We've often talked about the passive-aggressive racial compliment "You're not really black," and its varied iterations. More often than not, it's the the kind of comment that says more about the speaker than it does about the person.

I guess what I'm getting at, and I mean it as a high compliment, is that Stone is a dude -- in the sense that she is building a career typically allowed to only serious actors in Hollywood. Guys in the industry unfairly get more leeway, whereas actresses are so easily boxed in at an early age, and few have been allowed or earned the freedom Stone currently enjoys. She can literally do anything, and she's getting opportunities to prove it in period dramas, high school comedies, adult romantic comedies, and comic-book epics. She's on her way to becoming a lucrative brand, an ironic but nevertheless well-deserved achievement considering her multiple talents and eclectic taste.

I actually think it's more apt to suggest that Stone is on a trajectory to escape the permanent girlhood Hollywood foists on most actresses. Limiting actresses to stories that pit jobs v. love as if they're a choice, or that makes the question of whether or not someone is the One isn't just a female thing, or what femininity is made up of. Instead, it's a way of trapping actresses in the black-and-white terms of teenagedom, of walling them off from the full range of problems and joys women get to experience.