As a kid, Carina Chocano was confused by the mixed messages all around her about how to be a woman; messages that told her who she could be – and who she couldn’t. Dutifully absorbing all the conflicting information the culture had to offer, Chocano grappled with sexed up sidekicks, princesses waiting to be saved, and morally infallible angels who seemed to have no opinions of their own.
Carina learned that “the girl” is not a person, but a man’s idea of what a woman should be. She’s whatever the hero needs her to be in order to become himself.
It wasn’t until she spent five years as a movie critic, and was laid off just after her daughter was born, however, that she really came to understand how the stories the culture tells us about what it means to be a girl limit our lives and shape our destinies. She resolved to rewrite her own story.
In YOU PLAY THE GIRL: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks & Other Mixed Messages, Chocano blends personal stories and powerful analysis. From Bugs Bunny to Playboy Bunnies, from Flashdance to Frozen, from the ’70s to today, 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.
ABOUT CARINA CHOCANO
Carina Chocano is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, Elle, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and many others. She has been a film and TV critic at The Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Salon.com.
Her book You Play the Girl is the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for Criticism. She lives in Los Angeles.
