Boy, Oprah’s confession brought out a lot of discussion yesterday! You guys had 200 pounds of comments in our post and the full article is up now. Check out the reactions in the blogosphere:
Mopie finds some positives in Oprah’s confessions:
I think that this little snippet may have gotten lost in the hubbub: her goal is no longer to be thin. She may not be the perfect size acceptance advocate by any stretch of the imagination, but what this quote tells me is that she might actually be on the right track at last. I’ll be interested to see what she says on her show and in her magazine. She no longer strives to be thin. Does she really mean it?
Hmmm…yeah, I don’t believe it either. On the other side of the equation, Nudiemuse questions Oprah’s philosophy:
…I do think Oprah has done some great things. However her relentless MAKE YOURSELF BETTER AT ALL COSTS (that is my impression of some of her ideology) just bugs me. I don’t subscribe to the idea that one must aggressively reduce one’s number of perceived flaws. I don’t think of my body in terms of flaws. Further, I don’t think of my soul or my essence or my entire personhood in terms of things I can make better. I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to do better or be better. What I question though is the often blind YES I MUST DO THIS TO BE A BETTER PERSON thing. I hate to see people running after these things without sitting down and really examining them. Do you really need to go out and buy special books to learn to be a positive thinker? Do you need to bumrush the products and guru’s that Oprah follows to be a good person? Is doing any of these things going to put you on the path to Oprah-like gazillionaire status? Probably not.
My favorite takeaway has to be from Lesley, who talked about being disappointed in 1985 when a circus had a unicorn that turned out to be a one-horned goat (hey! I saw that stupid goat too! We’re unicorn-disappointment twins, Lesley! Clearly, we’re destined to be BFFs!) and then writes:
The moral to this story — the moral I’d share with Oprah Winfrey or with anyone still fighting to become a fantasy self, still struggling to believe that they are exclusively and personally responsible for their alleged moral and disciplinary failures to force their bodies into a certain shape, to fit a certain arbitrary ideal, to satisfy the fairytale ending in which the heroine loses the weight and lives happily ever after and Never Has To Diet Again — the moral is this: Unicorns aren’t real. It hurts. I know. It hurts to let it go. It hurts like fucking hell. It hurts because of all you’ve invested in that belief. All the effort, all the conviction, all the sacrifice. I know. I know how realizing that the circus unicorn was a fake ripped through my tiny 8-year-old soul; I know how coming to terms with the fact that I will never, ever look like a model — even a plus size model! — was brutal and excruciating and frequently sent me into spirals of self-loathing and despair, even for a long time after I thought I was over it. I KNOW. But unicorns aren’t real.
Maybe that answer’s Mopie’s question about whether Oprah is serious about not striving to be thin. It’s just another unicorn.
