Justine only goes to the Virtual Reality Exhibition in the hope she might get lucky with fit hunk Alex. Instead she gets unlucky with an Alternative Reality machine and leaves the exhibition as Jake! Once she's got over the shock, Justine starts to see the potential of her new situation. As Jake she has the opportunity to hang out with the lads and find out what really makes them tick. But when her real self develops a major crush on her virtual self, things start to get just a bit too complicated . . .

This essay collection focuses on the gendered dimensions of reality television in both the United States and Great Britain. Through close readings of a wide range of reality programming, from Finding Sarah and Sister Wives to Ghost Adventures and Deadliest Warrior, the contributors think through questions of femininity and masculinity, as they relate to the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality. They connect the genre's combination of real people and surreal experiences, of authenticity and artifice, to the production of identity and norms of citizenship, the commodification of selfhood, and the naturalization of regimes of power. Whether assessing the Kardashian family brand, portrayals of hoarders, or big-family programs such as 19 Kids and Counting, the contributors analyze reality television as a relevant site for the production and performance of gender. In the process, they illuminate the larger neoliberal and postfeminist contexts in which reality TV is produced, promoted, watched, and experienced. Contributors. David Greven, Dana Heller, Su Holmes, Deborah Jermyn, Misha Kavka, Amanda Ann Klein, Susan Lepselter, Diane Negra, Laurie Ouellette, Gareth Palmer, Kirsten Pike, Maria Pramaggiore, Kimberly Springer, Rebecca Stephens, Lindsay Steenberg, Brenda R. Weber

In the summer of 2010, Ragan Fox was one of twelve people selected to participate in the twelfth season of CBS's reality program Big Brother. Offering a rare, autobiographical, and behind-the-scenes peek behind Big Brother's theatrical curtain, Fox provides a scholarly account of the show's casting procedures, secret soundstage interactions, and viewer involvement, while investigating how the program's producers, fans, and players theatrically render identities of racial and sexual minorities. Using autoethnography, textual analysis, and spectator commentary as research, Inside Reality TV reflects on and critiques how identity is constructed on reality television, and the various ways in which people from historically oppressed groups are depicted in mass media.

Sex, Masculinity and God: The Trialogues is first and foremost an open exploration of the unknown and the forbidden. This exploration is navigated by three men of different existential style, belief and desire; but three men united in struggle to understand the nature of sexual energy, the difficulties of masculine identity, and connection to some other or beyond of the self. The adventure starts with a focus on the division producing what we refer to as masculine and feminine energy or identity. Instead of closing this difference up with intuitions of unification, their discourse plays in sexual difference in order to see what new territories can be discovered in the fields of science, religion and psychoanalysis. In play, what emerges include reflections on the meaning of historical identity, complexities of contemporary identification, paradoxes of new masculine movements, struggles of emotional negativity, disorientation of ethical duty and moral coherence, weird otherness of possible future technologies, and the strange unity of love and death. There are no final answers in this text, as it relates to sexual energy, masculine identity, or metaphysical meaning, but rather an invitation to open fully to even deeper levels of the unknown and the forbidden.

Daniel Mattson once believed he was gay. Raised in a Christian family, and aware of attractions to other boys at age six, Mattson's life was marked by constant turmoil between his faith in God and his sexual attractions. Finding the conflict between his sexual desires and the teachings of his church too great, he assumed he was gay, turned his back on God, and began a relationship with another man. Yet freedom and happiness remained elusive until he discovered Christ and his true identity. In this frank memoir, Mattson chronicles his journey to and from a gay identity, finding peace in his true identity, as a man, made in the image and likeness of God. Part autobiography, part philosophy of life, and part a practical guide in living chastely, the book draws lessons from Mattson's search for inner freedom and integrity, sharing wisdom from his failures and successes. His lifelong search for happiness and peace comes full circle in his realization that, above all else, what is true about him is that he is a beloved son of God, loved into existence by God, created for happiness in this life and the next. Mattson's book is for anyone who has ever wondered who he is, why he is here, and, in the face of suffering, where to find joy, happiness, and the peace that surpasses all understanding.

From a bold new feminist voice, a book that will change the way you think about your sex life. Fifty years after the sexual revolution, we are told that we live in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom; that if anything, we are too free now. But beneath the veneer of glossy hedonism, millennial journalist Rachel Hills argues that we are controlled by a new brand of sexual convention: one which influences all of us—woman or man, straight or gay, liberal or conservative. At the root of this silent code lies the Sex Myth—the defining significance we invest in sexuality that once meant we were dirty if we did have sex, and now means we are defective if we don’t do it enough. Equal parts social commentary, pop culture, and powerful personal anecdotes from people across the English-speaking world, The Sex Myth exposes the invisible norms and unspoken assumptions that shape the way we think about sex today.

This unique study of sexuality and society offers a provocative reframing of the subject—including what the author calls a periodic table of perversions. In Smut, Murray S. Davis investigates sex in a way that differs from nearly all previous books on the subject. Discarding the simplistic theory of sex as a natural instinct, he sets out to develop new explanations for its universal appeal. Drawing on a wide variety of literary forms, including the work of novelists, poets, and even comedians—and exploring everything from theology to pornography—Davis recaptures sex for the social sciences. First, Davis examines the difference between sexual arousal and ordinary experience, arguing that arousal alters a person's experience of the world. Positing an erotic reality distinct from everyday life, he demonstrates how different perceptions of time, space, human bodies, and other social types occur in each realm. Davis then asks why some people find this alternation between realities dirty, and offers a periodic table of perversions that summarizes the social elements out of which those who find sex dirty construct their world. Finally, Davis considers other conceptual grids affected by the alternation between everyday and erotic realities: the pornographic, which portrays individual, social relations, and social organizations being disrupted by sex; and the naturalistic, which conceives of them in a way that cannot be disrupted by sex. Throughout history these ideologies have battled for control over Western society, and, in his conclusion, Davis offers a prognosis for the future of sex based on these historical ideological cycles.

'A clear, concise, easy-to-read account of the issues between sex, gender and feminism . . . an important book' Evening Standard 'A call for cool heads at a time of great heat and a vital reminder that revolutions don't always end well' Sunday Times Material Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex. Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir's statement that, 'One is not born, but rather becomes a woman' (an assertion she contends has been misinterpreted and repurposed), to Judith Butler's claim that language creates biological reality, rather than describing it. She looks at biological sex in a range of important contexts, including women-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection. Material Girls makes a clear, humane and feminist case for our retaining the ability to discuss reality, and concludes with a positive vision for the future, in which trans rights activists and feminists can collaborate to achieve some of their political aims.