Photo by Molly Champion
Last year, I told my boyfriend at the time that I wanted to get into making mixtapes on cassette. It was my fifth year of collecting cassette tapes — I was looking into better gear that would let me play tapes and bootleg my own. He was really into it, so I told him he’d have one coming his way. He wrote, “You say stuff like this and then you wonder why I simp,” to which I texted back, “Here I am. The manic pixie dream girl.” We broke up, so he never received a cassette from me; I have yet to give one out since I can’t afford a solid setup.
The line about being a manic pixie dream girl was a joke, partly. I’ve been told that I fit the trope, as is the fate of any woman who happens to enjoy anything not stereotypically “feminine.” Yet, unsurprisingly, I don’t consider myself to be “manic,” a “pixie” or a “dream girl,” and never would. I simply have hobbies, like a normal person.
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Recently, I watched “Gold Diggers of 1993” for a film course I’m taking. Out of the readings paired with the film, Pamela Robertson’s chapter on “Gold Diggers” from her 1996 book “Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna” stood out to me. In her analysis of feminist camp, Robertson uses it to “reclaim a female form of aestheticism, related to female masquerade and rooted in burlesque, that articulates and subverts the ‘image- and culturemaking processes’ to which women have traditionally been given access.” Feminist camp is defined from several angles — including one that “views the world ‘queerly’: that is, from a non- or anti-straight, albeit frequently non-gay, position” — but “female performance” as linked to burlesque (i.e., Mae West), gold digging and “working women’s strategy” are at its core.
In “Gold Diggers,” three showgirls (Polly, Carol, and Trixie) struggle to make ends meet during the Great Depression. Things turn around and, eventually, the girls are given the opportunity to perform in a new show, thanks to funding from Polly’s secretly rich boyfriend, Brad. Because he comes from a high society family, Brad’s brother and family lawyer dissuade him from marrying Polly, a “cheap and vulgar” showgirl. To stop their plot, Carol (pretending to be Polly) and Trixie act just as shallow, narcissistic and “cheap” as the men think them to be, tricking them into spending thousands of dollars on clothes, accessories, pets and meals. By playing into the sexualized trope of being “parasites, chiselers” and, well, “gold diggers,” Carol and Trixie not only get what they want in a material sense, but perform feminist camp. Their act is a criticism of how women, particularly showgirls, were seen during the Great Depression; criticism that can easily extend into the lived experience and present-day.
Unfortunately, the stereotype of women as shallow gold diggers is still alive and well. Women in relationships with older men, for example, are often seen as greedy, merely waiting for the man to pass on in order to secure the assets he leaves behind rather than being with him for any romantic reason. While this stigma has been subverted as we see in “Gold Diggers,” it continues to be subverted in the present-day. Similar acts of this “gender parody” have been taking place in the last few years – online and otherwise – with pushes toward “bimbo-“ and “himbo-ification” in the name of reclaiming hyper-femininity and overt sexuality.
So, if we can take the camp to the brink of hyper-femininity in that very stereotypical sense of being glamorous, erotic, the epitome of fetish, as defined by Laura Mulvey’s male gaze — then what other stereotypes can we consider through the lens of feminist camp? Who’s to say we can’t take it to other brands of femininity? To the stigmatized and sexualized gamer girl brands? To the “one of the boys,” so-called “bruh girl” brands? To the free spirit astrological brands? To the forcibly manic-pixie-ified brands? A passage from Robertson on “Gold Diggers” that I find key is as follows:
“If the female spectator is “let in on the joke,” and the joke is on the men in the film, why must we assume that she stops laughing when confronted with feminine spectacle or the resolution of a romance plot? The knowledge that the female spectator gains about men, money, power and economics in the primary diegesis provides her with a means to read the spectacles from a feminist camp perspective, one which enables her to recognize herself in the fetishize images but from which she is able to knowingly distance herself.”
Here, Robertson discusses feminine spectacle in reference to how female bodies are portrayed in film. However, this line of thinking can easily be brought into lived experience — the joke can just as easily be on men who project these stereotypes in real life. “The joke” being on those who fetishize and undermine stereotypical aspects of femininity doesn’t stop when the perceived ‘goal’ of fetishization is reached, especially not when the subject of said fetishization is in control of the narrative via gender parody. Near the end of their ruse, Carol and Trixie make Brad’s brother believe he slept with Carol (who is, again, pretending to be Polly), and swindle him out of $10,000 for her ‘services.’ Despite the fact that nothing sexual happened, Carol and Trixie once again play into the man’s idea of showgirls being “vulgar” (though, clearly, not cheap at all), allowing themselves to be fetishized — a parody of the gender stereotypes pushed upon them. That fetishization, however, is completely within their control and part of “the joke” played on the fetishizer.
So, in thinking of performing gender in a campy way, how does the manic pixie dream girl fit? Just like the other forms of femininity I mentioned previously, the manic pixie dream girl is fetishized — but what makes her stand out is that she’s “not like other girls”; she’s quirky and unique. In my reading, unapologetically existing within that description creates that same “us” (those “let in on the joke”) and “them” (the one being joked about) created by Carol and Trixie in “Gold Diggers.” Sure, you can think the manic pixie dream girl is unattainably cool, but you’ll regret giving her that status when she’s so “unlike other girls” that she’s insufferable.
As a manic pixie dream girl, why not lean into the idea that I am so much cooler than you’ll ever be in any and every respect? Why shouldn’t I lean into the idea that my music taste (and taste in musical mediums) makes so-called (and sometimes self-proclaimed) “male manipulators” tremble in their beat-up Vans? Sure, I leave the piles of half-dirty clothes on my bedroom floor. Why not? It’s quirky and manic, right? Yeah, those are crumbs you’re lying on in my bed. No, I won’t brush them off — other girls don’t, so why should I?
Regardless of whether I ever do play into the idea of me being a manic pixie dream girl, I recognize that she is, in fact, not me. She is merely a fetishization of incredibly normal aspects of my personality and interests. Whether it ends with me being entirely insufferable is somehow both beside the point and entirely the point; it’s an inside joke of sorts, one that can function as reclamation, empowerment and most of all, fun.