The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

When anything in the zeitgeist was cited as an example of “Oprahfication,” it was a way to signal the primacy of emotion and the feminization of society. A 1997 story about Oprah in U.S. News & World Report was literally headlined “A Woman’s Woman.” “With America’s general prosperity, with relative calm in the rest of the world, has come the option of self-concern,” wrote Debra Dickerson. “Women love Oprah because she provides the outlet. Mean people hurt her feelings, as they do others’. Like other women, she hates being fat. The difference between Oprah and many others is that she says so—and validates ordinary women who are quietly angry and unhappy for the same reasons. She validates them, scolds them, worries about them, and shares her love with them, and they don’t begrudge her the millions she makes off them.”