who want to one bag and people will post. They'll be like, I have this trip. I'm going to Italy for a week, then I'm going to London, and then I am flying to Cairo. Or it's usually some crazy itinerary with multiple climates. Climates. And they'll be like, how does this look? I'm trying to one bag it. Oh, that's fun. People will give feedback on their packing. I'm considering posting my packing list and photos. Yeah. Share it on the Pat Patreon. Yeah, I'll share it on the Patreon. I might post it to her one bag. I usually travel with one bag, but I am sort of intrigued by the idea of cutting it down even more.
Elise: So one of my major, I get asked about how to pack all the time, and I just did a feature for downtime, the Substack by Alicia Ramos about packing and how I pack, only because I've been a foreign correspondent. And the two tips that I always share about packing are one, after you've packed your whole bag, do an edit and take out a third of it, because that you won't need usually even after you pack it into one bag, so you still take stuff out. And I do that for my toiletries in particular, because liquids weigh the most, smart liquids weigh the most, so try not to even bring liquids if you're going someplace where they're likely going to be there, or you can just buy them when you're there. Yes. And my other one is packing cubes. I always stuff everything into packing cubes such that everything gets really, really compact. But it's tricky. This is all tricky during ski season and those months when there's just a lot of gear. And so I try to level that up by getting the, what is that? Like, you know how you can order products from overseas and everything's kind of shrink wrapped. Is it shrink wrapped where they
Doree: Oh, like vacuum sealed.
Elise: Vacuum sealed. Yeah. So I've gotten one of those vacuum seal things for a lot of winter coats
Doree: So that I
Elise: Can pack my entire family into two carry-ons for skiing. And that's the only way it's possible.
Doree: That's really funny.
Elise: But yeah, this one bagging thing is a great intention. It's kind of fun too. And it sounds like there's a whole subreddit around it.
Doree: Yeah, there, there's a whole culture around it that I'm kind fascinated by.
Elise: And what's
Doree: Also nice is that now I can one bag it with Henry, whereas when he was a baby, that was impossible because babies have so much shit, even though they're tiny humans. So that's also fun.
Elise: Yeah. I always encourage each of my kids, this is all in the downtime newsletter that we can link from our page. But I encourage my kids, especially because I don't want them dragging their own suitcases because then I have to deal with it. I have to put them above in the overhead compartments. And so I give each daughter one packing cube, and so it's like, here's your packing cube. This is what you can put your stuff into.
Doree: Wait, you put your whole family's stuff in one bag, try one carry-on Try.
Elise: Yeah, try to, well, for summer, of course.
Doree: Wow.
Elise: Yeah. They wear one pair of shoes, and then the extra pair of shoes I can pack. So I usually make them wear the tennis shoes, the sneakers, and then there sandals I can just pull down and pack.
Doree: Whoa.
Elise: But then Rob is separate, so we do not include Rob because Rob says that he has male clothes and that it'll always take up more space. And he has more stuff because he's coming from a different home. La, la, la,
Doree: La. So wait, so you fit your stuff and your three children's stuff into one carry carryon,
Elise: One carryon, and then they have their own backpacks for their iPad and headphones and
Doree: Lovey. No, I know, but I mean, I'm impressed,
Elise: But I travel super light, so this is years. I got my 10,000 hours of packing. So
Doree: Maybe I'll just, I'll send you my pictures of what I'm going to bring and then you can edit it down for me. Yeah, happy. I can help you edit.
Elise: Totally. Totally. I think this is so fun. This is my area of expertise,
Doree: So yes. Okay, great. Wonderful.
Elise: To
Doree: Help. The other thing, I will have access to laundry, so yeah, I don't really, you're right. I don't really have to bring that much. What if Henry and I bring one bag? Oh my God. Whoa. You're blowing my mind right now. My mind is like,
Elise: I'm so happy. This is your intention, because this is an area where I can really help.
Doree: I'm so happy. How did journaling daily go for you? Love?
Elise: As soon as I intended it, I got really good about it. Love that. So as soon as I said it out loud, I remembered to, because I use an app, a journaling app called Day one, and Day one is on my phone and on my laptop, and it's in the cloud, so anything I add from my phone automatically, it's on the laptop version. And so I have been journaling photos and making little notes Cool. And little gratitude or funny things that the kids have said. And so like I said, I'm not writing essays. I'm not writing essays in there.
Doree: Sure.
Elise: I'm just journaling, and I've gotten much better at it ever since I said I would.
Doree: What's it called? One day?
Elise: Day
Doree: One? Day One, sorry. Okay.
Elise: Yeah, it's called day one. It's so simple. And you can put photos, you can do voice memos in there, and you can link from there if you want to, if there's some great article. But that intention went so well that I am going to go back to a more physical intention, which I have been historically not great at. The taking vitamins every day did not go so well. So this week my intention is going to be to foam roll. I'm sore af. I'm just sore all the time because, and it's not always from exercise, it's often because I have decided to jump back into a workout like a May, a former workout when I didn't exercise for five days, and so now I'm just sore all the time. I have to work it out. And there's so many stretches that just won't get at wherever my soreness is inside my hip and my sacrum. And so I am trying to foam roll as my intention this week.
Doree: I love that intention as someone who has a foam roller that sits mostly unused, but that it band foam roll is
Elise: So
Doree: Good, but ouch. Ouch. But then you're like, Ooh, it hurts so good. Maybe I'll go foam roll. You're really inspiring me today.
Elise: You're packing you and Henry into one bag and foam roll. Oh my
Doree: God. I wonder how, I'm actually really curious how he will react to that.
Elise: Just giving him the
Doree: Packing cube.
Elise: Yeah. They like their cube when we're leaving, when we're getting ready to pack, each daughter is like, where's my cube? I need my cube.
Doree: Will you send me the cubes that you use? I have a couple cubes and I don't love them.
Elise: Yeah, I got a set of free ones, and so I have one that I use from a free one, and then I got a set recently as a gift also. So I'll send you a photo.
Doree: Are they compression cubes or they're just cube cubes?
Elise: I don't even know the difference.
Doree: I've been going down a real rabbit hole here.
Elise: Oh, okay. Man, I've never read this
Doree: Subreddit. I just think you would enjoy it because it's a little voyeuristic. You know what I mean? You're like, oh, that's a choice to bring. You know what I mean?
Elise: One time there was a woman who grabbed my bag. I have an away bag and everybody has an away bag who grabbed my carry-on by mistake and walked off the plane. And so by the time I was grabbing my bag and I was sitting behind her, I got her bag, which was obviously the wrong bag, but I knew it wasn't mine. So I got off the plane, I was like, where do we find this woman? And we were trying to page her from the Houston airport, la, la la. Can't find her. Nobody responds. So then I decided we should open the bag, which felt so creepy. We have to find something identifying, maybe she has a pill bottle or something. But there was nothing in there except we discovered how well organized she was. I was like, damn, girl.
Doree: Oh, I love that. That's so funny.
Elise: Well, I have no idea who you are. Oh my God. And you have my bag, but bravo on your packing.
Doree: That's really funny. Okay, noted. Alright, well thanks everyone for listening. Forever35 is hosted and produced by me, Doree Shafrir and Elise Hugh, and produced and edited by Sam eo. Sammy Reed is our project manager and our network partner is a cast. Thanks so much everybody. See you next time. Bye.
*Transcripts are AI generated.