You play the girl : on Playboy bunnies, Stepford wives, train wrecks, and other mixed messages / Carina Chocano.

Essays.

"A Mariner original."

Includes bibliographical references (pages [264]-275).

part 1. Down the rabbit hole: Bunnies ; Can this marriage be saved? ; The bronze statue of the virgin slut ice queen bitch goddess ; What a feeling ; The eternal allure of the basket case -- part 2. The pool of tears: The ingenue chooses marriage or death ; Thoroughly modern Lily ; Bad girlfriend ; The kick-ass -- part 3. You wouldn't have come here: Surreal housewives ; Real girls ; Celebrity Gothic ; Big mouth strikes again ; The redemptive journey ; A modest proposal for more backstabbing in preschool -- part 4. A mad tea party: Let it go ; All the bad guys are girls ; Girls love math ; Train wreck ; Look at yourself ; Phantombusters, or, I want a feminist dance number.

"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. In You Play the Girl, Chocano blends formative personal stories with insightful and emotionally powerful analysis. Moving from Bugs Bunny to Playboy Bunnies, Flashdance to Frozen, the progressive '70s through the backlash '80s, the glib '90s, and the pornified aughts--and at stops in between--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."--Page 4 of cover.