Howdy.

How are ya?

I’m staring at the city skyline, dizzy from too much coffee, thinking about the world I inhabited for a long time, and what it meant to escape it. The manic pixie dream world.

Let me explain.

PERSONAL CONTEXT

When I was fifteen, I read John Green’s Looking for Alaska as my book of choice for “reading time”. Reading time was a hilarious thing that seemed quite legitimate at the time, but was really just twenty minutes of my teacher not having to teach us. I have memories of him reclining in his chair with his legs crossed on top of his desk like some kind of movie character playing the neglectful teacher. He had the coffee addiction and jaded worldviews to match. He also bore serious resemblance to the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, earning him an unfortunate nickname among the high schoolers and teachers alike.

So he’s there, ignoring our impressionable minds, and I’m using a pink highlighter to mark all of my favorite quotes and passages in the literary gem that was Looking for Alaska. It was John Green, yes, but I was falling into a love with language that I did not yet know would consume me. I also did not yet know what the manic pixie dream girl was, just that Alaska Young was very cool and I wanted to be her. I wanted to drink strawberry wine and smoke cigarettes under the stars of my apathetic boarding school while utterly transforming how my average, lukewarm, guy friend saw the world around him. I wanted to die young so that he could live. I didn’t know that there was a whole world of study being done on characters like Alaska. I didn’t know that it would take me years to undo the idea that I needed to be some eccentric fire-work of a human in order to deserve love.

“[The manic pixie dream girl is] energetic, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies, often with a touch of wild hair dye.”

–tvtropes

“Manic pixie dream girl: a type of female character depicted as vivacious and appealingly quirky, whose main purpose within the narrative is to inspire a greater appreciation for life in a male protagonist.”

–Oxford English Dictionary

MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL

I was too busy trying every chance I got to be that girl. I wanted to be different, cool, brilliant, and free-spirited. Which, to be fair, I was. But I had the wrong ideas about why that was neat. I thought that my eccentricities, my obsession with the stars and books and rAnDoM cApiTaLiZaTiONs as seen used by Margot in Paper Towns, were the very things that some wandering adolescent boy would love me for. I made sure to tell each one that I liked all about them. I dressed outrageously, talked about big ideas that I read somewhere or heard someone older and smarter say, and expressed existential dramatics characteristic of every cool indie-girl I ever saw in any movie ever.

To be seventeen, I had learned, was to radically question the world around you. It was the age that words like “patriarchy”, “feminism”, and “conformity” entered your vernacular. You were supposed to grab hold of them like weapons and use them to fight for your own liberation. But really, looking back, they were just words that we used to be taken seriously despite our teenage girl exteriors. It was about power.

I had not yet learned that it was never my job to make someone love me. I had not yet learned that you cannot manipulate and will these things into reality, no matter how many different colors you paint each nail on your fingers or which mismatched earring that you wear.

It’s not like I was faking it. I really was interested in and inspired by all of the things I talked about and wrote and read about. I really did love eccentric fashion and standing out and feeling free-spirited. These were never the problematic things. The fact that I felt pressure to always shine spotlights on them, to display and advertise them in order to gain love, and later, power, that was the problem. I see that now. It breaks my heart a little bit.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED SINCE

So, fast forward to now. Fast forward to college courses on girlhood studies and the female gothic, to bell hooks books stacking up next to my bed and Looking for Alaska still somewhere underneath them all. Fast forward to me, reading Norwegian Wood and noticing how differently I am receiving the manic pixie dream girl trope in the wake of all of these things. Let me explain.

I didn’t know this when I bought the book, but Norwegian Wood has been called the “grown up version” of Looking for Alaska. The narrative parallels are obvious, the female protagonists strikingly similar, making it a strange full-circle moment of the universe presenting me with the same story, years later. The same promise of adolescent love, but this time, in the hands of a no-longer adolescent. Which, changes some things.

No longer falling for that promise, I began to think critically about the implications of it. The implications of telling fourteen year olds these stories, knowing all too well that they will take them to the grave.

I landed on this article, by Hugo Schwyzer, and just kept running. I poured over All About Love and Communion by bell hooks, revisited the research I did for my girlhood studies course, and slowly, surely, came to understand some things.

IN THE REAL WORLD

Schwyzer writes,

“The manic pixie dream girl may serve as a catalyst for male transformation, but in both her real and fictional manifestations, she sends the message that a bright and sensitive young man can learn to embrace life only by falling in love with a woman who sees the dazzling colors and rich complexities he can’t.”

“Women do not exist to help men change; men do not need women to transform themselves.”

-Hugo Schwyzer “The Real-World Consequences of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Cliché”

I liked this article especially because of lines like this, for they display how Schwyzer doesn’t solely focus on the impact that this trope has had on women, but also on how offensive it actually is to men. It puts forth the idea that men are not capable of reaching self-actualization on their own. I know that I am the last person to defend the mental capacities of the average youthful male, but in all seriousness, I know that they can be quite brilliant. Obviously. To constantly be placed in the role of the cold, apathetic protagonist bumbling through life until some eccentric beauty rescues them from their own angst and teaches them about the poetry of life, must be pretty degrading. Why is someone always having to save someone else?

A TOXIC TEMPLATE

Schwyzer also, of course, addresses the more popular critique, the one that I am naturally interested in.

“the manic pixie dream girl is not just an onscreen fantasy—she’s a template for young women’s lives. “

“She [the manic pixie dream girl] laughed, shook her head, and decades ahead of her time, gave a short but impassioned speech about how monogamy was the enemy of true love.”

-Hugo Schwyzer

He frames this hideous truth about the template by telling a story about meeting his own manic pixie dream girl, some wildflower who refused to relinquish her freedom to a monogamous relationship. Which, oh my god, is just too good. It’s just too accurate. Why? Let us turn to bell hooks.

In All About Love, hooks thoroughly explains that women grow up learning that they don’t have the power. From the time we are little girls, we internalize that society is patriarchal, long before ever learning the vocabulary. We watch our big brothers do things that we are told we will never be able to, but for reasons that we are still too young to comprehend. In the beginning, we are powerless.

ELUSIVE POWER

But then, and this is my theory, we reach adolescence and begin to realize that we do have one, undeniable, natural source of power–our sexuality. We learn that women can get things just by looking pretty. It is the thing that our mothers and aunts and grandmothers and next-door neighbors tell us to guard and shield and, ultimately, leverage the world with.

If you like him, ignore him. Do you have a boyfriend yet? No? Oh, well, that’s good. You’re better off.

These were the messages I received as a child. These were the words that fell out of my mouths of the women in my life like patriarchal vomit that I have spent the past several years mopping off the floor of my own psyche.

In mopping, I have learned that what they were telling me was that to tell a boy I like him, or god forbid, to actually date him, was to relinquish the power of elusiveness that makes women so enticing to men. Be mysterious, they said. When a boy who liked me in high school called me an enigma, I felt that I had won. But at what?

Well, at being his manic pixie dream girl. But beyond that, at fulfilling the problematic ideals of second wave feminism that advocated for the relinquishment of male attachment at all.

Hooks writes,

“For the most part, the feminist movement…told us that we were better off if we stopped thinking about love, if we could live our lives as though love did not matter, [so as not to become] the woman who loves too much.”

-bell hooks Communion: The Female Search for Love

Again, the words Do you have a boyfriend yet? Oh, well, that’s good. You’re better off. Again, the words be mysterious. I can’t blame them for these messages anymore than I can blame the word for being round, but I suppose that’s the issue. And I don’t quite know how to fix it.

LOVE AS MEDICINE

I had a daydream the other day that I was walking on the beach holding the hands of two little girls. They were my daughters. We were on vacation. This was strange because I have always daydreamed about having sons. Boys. Girls seemed too risky, messy, and heartbreaking to raise in this world. I was one. But there, materializing in my mind like some psychic calling, were these two, beautiful little girls. And then it hit me.

I realized that maybe that’s how to fix it. By being the woman who doesn’t tell little girls that their sex appeal will be their only power in this world. That they need to be single, manic pixie dream girls who enchant men without ever actually letting one in. That to do so, would be bad, weak, and problematic for reasons unexplained.

I would teach them that there is great power in loving. That in this world, it’s quite the radical act. That closing yourself off, keeping men at a distance, and playing the mysterious girl who is hard to get, are only sure fire ways of never knowing love. The manic pixie dream girl is a dead girl. Alaska Young died. But I didn’t. I gave up on her and went on to learn all of this instead.

For more radical ideas, check out: The Book About Love that Heals my Heart.

Love, m.

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