Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (25 page)

Stories shape us, even the shit ones. Even the ones that are simplistic and obviate a great deal of real-life experience by design. Stories are how we organise our lives, how we streamline our desires, and sometimes they fall short, and sometimes they disappoint us, and they always matter. For women, love stories are the stories we are allowed to cast ourselves in, and those are the stories that shape our cravings and identities.

We can be the sweet princess who needs rescuing. We can be the femme fatale, the trophy blonde or the shining girl who saves the brooding young hero from his suffering and helps him to believe in the beauty of life. Women learn that the only stories we really get to be the heroes of, from
Pride and Prejudice
to
The Matrix
to
Bridget Jones’s Diary
, are love stories – and we don’t even get to be the hero of those. Love™ is meant to be the overwhelming object of a woman’s early life; her story ends when she finds it, or fails to find it. The most important thing is that her story ends.

Very occasionally, in romances and summer blockbusters, one runs across the man as love object, with floppy hair and flashing eyes where his personality should be, his only flaw being quite how besotted he is with our heroine. The shallowness of these two-dimensional beefcakes is immediately obvious: though their endings are invariably happy, few young men aspire to that role in real life, because they have so many other stories to work with. Why would a little boy choose to play the handsome prince when he can be a knight or a wizard, a hero or a villain, Superman or Batman? Little girls, though, only ever get two choices: we can be the princess, or we can be the witch. And everybody knows what happens to women who do their own magic. Stories matter. Girls trying to find their way in the world still learn that unless we play the love object, there are oven doors in our future. 

This is why female artists and women writers remain figures of suspicion. Men are allowed to make their work, their practice, the central romance of their lives. Men are allowed to love their art, their writing, their passion, a little bit more than anything else. Women are not, and if we choose to do so anyway, we will always be seen as lacking something, or taking on a man’s role, or both. Whatever else we do with our lives, we must carve out part of our hearts in the service of others, or we are not really women. We are permitted to be the wives and lovers of great men, but if we try to become great ourselves – even now, when there are fewer and fewer legal barriers stopping us from doing so – there must be something wrong with us. Sometimes you have to decide between doing what you love and being lovable, and the decision is always painful.

I WAS A MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL

Like scabies and syphilis, Manic Pixie Dream Girls were with us long before they were accurately named. It was the critic Nathan Rabin who coined the term in a review of the film
Elizabethtown
, explaining that the character of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ‘exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures’.
⁴
She pops up everywhere these days, in films and comics and novels and television, fascinating lonely geek dudes with her magical joie-de-vivre and boring the hell out of anybody who likes their women to exist in all three dimensions rather than two. She doesn’t get a story. She is part of a story that happens to other people. That’s what girls are supposed to be. 

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. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you’re slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It’s a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and
The Hunger Games
, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn’t bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire. 

In Doug Rushkoff’s book
Present Shock
,
⁵
he discusses the phenomenon of ‘narrative collapse’: the idea that in the years between 11 September 2001 and the financial crash of 2008, all of the old stories about God and Duty and Money and Family and America and the Destiny of the West finally disintegrated, leaving us with fewer sustaining fairy tales to die for and even fewer to live for.

This is plausible, but future panic, like the future itself, is not evenly distributed. Not being sure what story you’re in any more is a different experience depending on whether or not you were expecting to be the hero of that story. Women and girls, and low-status men, often don’t have that expectation. We expect to be forgettable supporting characters, or sometimes, if we’re lucky, attainable objects to be slung over the hero’s shoulder and carried off at the end of the final page. The only way we get to be in stories is to be stories ourselves. If we want anything interesting at all to happen to us we have to be a story that happens to somebody else, and when you’re a young girl looking for a script, there are a limited selection of roles to choose from.

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. 

For me, Manic Pixie Dream Girl was the story that fit. Of course, I didn’t think of it in those terms; all I saw was that in the books and series I loved – mainly science fiction, comics and offbeat literature, not the mainstream films that would later make the MPDG trope famous – there were certain kinds of girl you could be, and if you weren’t a busty bombshell, if you were maybe a bit weird and clever and brunette, there was another option.

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 colour 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. At least, it was before I washed all the dye out last year, partly to stop soulful Zach-Braff-a-likes following me to the shops.

And, yes, I’m a bit strange and sensitive and daydreamy, and, yes, I 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, hear and forgive – I also play the fucking ukulele. Truly. But the Manic Pixie is 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. 

Most of the classic Manic Pixie Dream Girls claim to be ironic re-imaginings of a character trope that they fail to actually interrogate in any way. Irony is, of course, the last vestige of modern crypto-misogyny: all those lazy stereotypes and hurtful put-downs are definitely a joke, right up until they aren’t, and clearly you need a man to tell you when and if you’re supposed to take sexism seriously. 

One of these soi-disant ironic films is
(500) Days of Summer
, the opening credits of which refer to the real-world heartbreak on which writer-director Scott Neustadter based the character of Summer: ‘Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental. Especially you, Jenny Beckman. Bitch.’
⁶

Men write women, and they rewrite us, for revenge. It’s about obsession, and control. Perhaps the most interesting of the classics, then, is the recent
Ruby Sparks
, written by a woman, Zoe Kazan, who also stars as the title character. It’s all about a frustrated young author who writes himself a perfect girlfriend, only to have her come to life. When she inevitably proves more difficult to handle in reality than she did in his fantasy, the writer’s brother comments: ‘You’ve written a girl, not a person.’

‘I think defining a girl and making her lovable because of her music taste or because she wears cute clothes is a really superficial way of looking at women. I did want to address that,’ Kazan told the
Huffington Post
. ‘Everybody is setting out to write a full character. It’s just that some people are limited in their imagination of a girl.’
⁷

Those imaginative limits, that failure of narrative, is imposed off the page, too, in the most personal of ways. I stopped being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl around about the time I got rid of the last vestiges of my eating disorder and knuckled down to a career. It’s so much easier, if you have the option, to be a girl, not a person. It’s definitely easier to be a girl than it is to do the work of being a grown woman, especially when you know that grown women are far more fearful to the men whose approval seems so vital to your happiness. And yet something in me was rebelling against the idea of being a character in somebody else’s story. I wanted to write my own. 

I became successful, or at least modestly so – and that changed how I was perceived, entirely and all at once. I was no longer That Girl. I didn’t have time to save boys any more. I had other priorities, and those priorities included writing. You cannot be a writer and have writing be anything other than the central romance of your life, which is one thing they don’t tell you about being a woman writer: it’s its own flavour of lonely. Men can get away with loving writing a little bit more than anything else. Women can’t: our partners and, eventually, our children are expected to take priority. Even worse, I wasn’t writing poems or children’s stories, I was writing reports, political columns. I’ve recently been experimenting with answering ‘fashion’ rather than ‘politics’ when men casually ask me what I write about, and the result has been a 100 per cent increase in phone numbers, business cards and offers of drinks. This is still substantially fewer advances than I received when I gave the truthful answer that what I wrote was: ‘sometimes, in notebooks, just for myself’.

Lately, though, as I’ve been working on longer ideas about sexism and class and power, I keep coming back to love, to the meat and intimacy of fucking and how it so often leads so treacherously to kissing. I was prepared for the personal to be political. What I didn’t understand until quite recently was that the political can be so, so personal.

There was never a moment in my life when I decided to be a writer. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know for sure that that’s what I’d do, in some form, and for ever. But there have been times when I didn’t write, because I was too depressed or anxious or running away from something, and those times have coincided almost precisely with the occasions when I had most sexual attention from men. I wish I’d known, at twenty-one, when I made up my mind to try to write seriously for a living if I could, that that decision would also mean a choice to be intimidating to the men I fancied, a choice to be less attractive, a choice to stop being That Girl and start becoming a grown woman, which is the worst possible thing a girl can do, which is why so many of those Manic Pixie Dream Girl characters, as written by male geeks and scriptwriters, either die tragically young or are somehow immortally fixed at the physical and mental age of nineteen and a half. Meanwhile, in the real world, the very worst thing about being a real-life MPDG is the look of disappointment on the face of someone you really care about when they find out you’re not their fantasy at all – you’re a real human who breaks wind and has a job.

If I’d known what women have to sacrifice in order to write, I would not have allowed myself to be so badly hurt when boys whose work and writing I found so fascinating found those same qualities threatening in me. I would have understood what Kate Zambreno means when she says, in her marvellous book
Heroines
,
⁸
 I do not want to be an ugly woman, and when I write, I am an ugly woman. I would have been less surprised when men encouraged me to be politer and grow my hair long even as I helped them out with their own media careers. My Facebook feed is full of young male writers who I have encouraged to believe in themselves, set up with contacts, taken on adventures and talked into the night about the meaning of journalism with, who are now in long-term relationships with people who are content to be That Girl. I would have understood quite clearly what I was choosing when I chose, sometime around the time I packed two suitcases and walked out on Garden State Boy, to be a person who writes her own stories, rather than a story that happens to other people. 

I try hard, now, around the men in my life, to be as unmanic, as unpixie and as resolutely real as possible, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression.

And it’s a struggle. Because I remain a small, friendly, excitable person who wears witchy colours and has a tendency towards the twee. I still know that if I wanted to, I could attract one of those lost, pretty nerd boys I have such a weakness for by dialling up the twee and dialling down the smart, just as I know that the hurt in their eyes when they realise you’re a real person is not something I ever want to see again. I still love to up sticks and go on adventures, but I no longer drag mournful men-children behind me when I do, because it’s frankly exhausting. I still play the ukulele. I wasn’t kidding about the fucking ukulele. But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me. I’m busy casting spells for myself. Everyone who was ever told a fairy tale knows what happens to women who do their own magic.