Who is 'the girl"? Look to movies, TV shows and magazines and the message is mixed: 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.
From the moment we're born, we're told stories about what girls are and aren't, what girls want and what they don't, what girls can be and what they can't. "The girl' looms over us like a toxic cloud, permeating everything and confusing our sense of reality. In You Play the Girl, Carina Chocano shows how we metabolise the messages embedded in our everyday experience and how our identity is shaped by them.