4.7 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
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0:00.0 | You're listening to shortwave from NPR. |
0:06.1 | As a teen, Sabrina Strings loved getting to hang out with her grandma. |
0:11.4 | Even when her grandma was obsessing over one of her soap operas. |
0:15.5 | I remember one time she called me into the living room and she's like, Sabrina, look at Victoria. |
0:21.8 | Victoria is a character on Young and the Restless. |
0:23.8 | She says, Victoria is killing herself to be thin. |
0:28.0 | Why are white women dying to be thin? |
0:30.7 | Fast forward to 2003. |
0:32.8 | Adult Sabrina was working at an HIV medication adherence clinic in San Francisco where she witnessed |
0:38.6 | real life examples of women sacrificing their health to be thin. |
0:43.3 | I had spoken to a couple of women, both HIV positive, who refused to take their HIV |
0:48.5 | medications for fear of gaining weight. |
0:51.4 | And that blew my mind. |
0:53.0 | And it immediately took me back to conversations I had been having with my grandma. |
0:55.6 | And I was like, oh my gosh, she was onto something so important. |
0:58.8 | You know, when she was talking about it, she saw it as largely a white phenomenon. |
1:02.8 | But the women I interviewed that day were both women of color. |
1:07.2 | Why are these women dying to be thin and did race have anything to do with it? |
1:16.9 | Sabrina went on to become a sociologist at the University of California Irvine and wrote |
1:22.0 | a whole book investigating these questions. |
1:24.7 | If you were like me, you might have assumed that there was some moment in between Marilyn |
1:29.2 | Monroe and Twiggy in which, right, suddenly, we suddenly became fat-fold in those three |
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