You Play the Girl

On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages

Carina Chocano

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780544648944
• eBook ISBN: 9780544648968
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

N ational B ook C ritics C ircle A ward Winner . "With dazzling clarity, [Chocano's] commentary exposes the subliminal sexism on our pages and screens."— O, The Oprah Magazine
As a kid in the 1970s and 80s, Carina Chocano was confused by the mixed messages all around her that told her who she could be—and who she couldn't. She grappled with sexed up sidekicks, princesses waiting to be saved, and morally infallible angels who seemed to have no opinions of their own. It wasn't until she spent five years as a movie critic, and was laid off just after her daughter was born, however, that she really came to understand how the stories the culture tells us about what it means to be a girl limit our lives and shape our destinies.
In  You Play the Girl, Chocano blends formative personal stories with insightful and emotionally powerful analysis. Moving from Bugs Bunny to Playboy Bunnies, from  Flashdance to  Frozen, from 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.

"If Hollywood's treatment of women leaves you wanting, you'll find good, heady company in  You Play the Girl."— Elle

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Can This Marriage Be Saved?

In 1973, the pharmaceutical company where my father worked transferred us from São Paulo, Brazil, where we’d lived for two years, to its New York headquarters. I was five years old, my brother was four, and my mom was about seven months pregnant with my sister. The company put us up in a hotel in the city, and a couple of months later my parents bought a house in New Jersey, which had a big yard and woods behind it. My dad was an executive in charge of marketing for Latin America, and he traveled for work about six months out of the year. We’d never lived in the suburbs before, and my mom wasn’t used to being alone all the time in the quiet. One weekday morning, she was in the kitchen when she heard a loud noise and followed it outside. It was the neighbor, mowing her lawn. When she saw my mom waddling toward her, she cut off the mower, thinking she’d disturbed her. My mom begged her not to. She’d been so relieved to hear it. The silence had been so spectral that she’d started to wonder if she was dead and the last to know.

That story always makes me think of The Stepford Wives. The Stepford Wives was a best-selling 1972 novel by Ira Levin that was made into a movie a few years later. The main character, Joanna Eberhart, is an aspiring photographer whose husband, Walter, talks her into leaving New York for the (fictional) town of Stepford, Connecticut. Joanna, played by Katharine Ross, has the slightly bewildered air of a person who stepped off the path for a second and can’t believe how quickly and irrecoverably she lost her way. Given the pressure she’s under to fall in step as the pretty, young wife of an up-and-comer, her yearning to be recognized (she dreams that someday someone will pick up one of her photographs and know it as “an Ingalls,” her maiden name) is especially poignant. She worries that her dreamy, bucolic images of children and everyday life aren’t important enough to be taken seriously as art. And she is gently, encouragingly held back by her husband, the culture, other women, and her own insecurity, which is lovingly inculcated over a lifetime. With her two little kids, her wood-paneled station wagon, her long brown hair in Vera scarves, and her bewilderment at her sudden isolation, Joanna reminds me of my mom in those days. The movie was shot in a town much like ours, and the languid shots of hazy green lawns, prairie dresses, dark kitchens, and Muzak at the market trigger so many of my earliest sense memories that every time I see it, I feel a twinge of nostalgia, and I almost forget it’s a story about a town where the husbands have colluded to murder their wives and replace them with housecleaning sex-bots.

In 1975, the producers of The Stepford Wives organized a special screening for feminist “opinion makers,”¹ notably Betty Friedan, in advance of the premiere. Friedan was the best-selling author of The Feminine Mystique and a cofounder of the National Organization for Women. The Feminine Mystique was a publishing phenomenon when it came out in 1963, reviving popular feminism after a long period of dormancy. Eleanor Perry, screenwriter of Diary of a Mad Housewife, introduced the film to the opinion makers as “finally, a movie that is not about two guys and their adventures.”² The screening did not go well. Friedan called the movie a commercial “rip-off of the women’s movement” and stomped out of the screening room.³ I can see how she would have been disappointed when the alternative to “a movie that is not about two guys and their adventures” turned out to be a movie about two women getting murdered by a proto–men’s rights cabal comprised of their husbands. Or maybe she resented being co-opted as a mainstream cultural reference, or disliked the way the women’s movement was characterized as a fight between middle-class husbands and wives over domestic labor and hairdos, or was frustrated with the way people kept missing the point she was trying to make about equal rights and the kind of legal, institutional, and constitutional change she was focused on. Maybe everything pissed her off because she was contentious and a control freak. Or maybe it just looked a little too familiar. I don’t know. But I don’t think I’m going out on too much of a limb by describing The Stepford Wives as a campy, fictional re­imagining of Friedan’s groundbreaking magnum opus, which had come out nine years earlier, and she didn’t like seeing it turned into allegorical kitsch.

Like The Stepford Wives, The Feminine Mystique was tendered as the journey to consciousness of an ordinary, middle-class housewife who found herself adrift in what Susan Brownmiller once described as “a make-believe world of perfect casseroles and Jell-O delights,” where “marriages failed because wives didn’t try hard enough, single-parent households did not exist, and women worked outside the home not because they wanted to, or to make ends meet, but to ‘earn extra income in your spare time.’”⁴ The Stepford Wives movie, which came out three years after the novel, had the air of an underwater dream shot behind glass. Not long after arriving in Stepford, Joanna befriends another recent New York transplant, Bobbie Markowe, and together they marvel at the placid conformity all around them. Whereas in the city and in neighboring towns, women are increasingly involved in the women’s movement, the Stepford wives are singularly devoted to their bodies, homes, husbands, and children. Their domesticity is cultlike in its utter self-abnegation. The wives exist only to nurture, please, and display their husbands’ status. They go to the supermarket in full makeup. They decline invitations for coffee to stay home and wax the floor. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert remarked that the actors playing the robot women had “absorbed enough TV, or have such an instinctive feeling for those phony, perfect women in the ads, that they manage all by themselves to bring a certain comic edge to their cooking, their cleaning, their gossiping and their living deaths.”⁵ Ebert seemed to assume that the actresses were at once in on the joke and safely removed from it, just as he was. It didn’t seem to occur to him that, both as women and actresses, they lived in Stepford, too. There was no ironic remove available to them. There was no escape.

It has long been fashionable to dismiss The Feminine Mystique as exclusionary for focusing exclusively on white, college-educated, middle-class housewives. Some of this criticism is deserved, but some of it misses the point. In the book, Friedan presents herself as an ordinary, alienated housewife nagged by a feeling of discontent she called “the problem with no name.” She wonders whether she is alone in her feelings or whether her old college classmates are also suffering from this existential malaise. (They were.) But this self-portrayal wasn’t exactly accurate. The Feminine Mystique wasn’t focused on actual housewives as much as it was on the housewifely ideal, or the “cult of true womanhood” of the mid-twentieth century. “With a vision of the happy modern housewife as she is described by the magazines and television, by the functional sociologists, the sex-directed educators, and the manipulators dancing before my eyes,” Friedan wrote, “I went in search of one of those mystical creatures.”⁶ What she discovered instead was a pervasive idea she called the “mystique,” a complex, pervasive, self-perpetuating messaging system that told women that, for them, there is only one true path to happiness—and that the journey there is very, very brief. It told them that no matter what their particular circumstances, individual desires, financial situation, sexual orientation, and/or cultural background, marriage, motherhood, total economic dependence on a husband, and complete immersion in the domestic sphere were the only true, real, lasting, and “natural” route to contentment for women. Fulfillment was one-size-fits-all, and if it didn’t fit you for whatever reason, then it was more than likely that you were the problem. The mystique dissuaded women from having goals beyond those dictated by 1950s gender roles. It said that “only a superwoman could choose to do anything with her life in addition to marriage and motherhood.”⁷ It encouraged women “to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents,” as well as women of previous generations with their pointless, doomed striving. A woman with aspirations had better make sure she was a genius, the Ladies’ Home Journal warned. “If she ended up doing something only ordinary, or ‘second-rate,’ she would be wasting the chance to raise a ‘first-rate’ child.” It made women feel guilty if they felt dissatisfied or frustrated or “didn’t have an orgasm waxing the family-room floor,” and explained why women were barraged by contradictory “expert” opinions about “how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents,” while being assured by the psychiatric profession that their inability to mold themselves into this fiction and to feel nothing but joy and contentment was their problem. Friedan’s contemporaries, college-educated women in their forties and fifties, “still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them.”

All of this sounds painfully retrograde now, but it also sounds painfully familiar. There’s a way in which girls are asked to account for their dreams and aspirations from the moment they start to form that hasn’t changed very much since Friedan’s time. In 2014, a sophomore in high school told me a story about how, when her friend got accepted to Stanford and announced her intention to start her own biotech firm, her mom had asked whether she’d given any thought to when she would fit having a family into that plan. The girl was seventeen.

Friedan felt this, too. As a 1940s career woman, she was appalled by the sudden domestic turn so relentlessly encouraged in advertising and so patronizingly validated by scientific experts. Decades before writing The Feminine Mystique, Friedan had worked as a labor activist and reporter for the United Electrical Workers’ News, where she was inspired by union women’s demands for equal pay, and she had covered the House Un-American Activities Committee. After getting pregnant with her second child, she was fired from the news­paper and became a freelance women’s-magazine writer. She wrote articles about breastfeeding, natural childbirth, homes, and fashion but was discouraged by her male editors from writing about female artists or politics, because American women wouldn’t identify with them. Not only could you not get an abortion at the time but even the word abortion could not be printed in newspapers.⁸ Friedan reinvented herself as just another “mad housewife” in part to make herself palatable to the middle-class, women’s-magazine and book-buying public, but also to avoid being labeled a Communist. But to read the book now and place it in the context of its time is to understand that The Feminine Mystique was anything but the whiny lament of a bored housewife. It was a Marxist takedown of patriarchal capitalism as rooted in the idea of the single-income nuclear family as the basic economic unit. But in Friedan’s day, it was more socially acceptable to be thought a middle-class housewife than to be thought a socialist, so, in order for her to say what she wanted to say, it was safer for her to “play the girl” while she said it. What she wanted to say was that it was all bullshit, that the entire system had colluded to force women out of the workforce after World War II by selling them an ideology, and that she was sorry, as a women’s-magazine writer, to have contributed to the problem. “I have watched American women for fifteen years try to conform to it,” she wrote. “But I can no longer deny my own knowledge of its terrible implications.”⁹ Friedan demystified the fairy tale and traced it back to its roots. She named the unnamed problem. She told women they weren’t crazy, that the culture was set up to drive them crazy and make them relinquish themselves and step into a mass-produced, ready-made identity, ready to please.

By the time The Stepford Wives rolled around, it really had been ages since The Feminine Mystique had come out. Maybe people Bobbie and Joanna’s age believed those days were behind them, or almost. Maybe they thought their husbands agreed and that, as Joanna told her Realtor, they were interested in “women’s lib,” too. Second-wave feminism was much more diverse than we tend to give it credit for, ushering into the mainstream a wide-ranging political, institutional, and informal activism that had first come into being in the nineteenth century and never really gone away. It wasn’t just about setting national agendas. Groups formed around personal identity, race, and class-based issues. Feminists took on cultural criticism and everyday experience.¹⁰ Kate Millett kicked off modern feminist literary criticism with Sexual Politics, a work of political philosophy that argued that representation mattered, that words and images had the power to shape reality, for better and for worse. The book, which began as her dissertation at Columbia, argued that the relationship between the sexes was a master-slave relationship, “one of dominance and subservience.” This power dynamic was at the basis of patriarchy: it was institutional and ideological. Stories functioned as a kind of “interior colonization . . . sturdier than any form of segregation, and more rigorous than class stratification,” a colonization that socialized children in this unequal gender “caste system” that they agreed to long before they understood it. “However muted its appearance may be,” Millett wrote, “sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.”¹¹

The output was dizzyingly varied. Shulamith Firestone took on sex, reproduction, and child rearing in her brilliant, if insane, Marxist polemic The Dialectic of Sex. Rita Mae Brown published Rubyfruit Jungle and helped form the lesbian radical feminist group Lavender Menace, in part as a protest to Friedan’s panicked exclusion of lesbian issues from the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York. (Friedan was afraid the movement’s goals would be undermined if conservatives could dismiss them as “man-hating lesbians,” which she needn’t have worried about, because they’d do it regardless.) Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin took on women’s representation in the media by cofounding Ms. magazine. The Black Women’s Alliance and Puerto Rican women activists joined to form the Third World Women’s Alliance in the fight against racism, imperialism, and sexism. Liberal feminists were trying to help women gain equal rights and representation in mainstream society; radical feminists wanted to topple the patriarchy and start over again from scratch.

Friedan herself had moved on to other things, like setting a national agenda for women’s rights and trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Suffragist Alice Paul had believed that an amendment was needed to ensure that the Constitution was applied equally to all citizens, so she wrote one in 1923 and rewrote it in 1943, when it was added to both the Republican and Democratic platforms. Social conservatives opposed it, though, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that the civil rights movement inspired a renewed interest in the ERA. In early 1972, the amendment passed the Senate and the House and was sent to the states for ratification. In the first year, it received twenty-two out of the necessary thirty-eight states. Then, a conservative Christian by the name of Phyllis Schlafly began to organize a fear-mongering opposition campaign. As the leader of the right-wing Eagle Forum/Stop ERA, she convinced dependent housewives that they would lose the right to be supported by their husbands and would be sent into combat. The pace of ratification slowed dramatically. Only eight states ratified in 1973, three in 1974, one in 1975, and none in 1976. Meanwhile, the “feminine mystique” was adapting to the times. It was getting cooler and craftier, more pandering. It said, “You’ve come a long way, baby!” before baby had gotten very far at all. In 1980, just before Ronald Reagan was elected president, the Republican Party withdrew its support for the ERA from its platform. The amendment was defeated just three states short of ratification. In 1992, the year Bill Clinton was elected president, having campaigned on the quip “and you get two for the price of one,” Pat Robertson wrote in an Iowa fund-raising letter opposing a state equal-rights amendment that feminism “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” As of 2016, the ERA has yet to pass.

Like most parents I knew, mine had a traditional marriage with a modern veneer. Or maybe it was a modern marriage built on a traditional foundation. Either way, my dad’s career was the kind of career that required a wife and kids. And of course his wife and kids required that he have a particular kind of corporate career. Our identity was entirely predicated on it, as was our existence. On the face of it, my parents’ marriage looked and functioned like a partnership. Unlike my grandfather, my father was not autocratic. Unlike my grandmother, my mother was not required to be outwardly submissive and secretly subversive. They had an egalitarian relationship, or an unequal relationship with an egalitarian vibe. Belief in the vibe of equality was crucial to the enterprise. Without it, the starship would have collapsed. Of course, my dad’s salary underwrote the whole operation, and it was it, not he, that was the boss of all of us. Throughout my childhood, I don’t remember once hearing the word choice applied to this arrangement, unless it was preceded by the word no. Between the time my mom got married and my younger sister turned three, she packed up the house and unpacked it again six times, across cities, countries, and continents. My dad would start a new job, and his family would magically re-form around him in situ. I couldn’t picture myself living my mother’s life, yet I couldn’t picture what life I might live instead, either. I couldn’t picture it because there were no pictures. Sometimes, my dad would joke around with me and say, “Never get married.” And I’d laugh and feel anxious and wonder, Is he talking about himself, my mother, or me?

The trouble was that I wanted to get married, just not in the traditional sense. I wanted to get married in the sense that I wanted to enter into an ever-deepening, ever-evolving conversation with another; with a person who saw me for everything I was. Romantic love is a mirror in which you can see your whole self pleasantly reflected, if you’re lucky. Or it’s a dark mirror into which you can disappear. Traditionally, the only plot that has been available to the heroine is the “marriage plot.” In stories, it has been her one thrilling, treacherous, booby-trapped obstacle course to transcendent happiness. Because marriage was the only culturally and socially sanctioned (“happy”) outcome for a girl, her story could conclude only one way to be deemed a success. In The Heroine’s Text, her seminal analysis of the marriage plot in eighteenth-century French and English novels, Nancy K. Miller argued that the novel as a form “would have never happened without a certain collective ‘obsessing’ about an idea called ‘woman.’” More than a reflection of social reality, “literary femininity in the eighteenth century,” Miller wrote, is “the inscription of a female destiny, the fictionalization of what is taken to be the feminine at a specific cultural moment.”¹² If, traditionally, the hero’s story was the story of a boy’s transformation into himself, then the heroine’s story, or text, was the story of a girl’s transformation into a wife. The transition from her father’s child to her husband’s wife was understood to be her only adventure. Everything, therefore, was riding on this one, early adventure. Its outcome would be, as Miller put it, either euphoric or dysphoric. She would get it “all” (a rich, handsome, sexy, kind, smart husband attuned to her emotional needs) or she would get “nothing,” and then she would probably die. Either way, the story ended. And there wasn’t much she could do to steer it toward its successful conc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Introduction
• 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
• The Pool of Tears
• The Ingenue Chooses Marriage or Death
• Thoroughly Modern Lily
• Bad Girlfriend
• The Kick-Ass
• 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
• 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
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Consulted
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH