This trope has been around so long that it’s actually been given a name. Film critic Nathan Rabin calls it the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character and describes it as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that 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.” It’s any chick in a movie who is more style than substance, and whose free-spiritedness and unconventional approach to life is meant to cover up for her general inability to function socially. And and it’s insulting to both genders.
…
It needs to stop because guys shouldn’t live their lives expecting a woman like this to exist. No guy should be waiting around for a quirky, blue-haired, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing chick to show up and fix his entire life, because what woman would want to deal with that expectation and level of pressure?
It also needs to stop because I don’t want wide-eyed gals to think they need to act like vapid morons to attract guys. Because I’m an average, twenty-something male in 2011 America, I’ve developed a pop-culture induced soft spot for pale chicks with giant eyes and bangs.
And, unfortunately, Hollywood is trying to convince women who look like this that being brainless goofballs who don’t understand how life works is an appealing personality type, and I just can’t let that stand.
Hollywood is still teaching women that “dumb” is “attractive,” they’re just hipsterfying it. I don’t know when it happened (maybe after Clueless?), but sometime after the ’90s, “Quirky Eccentric Weird Chick” became the new Bimbo. She’s just as insultingly one-dimensional as the archetypal Ditsy Blonde Bombshell Valley Girl character that was all over the place a decade ago, except now she wears vintage knee-socks and listens to The Smiths, and that’s supposed to be better, for some reason.
