“Girls in pop culture are also often represented in ways that feel almost, but not quite, human. They are lifelike rather than alive, and more than anything they resemble the 'idea of woman' in late capitalist culture; the twenty-first-century 'true… — Carina Chocano Copy Share Image
“Sometimes, it seems like popular media exists primarily to set impossible standards and then to shame people who don't try their hardest to meet them.” — Carina Chocano Copy Share Image
“You can learn a lot about the longings and generalized gender anxieties of an era by the kinds of fake women it dreams up.” — Carina Chocano Copy Share Image
“Gothic is the genre of fear. Our fascination with it is almost always revived during times of instability and panic. In the wake of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade described the rise of the genre as 'the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded,' and literary critics in the late eighteenth century… — Carina Chocano Copy Share
“Every new generation of women, it seems, feminist and housewife alike, is encouraged by popular culture to disavow its forebears and rebrand itself as an all-new, never-before-seen generational phenomenon, completely different in every way from what came before. The 'housewives' of the 1970s gave way to the Martha Stewart 'homemakers' of the 1980s, then the 'soccer moms' of the 1990s,… — Carina Chocano Copy Share
“Sex may be completely out in the open now, but it's still defined and controlled by a powerful subset of elite men. In the past thirty years, ideas about what makes women sexy have become narrower, more rigid, and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance. Nancy Jo Sales wrote an article in Vanity Fair about the 'porn… — Carina Chocano Copy Share
“Across the various iterations, the 'real housewives' flaunted their refusal to conform to the happy modern housewife ideal as though they were breaking the… — Carina Chocano Copy Share Image
“We appeared to be done with the marriage plot. ('What's the alternative to the marriage plot?' She said: ' The alternative is adventure.') My… — Carina Chocano Copy Share Image
“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… — Carina Chocano Copy Share Image
“What does a woman running for president have to do to be likable? Not run for president.” — Carina Chocano Copy Share Image
“What is marriage anymore, anyway? How is the institution structured? What assumptions do we bring to it? Is it an irreducible economic unit, in which production and labor remain distributed along traditional lines (the model of husband as protector and breadwinner and wife as 'angel in the house,' domestic goddess, and nurturer)? Or is it a spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and… — Carina Chocano Copy Share
“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… — Carina Chocano Copy Share Image
“In his 1899 critique of upper-class values, The Theory of the Leisure Class, economist and philosopher Thorstein Veblen wrote, 'The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther… — Carina Chocano Copy Share
“Strategic girls manage perception; idealistic girls go up against the narrative, because it’s at the root of the problem, and they get crushed every… — Carina Chocano Copy Share Image
