Endless Thread - The Unquenchable Thirst

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

For a moment last year, it seemed like there were two types of people: those desperate for a Stanley Cup Quencher, and those who did not understand the craze around these cups at all. Headlines abounded about the 40-ounce water vessel's popularity, and so did memes poking fun at the people — mostly women — who partook in the trend. As we head into another holiday shopping season, journalist Virginia Sole Smith helps Endless Thread understand WaterTok, the social media trend that pushed the Stanley Cup into the big time, and what it might tell us about the next item to flood our feeds. Show notes: Yes, Mermaid Water is a Diet (Burnt Toast) Why Does Anybody Need 37 Stanley Cups? (The Wall Street Journal) The latest TikTok weight loss trend is … hacking water? (Vox) Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson, Grace Tatter and Amory Sivertson.

Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

A heads up that this episode discusses diet culture. So you do you. Okay, here's the show. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Hello, Ben and Amory. Hello, Grace Tatter. Hello. So Black Friday is Nye, the holiday season, 24 is in full swing.

I don't know about you, but my inbox is absolutely full with sales promotions and gift guides from companies. I don't even ever remember going on their website. And as we fill our online shopping cards, I thought it would be a good time to revisit last year's hot ticket holiday item, the Stanley Cup. Three seconds to go! Not hockey, but a water bottle. A really big water bottle. The hot gift drawing screams and sobs of joy. A favorite for pre-second.

teens and adults alike comes in a variety of colors and costs $45. How many ounces does the Stanley Cup water vessel hold? It depends on the model, doesn't it? Well, it does, and we'll get to the specific model that was going crazy, which was 40 ounces of water, a lot of water. So Stanley Cup, the Cup company, not the hockey award, has been around for more than 100 years. But last year, there was this huge explosion in sales went from from 7.5 million in 2022 to 750 million in 2023. So 100 times the sales.

Wow. That's like insane to me. And this is something that I feel like has weirdly also happened with nerds recently. Mm-hmm. Like all of a sudden there's like a New York Times feature about nerds and all the kids are eating nerds again. Nerds was my favorite candy growing up. There's always lots more fun to be had with tiny crunchy nerds. Oh, nerds the candy.

We've got a lot of confusing terms in this episode. When nerds are not the nerds you're thinking of and Stanley Cups are not the Stanley Cups you're thinking of. Okay. And I feel like there are these moments where like all of a sudden a brand just becomes ubiquitous and everybody's talking about it. And you're like, where did this come from? It's a weird mystery to me, how this works.

Well, I can clear up at least part of the mystery for you right now, at least when it pertains to Stanley Cops. The Stanley Cup became so popular because people were talking about it on TikTok. And at first it was mostly women, mostly moms. But then it started to trend younger and younger. And by Christmas, 2023, we were seeing videos like these. All right. So this is, I believe it's a girl.

She's opening a present on maybe on Christmas Day. She's in her pajamas. She is tearing this box. box open. She's so pumped. She opens a Stanley Cup. It's purple. She's shaking with glee. What does the cup say? Stanley.

Not as cute as a puppy. She looks like about like, I don't know, maybe like 10 or 11. Do you remember, like, was there ever any thing you got for Christmas when you were that age that would have made you that excited? Yeah, I think I got like a gymnast Barbie at one point in time who came with a little set of uneven bars, and that was pretty cool, but not a water bottle. The water bottle would have gone in the, like, clothing column of thanks. You know. I feel like on its surface, this is a good thing, right?

You need hydra homies. You need people that remind you to drink water. And if that helps to have a water bottle, you know, that's, like, I don't know, glamorous. Maybe so be it. Yeah, it's just a water bottle, albeit a $45 one. It seems like there are definitely worse things for kids to get hooked on. But would you be surprised to learn that the Stanley Cup's popularity was accompanied by some major backlash? No, I would not.

As a culture, we love to yuck each other's yums. Big Dumb Cup. People called them adult sippy cups. And there was just in general, like, a lot of eye-rolling about the popularity of this water bottle cup thing. It's wild, right? I mean, people were lining up. People were fighting. You're reading articles about, like, kids bullying each other at schools.

They didn't have this cup. Like, the popularity of this specific item did feel kind of unprecedented in a way. And one of the things that drew us to this story, Grace, was that this trend was mostly focused on women and girls. Absolutely. This was very much a gendered product. And that actually is a really important part of the story that I don't think was told last year when everybody was talking about how popular this cup was. This evolved from a TikTok trend that itself is a symptom of another very powerful American cultural force,

one that affects everyone, but especially women. And one that is not solely about overconsumption, but ironically is about under consumption. Even though you've tried other methods and failed, you can still lose ugly fat fast. I'm Ben probably dehydrated Brock Johnson. I'm Amory, very hydrated, but also always has to pee, Siebertson. Two minutes, she says. Two minutes. I'll be back in two minutes. I'm Grace. Honestly, usually just the right amount of hydrated tatter, the Goldilocks of hydration.

Wow. Wow, Grace. Wow, don't have to brag about it. Yeah, geez. And from WBUR in Boston, you're listening to Endless Thread. And today's episode, The Unquenchable Thirst. All right, Grace, where do we start? Okay, it's 2023, and a Stanley Cup is the item to have, especially for women of all ages.

More specifically, the quencher, a 40-ounce cup that comes in lots of colors and can fit into a car cup holder. And this popularity has been stoked by TikTok. But why did it take off on TikTok in the first place? This is a good question for Virginia Soul Smith. I'm the author of the book Fat Talk, parenting in the age of diet culture, and I write the newsletter, Burnt Toast and host the Burnt Toast podcast, and I live in the Hudson Valley in New York.

Virginia wrote an essay for her newsletter, Burnt Toast, on this very topic, and she tied the popularity of the Stanley Cup to Water Talk. Do you remember what Water Talk is? We also talked a little bit about this as a team when it was at its peak popularity. Water recipes, fancy water recipes involving powders, flavored powders. Yeah, that's about the information I have about it too, because I'm not, I'm not on water talk, I will admit. As a perpetually dehydrated person, I'm not on water talk. Exactly.

So it was women who were putting usually sugar-free syrups or powder. in their water to make it taste better so they could drink lots and lots of water. This is my water recipe that has me drinking a gallon of water like it's a treat. It's almost like a sweet treat and we're talking like zero calories and water. I mean, it's really a Venn diagram in my mind between the Water Talk and the Stanley Cup and it would be almost a perfect circle of overlap because Water Talk is selling us this lifestyle of hydration, hydration, hydration. In order to do all of that hydrating,

you need something to put it in. And because we're talking about a phenomenon that is rooted in influencing and influencers make their living by selling us things, it completely makes sense that they would start pushing different, you know,

trendy water bottles as a way of marketing the whole concept of water talk, basically. A classic, accessoryizing capitalism situation right there. Exactly. Influencers sell us things. That's how they make their money. And they're talking about drinking a lot of water. A big cup is a natural fit. But that doesn't really explain why people were so into watching videos of people

drinking a lot of water or making these water recipes. So let's dig in a little bit more to that. Virginia's introduction to the world of water talk was the same as a lot of people's. It was a TikToker named Tanya Spanglo. She did all these TikToks where she would make pinacolado water. By a little bottle of banana flavoring and you used a boop, just a little drop, okay? And mermaid water. You guys want a little mermaid water? Let's do it.

So basically just like adding different flavors to water. What is mermaid water? It's just it. It's mostly like seaweed and barnacles, I think they put in there. Yeah, right. Well, Tanya is not a mermaid. She lives in the very landlocked state of Oklahoma in a small town, and she is a 40-something-year-old mom and grandma.

Her handle on TikTok is taking my life back at 42, and she started posting there in 2020. And for two years, her videos were racking up like maybe 3,000 views here and there, sometimes a little bit more, usually less, nothing super viral. There's nothing particularly polished or edited about Tanya's videos. I live in a very small town and all we have is a Sonic, Carl's Jr. and a McDonald's. So Sonic it is, right? She has videos where she participates in TikTok trends and is very silly. She makes a lot of self-deprecating jokes about wanting to gain followers and go viral. But the vast majority of her content is about losing weight.

Hi guys, let's call this weight loss tip Tuesday. A really key part of Tanya's story is that to date, she has lost nearly 300 pounds. In 2020, she underwent gastric sleeve surgery. which involves part of your stomach being removed and requires you to eat less. And she's been very open about this. Do you struggle living a normal life after white loss surgery? Absolutely not. I live a better life after my weight loss surgery,

a much better life. And it's interesting because you see her numbers, like, over time, they go from, like, you know, what you described as, like, 3,000 to pop to we're looking, I'm looking at, like, half a million views. Her account is popping off as I'm looking through her videos over time. Yeah. told Vox that in 2022, she noticed that the videos where she talked about doctoring her daily water

intake were getting a lot of views. And you know, what do people do when they realize that some kind of content is really popular? They lean into the algorithm and they produce more of it, right? Sure. And like Virginia said, all that water's got to go somewhere. So the Stanley Cup, 40 ounces of my daughter supplies me with these. This is my second one. You guys asked me about it yesterday. It's a little heavy. It's a little bit heavy, but here's the best part. How our unhealthy obsession with weight loss is connected to our thirst for Stanley Cups after a break. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

Stories about policing. Or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you.

the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal. we can help. Discover how the magic is made at wbUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, so Grace, we've been talking about Tanya Spangelo, this woman from Oklahoma, who started a TikTok to document her weight loss. Yeah, so Tanya is known as the mother of water talk, which helped make the Stanley Cup the item of

23. But there's actually been this long-standing focus on hydration among influencers that came even before Tanya. There's a blog called the Buy Guide, B-U-Y, that's run by Mormon mom influencers that had been promoting Stanley Quencher's for a couple of years by the time Tanya came around. Our favorite cup just got even better. Version 2.0, launching September 13th, the beloved when all of these streams came together into a torrent of demand for this really big cup, Waterdoc's weight loss focus largely got swept away with the current. But it's a really important piece of this puzzle, which is why I wanted to talk to Virginia Soul Smith. She is an expert in diet culture. Diet culture is the system and beliefs that we are all living in all the time, which

tells us that if we were to achieve a thin body, and that's a goalpost that's always moving, but a thinner body than the one you have now, we would be happier, we would be more successful. It teaches us to equate our body size not only with health, but also with all happiness, wellness, contentment, success, et cetera. Oh, man. I think the only thing more upsetting than acknowledging the pervasiveness of diet culture is not acknowledging the pervasiveness of diet culture. Yeah, nobody wins in diet culture.

Some people are disproportionately affected by it, depending on factors like body type and gender. But 9% of Americans of all body types experience eating disorders, which is the deadliest form of psychiatric illness. And this obsession with food and bodies contributes to anxiety and depression for many, many more people than that. And to be clear, this is about a pressure to be thin, not healthy. Those are two different things. And yet, fat people face bias in all sorts of settings, at work, at the doctors, on dating apps. There's this one video that Tanya posted in 2021. This is before she went super viral.

And it's really stuck with me. I'm so sick of gaining weight and losing weight and gaining weight and losing weight that I could freaking scream. When I was 400 pounds, I didn't have this problem because I didn't care. I didn't give two crafts. But now that I've had weight loss surgery, I gain a pound and I feel the guilt. Like, you've done all this work, all this money, all this, everything. How dare you?

Like, ah! She starts with this anger at herself, but then her tone changes, and it honestly just breaks my heart. I'm so ashamed. I can appreciate the prison that can feel like sometimes when you just, you, yeah, that's, I feel it. And here's the thing. When Tanya shared this video, she was already thin. She had already lost a lot of weight. And it just shows how diet culture can make it feel nearly impossible.

to feel truly at ease with yourself. I think the most relevant some of this gets for me is I wrestled in high school. You know, wrestling is a weird sport in this way where you have to suck weight constantly and sometimes that's water weight and you have to stay at your weight. I don't have a lot of connection to what you're talking about, Grace,

but this is probably the closest I get is when I was in high school and I had to keep my weight, as did many of my fellow wrestlers. and it was very, it was difficult. I guess what I'm trying to say is I agree with your point, Grace, that everybody experiences this at some level because it's a systemic thing that exists throughout society

in a lot of different ways. Yeah, constantly thinking about how much food you're consuming and how much you weigh, it's not fun. It does not feel like a great way to use your mind. Tanya, obviously, has always been very open with the weight loss angle to her. content. It's like all over her page, right? But other creators who take this water talk trend are less open about that. They're not necessarily using the weight loss hashtag. People talk about it

much more in terms of like, I'm trying to drink less alcohol or I want to have more energy. And it's not that you don't also have those goals. It's that I think the question we need to ask ourselves is like, would that goal in and of itself be enough if it didn't also align with thinness. You know how in Harry Potter, he can speak parcel tongues so he can hear snakes talking when no one else can? That's kind of what this feels like sometimes. No one is explicitly saying, do this to get thin or stay thin, but you kind of know that's the underlying message. Over the past decade or so, the discourse has really changed to embrace body positivity, which in theory is great, but in practice means we're now not only ashamed of fatness, but ashamed to even talk about the shame, because we're

supposed to love our bodies. And so we're just finding more and more indirect ways to talk about this, and it hasn't actually reduced anti-fat stigma, and I don't think anyone is any happier. That makes total sense to me. It's complicated, and it doesn't get treated as something that is complicated. We can't talk openly and honestly about diet culture and wait for fear, sometimes of misstepping or saying the wrong thing or hurting someone else, traumatizing someone in the way that we talk about this stuff, which makes us so careful about talking about it that we can't really talk about it. And Virginia says this is kind of a big culture-wide gaslighting.

Many of these influencers with the water talk will tell you, like they'll get you in the door talking about something else, talking about it's a lifestyle plan, it's about health and wellness, you know, you're just trying to eat clean, you're just trying to hydrate all of these concepts. And then when you actually drill into what their advice is or what the rules are of the plan or whatever it is, it is the same old eat as little as possible approach to weight loss that it's always been. But it's kind of dressed up in this whole other thing. Like drinking more water, even if it's full of artificial sweeteners and doesn't taste like water anymore. And that's because

diet culture sells stuff, and it always has. I found this ad, this Coca-Cola ad from the 1960s that I feel like is really telling, and I want you guys to watch it. Oh, boy. Another thing, the cold, crisp taste of Coke is so satisfying.

It keeps me from eating something else that might really add those pounds. Cokes are natural. Pulsome blending of pure food flavors. These things are so ridiculous. ridiculous when you listen back to them. But like I have a friend who I was talking with his wife about some of this stuff. And she told me that when she was growing up, her parents used to say to her, skinny tastes better. Which is like such a fucked up thing to say.

I was remembering the time when I performed with my dad's band. I was singing with his band. And this old guy who I'm pretty sure was not. wearing socks. He had on dress shoes with no socks. Interesting detail? Well, I told myself this afterwards because what he said to me was we took a little break in the set and I went over to a table that had some, you know, like cookies and punch, whatever. And I grabbed a cookie. And this old guy says to me, careful, if you don't watch your figure, no one else will. Ew. Yeah, which is why I clung to the like, well, you don't even have socks. Because that's, I was, you know, I was, I was young and I did not know what to say to him in that moment.

Now, in my mid-30s, I would say, that's inappropriate. You shouldn't say something like that. But as an 18-year-old, which is probably what I was, I just froze and then felt badly that I was eating a cookie. These comments really stick with you, whether they come from a random old man without socks or from an ad on TV. And the fact that this messaging is so powerful, so sticky, is why it's been used to sell us stuff for decades. And in the modern day, we know that straight up soda isn't going to slim us down, but this messaging that maybe sugar-free water will satisfy your cravings and make you not want to eat, that can still get to us. That still might make us want to buy something. And so the way Stanley Cups are marketed are obviously different from how Coca-Cola is marketed in the 1950s because we're hearing more from influence.

influencers instead of directly from the company itself, but it's basically the same playbook. Influencers are selling more than a product. They're selling a certain lifestyle, right? A certain way of being. And if drinking water is equated with thinness and thinness is equated with all things good by the transitive property, anything that shows the world that you take hydration seriously, suggest like almost like that you are virtuous, that you are good, that you are worth following, which helps the Stanley Cup take off. It's this aesthetic of this influencer who is young and thin and most likely white and like long, shiny hair and very hydrated, beautiful skin.

And so, of course, she has this great accessory that she's using to do all of this hydrating. Like, you probably can't get her perfect hair or her perfect teeth or her perfect skin, but you can get the cup. So Stanley didn't invent water top. It doesn't seem like the company actually went to these influencers first. But Virginia said it just would have been bad business for them not to capitalize it on it once there were a lot of influencers talking about water online. And Stanley did this in a few ways. So they partnered with the buy guide, which is a blog I mentioned earlier.

And they heavily engaged with content like Water Talk on social media. So if they saw these videos, they would share them. They would obviously send influencers this quencher Tumblr that became so popular. And then they built even more on the social media fair by partnering with popular brands like Starbucks, Target, OLA. So brands that might already have be reaching similar demographics, popular with a similar demographic. And they would release these limited edition cups. So that adds to this air of scarcity, that this is special. And all of this culminates in this air of aspiration that comes with the cup.

Like, the cup comes to symbolize so much more than a mere 40-ounce pastel-colored metal tumbler. It was incredibly smart of them to figure out how to market to women and girls, because women and girls are the most powerful consumers in the country and always have been. Like, we do all of the shopping and purchasing. And so to figure out how to make this cup super attractive and covetable to women and girls was, I mean, it was absolute marketing genius. There was a subhead of Virginia's essay on Stanley Cups that was, who do we hate when we hate Stanley Cups? And I feel like at this point you might know the answer.

Yeah. Stanley is like a company that has traditionally marketed to men. Right? I mean, I'm not. Yeah. And also I think what's interesting is that they're trying to, clearly they're trying to like spread out. But the way that they do it and the cultural reaction to that, it somehow ends up, like, managing to hurt women, which is big sigh.

Yeah, when a company capitalizes on something to sell things to women, people don't point at the company and go, like, wow, they were really good at marketing. They go, why are women's suckers for falling for this marketing or why are women's suckers for buying this? like the company and the fact that there was an active push to make people buy this. Like that almost gets like erased from the narrative. We do not denigrate the purchasing decisions of men in the same way. You know, we don't talk about people buying flat screen TVs or the latest sneaker drop or, you know, lining up for iPhones. Like we might talk about like, wow, this is like, you know, there's critiques of that as consumer culture,

absolutely. But we don't assume that the consumers themselves are idiots. in the same way, that really makes me furious. Because if you want to be mad about consumer culture, be mad at the brands that are pushing consumer culture, be mad at the diet brands, be mad at Stanley for deciding to create this whole scarcity marketing phenomenon that was very carefully architected by them.

That's fine, be mad at them. But don't be mad at the consumers who are, like, responding to this messaging. Because what I think we forget when we do that is we are all consumers responding to this messaging. this messaging is very powerful. It's very carefully designed to capture us. This is like the sad genius of marketing where you can think that you are genuinely coveting the cup itself, the Stanley Cup, but you might actually be coveting what the cup represents,

you know, this dream of thinness. Yeah, totally. Last year, the dream of thinness was causing us all to buy Stanley Cups. This year, the dream of thinness, maybe. be contributing to sales for like these face rollers that make your jawline more to find or supplements that lower your cortisol levels. Those are some of the things that at least I'm getting targeted ads for. This whole Stanley Cup thing was sort of just like the tip of the iceberg about a lot of people were responding to. This looks like rampant gross consumerism and I'm going to judge the people participating in it when really we need to look at like what are the larger systems that are fueling rampant consumerism rather than blaming

the consumers themselves. So as we head into another holiday shopping season, I'm going to ask myself questions about why I want what I want. Is it in pursuit of an impossible dream? Or is it not that complicated? In which case? You know, life is stressful. And if a pink water cup makes you happy, like I like what is the what is the real harm here on an individual level? Okay. And I don't think this is a total absolution of individual responsibility, right? Like we're still arguing. We're still arguing, for thinking critically about your choices. But in some ways, I think that being less critical of yourself and others can actually be part of the work of chipping away at these systems that are just so big and can feel immovable.

I feel like I can hold in my brain both the sort of like purposeful kind of driven marketing and consumerism of a reusable water bottle that doesn't actually. really serve its purpose as a reusable water bottle when you buy a new one every year. And also, I can be reminded of this deeper thing that is happening, which is that diet culture is really pervasive and insidious and it's connected to our consumerism as well. And self-care isn't necessarily buying yourself a new water bottle. It might be like allowing yourself to be who you are. Yeah, I had not heard of water talk before this episode. And Grace, I just really appreciate how you tackled this very messy subject because how to take down diet culture is not clear to any of us.

But saying the thing out loud and calling out the sorts of dog whistles for just the, unrelenting forces that we all feel and may not always feel comfortable saying out loud, I think is a good first step. Yeah, I think my big takeaway from all of this has been, think critically, but be less critical of yourself. Think critically, but be kinder to yourself and to others. And maybe you do deserve a little treat, whether or not it's a Coke or a cookie. Always.

This episode was produced. by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Grace Tatter, Amory Severson, and yours truly, Ben Brock Johnson. Production assistance from our summer intern Mia Giuliani, who also introduced many of us to Water Talk. Hey, Mia, we miss you. Hope you're doing well. It was sound designed by our production manager, Paul Vikas. Our managing producer is Summa Tajoshi. The rest of our team is Dean Russell and Emily Jenkowski. Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines between Ben's lack of hydration, Amory's overhydration, and Grace's golden. locks hydration.

Grace, how do you do it? If you have an unsolved mystery, untold history, or you have an idea for how to make sure Ben drinks more water today and every day for the rest of his life, email us at endless thread at WBUR.org. Bye.