Carina Chocano

"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...