Since Oprah Winfrey has been off the air several of her award winning, decades-old interviews with celebrities have garnered a lot of backlash. First it was her interview with Britney Spears way back in the day, before everyone was educated on mental health and what harmful questioning was.
Now fans are coming for Oprah because of her 2003 interview with Dolly Parton, but unlike Britney who’s had to endure 13 years of hardship, Parton is thriving and living her best life, and even took the questions with what could be argued as a grain of salt. She wasn’t bothered by them at all.
Oprah draws backlash from Dolly interview
Oprah asked about her plastic surgery, which by today’s standards would be verboten, or at least handled in a more sensitive fashion. Oprah just put it out there on the table asking Dolly what she was doing to stay young, saying that she had had work done, and Dolly flat-out embraced the question like the queen that she is, saying that she did have work done and she would have more work done when she needed it.
Dolly has never exactly shied away from the fact that she has had plastic surgery, no she hasn’t provided everyone with a diagram of exactly how many procedures she had and what areas she’s had fixed, but she’s been pretty open about the fact that she’s had work done before. In fact that was a pretty big topic of all the headlines in the 90’s, so by the time 2003 rolled around, Dolly was used to this line of questioning.
Oprah also brought up her struggles with depression, which, again, today would be handled quite differently because people recognize that questions like that can be quite triggering. However, this was 2003 and as a culture we weren’t educated in mental health, pick any number of interviews from two decades ago and you will run across questions that would trigger anyone, but they weren’t thought of as inherently triggering back then because that was the culture.
Either way, Parton just shrugged it off and said that the reason why she was depressed had nothing to do with turning 40, as Winfrey had originally thought, but rather the fact that she had gained weight and that she had turned 40 – hey it’s alright Dolly, we aren’t judging. We stan a thicc queen. (Though honestly, I think Dolly is at a fine and healthy weight now.)
The thing that we can learn from these interviews is to do better, and to have less harmful lines of questioning for interviewers in the future, but honestly, no one is perfect and while this is not a defense of Winfrey, she couldn’t know what she hadn’t learned – what none of us had learned – yet. This probably isn’t the last time we’ll see another interview of hers get panned on twitter, but.. it’s twitter… the big blue hellscape. Stay tuned!!!
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