About Reality Bites Back

“Jennifer Pozner’s Reality Bites Back is an

extraordinary gift to critical media literature…This
should be required reading for every American girl
and woman.” –Melissa Harris-Perry, Professor,
Princeton University; Analyst MSNBC; Columnist, The
Nation

What does it mean to be female in America? According

to reality television, women in general are golddiggers,
bimbos, and bitches, and women of color are violent,
“low class” whores. Straight, single gals are pathetic
losers and, we’re led to believe, it’s hilarious when they
get mocked, dumped, or punched in the face. And even
during the worst financial crisis since the Depression, it’s “important” to blow a year’s
salary on bridal gowns, couture clothes, and luxury vacations. Throughout the first
decade of the twenty-first century, our most popular form of media has erased all signs
that the women’s rights, civil rights movement, and gay and lesbian rights movements
ever occurred.

The resulting picture of America displayed

through the lens of The Bachelor, Flavor of
Love, and The Real Housewives of…
everywhere… is profoundly warped. Nearly
every night on every major network,
“unscripted” (but carefully crafted) dating,
makeover, lifestyle, and competition shows
glorify regressive stereotypes most of us
assume died forty years ago. The masterminds
of reality television have accomplished what the
most ardent fundamentalists have never been
able to achieve: they’ve created a world in which
women not only have no real choices…they Reality Rehab with Dr. Jenn
don’t even want any.

Who is creating this pop cultural backlash against women’s rights and social progress,
who profits from it, and why? What are the implications of a generation of viewers
gulping down this influential genre’s gendered myths as uncritically as those ubiquitous
Cokes on American Idol—and what can we do about it?

In Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV, Jennifer L. Pozner,
founder and executive director ofWomen In Media & News (WIMN), takes a fierce,
funny, and in-depth look at how reality TV affects our beliefs, our behavior, and our
culture. This genre encourages us to think less and buy more… but Pozner isn’t buying.
Instead, she lays out the deep-seated biases reality TV promotes about women and
men, race and class, love and marriage, sex and beauty, advertising and consumption,
and more. Drawing on a decade of journalistic research, she connects the dots between
reality TV’s hostile representations of women and people of color to decades of similarly
harsh narratives in news media and politics. When Tyra Banks shames a poor, single
mother of color for her “defeatist attitude” and claims she doesn’t want to work hard on
America’s Next Top Model, Pozner hears echoes of diatribes against so-called “lazy
welfare queens” in 1980s and early 1990s journalism. And what else are Wife Swap and
Nanny 9-11, she asks, if not a continuation of that factually specious yet ever-present
old media chestnut, the “Mommy Wars”?

Reality Bites Back deconstructs reality TV’s twisted fairytales, demonstrating that far
from harmless “guilty pleasures,” this genre has a damaging impact on our intellectual
and political development. Pozner offers readers a new way of looking at the
manipulative framing—and social ramifications—of their favorite shows, urging us to
banish the phrase “mindless entertainment” from our collective vocabulary. Exposing
behind-the-scenes production employed to “get the kids to go to Crazy Town,” she
blows the lid off the claim that unscripted programming simply portrays “real people”
with “real emotions.” She reveals how producers, writers, editors, and embedded
advertisers spin fictions out of whole cloth—and lays bare their ideological and
commercial agendas.

Smart, engaging and eye-opening, Reality Bites Back arms readers with the tools they
need to understand and challenge media stereotypes, and to advocate healthier
alternatives. Resource-filled chapters like “Fun with Media Literacy” help readers to
become more conscious, critical media consumers, while the solution-oriented
conclusion, “What Are You Going To Do?” provides a variety of easy, engaging
strategies readers can use to demand accountability from the corporations responsible
for this contemporary cultural attack on women.
 About the Author
Jennifer L. Pozner is founder and executive director of
Women In Media & News (WIMN), a media analysis,
education and advocacy group. She is also managing
editor of WIMN’s Voices, the popular group blog on
women and the media. Her book, Reality Bites Back:
The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV (Seal
Press, Nov. 1, 2010), grew out of WIMN’s media
analysis program.

A widely published journalist, Jennifer serves on the

board of editors of In These Timesmagazine. Her work
has appeared in corporate media outlets such as
Newsday, Chicago Tribune and the Boston Phoenix,
independent magazines such as Ms. magazine, The American Prospect, and Bitch:
Feminist Response to Pop Culture, and online media such as WomensEnews, AlterNet,
and Salon, among others. Her essays have appeared in numerous anthologies.
Additionally, she has served as an adviser for and has been featured in several
documentary films, including “I Was a Teenage Feminist” and “Miss Representation.”

Jennifer has appeared as a media commentator on NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC,
ABC News Now, GRITtv, Democracy Now!, National Public Radio, and Comedy
Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” And, because she’s a sucker for
punishment, she’s gone head to head with some of the most blustery boys of cable
news, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Joe Scarborough.

A noted lecturer, Jennifer has spoken on women, media, politics and pop culture at
more than eighty colleges across the country, on topics ranging from portrayals of
women in reality television, to gender and race biases in journalistic coverage of
elections, to media coverage of war, poverty and natural disasters. She conducts media
literacy workshops and media trainings for women’s groups, youth, and social justice
organizations.

Prior to founding Women In Media & News, Pozner directed the Women’s Desk at the
media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, where she wrote for Extra!,
the media criticism magazine, and contributed to CounterSpin, the nationally syndicated
radio show. Prior to that, she wrote the Media Watch column for the (now dearly
departed newspaper)Sojourner: The Women’s Forum.
In 2009, she was recognized as one of the New Leaders Council “40 Under 40”
progressive leaders in America. In 2007, Soroptimist International of NYC honored her
with their “Making A Difference for Women” Award. Still, her favorite award remains her
2006 inclusion “The Real Hot 100,” a Girls In Government project honoring young
women leaders making change in their communities. The “Certificate of Hotness” they
gave her for media activism still makes her happy four years later—because it came
with the tagline, “See how hot smart can be!”

Forbes named Jennifer one of “20 Inspiring Women To Follow On Twitter” in 2010. Later
that year, she was amused to find her non-profit activist self alongside Tyra Banks,
Martha Stewart and Vera Wang on BizTech Day’s list of “25 Influential Business Women
in New York City You Should Follow on Twitter.”

Jennifer is a graduate of Hampshire College. She believes, as Ani DiFranco sings, “You
gotta live light enough to see the humor, and long enough to see some change.” She
has been known to belt out random snippets of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical
episode upon request.

* Photo credit: Thomas Lascher.