HOW TO BUILD A GIRL – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

The title is… illuminating. And ironic. How to Build a Girl. We girls don’t have cultural scripts for building ourselves in the way that boys do, which come at boys from all angles: from pop culture, from sports, from history lessons in school, from everything that they see in the world that tells them that they can do whatever they want and all barriers they encounter can be surmounted. (Disclaimer: applies mostly only to straight white boys. And isn’t even really true! But still it gives them a confidence boost, and the arrogance to expect everything from the world, and that’s hugely important.)

Certainly movies have not had a lot of interest in letting teen girls be anything other than supporting characters in boys’ construction, in a filmdom dominated by male filmmakers telling stories from their perspectives. We’ve have a few good — really, really good — movies about teen girls recently. We’ve been allowed about one per year, and mostly they are tiny releases. Continue reading…