Oh, hey, it's the new leaf on what you thought was a dying house plant.

Allie Ward, this is ologies.

We're going to get real about sociology.

It's everywhere humans are, including in your television.

And by that, I mean probably your laptop in bed or your phone on the toilet.

Now, reality TV sociology is a real thing.

And it's proof we're going to meet a professor of sociology at Lehigh University, who is part of the core faculty of women, gender and sexuality studies,

who's also an author of the book's Dominatrix, gender, eroticism, and control in the dungeon.

And her highly lauded 2022 release, True Story, What Reality TV Says About us. And she studied creative writing at Princeton

and then got a PhD in sociology from Columbia and has spent her career analyzing and writing

about non-normative or deviant behaviors and how they shed light on how we relate to each other.

Now months back, a tweet of hers went viral and it was a snapshot of the list of presentations

some of her students were giving.

And among them were the sociology of body image and self-worth in The Biggest Loser, the

sociology of work and inequality in below deck, the sociology of lesbian relationships

in the ultimatum, queer love, the sociology of perfectionism

in Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. So we will dive into a lot of that and more in a sec. But first, thank you to

patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show for a dollar a month or more and submitting

questions before we record. Thanks to everyone out there in Ologies merch from

ologiesmerch.com. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews, which helped the show so much. I read them

all and I read you one. So thank you to Sarsie Gray, who wrote, in the world of severance,

Ali Ward is the Audi, Helly R deserves. Sarsie Gray, thank you for that. I hope I wouldn't do that to myself. You know what?

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