“Women Behave in Ways They Find Sanctioned in Stories Written by Men”

Laurie Penny recently wrote an essay for the New Statesman called “I Was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” in which she concludes: “Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else’s.” She writes:

Manic Pixies, like other female archetypes, crop up in real life partly because fiction creates real life, particularly for those of us who grow up immersed in it. Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men who know better, and men and women seek out friends and partners who remind them of a girl they met in a book one day when they were young and longing.

Though I am wary of any sentence that begins with a general “Women behave,” I think these thoughts ring true, even if the conclusion isn’t necessarily a foregone one; all the fictional females I’ve ever been drawn to (Claudia Kincaid, Maeby Funke) are ones that cared primarily about pleasing themselves. Penny continues:

[….]And that’s how I became a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The basic physical and personality traits were already there, and some of it was doubtless honed by that learned girlish desire to please — because the posture does please people, particularly the kind of sad, bright, bookish young men who have often been my friends and lovers. I had the raw materials: I’m five feet nothing, petite and small-featured with skin the color of something left on the bottom of a pond for too long and messy hair that’s sometimes dyed a shocking shade of red or pink.

And yes, I’m a bit strange and sensitive and daydreamy, and retain a somewhat embarrassing belief in the ultimate decency of humanity and the transformative brilliance of music, although I’m ambivalent on the Shins. I love to dance, I play the guitar badly, and I also — since we’re in confession mode, dear reader, please hear and forgive — I also play the fucking ukelele. Truly. Part of the reason I’m writing this is that the MPDG trope isn’t properly explored, in any of the genres I read and watch and enjoy. She’s never a point-of-view character, and she isn’t understood from the inside. She’s one of those female tropes who is permitted precisely no interiority. Instead of a personality, she has eccentricities, a vaguely-offbeat favourite band, a funky fringe.

I can’t stand all the ways in which women are subtly coaxed into being decorative before anything else, and there are many corners of the Internet (Pinterest, lifestyle blogs) that I avoid as a result. Certainly I shiver to think of a male-driven media trope leading a woman to imagine herself as a “story that happens to other people,” and I agree when Penny writes things like, “But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me.” But it is no coincidence that my favorite sentence in the piece (its beginning modifier aside) is also the only time she comes close to acknowledging the massive role of class and race in this particular idea: “Averagely pretty white women in their late teens and twenties are not the biggest, most profoundly unsolvable mystery in the universe.”