Ebook: Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV

Nearly every night on every major network, "unscripted" (but carefully crafted) "reality" TV shows routinely glorify retrograde stereotypes that most people would assume got left behind 35 years ago. In Reality Bites Back, media critic Jennifer L. Pozner aims a critical, analytical lens at a trend most people dismiss as harmless fluff. She deconstructs reality TV's twisted fairytales to demonstrate that far from being simple "guilty pleasures," these programs are actually guilty of fomenting gender-war ideology and significantly affecting the intellectual and political development of this generation's young viewers. She lays out the cultural biases promoted by reality TV about gender, race, class, sexuality, and consumerism, and explores how those biases shape and reflect our cultural perceptions of who we are, what we're valued for, and what we should view as "our place" in society. Smart and informative, Reality Bites Back arms readers with the tools they need to understand and challenge the stereotypes reality TV reinforces and, ultimately, to demand accountability from the corporations responsible for this contemporary cultural attack on three decades of feminist progress.;Introduction. Resisting Project Brainwash -- 1. Unraveling Reality TV's Twisted Fairy Tales: Cinderellas and Cautionary Tales -- 2. Get Comfortable with My Flaw Finder: Women's Bodies as Women's Worth -- 3. Bitches and Morons and Skanks, Oh My! What Reality TV Teaches Us about Women -- 4. This Is Not My Beautiful House! Class Anxiety, Hyperconsumerism, and Mockery of the Poor -- 5. Erasing Ethnicity, Encoding Bigotry: Race, Pre- and Post-Flavor of Love -- 6. Ghetto Bitches, China Dolls and Cha Cha Divas: Race, Beauty, and the Tyranny of Tyra Banks -- 7. Beautiful Corpses, Abusive Princes: Violence against Women as Glamorous, Romantic Reality -- 8. "I Would Be a Servant to Him" New Millennium, Same Old Backlash -- 9. The World According to CoverGirl: Advertiser Ideology Goes 3-D -- 10. Fun with Media Literacy: Drinking Games, Deconstruction Guides, and Other Critical Thinking Tools -- 11. What Are You Going to Do? How You Can Transform the Media--Starting Today.;Takes a look at how our favorite shows reinforce stereotypes and force-feed us messages about who we're supposed to be and what we're supposed to want. Pozner exposes the commercial and political agendas behind the genre, revealing how the shows negatively impact women, people of color, and future generations.