You Play The Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Princesses, Trainwrecks and Other Man-Made Women - Softcover

Chocano, Carina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349005559 ISBN 13: 9780349005553

Publisher: Virago, 2016

Synopsis

We all know who The Girl is. She holds The Hero's hand as he runs through the Pyramids, chasing robots. Or she nags him, or foils him, plays the uptight straight man to his charming loser. She's idealised, degraded, dismissed, objectified and almost always dehumanised. How do we process these insidious portrayals, and how do they shape our sense of who we are and what we can become?

Part memoir, part cultural commentary, part call to arms to women everywhere, You Play The Girl flips the perspective on the past thirty-five years in pop culture - from the progressive 70s, through the backlash 80s, the triumphalist 90s and the pornified 'bro culture' of the early twenty-first century - providing a firsthand chronicle of the experience of growing up inside this funhouse. Always incisive, Chocano brilliantly shows that our identities are more iterative than we think, and certainly more complex than anything we see on any kind of screen.

About this title

About the Author:

Carina Chocano is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and Elle, and her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Vulture, Wired, Rolling Stone, Details, New York Times Book Review, New Republic, Aeon and others. She was a staff film and TV critic at the Los Angeles Times, a TV and book critic at Entertainment Weekly and a staff writer at Salon. Her work has been anthologised in the New Yorker humour collection Disquiet, Please!, the humour collection More Mirth of a Nation and the essay collections Altared and Borderline Personalities. Her humour book, Do You Love Me, or am I Just Paranoid? was published by Random House.

Review:

From O magazine:Carina Chocano's You Play the Girl reads like a war cry. With dazzling clarity, her commentary exposes the subliminal sexism on our pages and screens. As females, she writes, we're born into a world that "tells us not to trust our own eyes," to "deny our feelings." Structured to mirror Alice's journey through Wonderland--the first section is "Down the Rabbit Hole," the last "A Mad Tea Party"--the book is dedicated to the author's daughter, Kira, whom Chocano hopes will one day reject the gauzy "pack of lies" embedded in, say, Sleeping Beauty, for the more complex appeal of Lewis Carroll's heroine.

It's not only Carroll's cottontails that interest Chocano. As a girl, the bunnies she saw posing in her grandfather's Playboys informed her notion of desirability, though it was Bugs Bunny who was her first "sexual crush." When Bugs dressed up to portray a geisha or Lana Turner or Carmen Miranda, "he/she was both the person giving the performance and the person the performance was for." Chocano compares Bugs's androgyny with that of another idol, David Bowie. 

Whether invoking Rita Hayworth or Real Housewives, the book blends feminist critique with memoiristic riffs on motherhood, calling out the reductive archetypes all around us. Of the movie Frozen, which Kira has seen about 30 times, Chocano muses: "Not only is Elsa Disney's first neurotic princess, she may be its first psychotic one." 

How do you raise a girl in 2017? The answer, Chocano suggests, is to teach her to recognize that "the territory is hostile. But the heroine is brave." -- Claire Luchette

Read more: oprah.com/book/you-play-the-girl#ixzz57U5jDaddProduct DescriptionEditWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay 

In this smart, funny, impassioned call to arms, a pop culture critic merges memoir and commentary to explore how our culture shapes ideas about who women are, what they are meant to be, and where they belong.Who is "the girl"? Look to movies, TV shows, magazines, and ads and the message is both clear and not: she is a sexed up sidekick, a princess waiting to be saved, a morally infallible angel with no opinions of her own. She's whatever the hero needs her to be in order to become himself. She's an abstraction, an ideal, a standard, a mercurial phantom. 
From the moment we're born, we're told stories about what girls are and they aren't, what girls want and what they don't, what girls can be and what they can't. "The girl" looms over us like a toxic cloud, permeating everything and confusing our sense of reality. In You Play the Girl, Carina Chocano shows how we metabolize the subtle, fragmented messages embedded in our everyday experience and how our identity is shaped by them.  
From Bugs Bunny to Playboy Bunnies, from Flashdance to Frozen, from the progressive '70s through the backlash '80s, the glib '90s, and the pornified aughts--and at stops in between--Chocano blends formative personal stories with insightful and emotionally powerful analysis. She explains how growing up in the shadow of "the girl" taught her to think about herself and the world and what it means to raise a daughter in the face of these contorted reflections. In the tradition of Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, and Susan Sontag, Chocano brilliantly shows that our identities are more fluid than we think, and certainly more complex than anything we see on any kind of screen.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0349005559
• ISBN 13: 9780349005553
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304