The Butcher's Darling.

Awful but cheerful.

By Jennie Lightweis-Goff

I was born as a hysteric on August 31, 1988, a few weeks after my ninth birthday. The excitement of gifts and compensatory parties — designed to make me forget that kids born during the regular school year had roomfuls of classmates sing to them — had faded. But one pleasure never left: the excitement of standing on my toes behind my mother on the grocery checkout line to see the headlines and black and white images of the trashy tabloids. These days, we remember The National Enquirer or mock the headlines of The New York Post. (Other women have nicknames for their situationships; I’ve said goodbye to more than one man by writing him a rhyming hypothetical headline about our star-crossed affair.)

But there were many more newspapers and magazines then. Glossy and nubby, the raw and the cooked. Just above my eyeline, I see the misty edges of a vintage photograph. I lean back as I climb to the crest of my toes. (Henri had an acute attack and fell into his grave, read the mnemonic poster on the wall of my French classroom, designed to remind us of the direction of accent marks. Acute backward and grave forwards.) When I see the tabloid cover pictures in their fullness, I shift backwards and then forward in terror; I have an acute attack and fall into someone else’s grave. It’s not Bat Boy or Reanimate Elvis, but an image of five dead women, four on morgue slabs with their throats slashed, one laying on her side in bed. The wall behind her is splattered with viscera; sometime later, I remember thinking thank God it was in black and white. All of our metaphors are photographic now, lensed and pinched and zoomed into focus. I inspected the fifth woman, the outlier. The men who found Mary Jane Kelly — Jack the Ripper’s final victim — on November 8, 1888, knew her by her eyes and teeth. The rest of her face had collapsed into the bedding. At the inquest, the witnesses averred that they would never recover from the sight.

The twentieth-century tabloid — I do not remember which — published a grid of “the five” in dubious honor of the centenary of Jack’s first kill: Polly Nichols, on August 31, 1888. For the rest of my life, I suspect these images will remain my ultimate information hazard. I asked my mother for the details. I point at what I’ve seen. She will advance no further into the story than I have traveled, here, alone. The orderly fear came later, with trigger warnings and blurred Reddit clicks. We lived in a different world then: only the sensory world, without digital wallpaper or static interference. I could see the skinless chicken thighs laying on the conveyor belt, passed from my mother’s hands to the cashier’s and then to mine, as Mom told me to bag the groceries.

Later, at the dinner table, I bite and see the flash of red down near the chicken bone. I taste the metal blood spray on Mary Jane Kelly’s wall and then, for the first time, I faint.

***

When I am afraid --- tipping in and out of a manic state — I feel it first in my aversion to chrome rows of meat in the grocery store. Before long, I am checking locks and scanning the faces of my loved ones for signs of body-snatchers, some novel identity theft. In the age of peak true crime, I recognize my sisters. In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe describes a lifetime of falling into “murder funks” when depression leads her — like a lightbulb on insomniac nights — to Dennis Rader’s daughter’s memoir or to Jeffrey Dahmer’s Wikipedia page. In “Sexy French Depression,” a song from the beloved musical comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rachel Bloom sings while reclining in a bed that “smells like a tampon” and reading a book on John Wayne Gacy. (The lyrics are written in inimitable, subtitled French). But we don’t have much in common. They fear that the killer is under the bed, and they use the shot of energy to shake the bed-skirt and check. Once they leave the house, they’ll use books by Ann Rule and Maureen Callahan to shield themselves from men who stand too long near their car doors in parking lots. But I’m not afraid of the predator; I’m afraid of the body he leaves behind. I could enter my own bedroom and find Mary Jane Kelly, slashed and cubed, between my sheets. Maybe she will turn slightly. The dangling eyeball will gaze at me for a moment, and I will recognize my own mutilated face.

The distinction, I think, is the line between hysteria and its near-cousins: mania, anxiety, and depression. Hysteria is a form of identification; it is mimetic, of course, but the hysterical self becomes unstuck, like deteriorating glue in the binding of a book, from its body. Freud, who self-diagnosed as a hysteric, saw himself in talented Dora. By contrast, depression has become a lazy catch-all diagnosis for disordered thinking; we have filed down its edges to make it fit, now that hysteria seems dated and borderline seems owned as a colloquial denunciation for a messy bitch. The spread of the depression diagnosis is, of course, medicalized in a way that might remind us of hysteria – the thing we’ve allegedly overcome, as smart people in a modern society.

One does not have to be RFK, Jr. to think that SSRIs are over-prescribed. After all, the first great chronicler of Prozac was the late Elizabeth Wurtzel. She was a feminist, an unsung genius, a Dionysian anti-Didion. An iconic New Yorker who wore cashmere sweaters doused with perfume and stained with her favorites: Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow and Mr. Softee ice cream. When she wrote Prozac Nation, Wurtzel noted that there were 6 million prescriptions in America alone, after just a few short years on the market. “As a Jew, I had always associated that precise number with something else entirely,” she wrote. The number pivots and points like a knife poised to slice a carotid artery.

Her second book, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, is a catalog of danger; she acknowledges sympathy for Amy Fisher and Delilah, but real identification with girls who died ugly: Cathy Earnshaw and Margaux Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald. The stereotypical girl-on-girl crushes don’t hold much lure for her, and when she turns to acknowledge Sylvia Plath, it is to say that there’s “no such creature as a ‘submissive, sympathetic depressive,’” despite the endlessly circulated images of the poet as a trapped and hapless wife. She is not the unwashed Esther Greenwood of The Bell Jar, but a “hot-blooded madwoman….with bloody red lipstick,” the kind who looked at dead bodies and found in them some perfection, as in the poem “Edge” (1963). We have misunderstood her, Wurtzel seems to say, or misunderstood diagnosis entirely. “Depression, the disease of not feeling, starts to manifest itself as….hysteria…the disease of feeling too much,” she writes. And when we fail to see these categories – to imagine one as wholly obsolete, replaced by our superior knowledge – there is much we fail, symptoms we ignore, drugs we fail to research, and words that swim away from meaning.

Not long ago, my friend Amy arrived at my book release party with a 5-foot black and cream striped scarf wrapped in tissue paper and stuffed into a storage bag. The black fabric has a kind of lavender undertone, like the oil-slick dye jobs back in the 90s, when every girl had a copy of Prozac Nation tucked in her messenger bag. The scarf had belonged to Wurtzel, been purchased from her estate’s sale by another friend, then passed to Amy and never worn. I could just smell cigarettes, Amy told me, even after a second cleaning. I smelled nothing but perfume. Less the scent of a ghost who just passed through the room than the heavier business of your grandmother’s cut glass flacons. I held it for a long time before I slipped it around my neck, still fearful of the hysteric’s “secondary identification,” which we are too quick, I think, to name as narcissism. I wear it when I am full of fear and choose, nonetheless, to be foolhardy. When I rise from my bed with the wounds still in bloom.

Are you following Jennie Lightweis-Goff? She is a flâneuse, scholar, and writer. Jennie in jammies, Dr. LG on the dotted line.

Author of Blood at the Root (2011), Captive City (2024), Porgy's Cart (2026), and The Chef's Sabbath (soon).

The Butcher's Darling.

Awful but cheerful.

By Jennie Lightweis-Goff

The ideas about the painting ‘A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere’ I present in this episode are thanks to the scholarship and insights of Dr. Sander Gilman, medical historian. His works on the subject of hysteria are unparalleled and a must read if this topic interests you.

Show notes

Referenced:

The Yellow Wallpaper, full text

Terri Kapsalis: Why I teach the Yellow Wallpaper

https://lithub.com/author/terri-kapsalis/

A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere

Dr. Sander Gilman: The Image of the Hysteric

Featured Guests:

Gabi Jones

The Vintage Vault

Uncovering and styling the stories behind vintage fashion with Gabi Jones, seasoned curator trusted by over 1.6M vintage lovers

By Gabi Jones

Terri Kapsalis

https://www.terrikapsalis.net/

Jamieson Webster

https://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty/jamieson-webster/

Jennie Lightweis-Goff

The Butcher's Darling.

Awful but cheerful.

By Jennie Lightweis-Goff

Season 3 of the Memory Hole Podcast is a 7-part series, best listened to in order.

Please follow, like and comment on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to discuss these ideas further, please share an episode with a friend.

Fits and convulsions… Paralysis… Mutism… Loss of appetite… Limping. …Insomnia...Exhaustion... Digestive problems... Menstrual difficulties... Fainting spells… Exaggerated contractures... Contractures, not exaggerated... Dizziness... Sensation of choking... Loss of interest in daily life... Heaviness… Sinus pain…Weak pulse... Stuttering… Coughing... Sore throat... Migraines... Ovarian sensations... Visual disturbances... Local numbness (particularly left-sided)…

Just what, exactly, is hysteria? In Episodes 3 and 4 we’ll look back into history to better understand this shape-shifting illness.

Show Notes:

Referenced:

Opening clip: Dream Crazier, 2019 Nike Ad

From Paralysis to Fatigue; A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era by Edward Shorter

The Babinksi reflex test

Jean Martin Charcot

Hysteria Beyond Freud, by Sander Gilman

Dora, An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

Thomas Sydenham, the English Hippocrates

Film: Freud, the Secret Passion

Featured guests:

Terri Kapsalis

https://www.terrikapsalis.net

Jamieson Webster

https://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty/jamieson-webster/

Season 3 of the Memory Hole Podcast is a 7-part series, best listened to in order.

Please follow, like and comment on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to discuss these ideas further, please share an episode with a friend.

This topic is known as culture-bound syndromes, or now in a newer name, cultural concepts of distress. Usually studied in anthropology and sociology, it is commonly recognized that sufferers from culture-bound syndromes communicate their distress in unique ways, called idioms of distress - a phrase which sounds to me like an invocation of the symptom pool.

Ideas about classification undergird this topic, which is also an interest of mine.

Show Note:

References:

Brian Eno on culture https://musicthoughts.com/t/114

https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-a-big-theory-of-culture

DSM & Culture Bound Syndromes https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/psychology/culture-bound-syndromes

Lumping and Splitting

Featured guests:

W.David Marx, author

http://www.neomarxisme.com

Lisa Marchiano, Jungian analyst and author

https://lisamarchiano.com

Ethan Watters

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethan-watters-51a8aa16

Nicholas Haslam

https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/6837-nicholas-haslam

Jonathon Tsou, The Marvin and Kathleen Stone Distinguished Professor of Humanities in Medicine and Science

https://profiles.utdallas.edu/jonathan.tsou

Thanks to Kat Chamberlain for her Turkish translations.

Season 3 of the Memory Hole Podcast is a 7-part series, best listened to in order.

Please follow, like and comment on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to discuss these ideas further, please share an episode with a friend.

The Symptom Pool:

Medical Historian Edward Shorter defined the symptom pool as a culture’s collective memory of how to behave when ill. Shorter put forth the idea that in the case of psychosomatic illnesses (like paralysis at the turn of the twentieth century or multiple personality disorder at the turn of the twenty-first), the unconscious mind is attempting to speak in an appropriate language of emotional distress that will receive validation by the culture. What symptoms are socially acceptable - to physicians and patients alike? While this unconscious process can alleviate distress, it ultimately leaves suffering unaddressed.

Cerulean Blue:

In The Devil Wears Prada, 2006, Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly delivers her famous ‘cerulean blue’ speech, neatly describing the trickle-down processes of trends and culture:

This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you.

You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

I am a writer and pathologist who’s personal brush with the recovered memory psychogenic hysteria in the early 1990s left me obsessed with how we get carried away by trends, how our most personal and private emotions are expressed in changing, arbitrary cultural moments.

Season three is a seven-part series reported audio series to address the question: how do fads and fashions shape our emotional lives? I’m interested in finding an answer because I was once susceptible to these kinds of cultural forces. What about you?

Show notes:

Topics include:

Pegged, cuffed, jeans

Season 1 of the Memory Hole Podcast: The Courage to Heal

https://www.memoryholepodcast.com/podcast/episode/2c348067/ep-3-suspicion-to-confirmation-the-promise-of-the-courage-to-heal

Meredith Maran

https://www.meredithmaran.com

Malcolm Gladwell & the tipping point

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-gladwell/the-tipping-point/9780759574731/?lens=little-brown

Miranda Priestly

https://artdepartmental.com/blog/devil-wears-prada-cerulean-monologue/

Edward Shorter: From Paralysis to Fatigue

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/From-Paralysis-to-Fatigue/Edward-Shorter/9780029286678

Featured guests include:

Gabi Jones, actress and online vintage fashion content creator

The Vintage Vault

Uncovering and styling the stories behind vintage fashion with Gabi Jones, seasoned curator trusted by over 1.6M vintage lovers

By Gabi Jones

W. David Marx, author

http://www.neomarxisme.com

Nicolas Haslam, professor of psychology Melbourne

https://psychwire.com/profiles/1qkkabd/nicholas-haslam

Lisa Marchiano, Jungian analyst and author

https://lisamarchiano.com

Ethan Watters, freelance journalist

Culture and Cognition

For three decades, I've written about how culture impacts how we think and interact. This substack is created to explore the latest research and update some stories from the past.

By Ethan Watters

Please follow, like and comment on Apple Podcasts, and share this season with a friend.

Welcome back to the Memory Hole, now for Season 3. We’re about to dive into an examination of psychic epidemics, the contingent nature of our emotional lives, and the symptom pool we’re all swimming in.

Tune in, share, and subscribe to hear from the voices featured (in order) in this trailer, and many others:

Ethan Watters

Terri Kapsalis

Lisa Marchiano

Please follow The Memory Hole Podcast on Apple Podcasts, rate and review the episodes, and stay tuned you prefer so you won’t miss the upcoming episodes.

Did you forget about how hard we all once tried to remember? You can go back and listen to Seasons 1 and 2 now, before Season 3 airs.

As 2025 draws to a close, I’m hard at work on Season 3 of the podcast. This next season will be about a fundamental question I have about the recovered memory movement - why did those ideas make sense to me in 1989, but would not have been offered as an explanation in 1999? Why and how does culture shape and explain our innermost selves? I’m talking to experts in psychology and history to help sort it out, launching in early 2026.

Thanks for listening!

We can make great art as we consider our pasts, but we need to be smart about how we do that.

In this episode:

Nicholas Dames https://nicholasdames.org/contact-2/

Pride and Prejudice

Inside Out 2 - Nostalgia 

Dan Chaon https://danchaon.com/

Olivia Gatwood https://www.oliviagatwood.com/ 

Kat Rosenfield https://katrosenfield.com

Elif Batuman The Elif Life: A Great Time for Personal Narrative 

Gen Z is not reading

Recursion, a novel by Blake Crouch

In this episode:

Twin Peaks

The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, by Jennifer Lynch

Katie Roiphe's Harper's article about incest-related fiction can be accessed here, on my website:

https://www.memoryholepodcast.com/about

A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley

In Search of Lost Time, the monumental work of Marcel Proust, demonstrated a new way to consider subjective experience; his insights into the nature of memory and accompanying sensations, are considered.

In this episode:

Kate St. Vincent Vogl

Andromeda Romano-Lax

-Andromeda's novel, now in paperback

The Tell by Amy Griffen

Remembering Molly - Immediate and delayed false memory formation after acute MDMA exposure. Kloft, Otgaar, Blokland, Toennes, Ramaekers. Eur Neuropsychopharmacology

The Courage to Heal, as featured in Season 1, Episode 3

Professor Patrick Bray

-Article: Proust and the neurosciences

-According to Marcel Proust: new guidebook focusing on Proust's writing

Fran Mason - 73 Notebooks

Janet Malcolm Still Pictures

We are all fascinated with loss of memory, and perhaps fiction offers a needed relief valve for these concerns. But does it advance the wrong ideas?

In this episode:

The first detective novel: The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins and the Birth of Amnesia; Nicholas Dames

Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Before I go to sleep by SJ Watson

Kat Rosenfield

'Elizabeth is Missing'

Black Eyed Susans

In the Woods

Memory's misuse in storytelling

I made a second season because I wondered - why, if the recovered memory movement is over, do so many people still believe in repressed memories?

Season 2 is for you if:

-you love books, movies or otherwise escaping into a story

-you think about memory and forgetting

-you think about why we think about what we think about...

-you liked Season 1

-you like learning about debunked beliefs.

Please join me, won't you, once again, in The Memory Hole.

Featuring

Andromeda Romano-Lax

-Her Present Tense Substack, featuring the recent post Do We Care About How Memory Really Works? Amnesia, "useful" unreliability, and the return of the Memory Wars

-Her novel, The Deepest Lake

Kat Rosenfield

-Her Substack

-Her novel, You must remember this

Sources

Jonathan Lethem’s Vintage Book of Amnesia 

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Bourne Identity

Memento

Repressed memories in film

This trailer features interviews with authors Andromeda Romano-Lax and Kat Rosenfield.

Complete links to guests and sources will be provided in upcoming episode notes at www.memoryholepodcast.com

We discuss human susceptibility to cultural ideas and how a more communal understanding of identity and memory might be a healthier approach.

Show notes for Episode 6:

Carrie Poppy

https://maximumfun.org/about/team/carrie-poppy/

Historian Edward Shorter

From Paralysis to Fatigue; a history of psychosomatic illness in the modern era

Idioms of distress

https://www.brightfutures.org/concerns/culture/cultural-concepts.html

Article in The Cut:

The Memory War; Jennifer Freyd accused her father of sexual abuse. Her parents’ attempt to discredit her created a defense for countless sex offenders.

Carrie’s response: The Letters New York Magazine Hasn’t Printed.

 Meredith Maran

Interview 5/23/2023

My Lie; A True Story of False Memory

Forward to the second edition Diana Russell’s book, The Secret Trauma, published in 1999.

 https://www.dianarussell.com/the_great_incest_war.html

Cover art collage by Jena Martin, using Solitude by Frederick Leighton 1890

Opening: The Confessions of St. Augustine, AD 401

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3296/3296-h/3296-h.htm

Interviews:

Dr. Henry Otgaar

Personal Website

Maastricht University 

Interview 9/21/2023

Dr. Sophie Scott

The Brain: 10 things you should know

X/Twitter

Interview 9/22/2023

Mentions:

Bart Simpson: Oh boy, time to repress another memory

⁠Season 14, Episode 17⁠

Dr. Scott mentions the 'Lost in the Mall' study

Context: https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XQze2hIAAGYP8ckl

Beyond Lost in the Mall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOpMhYGPajU

Explaining memories in the movie Inside Out - where they went wrong:

https://theconversation.com/does-pixars-inside-out-show-how-memory-actually-works-43311

Cover art collage featuring Mnemosyne, also titled Lamp of Memory and Ricordanza.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881.

“We look at the world once, 

in childhood. The rest

is memory.”

Louise Gluck

Any and all background music from the free YouTube Audio Library

The Memory Hole Podcast theme is: A Great Darkness Approaches, Can You Feel It? by  ELPHNT

If you listened to Episode 4 you heard a lot from him about Freud. But he had lots more to say during our interview and I don’t want to condemn those words to a file on my computer. Plus he doesn’t have a lot of accessible interviews on the internet. I believe his voice needs to be heard.

About the guest:

Frederick Crews is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His many books include The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy, The Random House Handbook (currently in its sixth edition), and Postmodern Pooh.

Interview, 6/28/2023

Freud: The Making of an Illision

Episode cover art featuring Amalia Freud, Sigmund's mother.

Show Notes:

Frederick Crews is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His many books include The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy, The Random House Handbook (currently in its sixth edition), and Postmodern Pooh.

Interview, 6/28/2023

Freud: The Making of an Illision 

The Freudian Cover Up 

https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/10040046

----

Mark Pendergrast

Interview 6/14/2023

Quotes from Prodigy, early internet chat room, taken from his book Victims of Memory.

His more recent and comprehensive book on this subject is Mind Warp: 

https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Warp-Repressed-Arose-Refuses/dp/0942679415

----

Ms. Magazine Cover Story - Believe it. Cult ritual abuse exists

https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/drawn-to-purpose/about-this-exhibition/magazine-covers-and-cartoons/disturbing-content/

The article is unavailable on the Ms. Magazine website archives; a PDF copy can be accessed on the Memory Hole Podcast website, www.memoryholepodcast.com 

Reaction to the article: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/All+the+babies+you+can+eat.-a013566129

 ----

Melody Gavigan’s story of retraction appears in Time Magazine, in an article Lias of the Mind from 1993

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,979691,00.html

----

Statements from professional organizations disavowing recovered memory therapies:Americal Medical Association

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207149508409955

American Psychiatric Association  https://www.psychiatry.org/getattachment/930fb215-2147-40e9-9d44-f06d84fc64de/Position-2013-Memories-Child-Abuse.pdf

----

Decision in the Holly Ramona legal case: 

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/14/us/father-who-fought-memory-therapy-wins-damage-suit.html

----

Geraldo Rivera, as quoted in The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic, 2004 

-from CNBC 12/12/1995

----

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation

http://www.fmsfonline.org/

War of Remembrance, Philadelphia Magazine, January 1994

Pam Freyd Interview with David Calof in Treating Abuse Today 1994

Clips from the Documentary Making Memories used with permission of Patrick Clancy

Access it here: 

False Memories: Remembering What Never Occurred? (TW: Child Sexual Abuse)

Pam Freyd’s article, published anonymously: How Could This Happen?  Coping with A False Accusation of Incest and Rape, Jane Doe

http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume3/j3_3_3.htm

The Cut chooses Jennifer Freyd

https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html

Rebuttals

https://carriepoppyyes.medium.com/four-letters-new-york-magazine-hasnt-printed-88e08e94db5f

Beware the Incest Survivor Machine, New York Times, Carol Tavris 1993

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/03/books/beware-the-incest-survivor-machine.html

Cover image collage by Jena Martin featuring the Sphinx from the painting Oedipus and the Sphinx Francois-Xavier Fabre, 1808

The tragic story of Oedipus 

https://www.thecollector.com/oedipus-rex-artworks/

Any and all background music from the free YouTube Audio Library

The Memory Hole Podcast theme is: A Great Darkness Approaches, Can You Feel It? by  ELPHNT

All quotes come from the 1st Edition of The Courage to Heal; a guide for women survivors of child sexual abuse, 1988

For more audio background about the book, please check out the Conspirituality podcast's two brilliant episodes on this text.

Meredith Maran Interview 5/23/2023

Mark Pendegrast Interview 6/14/2023

Frederick Crews Interview 6/28/2023

The cover image for this episode is of Cassandra (Cassandra. 3307: Bust by Max Klinger, 1857-1920. Hamburger Kunsthalle)

"Have I missed the mark, or, like true archer, do I strike my quarry? Or am I prophet of lies, a babbler from door to door?" (Cassandra. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1194).

Any and all background music from the free YouTube Audio Library

The Memory Hole Podcast theme is: A Great Darkness Approaches, Can You Feel It? by  ELPHNT

But by the late 1980s, something had changed.

Please note: between minutes 3:30-4:56 on some platforms there is a blank space. This was a YouTube clip of an Oprah Winfrey program in 1986, included to demonstrate the pervasiveness of this topic in popular culture. If this is missing in your feed, please accept my apologies. Here is the incident referred to:

In addition to physical abuse, young Winfrey was sexually assaulted by more than one family member when she was just nine years old. She was also molested by a family friend while still a little girl. Oprah shared these traumas with the public very early on in her career. The New York Times reported in 1986 that during an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show about battered women and incest. She started to cry when a guest talked about her experiences of abuse and sexual assault, asking for a station break and hugging the woman, at which point she revealed her own experiences as a victim and survivor. She later said “For the longest time, I carried this burden around with me and was afraid to tell anybody because I thought it was my fault.”

Prime time movie night Something about Amelia

After school special: Don’t Touch

Rosanne Barr

During an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the comedian admitted that she is ashamed to have levied allegations of sexual abuse against her mother and father in 1991."I think it's the worst thing I've ever done," she said. "It's the biggest mistake that I've ever made."

https://www.intouchweekly.com/posts/roseanne-barr-incest-156910/

Oprah Winfrey

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9604633/Oprah-recalls-repeatedly-raped-19-year-old-cousin-age-nine.html

Meredith Maran Interview 5/23/23

Dan Rather CBS Evening News, March 1988, Television Archive

Playboy magazine comic, quoted from The Best Kept Secret, Florence Rush 1980

Quotes from: John Money, Wardell Pommeroy, Larry Constantine from The Best Kept Secret, Florence Rush 1980

More about Florence Rush

Love’s Baby Soft Commercial, 1975 “Because innocence is sexier than you think.”

Mark Pendergrast Interview 6/14/23

Laura Pasley https://www.stopbadtherapy.com/retracts/pasley.shtml

Laura Pasley appeared in documentary: Making Memories, from the False Memory Foundation (Patrick Clancy)

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The Memory Hole Podcast theme is: A Great Darkness Approaches, Can You Feel It? by  ELPHNT

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-trailblazer-of-trauma-studies-asks-what-victims-really-want

It’s embarrassing to admit this brush with disaster, embarrassing to admit I’m suggestible enough to have nearly fallen into something like a cult. Because I wanted to be like my college roommates, I tried to believe I’d experienced and then forgotten truly horrible events. What outrageous claims would I have made, how far would I have gone just to fit in? Fortunately, I awoke from my enchantment before I did anything I would later regret.

Interview with Meredith Maran, conducted 5/23/2023

You can request a copy of her memoir, My Lie, A True Story of False Memory on her website https://meredithmaran.com/

You can hear an interview she conducted about this book here.

Dead Can Dance

https://www.deadcandance.com/

The charm of prostitution: Risky Business

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1017641-risky_business

‘Alternative’ in the 1990s was about more than music.

https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Alternative

Obsession commercials. Are you obsessed? I still am.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1985/03/14/ah-the-obsession-with-it-all/ebd515cd-0c94-451a-a55d-0402448ad81a/

More Calvin Klein and the zeitgeist.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/style/ck-one-fragrance-cologne.html

Heather Locklear and viral social concepts

https://www.retroist.com/p/and-they-told-two-friends-how-faberge-organics-shampoo-explained-virality

Any and all background music from the free YouTube Audio Library

The Memory Hole Podcast theme is: A Great Darkness Approaches, Can You Feel It? by  ELPHNT