Reality TV and the Performance of Authenticity in The Real Housewives

 Reality TV usually offers an unfiltered sight into people's actual lives, a popular example is The Real Housewives. Marketed as a glimpse into the friendships, life challenges, and everyday routine of wealthy women, the show wants viewers to beleive they are witnessing authenticity. However, after a closer consideration, The Real Housewives shows how "reality" is usually carefully studied and organized through performance, editing, and audience expectation. 

The overall appeal of The Real Housewives lies in its honesty, At first Glance. performers freely discuss different types of topics, like marriage, friendship, personal problems and finances in ways that feel unfiltered. confessionals give the look of direct communication between the cast members and the audience, building a trust and emotional connection. Yet these moments that the viewers see are filmed, edited, sometimes reacted, creating confusion about how authentic these works truly are. 

Rather than presenting their actual lives and their "true selves", many cast members act a version of authenticity that is shaped by the laws of reality tv. 

Dramatic confrontations, emotional outbursts and oversharing are not just personal expressions; they are filmed and presented on the screen, and rewarded with continued participation in the franchise. 

Authenticity becomes a performance in this sense. and that gives different meanings to what thing really are, like being real usually means being louder, aggressively confrontational, or too emotional more than one might be in everyday life. Cast members usually highlights their performance through defending their actions, reframing narratives, and talk directly to both the audience and other cast members through the reunion episodes. 

This constructed authenticity matters because it affects and influence the way viewers understand communication, sarcasm, confrontations, and emotional escalation as normal behaviors or overly performed expression. While this may be made for entertaining purpose, it also can lead to risk normalizing communication styles that are considered dramatic rather than understood.

Overall, The Real Housewives demonstrates that reality TV does not exclude performance, it just reshapes it. Authenticity on the show is not about showing the cast members' real actions rather than meeting the audience expectations. This raises an important question about pop culture more broadly: when authenticity is performed, does it lose its meaning, or does it become a new form of communication shaped by media culture? 

Who Knew Jeans Could Tell Us This Much About Advertising?

In 2025, campaigns from American Eagle and Gap reminded us that advertising campaigns shape how we understand identity, desirability, and cultural relevance. Sydney Sweeney’s partnership with American Eagle and Gap’s campaign featuring KATSEYE look like standard celebrity and influencer marketing, but both function as powerful pop culture texts that show us just how brands use celebrities to construct meaning.

American Eagle’s campaign with Sydney Sweeney leaned heavily into a standard, played out formula where they relied on hyper-visibility, aspirational femininity, and nostalgic “girl-next-door” aesthetics. Sydney has the standard, safe image of being white, conventionally attractive, and widely recognizable. Her being the face of this campaign worked as a shortcut for desirability and relatability. The backlash that followed was all about what the ad symbolized of whose bodies and identities are still treated as the default in mainstream advertising. This reaction highlights something is discussed in our readings that popular culture often reinforces ideologies by making certain images feel “natural” or unremarkable, even when they reflect narrow standards.

Shortly after, Gap released a campaign with KATSEYE and positioned the brand as globally minded, youth-driven, and culturally aware. Featuring a diverse, international girl group automatically insinuated inclusivity and modernity, which aligns with Gap with Gen Z values. They were focused on selling relevance, and it's part of what made their campaign so successful. The campaign suggested that Gap understands where culture is going and wants to be part of that movement, not stuck in the past. 

What’s interesting is that both campaigns relied on the same rhetorical strategy of attaching meaning to a product through people. As Brummett explains, popular culture works rhetorically by shaping what feels normal, desirable, or aspirational through everyday media. Sydney Sweeney and KATSEYE are symbols of the brand. They stand in for entire lifestyles, values, and identities that consumers are invited to align themselves with through purchase.

This shows how advertising actively participates in creating culture. When consumers buy into these campaigns, they buying belonging, identity, and cultural positioning. Even criticism and controversy play a role which keeps brands visible and culturally relevant in an attention-driven media environment.

If advertising has this much power to shape meaning and behavior, where does responsibility fall? Should brands be held accountable for the ideologies they reinforce, or is it up to consumers to read these messages critically? And as consumers, how often do we stop to ask why a campaign resonates with us, or who it leaves out?

No Boobs, No Problem: Flat Representation in Pop Culture

For years, women have been told through popular culture messages that their worth resided somewhere between a Victoria's Secret catalog and the latest push-up bra technology. From Marilyn Monroe to Pamela Anderson, having a “bombshell” figure and voluptuous breasts has been considered the feminine ideal for a majority of the 20st century. But do boobs make a woman feminine?

Pamela Anderson

 

When a breast cancer survivor goes flat after a mastectomy, whether by choice or by necessity, she is thrown into a world that is incongruent with decades of pop culture programming. The old narrative states that a flat chest is boyish, unfeminine, and incomplete. If a woman didn’t have breasts, or breasts that were “big enough,” she needed to seek breast augmentation to appear more attractive and womanly. Small breasts, or no breasts, were not “desirable.” However, nobody benefits from women believing they need to be “fixed” if they don’t have breasts, especially breast cancer survivors.

Today, something powerful is happening. Women are steadily rejecting the old stereotypes reinforced in movies, TV shows, and magazines. Roughly 75 percent of mastectomy patients opted out of breast reconstruction in recent years, according to a 2021 study. Although not a flattie (someone who has gone flat after a mastectomy), even Pamela has had a breast reduction and has spoken about her newfound confidence in her natural appearance. Big boobs are officially out.

Kathy Bates

Recently, flat representation has been present in full force. Breast cancer survivor Kathy Bates refused to wear her breast prosthetics to the 2025 Emmy Awards, donning a formal gown with grace and glamour. She also performed without prosthetics on Lip Sync Battle. Former Victoria’s Secret model Christine Handy has graced runways, modeling how clothing fits flat chests. In 2014, well-known comedienne Tig Notaro first performed an entire stand-up set topless following her double mastectomy. Famous breast cancer survivors are confidently owning their scars publicly.

When famous flatties confidently and shamelessly present without breast prosthetics, “normal” people—both women and men alike—receive the new message that being flat is an acceptable way to be. The stereotype that “big breasts equal attractiveness” begins to shift. Women don’t feel so alone through an unmooring and challenging experience. They see themselves in others and see that being boobless is just as beautiful as having boobs. Representation matters, and flat representation matters. Boobs do not make a woman more of a woman. Body parts, or the lack of them, do not make us who we are.

Like Kathy, Tig, and my beautiful friend Christine, I am a flattie. When I walked topless in my first breast cancer awareness walk following my double mastectomy, people told me I was brave. Likewise, Tig Notaro was called “the bravest woman in comedy” for performing topless. While walking, I didn’t think I was brave. I was just walking. I wanted to show that flat is not shameful. It’s beautiful. Flat is attractive. Flat is feminine. Why is opting to go flat still seen as a radical choice and framed as bravery? And how long will breast-centered beauty standards continue to influence pop culture?

Tig Notaro

 

The Sandlot Effect: Accepting and Resisting Pop Culture

    Growing up, there were a couple of movies that genuinely changed my life. One was the 1993 cinematic masterpiece The Sandlot. My buddies and I lived and breathed this movie. Most summers were spent on our own “sandlot” baseball field from sunup to sundown. We played until it was too hot, then went to the local pool (no Squints-style stories, unfortunately), and came back for night games under the fireworks on the Fourth of July. We even bought our own pairs of P.F. Flyers for the same reason Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez did—because they were guaranteed to make a kid run faster and jump higher.

    Popular culture is important to study for many reasons. One of those reasons is how deeply our everyday exposure shapes us as individuals. Deanna Sellnow defines pop culture as “Everyday objects that influence people.” Watching The Sandlot as a kid is a perfect representation of this definition. This movie didn’t just influence what we watched—it influenced what we played, how we acted, and even what we wore. It shaped our friendships, our imagination, and the way we spent our time, all without us ever realizing it. I remember thinking how “cool” it was to be kind when I watched Benny take a chance on Smalls, the new kid in town who simply wanted to fit in. Benny took him under his wing, taught him out to throw, catch, and hit (which later came back to “bite” him in the butt!) I wanted to be like Benny and the rest of the sandlot crew. 

    Understanding pop culture helps us become better critical consumers of information. If movies, music, and trends can ultimately shape the way we live our lives, where do we draw the line between “accepting” and “resisting” that influence? The Sandlot gave me positive memories, friendships, and a love for baseball—but not every piece of pop culture leaves such a lasting impact. I see this as I watch my older sister, who is also a big Sandlot fan, take my five-year-old nephew on a “popcorn run” when the chewing tobacco scene comes on. How do we decide what parts of pop culture we allow to shape us, and which parts we choose to push back against?

When “Just Entertainment” Starts Teaching Us Who We Are

Every time I hear someone say, “It’s just a show” or “It’s just a song,” I think about how much of our worldview is shaped by the things we consume without thinking. This week’s readings pushed that idea even further. Sellnow argues that pop culture isn’t background noise, it’s one of the most powerful teachers in our daily lives. Brummett calls pop culture rhetoric, meaning it’s always persuading us, even when we’re relaxed on the couch scrolling TikTok.

Once I sat with that, I realized how often we learn our values from fictional worlds. Klosterman’s piece on Harry Potter shows how deeply people attach to stories, sometimes treating fictional characters as more emotionally real than the people around them. Fans don’t just enjoy a text; they build identities around it. You’re not just someone who reads Harry Potter, you’re a “Harry Potter person.”

Jacobson’s reflection on 25 years of pop culture studies made me appreciate how far the field has come. What used to be dismissed as “not serious” is now recognized as a legitimate way to understand society. If pop culture is where people go to make sense of politics, relationships, gender, race, and power, then studying it becomes essential. The “fun stuff” is where the sneakiest lessons live.

Think about a show like Euphoria, Bridgerton, or Black Panther. These aren’t just stories; they’re arguments about what love looks like, what justice looks like, who gets to be a hero, and whose pain is worth centering. Even silence is rhetorical, who doesn’t show up on screen, whose accent is mocked, whose body is treated as a joke, whose culture is exoticized.

What struck me most this week is how easy it is to feel emotionally attached to a pop culture world and never question what it’s teaching us. If a fandom becomes your community, are you more likely to defend the text than critique it? At what point does “I love this” turn into “I’ll excuse anything this does because it feels like part of me”?

So here’s what I’m wondering:

1. Have you ever realized, maybe years later, that a show, song, or fandom quietly shaped your beliefs about yourself or other people? What was the text, and what did it teach you?

2. Is there a pop culture text you love that you’re hesitant to analyze too closely because it might disrupt the comfort it gives you?

Who Told Us to Shave? How Pop Culture Taught Women Their Natural Bodies Were a Problem

When something feels natural or simply "just the way things are," we rarely stop to ask where that belief came from or who benefits from it. One of the most effective lessons pop culture teaches us is not what to think, but what not to question. Women's shaving norms in the twenty-first century are a powerful example of this process.

Being a critical consumer of information requires recognizing that cultural norms are often constructed rather than discovered. In the early twentieth century, Gillette recognized that it could drastically expand profits by marketing razors to women. To do this, they introduced a new idea into society: that women's body hair was dirty, embarrassing, and incompatible with femininity. These early advertisements functioned as discrete pop culture advertisements because they were intentional messages designed to persuade society.

Over time, these beliefs became so normalized that it stopped feeling like advertising at all. The advertisements and products increased, creating a shared cultural belief that women "naturally" shave their legs and armpits. By World War II, grooming norms were reinforced as moral and social obligations. Femininity had to be maintained. Pop culture actively disciplines women into grooming their bodies, pushing the narrative that body hair is embarrassing.

Fast forward to the present day, we see brands such as Billie positioning themselves as a progressive alternative razor brand. By showing women with visible leg and armpit hair, Billie frames shaving as optional. This pushes back against decades of shame-based advertising that taught women that hairlessness was nonnegotiable.

However, in order to critically consume media, we must look beyond tone and aesthetics. Billie's advertisements are still discrete texts that have a capitalist agenda - to profit from women's bodily insecurity. While the marketing messaging has shifted from "fix yourself" to "empower yourself," the real underlying economic structure remains intact. Resistance to the norm can be commercialized, too.

The tension between early twentieth-century ads and modern ones shows why pop culture studies matter. Popular ideas often feel status quo not because they are true, but because they are everywhere. Studying pop culture helps us see how gender norms, consumerism, and identity are created, and continuously reinforced, through everyday media.

If beauty standards are created by media messages, can progressive advertising truly challenge them, or is it simply finding a more palatable way to profit from women's bodies?

The Karate Kid’s Guide to Fatherlessness

 The Karate Kid’s Guide to Fatherlessness

I cannot remember the first time I saw The Karate Kid, the original, not the arguably poor remake with Jackie Chan. What I do remember is being drawn into the action and the satisfaction of seeing the bullies get what they deserved. Perhaps this is what initially drew me to martial arts, but more important is what the story reveals about relationships and fatherlessness.

Watching the films again as an adult, and following the Cobra Kai series, it becomes clear that the story is not completely about karate. Karate is the vehicle for something deeper, the bond between Mr. Miyagi and Daniel LaRusso, which fills a gap left by Daniel’s absent father. Daniel struggles with anxiety and conflicting emotions after losing his father at a young age and moving to a new city, while Johnny Lawrence, the original bully, grapples with his own fatherless issues, seeking guidance from his aggressive sensei, John Kreese.

Cobra Kai flips the script a bit by focusing on Johnny and revealing his own struggle with lack of a good father figure. The series humanizes him and other characters by showing how fatherlessness shapes their behavior and choices. The television format allows this approach, showing not just what the characters do, but why they act as they do. We get to see their search for respect, moral guidance, and boundaries, which are traditionally provided by fathers.

Mainstream pop culture rarely portrays fathers as moral influencers. Sitcoms such as Home Improvement and Everybody Loves Raymond frequently depict fathers as bumbling comic relief, while shows such as Family Guy often glorify absentee fatherhood. This minimizes the real impact fatherlessness has on children. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one in four children in the United States lives without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. Stories such as Cobra Kai effectively illustrate the emotional and moral gaps this absence can create.

So how does this series address this issue?  Despite opposing and often despising one another, the characters share a consistent search for the respect, structure, morality, and boundaries traditionally provided by a father.  This was epitomized in the character of Mr. Miyagi who is raised up to this level of moral excellence while still being grounded in humility and discipline.   Mr. Miyagi was this constant in the narrative, being highly respected by those willing to learn from his character and example. Even for characters who never met him directly, Miyagi’s influence endures through those he directly impacted and through what he represented  that is foundational to success as family, biological or otherwise.

While it would be misguided to look to a film or television character as our measure of morality, that is left to a much higher power and standard, the solution to issues like fatherlessness can and should be addressed in modern pop culture.  What we consistently view has a powerful influence on how we think, act and relate to others.  In modern pop culture, do fathers need to be portrayed as vital, respected, and necessary figures, roles best filled by individuals whose character embodies the wisdom, discipline, and humility of Mr. Miyagi or the like?