Review by New York Times Review
As a television and film critic, Chocano has been watching variations of the same story for years. In her collection of essays, she describes her work as "consuming toxic doses of superhero movies, wedding-themed romantic comedies, cryptofascist paeans to war, and bromances about unattractive, immature young men and the gorgeous women desperate to marry them." Our cultural landscape is a bleak one, and Chocano, on a descent into it that she describes as a spiral, finds enough to drive anyone mad. Chocano dedicates the book to her daughter, Kira, her companion on a self-imposed heroine's journey through the tropes of contemporary culture. Kira loves films like "Sleeping Beauty" in which the central characters' powers are linked to their prettiness. Chocano, meanwhile, worries that her daughter is absorbing stories in which girls play the grail and not the hero. As for herself, as an adult woman, she worries about being asked to identify with archetypes of murky depths. Once "you've glimpsed the social, political, historical and ideological underpinnings of every text ever constructed," she explains darkly, like a fairy-tale villain imparting a wicked curse, "you'll never again see stories in the same way." The cultural formulas that Chocano identifies are frustrating, but her readings don't deny them their fun. She recognizes that it's possible to enjoy stories even when you know they're silly at best and poisonous at worst. In the tradition of a long line of women writers, Chocano wants to make sense of this sort of enchantment and understand what kind of education it is offering up, and to whom. Out of all the little girls who need rescuing, Chocano finds herself relating most to Alice from "Alice in Wonderland": a girl who falls into a society with such nonsensical standards for etiquette, it's a relief to return to Victorian England, where at least there are clear directions for how women should behave. HALEY mlotek is a writer and editor based in New York.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 17, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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.--Eathorne, Courtney Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 princesseager to be rescued by her princecontinues 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
