Do You Remember: When Carnie Wilson Live-Streamed Her Gastric Bypass Surgery
‘90s fatphobia was really something else.
CONTENT WARNING: This piece delves into issues of fatphobia, disordered eating, and descriptions of surgery.
Fatphobia has always been in style. Even when body positivity (albeit in its most diluted and capitalism-friendly form) was making waves in the mainstream, we’ve never seen a period in our lifetimes where skinny wasn’t considered the beauty ideal. Now, as weight loss medication becomes more widely available and we enter an era of so-called radical transparency over celebrity cosmetic surgeries, it feels like we’ve made a hard U-turn back to the era of ultra-thin. Every time I see a red carpet event, I feel flabbergasted by how everyone is getting smaller and smaller, and we’re unable to talk about it with honesty or nuance. None of this is new but it is astonishingly potent in what it reveals about money and class as the real forces behind body shaming. Everything can be commodified, even your changing body (hell, especially your changing body.)
Wilson Phillips was on top of the world in 1990. The pop band, made up of the daughters of rock and roll royalty, sold over 10 million copies of their debut album and had received five Grammy nominations for it. The song "Hold On" topped the Billboard Hot 100 list for 1990 and is still considered one of the decade's top pop hits. Their time in the spotlight was brief but the band certainly made an impact as a girl group with pop and easy-listening appeal.
They made for good copy too. Chynna Phillips was the daughter of John and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas fame, while Wendy and Carnie Wilson were the kids of the legendary Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. The women grew up together and were intimately familiar with the dark side of the music industry, a contrast from their pleasantly poppy songs. Both Carnie and Chynna would talk about their experiences with drugs, struggles that the press would eagerly draw parallels with their respective fathers. But for Carnie, who co-wrote their biggest hit and has remained arguably the most enduring member of the band, the media couldn’t stop obsessing over something else: her weight.
(Image via YouTube.)
Carnie Wilson talked frequently about how she was scolded and mocked for her weight, treated like the black sheep of the band by management and the press. In the video for “Hold On”, shot on a sunny beach, she’s fully clothed while Wendy and Chynna bare some flesh. She was often put into restrictive corsets that made it tough to breathe or even move, which caused bleeding and sores. She admitted to “running into the bathroom and just sobbing” when a record executive, during the production of their debut album, asked her, “What are we going to do about this weight problem of yours?” Chris Farley played her on SNL. In one appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show, she was tricked into standing on a set of scales with the number of pounds she weighed blaring on a big screen above her. That incident of blatant bullying left her "so devastated and so embarrassed," as you can imagine. Reportedly, Stern has never apologized for this "prank."
