. >> host: richard weitz is the author of "chasing normality: with a little help from family and friends," co-author is maureen o'halloran clark. thank you for joining us for a few minutes on booktv. >> guest: you are very welcome. i enjoyed it. >> in her book "enlightened sexism, susan douglas compares culture. >> i wanted to begin by just talking summit in from about why i wrote this book, and then i'm going to do a brief reading from the introduction. in 1994, i published a book called "where the girls are" and it did very well. it was about the mixed messages that baby-boom girls and women got from the mass media and our own love-hate relationship with popular culture. as a result, i did get a lot of speaking engagements at colleges and universities. but pop culture, as we all look, has a pretty short shelf life, and especially after the turn-of-the-century. and survey by the middle of the past decade, people were starting to ask me what i thought about buffy, or xena, not to mention the bachelor. all the makeover shows. and then more reason shows like desperate housewives or madmen,