Tag: Jennifer L. Pozner

YouTube Break: Reality Rehab With Dr. Jenn

Back in March, we featured Jennifer L. Pozner’s book, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, as a Quote of the Day. I just ran across something awesome: a satirical and hilarious video series called, Reality Rehab with Dr. Jenn, in which Pozner hosts a mock-reality-rehab show. Her main responsibility as host involves revealing and critiquing reality TV stereotypes by attempting to help those stock characters “learn how to be three-dimensional human beings again.” The featured stock characters include The Desperate Bachelorette, The Angry Black Woman, The “Real” Housewife, The Top Model, The Slutty Bitch, The Douchebag Dude, and The Gangsta Guy. I’m posting the trailer below, but definitely go to her site, and check out the entire series!



Bio from the Web site:

JENNIFER L. POZNER (“Dr Jenn”; Executive Producer) is the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, and the producer and cowriter of this Reality Rehab project. She is founder and Executive Director of Women In Media & News and editor of WIMN’s Voices. A widely published journalist who freelances for corporate and independent print and broadcast outlets, Jennifer is also a noted lecturer on women, media, politics and pop culture. 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. She has served as an adviser for and has been featured in several documentary films, including I Was a Teenage Feminist and Miss Representation. Jenn is extremely indebted to and impressed by the entire Reality Rehab team, who worked entirely for free to pull this indy project together. This is her first time writing and producing a video project…she hopes you enjoy it! (Tell her what you think on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.)

Quote of the Day: Jennifer L. Pozner

Reality Bites Back: the Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV by Jennifer L. Pozner (Seal Press)

While there are huge swaths of this book I’d like to quote, I’ve chosen a passage from the chapter “Unraveling Reality TV’s Twisted Fairytales: Cinderellas and Cautionary Tales,” which focuses on reality dating programs (such as The Bachelor). It’s often simple to dismiss such programming, but like all media, these programs do significant work in cultural norming, and we don’t always understand how powerful the messages are.

On fairytale imagery:

For women, these representations conjure our earliest memories–of the stories our parents read to us before bed, of the cartoons that danced in our imaginations, telling us what we could (and should) look forward to when we grew up. No matter how independent we might be as adults, how cynical we consider ourselves, or how hard we’ve worked to silence external cultural conditioning, decades of sheer repetition make it extremely difficult to fully purge societal standards from our psyches. Simply put, it’s damn near impossible to live completely outside the culture, no matter how well we try to shield ourselves from its impact.

[…]

Regardless of where we fall on this continuum–from conscious refusal to let childish notions inform our love lives to enthusiastic embrace of fantasies we’ve nursed since we were little girls–producers play on these deep-seated ideas about gender, love, and romance for ratings. This, in part, is what Mike Darnell was talking about when he told Entertainment Weekly that the secret to airing a successful reality TV show is to create a premise that is “steeped in some social belief.” And, as we’ll soon see, similar stereotypes about race, class, beauty, and sexual orientation are endemic, even necessary, to reality TV–in all its forms.

I believe that media literacy is the education issue of our time. While many people are cynically aware that they’re being sold products in television–through both traditional advertising and product placement–they’re less savvy about the ideas and cultural norms being sold to them. As Pozner points out, it’s the “sheer repetition” of the regressive ideas and images in reality TV that has a lasting effect on our views of women, in particular.
I highly recommend reading–and purchasing–Pozner’s Reality Bites Back. It’s a fantastic book, very teachable (if you’re a teacher-type), and published by Seal Press, which prints books by women and for women.