BOOK REVIEW: You Play the Girl by Carina Chocano
Feminism and the feminist analysis of society was the first serious critical perspective on gender. Feminist theory remains my intellectual touchstone, the main framework of my own understanding of the context of my own experience.
You Play The Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages, by Carina Chocano (Mariner 2017) is a collection of individual essays, most of them delving into some aspect of popular culture and examining it from a feminist perspective.
I will admit that my initial impression as I began reading was "This has already been done". The first essay in the book is a critical feminist examination of Playboy bunnies and the publication of female nudes as an erotic consumer item. I couldn't help comparing it mentally to Gloria Steinem's own Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions from 34 years ago, and Chocano's own mention of the Steinem book (and Steinmen's "undercover" experience as a bunny in a Playboy club) didn't really offset that sense of rehash.
Only gradually did I get it, fully understanding what she was up to. Chocano writes specifically as a feminist of her generation, as a woman who came of age after a presumably successful feminism had indeed already addressed so many of these issues. Women grew up taking the correctness of equality for granted and assuming that nothing remained but the mopping-up work of hammering out some of the remaining details. And the society in which they did that growing up reflected that same expectation. Chocano writes, "...the 'feminine mystique' was adapting to the times. It said, 'You've come a long way baby!' before baby had gotten very far at all".
So You Play the Girl is largely about today's women facing the same problems already identified as women's issues by the feminists the preceding generation (or two), and how those continuing problems manifest nowadays against the backdrop of a socially shared assumption that women are and should be equal to men.
The focus is on popular culture, and in particular media depictions of women as a form of ongoing propaganda about women's place in society. Some of Chocano's essays celebrate empowering portrayals of women (Disney's Maleficent is prominently features here), while more of them examine the worrisome regressive disempowering images (Train Wreck, Pretty Woman).
You Play the Girl was selected by my local book club for discussion. We're all middle-aged people who came of age somewhere between de Beauvoir and Steinem, and none of us are sufficiently consumers of television and movies to have a full-fledged familiarity with the representations that Chocano discusses. Indeed, there was more than a bit of sentiment of the "Yeesh, who reads or watches all this stuff? I haven't even heard of nearly half of it, and really how important is it all anyway, these are just movies and TV shows". I do think, though, that social images matter greatly. It's not the individual movie, it's the entire wall of movies that contain the same messages if there aren't some exceptions containing a contradictory tale. For every item that Chocano put the spotlight on that I had not watched or read or listened to, I could recall some that I had for which the same criticicm could be applied.
Chocano describes women in situations where the options available for them to choose from are so slanted against selecting in favor of their own autonomy and against playing a designated role as a feminine subservient or feminine afterthought to a central role in which a male is cast that when we're shown the options in stark illumination, we realize that it part of the lie, part of the ideology, for our society to say "it's your choice" when there are few viable true choices available for many women. It's an equation we officially recognize in the case of workplace pressures to provide sexual favors: when one of the available choices entails dire consequences, the actor is not free to choose and the situation is understood to be coercive.
One of the ways in which choices can be limited is for the existing options to be hidden, not described. People do not choose what has never occurred to them, and this is where representational art in pop culture plays such a critical role. In my own gender concern, I often say that my goal is to put the phenomenon of being a gender invert on the map, as a possibility that people have heard about. I see that goal as part of the larger general venture within feminism of seeking portrayals that echo our understandings of the possibilities, and don't just regurgitate the same confining patterns and repeat the same clichés.
Even when sometimes that means writing or stating things that may themselves come to sound like clichés.
Nothing underlines how topically relevant these ongoing not-entirely-new feminist issues are than the political issue du jour, sexual harassment and the failure of the establishment to actually do anything about it.
In many ways, this is all a reminder of the complexity of social progress: you may get disregarded for continuing to complain as if no progress had been made, but when you acknowledge the progress you get disregarded because now the issue is considered to be in the out box, taken care of, finished.
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Index of all Blog Posts
You Play The Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages, by Carina Chocano (Mariner 2017) is a collection of individual essays, most of them delving into some aspect of popular culture and examining it from a feminist perspective.
I will admit that my initial impression as I began reading was "This has already been done". The first essay in the book is a critical feminist examination of Playboy bunnies and the publication of female nudes as an erotic consumer item. I couldn't help comparing it mentally to Gloria Steinem's own Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions from 34 years ago, and Chocano's own mention of the Steinem book (and Steinmen's "undercover" experience as a bunny in a Playboy club) didn't really offset that sense of rehash.
Only gradually did I get it, fully understanding what she was up to. Chocano writes specifically as a feminist of her generation, as a woman who came of age after a presumably successful feminism had indeed already addressed so many of these issues. Women grew up taking the correctness of equality for granted and assuming that nothing remained but the mopping-up work of hammering out some of the remaining details. And the society in which they did that growing up reflected that same expectation. Chocano writes, "...the 'feminine mystique' was adapting to the times. It said, 'You've come a long way baby!' before baby had gotten very far at all".
So You Play the Girl is largely about today's women facing the same problems already identified as women's issues by the feminists the preceding generation (or two), and how those continuing problems manifest nowadays against the backdrop of a socially shared assumption that women are and should be equal to men.
The focus is on popular culture, and in particular media depictions of women as a form of ongoing propaganda about women's place in society. Some of Chocano's essays celebrate empowering portrayals of women (Disney's Maleficent is prominently features here), while more of them examine the worrisome regressive disempowering images (Train Wreck, Pretty Woman).
You Play the Girl was selected by my local book club for discussion. We're all middle-aged people who came of age somewhere between de Beauvoir and Steinem, and none of us are sufficiently consumers of television and movies to have a full-fledged familiarity with the representations that Chocano discusses. Indeed, there was more than a bit of sentiment of the "Yeesh, who reads or watches all this stuff? I haven't even heard of nearly half of it, and really how important is it all anyway, these are just movies and TV shows". I do think, though, that social images matter greatly. It's not the individual movie, it's the entire wall of movies that contain the same messages if there aren't some exceptions containing a contradictory tale. For every item that Chocano put the spotlight on that I had not watched or read or listened to, I could recall some that I had for which the same criticicm could be applied.
Chocano describes women in situations where the options available for them to choose from are so slanted against selecting in favor of their own autonomy and against playing a designated role as a feminine subservient or feminine afterthought to a central role in which a male is cast that when we're shown the options in stark illumination, we realize that it part of the lie, part of the ideology, for our society to say "it's your choice" when there are few viable true choices available for many women. It's an equation we officially recognize in the case of workplace pressures to provide sexual favors: when one of the available choices entails dire consequences, the actor is not free to choose and the situation is understood to be coercive.
One of the ways in which choices can be limited is for the existing options to be hidden, not described. People do not choose what has never occurred to them, and this is where representational art in pop culture plays such a critical role. In my own gender concern, I often say that my goal is to put the phenomenon of being a gender invert on the map, as a possibility that people have heard about. I see that goal as part of the larger general venture within feminism of seeking portrayals that echo our understandings of the possibilities, and don't just regurgitate the same confining patterns and repeat the same clichés.
Even when sometimes that means writing or stating things that may themselves come to sound like clichés.
Nothing underlines how topically relevant these ongoing not-entirely-new feminist issues are than the political issue du jour, sexual harassment and the failure of the establishment to actually do anything about it.
In many ways, this is all a reminder of the complexity of social progress: you may get disregarded for continuing to complain as if no progress had been made, but when you acknowledge the progress you get disregarded because now the issue is considered to be in the out box, taken care of, finished.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts