You Play the Girl

Starred review from May 8, 2017
In this whip-smart essay collection, pop culture critic Chocano explores representations of women in books, movies, and television, with characters ranging in time and temperament from Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart to Mad Men’s Joan and Peggy. Remarkably comprehensive and enjoyably associative, the essays move quickly from the haunting performances of French actress Isabelle Adjani to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Bewitched, and I Dream of Jeannie as allegories for the potential of powerful women to “wreck civilization.” Chocano astutely observes that Thelma and Louise and Pretty Woman are “dueling metanarratives” from the same cultural moment, offering diametrically opposed messages about women’s aspirations. On a personal note, Chocano describes her laborious efforts to raise a daughter without the patriarchy’s cultural hangups via an extremely thorough examination of Disney’s Frozen and its famous aria, asking—“What exactly is she letting go of?” Readers with even a rudimentary understanding of feminism may find it wearisome to have such seminal texts as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) rehashed; with a vast spectrum of material, and Chocano’s incisive and witty approach, however, these essays will appeal to anyone interested in how women’s stories are told.

June 15, 2017
How culture teaches girls what it means to be female.Growing up in the 1970s and '80s, journalist, essayist, and TV and film critic Chocano (Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid?: The Serial Monogamist's Guide to Love, 2003) felt "unreal, peripheral in my own life, trapped in a dream not my own." As a girl, she was supposed to identify with fairy-tale princesses, but she felt like Alice in Wonderland, living in a world of contradictions and illogic. The iconic princess, she came to realize, was "limiting, oppressive, infantilizing." As she argues persuasively, that image of the princess--eager to be rescued by her prince--continues to pervade. Combining memoir and cultural critique, Chocano finds much evidence that movies and TV send a message undermining girls' empowerment. Although women "might be smarter, more responsible, and more together than men now," the movies profess that men are still happier "because this was still a man's world." Among the movies she examines are Pretty Woman (a "shameless American capitalist version" of romance), Lars and the Real Girl ("the weirdest Pygmalion story ever told"), Fatal Attraction, Flashdance, My Best Friend's Wedding; she also looks at the TV show Sex and the City and its "media-created stereotypes." Now raising her own daughter, Chocano worries, rightly, that ideas about women's sexuality "have become narrower, more rigid, and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance." She finds that "the porn aesthetic, combined with the underrepresentation of more multidimensional female characters," skews girls' conception of gender roles. Even the children's movie Frozen, which her daughter saw about 30 times, sends mixed messages. Its protagonist is supposed to be powerful, but the movie insists that "power is perhaps the most unnatural trait for a girl to possess." A girl's "greatest mission," after all, is to be as attractive as she can be by transforming herself "into a trophy." Independence leads to "solitude and loneliness," creativity to madness. A sharply perceptive look at the myths that constrain women.

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Starred review from May 15, 2017

Every woman often faces the unwelcome prospect of "playing the girl." These essays by journalist Chocano, inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice, lead readers on a journey to identify and understand just who this girl is and from where she originates. The author interweaves relevant personal stories from her childhood and adult experiences with an entertaining and insightful review of female characters from the last 50 years of pop culture, including television, film and literature. Chocano not only looks back at her own experiences, she also writes emotionally about the realities of the world that her young daughter faces today. Each piece combines numerous, well-connected examples from the author's extensive knowledge of pop culture, with an analysis of a theme related to the various aspects of women's lives: work, relationships, marriage, sexuality, motherhood, and even math. As a result, the essays have a sound research foundation and are well documented. VERDICT This entertaining, engaging, enlightening tour of the portrayal of women in pop culture will appeal to general readers and researchers in a variety of cross-disciplinary fields.--Theresa Muraski, Univ. of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Lib.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2017
In her hours of screenings and endless dissections of character arcs, successful film and television critic Chocano noticed that despite the relative progress women made in the twentieth century, twenty-first-century entertainment still completely fails to accurately and dynamically represent women. In this memoir-essay hybrid, Chocano shows how the industry continues to compartmentalize fictional women: as a mother, housewife, love interest, or the girl. This Chocano-coined girl is still the norm for female roles in Hollywood today. She's generally chill. She's the cute friend or coworker who can smoke marijuana and fart with the guys but still maintains a supremely feminine look and sexuality. The girl has become ubiquitous, but Chocano points out that she wasn't written in a vacuum. Through candid accounts of her own formative years, Chocano offers solace to a new generation of women dissatisfied with their representation in the media. She puts words to the numbing frustration she felt while watching Pretty Woman and explains the feminist satisfaction of such premieres as Thelma and Louise and Nancy Meyers' Private Benjamin. Chocano's encyclopedic knowledge of film, literature, and television, plus her wickedly funny, wildly unapologetic, and intimately conversational voice, will leave readers wanting more and more.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)