Table of Contents
Praise for Reality Bites Back
Reality Bites Back is a cogent, witty, exhaustively researched look at how your reality-TV sausage gets made. Since reality programming is likely to continue down its slippery slope, the books forward-thinking call for more media literacy and less televised stereotyping couldnt come at a more crucial time. TV can still be a guilty pleasure, but that doesnt mean it cant also be an informed one.
ANDI ZEISLER, Editorial Director, Bitch Media
A landmark study of one of the most misunderstood, vitally important aspects of popular culture. Mixing superb extensive research with crystal clear writing (and a scathing wit), Jennifer Pozner demonstrates not only the entirely fabricated nature of so-called reality television, but illustrates how its gender, racial, and class narratives are deeply reactionary. This book will disabuse any honest reader of the notion that reality TV is just escapist and innocent. An indispensable tool for teachers of media and popular culture. I will use it in my classes.
SUT JHALLY, Professor of Communication, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Executive Director, Media Education Foundation
Pozner delivers the goods by comprehensively analyzing race, class, and gender in reality shows, offering viewers concrete steps to deconstruct racist messages and build their own healthier media alternatives. A must-read for all avid TV watchers, and those who love us.
Rinku Sen, Publisher, ColorLines magazine; President and Executive Director, Applied Research Center
Media is a form of sustenance for our society. Our television diet consists of fables that leave women looking damaged and destructive. How do you change the game? First you understand it. Pozners Reality Bites Back is a chance to understand why reality television is so dominant, and how that shapes our interactions with each other and the world.
Farai Chideya, radio and television personality; author, The Color of Our Future and Kiss the Sky
Jennifer L. Pozner provides a decoder ring for understanding how todays most popular TV shows manipulate what we think about ourselves and others. Revealing complicated issues of body image, sexuality, money, race, and gender, Reality Bites Back is a smart and witty lesson in media literacy. Readers who are new to the topic will come away with a clear understanding pop culture politics. Those more familiar with the subject will find updated examples and deep analysis. Pozner is a clever writer with a keen eye for the issues that matter. Expect to be both edified and entertained.
SHIR A TARR ANT, PhD, author, Men and Feminism; Associate Professor, Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, California State University, Long Beach
Reality Bites Back is a MUST READ for committed reality TV addicts and those frustrated by the onslaught of these shows. A comprehensive, well-researched, intelligent look at voyeur culture and what reality television tells us about our cultural understanding of race, class, gender, and status.
SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY, Executive Editor, Feministing.com
An incredible resource for media educators. From concrete examples of destructive messages in specific programs, to media literacy activity ideas, to a thorough resource guide, it offers an evidence-based analysis of reality TV without demonizing its audiences for watching. Pozner empowers viewers to confront sexist, racist programming in ways that are fun, meaningful, and doable for young people. I cant wait to share Reality Bites Back with teen filmmakers.
MAILE MARTINEZ, Program Manager, Reel Grrls, Seattle
Jennifer Pozner does a brilliant job exposing reality TVs troubling hyperconsumerist messages, and offers common sense ways to fight back. As a feminist, a mom, and an educator, it frightens me how easily we have allowed reality TV to define beauty, intelligence, and what we should own.
VERONICA I. ARREOLA, VivalaFeminista.com
For Mason Wicks-Lim (age five), who said, while watching
a Nickelodeon video, Mom, can we turn this off?
I feel like theyre trying to sell me something.
And for Elizabeth Martinez (age six), who observed the announcement
of the Emmy Awards nominees for writing and asked,
So, is this the mens writing awards?
If we were all as engaged, aware, and critical media consumers
as these kids are, I wouldnt have had to write this book!
Introduction
Resisting Project Brainwash
The whole process of watching television [has] social significance. Television provides us with pictures of the world, of our world, and the knowledge that most of these pictures are fictional does not immunize us from believing in them. The beliefs we form become part of the context within which we understand who we are. To understand prime-time television, then, is to understand an important part of the way we view the world and ourselves.
SUT JHALLY AND JUSTIN M. LEWIS, Enlightened Racism
Nearly every night on every major network, unscripted (but carefully crafted) dating, makeover, lifestyle, and competition shows glorify stereotypes that most people assume died forty years ago. Follow me into the rabbit hole of reality TV, and lets take a look at how televisions Svengalis want us to see ourselves.
On ABCs The Bachelor and NBCs Who Wants to Marry My Dad? fifteen to twenty-five interchangeable hotties compete for the chance to marry a hunky lunkhead they dont know from Adam. Weepy waifs line up to be objectified for a living (or simply for a moment) on the CWs Americas Next Top Model. Branded ugly ducklings, appearance-obsessed sad sacks risk their health to be surgically altered on Foxs The Swan and E!s Dr. 90210. Starved women get naked for Oreos and men gloat about dumb-ass girl alliances on CBSs Survivor. Women of color are ostracized as deceitful divas on NBCs The Apprentice, lazy or difficult on ABCs Wife Swap, and ghetto train wrecks on VH1s Flavor of Love and I Love New York. And through it all, slurs like bitch, beaver, and whore are tossed around as if theyre any other nouns.
Who do we have to thank for this?
Meet Fox exec Mike Darnell, who The Washington Post suggests may be the most influential man working in television. The phrase shit-eating grin could have been coined for this once-disgraced, now-embraced king of bottom-feeder reality TV schlock. Back before we all succumbed to American idolatry, reality television wasnt a prime-time-dominating genre with its own Emmy categoryit was simply one low-rated, unscripted MTV soap opera called The Real World. In just two hours on February 15, 2000, Darnell changed all that, with Who Wants to Marry a MultiMillionaire? The special, which predated the game-changing Survivor, was a hybrid of Miss America and a mail-order bride parade. With executive producer Mike Fleiss of Next Entertainment, Darnell brought fifty brides-to-be to Las Vegas to be auctioned off to a complete stranger. They sashayed in swimsuits, tittered nervously, and answered pageant-style questions to assess their moral fortitude and sexual prowess in thirty seconds or less. Groom Rick Rockwell was hidden as he and the audience determined who deserved the biggest prize of all... a brand-new multimillionaire husband. Nurse (and future
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