BOOK REVIEW: You Play the Girl by Carina Chocano

Cafe Society
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(This is a repurposed blog post) *

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.

  • AHunter3 blogs weekly on the subject of being genderqueer, gender politics issues in general, and his ongoing attempts to get his book published. These blog posts tend to be anywhere from 500 to 2500 words in length and are written in the style of a regular column in a periodical.
    The reposting of these blog posts has been cleared with the moderators in advance.
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Discussion of a book is better suited to Cafe Society; moving it there.

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I don’t know if your blog post differs from this post. But based on your title, I thought you were actually going to review the book for us (not just tell us what it is about, but provide a critique).

I am not totally plugged into pop culture, but I’m plugged in enough to know there are still a lot of annoying stereotypes and tropes still lurking in mass media that need to be challenged. Also, I still find myself looking for stories about women that are like me, that I can fully relate to, while simultaneously realizing this is a tall order to ask of fiction driven by plots and other interesting things that would never happen to most people, let alone me personally.

I hope this isn’t too much of a sidetrack, but I am curious of your opinion about this piece:

Coming out as ‘non-binary’ throws other women under the bus

I stumbled across a link to the piece on Reddit a couple of weeks ago. I’m not hip on feminist discourse, but I think it articulated much of my discomfort with genderqueerdom. I understand how embracing gender non-conformity challenges old-fashioned and harmful notions about gender. But I don’t understand how creating new gender boxes (like “gender invert”) achieves this aim.

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I have never claimed to be the perfect shining beacon, the person who is wonderfully free from all gender constraints and can lead everyone to the world where we can all just be ourselves.

Instead, I am gendered. Most people are. Most people internalize a bunch of messages that are attached to them on the basis of their sex, and those messages constrain them and channel how they grow up internally, how they develop mentally and emotionally and so forth. I’m an oddity, a person who jumped the tracks, so to speak, but (as others have said of me) a lot of my own growth and development was therefore formed in reaction, pushing away from male stuff and embracing female stuff. If that sounds less than ideal and free, well I think that’s an accurate read on things. But as I said, most of us are indeed gendered.

Does it help the overall situation to create a new gender box that identifies a person like me? I think so. When one espouses the desirability of people being unconstrained by gender, that creates a sort of neutral expectation of people when you know their sex, but we live in a world where we don’t have a universal embrace of that as an ideal. ( **cues up the theme music for ‘Most People Are Gendered’ once again **) So what you end up with is a sort of two-channel view of what people might be like when you take their sex into consideration:

a) That they are neutral, that they have not embraced all that old moldy social bullshit about differences between the sexes, that they are androgynous, unaffected by gendered expectations, having internalized none of it; or

b) That they are gendered in the typical fashion for their sex, to some extent, either because lo and behold there really are some differences between the sexes or because lo and behold there are a lot of social expectations and messages and lots of people do internalize them and get shaped by them

Notice that if you “average” them out, as if this were math or something, you come out with a predilection for expecting at least a moderate bit of gender-typical behavior of people. An expectation that a person about whom you know nothing but their sex is going to fall somewhere in between gender-neutral behavior and behavior that is conventionally gendered. “Somewhere in between” converts, expectationwise, to “moderately conventionally gendered”.

When you specifically throw in the possibility of gender inverts, that tugs the expectation-average away from the conventionally-gendered part. Just being aware of the existence of some such people, and therefore of the possibility that the utter stranger you encounter might be a gender invert, shapes expectations closer to a neutral. Now it’s a three-tined fork:
a) That they are neutral, that they have not embraced all that old moldy social bullshit about differences between the sexes, that they are androgynous, unaffected by gendered expectations, having internalized none of it; or

b) That they are gendered in the typical fashion for their sex, to some extent, either because lo and behold there really are some differences between the sexes or because lo and behold there are a lot of social expectations and messages and lots of people do internalize them and get shaped by them; or

c) That they are gender-inverted, manifesting characteristics generally associated with the opposite sex, to some significant extent, either because there really are variations among people and some people as individuals happen to have such characteristics naturally, or because some people’s response to gender-socialization pressures is to react repellently and inversely.

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But under your framework, if I understand it correctly, the individual must identify themselves as “gender invert” or “neutral” for you to perceive them as such.

If I identify myself as a woman because I don’t particularly care to talk about my personality and preferences and inclinations among non-intimates and you didn’t know anything about me, would you automatically assume that I’m “b”?

If the answer is yes, then I don’t see how this is progressive. It seems to me the most progressive view is to see everyone as “a” unless there’s a situation where it makes sense to take another view (like when you’re courting someone or when you suspect someone may be trying to court you). Someone who looks “gender typical” may very well not be when you actually get to know them.

Since gender expectations are variable from society to society, generation to generation, and subculture to subculture, then I don’t know what we gain from assuming that there is a “typical” way of being gendered. I also don’t see how this assumption doesn’t just entrench the stereotypes that we should all be challenging. Putting people who challenge their respective gender stereotypes AND who have a specific ideological bent (e.g., identifying themselves as “gender invert”) in a different box from the people who challenge gender stereotypes and prefer conventional labels doesn’t sound particularly feministic or progressive to me. It actually makes me concerned that the fight against misogyny will one day have to share a platform with the fight against hatred for the new-gendered-box-of-the-year. I don’t think these problems should be granted the same gravitas.

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I don’t follow you here. I mean, you may be right about me (just as I don’t claim to be pristinely ungendered, I also don’t claim to be magically able to never perceive others through the lens of the gender I assign them to in my mind. Or to be walking around “not seeing gender”). But if I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that my framework specifically means doing this in a way that everyone else (in general) isn’t also doing it? Doing it worse? Emphasizing it more? Something? And I don’t see that at all.

Do you mean — would I formally designate you that way inside my head and treat you accordingly? Or do you mean — would I probably unconsciously tend to think about you in those general terms?

I think nearly everyone would tend to unconsciously project some of “b” and perhaps some of “a” onto you whether you identify yourself “as a woman” or not, if you have an appearance or presentation that causes them to classify you as a woman.

I think I would be doing that too, but that I would also be alert to the possibility of “c” in a way that most other people would not.

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I can’t tell if I’ve distilled down your framework correctly or not. Since you didn’t tell me I’ve got it all wrong, then I’m going to assume I understand it. You don’t see someone as “gender invert” unless they identifiy themselves as “gender invert”. One must be consciously inverting gender expectations/norms/conventions to be called “gender invert”.

I’m not saying your framework is wrong or “worse”. I’m saying it doesn’t seem very progressive. It’s not making anything worse. But it’s not a promotion of feminist values. To me, it’s like arguing you’re against nationalism while insisting everyone perceive you as a Appalachian American instead of a American. Is “Appalachian American” really all that better than “American” when it comes to resisting nationalism?

I don’t presume to know what everyone else does. Personally, I try not to make assumptions about someone based on whether they present as a stereotypical woman or a stereotypical man. Sure, I know that I will probably have some assumptions about them based on my programming. But I don’t see any benefit to indulging these asssumptions. If someone told me that because I wear earrings, wear skirts, and don’t correct people when I’m referenced by feminine pronouns, they naturally assume I act in X, Y, and Z ways and like X, Y, and Z things, I would feel like that person didn’t have a very progressive mindset. I would prefer they not make any assumptions about me and just see me as a monstro. Do you think this is wrong or “worse” than your framework?

You’re not aware of what you are “unconsciously” thinking, so no, I’m not asking the latter. I’m asking if you get a certain picture in your head when someone identifies themselves as WOMAN. And if so, do you resist that picture or do you assume that picture is adequate until you get more information.

Because when I hear someone identify themselves as MAN or WOMAN, I get a certain picture in my head. But I actively resist those pictures because I know they are likely steeped in stereotypes and sexist notions.

There is a diference between doing something unconsciousnessly and doing something knowingly. I’m asking about what you knowingly do. If you see someone who looks like they are a gender non-conformist, do you knowingly see them as a “gender invert”? Or do you knowingly see them as a “typical” or a “neutral”? I don’t think most people wait for someone to give them a label before putting them in a box. No social constructs work this way.

Personally, I don’t see the point in putting someone in the “gender invert” box. The only difference between such a person and a person who challenges gender stereotypes is that the gender invert is consciously challenging, while the neutral person is not necessarily. I also believe that there would be a whole lot fewer “typically gendered” people out there in a society where gender expectations were looser. I think we should be loosening expectations, not creating new boxes filled with their own set of expectations, thereby guaranteeing that every generation will have a set of individuals who don’t feel adequately represented by the pre-existing boxes (I am not a true male girl because while I like to wear dresses and watch chick flicks, I hate domesticity and talking about feelings. So I’m going to create another box, just for feminine males who feel exactly like me.)

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I am now going to inform you that you’ve got it all wrong based on the following:

Yeah, that’s wrong.

“Gender invert” is a term I invented. (Or, technically, a long-unused term that I appropriated. Either way, it’s not in use by people who aren’t me. So no one but me, at this point, is going around identifying as “gender inverted” or, if they are, they probably don’t mean the same thing when they use the term).

And I was not consciously inverting gender expectations/etc throughout my life, for the most part and yet I was a gender invert. Now and then I was doing it consciously. Then I’d continue my life and not pay much attention to the fact that some Friday 3 months ago I consciously reacted to some hazing by deliberately embracing a feminine expression when the folks hazing me said I was acting like a girl or whatever — I’d basically forget about it as not particularly important and go on with my life.

I think it would be useful here to make a distinction — a distinction between formally and consciously treating people a certain way based on the category we stick them in, on the one hand, and having a tendency to treat people differently based on our socially learned unconscious tendency to categorize them, on the other hand.

The first of those is nearly always a disempowering, limiting, indefensibly bigoted thing to do. OK maybe not always —I could probably come up with exceptions — but if that’s what you think I’m proposing (or doing) you’re right to be highly suspicious of it.

The second of those is trickier: it is not that we should do it, it is that we generally are doing it, and are scarcely aware of how pervasively we are doing it. We gain nothing except a false comfort level by pretending that only bigots and superficial people and hopelessly out-of-date relics of a more rigid social era do it.

I am not going to tell you that you do it. I’m not inside your head. You, unlike me, may be oblivious to people’s sex in the sense of attributing / expecting / interpreting them and their behavior with an unconscious code of gendered meaning.

I will tell you that if you’re really like that, you are far more of an outlying variant person than I am. I speak here as a sociologist (well, a one-time sociology grad
student at any rate) and a social theorist, not just specifically as a gender activist. I say this with confidence: In general, people in our society categorize people mentally as one sex or the other, and then they interpret nearly everything they say or do in ways that differ according to the sex of the person, and that set of differences in attributed meaning and interpretation is a huge part of what we call “gender”.

You are nevertheless entitled to dissent with that assertion. If you disagree with it, it will help us, communications-wise, for you to explicitly say so, so we’re not chasing each other in circles here.

Back to what you said:

If they told you that, thus indicating that they consciously endorse those attitudes and assumptions, I’d agree with you.

But if it merely happened to be true, that would make them normative, typical, very much a part of your ordinary everyday backdrop of humans. People do that.

Now, to elaborate on that and refine it a bit, back to what I said: Those same people also have, in their heads, the notion that maybe despite wearing earrings, skirts, and accepting the use of feminine pronouns, you don’t have a particularly gendered set of behaviors and preferences and inclinations — that you’re more androgynous.

Yes, that means they have somewhat contradictory sets of potential code in their heads for interpreting you. Humans are like that, too —capable of simultaneous consideration of contradictory notions. Different narratives. It’s like when people go to a movie without reading all the reviews. Within the first 20 minutes they’ve seen elements of the movie that resonate as “satirical comedy” and other elements that are more “horror” — they know both genres. It is conceivable that they might enjoy the movie more if they had no knowledge of genres at all, but knowing the genres as seasoned movie-goers do enables them to catch on to things more quickly that a genre-blind person would simply miss altogether.

So there they are, intuiting you as possibly feminine (they know that [del]genre[/del] gender) and also possibly androgynous (they know that one, too). Do you see how that shapes up to an “average” projected expectation — their behavior that you experience, their expectation-driven behavior — as somewhere between “feminine” and “androgynous”, hence not neutral but still gendered feminine?