What’s Going On With Oprah?
Why her WeightWatchers marriage of convenience is over, but she's not out of the game.
In December, when Oprah announced that her newly thin, purple dress-clad body was thanks to weight loss medication, I said I wasn’t going to write an Oprah think piece for you. And there is still nothing new to say about Oprah’s multi-decade, highly publicized war on her own body.
There is also nothing new to say about the oceans of anti-fatness, racism, and misogyny she swims through as a public figure in a Black, female body of various sizes. "I don't know if there is another public person whose weight struggle has been exploited as much as mine," Oprah said in an Oprah Daily episode about GLP-1 drugs last September. She’s not wrong. “It’s easy to blame Oprah,” wrote Shana Minei Spence in December. “[But] she has been a victim all this time like the rest of us.”
What has always been challenging about Oprah is that we have to hold her victimhood together with her monetization of that victimhood. And there is something new to say—or rather, to puzzle out—about Oprah as a diet culture creator and exploiter of other people’s weight. Which she very much is. Oprah’s story has always been her own to sell. But how much do the rest of us pay in the process?