Two days ago, I read Julie Klausner’s Don’t Fear the Dowager blog post. Today I read Lena Chen’s two cents on the matter, followed by the article on Racialicious about the racial and socioeconomic context of all this ‘manic pixie dream girl chic’ buzz.
I feel a lot of things about just how politics, economics, social history, and race are tangled and spat out as our fashions. This goes for any time period but particularly for right now since I am, no matter what I do, an agent of these fashions. It’s important, when dealing with talking about ways in which we build personal identities and express ourselves, not to demonize or romanticize any ‘sides’ because doing so would only get in the way of understanding them. Lena Chen put it best by saying: ” I try to question where my habits and preferences originate from, because they certainly weren’t present in utero.”
Julie Klausner writes that “ adult women are acting more and more like little girls, and it’s really starting to get on my nerves.” Among some of the images she uses, there’s one of Zooey Deschanel tweeting “I wish everyone looked like a kitten.”
Here’s a picture of Julie Klausner making a Zooey-Deschanel-style-bug-eyed-twee-face surrounded by ceramic owls. Okay. And it just so happens she’s publishing a book whose main audience is most likely (going on the fact that it’s about dating and it’s hot pink and she’s donning a 40s-style bathing suit on the cover) the demographic she’s bitching about on her blog.
This isn’t to say I don’t agree with what she’s saying. I just think it’s worth noting that she’s sick of the trend because she lives and earns a living by it. Her piece is one of those ‘you’-re-bringing-up-the-right-things-for-the-wrong-reasons’ situations, or more accurately, ‘bringing-up-the-right-things-but-not-delving-deeply-enough-into-them.’
The following paragraph says it better than I could:
“The Klausner article generated a ton of push back on Jezebel. I suspect because the manic pixie dream girl persona is “in” right now and everyone wants to feel like they choose their own choices. In this case, that means that some women want to believe that their predilection for rompers and kittens and baby voices reflects their individual personalities and not some trend toward retro, non-threatening femaleness. But no one chooses their choices in a vacuum and certainly it means something that so many women seem to be finding this super-girlish, childish part of their personalities at the same time, while Katy Perry’s sex and candy persona is tearing up the charts and actual little girls are being bombarded with pink, purple, princesses, tulle and sparkles.”
This trend/style is so deeply embedded in all of us, (because, who the fuck doesn’t want to be a child/enjoy ‘cute’ things), that we forget to wonder what it says about how far we’ve come in terms of social and cultural progress, and whether we too easily forget that there’s a lot of progress to be made.
Not to mention, to take from that article again, the fact that the “wide-eyed, girlish, take-care-of-me characters that Deschanel inhabits on film are not open to many women of color, particularly black women [who] can be strong women, aggressive women, promiscuous women…[who] can do Bonet bohemian and Earth Mother […] but never carefree and childish. Even black girls are too often viewed as worldly women and not innocents.”
And there is certainly something distubring in Zooey Deschanel’s website, “HelloGiggles” describing itself as “lady-friendly” and assuring its visitors that no “Boys Club content” is anywhere to be found on the site. Because apparently we’re back at that “boys like this” and “girls like that” stage.
We’re still living in a time when it’s dangerous for women to be childlike because it’s seen as a weakness, submission, an easy-way to get the favor of men who enjoy feeding this cycle (As Klausner writes, “We all know these manic pixie Muppet Babies are really just in it for the peen. And instead of acting like a woman who might remind a skittish bro more of his teacher or his mother, we’re going for the pubeless, twee, Anime-eyed version of whatever dream girl we assume they want or need.”), when where a woman’s intersts lie should never be linked to that.
And all the while I’m processing all of this, most of what I can think is: these articles complaining about current fashion-ethos ask people to “act like grownups,” but shouldn’t the word be adults?
