More on Manic Pixie Dream Girls: Can't Kill the Father In The Mind

By K.M. Zwick

Being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl may be about an inability to psychologically “kill the father," in my opinion.

"Lemme splain. No, there is too much. Lemme sum up."

The wish to kill the father was an idea first laid out in literature (I believe) by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex and later - famously - theorized as an essential conflict in early childhood by Sigmund Freud, a conflict embedded in the phallic stage of psychosexual development.

While this theory - a young child's wish to kill the same-sex parent and be joined with the opposite-sex parent - has been hotly contested by behaviorists and feminist theorists alike (the latter decrying phallocentrism), and misunderstood as perverse by people who don't really read the material, there is also a plethora of feminist psychoanalysts (Nancy Chodorow and Irene Fast chief among them) who propose that the Oedipal complex certainly pertains to girls as much as it pertains to boys (and women and men).

While a girl's "conflict" has been called the Electra complex by some - positing she wants to kill mom and join with dad - I'm going to go ahead and assert that a girl - especially in Western society, if not everywhere - also deals with a wish to kill the father. And a great fear of doing just that.

And why am I talking about killing daddies? Thank you for asking.

I'm not talking about literal, real killing, first of all. And neither was Freud, at root.

While a concrete, non-neofrontal-cortexed 3 year-old may have the kind of scary fantasies of actually destroying the same-sex parent that Freud-haters love to abhor, a more matoor brain can psychically handle the idea of an internal conflict associated with killing the father in the mind. Killing the internalized father-parts (aspects of who dad is and the messages about yourself you receive from him, whether he intended them or not) that hold the Self back from becoming its own separate Self. THAT can present a whole hot mess of conflicts for a developing personality, depending on the father in question.  And I'm assuming, essentially, that it does. And that the MPDG is a manifestation of that conflict.

The word "separate" is essential here. In a more nuanced understanding of the Oedipal complex, there is a desire to separate from the same-sex parent (individuate, pull away from) and a desire to be closer to the opposite-sex parent (become more like, merge with). Freud always used coarse, sexual and aggressive language to describe such processes, but it's fairly simple.

Dig: I'm reminded of my brother around the age of 3 really being excited about dressing up like a mermaid and playing with Barbies. He was merging with the feminine in his life - offered by his mother and his sister. Similarly, when I was 3, I occupied the brief height of my tomboyishness, wanting very much to be like my father and wearing almost exclusively corduroy bell bottoms and a Batman long-sleeved shirt and adopting two boys at school as my best buddies.

While it may be taboo to discuss merger fantasies as sexual, because concrete thinking positions "sexual" as meaning intercourse or something involving genitalia, think rather of "sexual" here to mean pleasurable joining. In order to move closer to the opposite-sex parent, to find pleasure in the opposite-sex parents' attributes, a small child must move away from the same sex parent, as the primitive mind does not yet understand integration. A small child tends to exist in a world of "either/or" rather than "both/and," so it makes sense that a child would feel a pull to split the feminine and masculine, to psychically, if only temporarily, kill off one (in the Self) in order to merge with the other (in the Self).

While there are aspects of this that are arguably terrifying for a child - a fear of hurting the same sex parent, perhaps, while also desiring to push that parent away; an ambivalence about giving up wholesale on one set of traits in favor of another - it is also a time of playing. With identity, with sexuality, with what is pleasurable. It's a time of playing with choices and options and agency.

That freedom to play is something Freud argued (and other analysts after him, like Irene Fast argued) as an essential phase to be able to move through.

"Issues" associated with this stage of development, Freud, Fast, Chodorow (etc.) theorized, may plague individuals throughout adolescence and adulthood. What "issues" may arise during the Oedipal phase that would prevent playing, temporary psychical killing off, experimenting with differing gendered norms?

Well, here are a few: What if a child (in the stereotypical Oediapal complex, the child is a boy and the parent is dad) perceives, however unconsciously, that to kill off dad in the mind and sense of Self might threaten dad's exalted place in the home? What if the internalized concept of dad paints dad as both all-powerful and extremely fragile, in terms of ego, as if separating from him would impossibly and forever hurt him (consider the Narcissist, consider the addicted parent, consider other types of arguable 'impairment')? What if the idea of hurting dad feels dangerous because the child depends upon dad for survival (in a literal sense)? What if attempts to separate from dad, by playing with becoming a Self differing from him, are met with real or perceived punishments, neglect, or dad pulling away approval and affection?

There are many ways in which it may feel difficult or impossible for a young child to freely play with gendered norms, traits and desires to move toward the opposite-sex parent, in the Oedipal conflict.

If there is a notion in the child's mind that killing off dad (in the mind) is dangerous in various ways - either physically or emotionally - it is far less likely a child will go through with experimenting with psychically killing dad off. For children (or adults) you may perceive as full-out rebelling against the dad in the mind ("She/he is NOTHING like dad. She/he has gone in the complete opposite direction, intentionally") I might posit that that individual is also still joined with the dad in the mind - oppositional acting out in relation to the dad may be another way to reify his power. That is still referential to a very alive dad-in-the-mind.

So what? Well, yeah, so what. Except that it is argued generally that children who suffer dire consequences - real or perceived - in response to normative developmental urges have some neuroses of various types to contend with later in life. Believe that or not, it's important to the rest of this article to get hip to the idea that an inability to kill the father in the mind can shape personalities in ways that may be detrimental to the individual.

The idea I'm laying out here in talking very briefly about a much-written about psychological process in early childhood is that there is, at least in psychodynamic/analytic theory, a necessity to "kill off" (aka separate from) parts of our introjected (internalized) authority figures as we grow up in order that we may discover who we are without the authority figures' identities pressing down upon us or without a sense of fear of or anger toward those authority figures informing everything that we do. It may be necessary to go through the process of separation (killing off) in order to make a conscious choice to take back in those things we distanced ourselves from.

Agency. Choice. Kind of a big deal.

Connected to this idea - not mine, but belonging to countless feminist psychoanalytic theorists - is the notion that because we live in a patriarchal society, there is always a "Father"(1) that is being interalized psychically for women, far far beyond the Oedipal complex in early childhood; there is an ongoing male gaze/form/desire authority to whom women are referential, in terms of our own identity. Similar to the way a child is referential, in early childhood, to his/her parental authority figures, at a very basic level, women may be contending with a wish to and a fear to kill the Father in the mind long into adulthood.

Are you with me thus far? Awesome. Let's move on.

*****

I was thinking about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl again today, because this article by Laurie Penny is circulating. She's primarily looking at the MPDG in literature and TV and film and making a compelling, dare I say, Simone-de-Beauvoir-ian argument that this MPDG trope is clearly born of the conditioned feminine desire to be for the man, whereas the masculine desire is to be of the man. The man has visions of being a hero; the woman has visions of being the hero's ladyfriend, sex kitten, and housewife. The supporting role, essentially.

It's about: For someone (else) versus of someone (the self). There's an entire book on this. It's called The Second Sex. Sartre also had, you know, some things to say about this.

The MPDG character, Penny points out, is an uninterrogated scrim of a woman - someone who is a mysterious, endlessly entertaining ray of childish sunshine in the desolate, sad, philosophical desert that is The Man Unto Himself. She's like a five year-old hopped up on pixie sticks and Mountain Dew, but she exists in a grown woman's body and every once in awhile she says grown woman things.

People are being very hard on Zooey Deschanel for her starry-eyed cuteness, her rompers and big glasses and impish good looks, her love of all things squee, and her characters' ironic self-effacement dressed up as feminism. I, personally, adore Deschanel, and I believe she is much more complex and human than the characters she plays on-screen. Additionally, the MPDG trope is not one she invented - she's merely the most recent poster girl for a timeless tradition of daddy issues. Hashtag daddy issues, y'all.

PS. You know how white people -and I am one of those- have to admit that they're racists simply because they were born into this messed up racist world - regardless of their personal or political beliefs or how many people of color they know and love or how well-educated they may be about racism? Well, I'm going to go ahead and say that because I'm a HUMAN, I'm also sexist. Regardless of what a loud-mouthed open-minded female feminist I am and have been for a long time now. I'm sexist. So I cannot say for sure that the reason I enjoy everything ZD does - I love New Girl, I like her website HelloGiggles, and I dig her voice - is not at least somewhat informed by having my own occipital lobe shaped by the male gaze since vision one. (This is a way in which I have not successfully and totally killed off the Father in my own mind, 'haps.)

Ok.

Now hear this: Girls with a proclivity towards Manic Pixie DG need to kill the father/Patriarch in the mind lest they forever attempt to undermine their own developing womanhood in a misguided effort not to threaten their fathers/Father. With burgeoning sexuality. With a different set of skills from theirs. Or, God forbid, with the same set of skills. With competence. With brains as big as, or bigger than, their breasts. Maybe it’s not the familial father, always, but it’s certainly at least the Patriarchal one.

I do not think girls are merely in potential competition with other women (aka mother/Mother). I think girls/women are in competition with men/Father - but because of a perceived danger (please don't tell me I have to enumerate the various dangers - physical, emotional, sexual, material, and in communities - that still exist for women in relation to men) regarding such a competition with men (Father), there are these ways in which women minimize their gifts or stunt their own growth so as not to step into that Danger Zone.

The Great Patriarch in the mind must be killed, MPDG, if you are ever to truly inhabit a three-dimensional character arc of your own making. Play, experiment, seek a leading role.

Aside: In case anyone worries I'm actually into patricide - I am not remotely into real life murder or violence of any kind, and I love my real life father. See first section regarding the metaphor - it's about separating a sense of your identity from an oppressive force inside your own head. Killing the Father in the mind is just a quicker way to get this point across. I can be very Freudian in that way.

If we view ourselves through this internalized father or Patriarch - and if that is not useful to our agency as women - we must separate ourselves from this introject. We must move away from shaping our identities around our fear of hurting/provoking/exceeding father/Patriarch.

I'll flesh this out just a tad more regarding the MPDG and the Patriarch in the mind.

Why the HELL is she so manic, anyway? I believe it is referential mania. I believe it is there to serve a specific purpose in relation to the Father in the mind and maybe literal men in the flesh.

I have known too many women over my lifetime who have hidden their lights under a bushel lest they outshine their main squeezes (supporting role to the primary character in the script). Women who don't want to appear too strong, too smart, or too on top of their sh*t standing next to dudes who, in the right light, really do look shockingly like their fathers (if not physically then psychologically/behaviorally). Women who talk to their friends 25 hours a day about the silly/offensive/annoying/sexist/innocuous/insert other stuff their men say or do but who cannot find the voice to say this directly to their men. Women who know what they want but don't believe they can ask for it. Or, worse, women who have no idea what they want and so they plod on, an appendage to another person only to find out some time in middle age, or later or never, that this is not a satisfying way to go through life.

(See Betty Friedan. See Sheryl Sandberg.)

I've known countless women who stay and stay and stay in unfulfilling relationships with very sad, underachieving, not altogether kind individuals hoping and hoping and shining their rays of light and shining and shining (on the men only) only to discover, devastated, that they cannot save these men from their solemnity with MPDG cartwheels and overfunctioning and perfect cooking and endlessly interesting stories, hobbies, musical talents, sci-fi know-how, fill-in-the-blank-of-mad-skillz and brightly colored scarves.

(I also have known and know lots of very happy women in happy relationships and I know a lot of awesome dudes. Obvs, I'm talking about another set of women and dudes in this piece - but I want to make it clear that I don't think all women are MPDG types nor do I think all men are sad hacks.)(Also, the entire thing can play out with same sex couples. Don't get too caught up in genitalia/the literal. We all have Father and Mother and divides between masculine and feminine and the power associated with each in our minds, regardless of the anatomies involved in relationships because of the vastness of these split-up roles and our continual black-and-white thinking in relation to each other at the systemic level culturally, etc etc.)

My argument, essentially, is that all of this is about daddies. The SYMBOLIC Daddy, if not the literal daddy. Pleasing Daddy, the one we carry in our minds. The narcissistic, easily wounded, Needing-To-Be-Powerful-And-Uncontested Daddy. So as not to outshine what is often The Voice and The Power and The Authority in our minds. So as not to threaten him with our own successes, we do not kill him/Him off. So as not to humble Him with our own abilities, which are not contigent upon having a physical phallus to show for it. Staying young and childish so that he gets to continue to be in charge. Of the household. Of us. Staying spritely and coquettish to bring him a smile. Staying young and childish so The Authority out there in the larger world gets to stay in charge, will approve of us, will be entertained by us. Relegating ourselves to ever-smaller roles, and often ever-smaller bodies, to stroke the ego of the leading man, quieting our drive or desire to be anything more. Anything bigger. And in exchange, we are promised something - that we are now not too threatening or too big to be loved.

(See Susan Bordo. See Naomi Wolf. See Mary Pipher.)

I have to say - it's a loving gesture on the part of the MPDG. Super duper loving - how exceedingly caretaker-y of us, really. It's misapplied, but it is loving. I don't mean to shame any of us for falling into this type of behavior. It's not something we have a lot of say in initially, given that the conditioning starts so young, whether it's coming from within the home or from without. I have boundless compassion for it.

But it's not particularly useful for a couple small things like personal growth and equal relationships with men. But just that, really.

There's another book about this kind of misapplied love. Women Who Love Too Much. See it.

And at what cost? At the cost of the development of the self. Of maturing. Of being OF ourselves rather than FOR someone else.


As an important side note, I think this all does men (or any "other" in that role) a terrible disservice, as well. I believe it treats them as fragile, frail, and incapable of being around strong, competent women. This seems like an assumed fragility that is passed down like a gene and colluded with through generations so that everyone is, at the cultural level, at least semi-buying into it, even if it's not conscious. I don't personally believe it that men cannot take it if a woman is successful, competent, adult, and awesome. Or, dowager, as Julie Klausner put it. I don't think we need to treat ourselves as smaller and less awesome than we are; AND I don't believe we need to handle men with kid gloves. I like to have more respect for individual men than that, despite the unfortunate history of women catering to the assumed King Baby. I often consider how constructs of women as powerless victims or compulsive caretakers make implicit certain assumptions about men and what they need and who they are that are equally disrespectful and offensive, so I'm throwing this in here for good measure. The MPDG thing is just bad for everyone involved.

*****

Pre-pubescence - that is the stage of life during which we rarely have an independent voice of our own. The latency stage (think elementary school) is when our sexuality is entirely under wraps (a) or (b) is ridiculously cutesy and fantastical, separate from any real sexual, physical desire (think cooties, the M.A.S.H. game, falling in "love" with teen pop heartthrobs who appear as eunuchs to us at that age, etc.).

We are most likely to be good little boys and girls, to obey, to follow a certain concrete code of moral values, and to wish to please our parents in the latency stage.

Once adolescence hits - forget it. The start of a separate self, sexual, nubile, impulsive, free-thinking, rebellious, is likely to emerge - at least for a few years. It's like being a toddler, but way taller and capable of driving omg. Adolescent behavior and impulses, as a matter of developmental course, veer dangerously close to Leading Roles for teenagers. Center stage. It's another test for parents, another measure of how agency is addressed. And, outside the home, more norms, demands, and expectations for how and who to be fly into the heads of these blossoming teens. There's dad and mom and then there's Dad and Mom.

And what comes after adolescence? More maturing, if we're lucky. More individuating. More self. If we're lucky.*

The MPDG strikes me as an adult straddling puberty, with one foot squarely in an early latency stage - giggly, obedient, silly, plastering her bedroom walls with unicorn decals and not-so-ironic posters of Justin Bieber - and one foot squarely in adolescence approaching adulthood (or, in Freudian terms, the genital stage). She CAN be sexual, impulsive, free-thinking, rebellious, full of agency and independence. But if that grazes too close to being an actual move towards competence, assertiveness, and selfhood that may outshine or threaten the ego of the nearest dude (even if the nearest Dude is in her mind only), she can quickly revert to a fit of giggles and blow some bubbles to make the whole Smart Woman Getting Sh*t Done thing go down more easily. To you. To herself.

The problem with the MPDG is that she makes the very interesting and compelling parts of herself easy to dismiss. She minimizes them. Zooey Deschanel, at least from the outside, strikes me as an incredibly competent, savvy, smart, ambitious, and entrepreneurial young woman. AND - sometimes the birds and ukeleles and romper room dresses seem less cleverly ironic to me than really daddy's girl-esque. And that is why I think I started wondering if MPDGs have some psychical d(D)addy-killing to get on with. There's something awfully 5-to-7 year-old-ish about the whole Manic Pixie asethetic.

And that made me think about where five year-olds are developmentally. In Freud's language? Hopefully completing the Oedipal/Electra complex successfully (oh, in an ideal world). But there's something else to contend with for little girls - it's not just a separation from mom (same-sex) that they need to concern themselves with developmentally, in terms of identity experimentation and play and Self, it's also a separation from dad/Dad. That parental figure in the mind - reified as a figure of absolute force and power because of the POV under which we women invariably grow up (not our own) - doesn't get killed off for the MPDG. That manic pixie daddy's girl stands as a bridge between childhood and adulthood in large part, it seems to me, to continue to be childlike enough to never be a threat to a male/Male. To never compete, to never even play the game of adulthood, of wholeness. Of obtaining her own POV.

Respect: It may not be literally threatening to every actual father for a girl to grow up and be her own person (though I think I could make a compelling argument about those in Gen X and older and their fathers (culturally speaking, in generalities)). But that's not my point. There are some f*cking fantastic fathers in this world, and every time I meet one, I nearly lose my mind with joy and gratitude and love.

But for women to develop the capacity to grow up, to shed the pixie sticks and pony tails - both literally and metaphorically - it may be necessary to kill off years of partiarchal conditioning, that we carry with us in our sexist-against-ourselves minds - the tropes in literature, film, tv, magazines that say "Be FOR him, not OF yourself. Be a supporting role, not a lead. Make this Nick guy (depressed, alcoholic, jobless) happy."** If it's not our personal respective fathers, there's a larger Father we've been trained to please. And we're really afraid of hurting his feelings and being abandoned/alone/unloved. The MPDG's currency is her ability to snuff out her own bright adulthood light.

I don't think I need to own something - like a girlish frock and a penchant for Trapper Keepers, a high-pitched giggle or a humorous dead-pan - that makes it somehow easier for a man to swallow that I'm kick-ass.

I did think that, though. For years and years. And yee-heers. Like Laurie Penny, I was a manic pixie dream girl for a good chunk of time, and not for awesome reasons, despite being a hardcore feminist. It is a slow death, the internal Father killing. It may take as many years to kill that Father in the mind as it took for Him to grab a chair and settle in. And that was decades.

At the age of 34, I'm glad it occurred to me at some point that the only person I'm responsible for making smile more is myself. I'm still bubbly, joyful, exuberant, and passionate, and like Penny, have a tendency in my personality towards the twee - I just get genuinely giddy and over-the-moon about stuff - but now it's all directed at the things that bring me joy. My absolutely amazing job. My endless interest in new music. My passionate loyalty to my friends and family whom I love and who return love to me. My ridiculously prolific opinions about everything that I have no idea if anyone else actually reads. My belief in social justice and my infatuation with humor. My love of quality, wherever it may be found. My need to dance. My excitement about simply being alive on this beautiful goddamn planet. Yeah, I play the guitar and I probably own at least one thing with a bird on it, and I'm not going to stop wearing bright colors any time soon. But that sh*t's for me. That bird is of me, Simone. And nobody's going to freaking die if I kill off some metaphorical Patriarch in my mind. Nobody has, as far as I know, anyway.***

I presume one of these days a man entirely responsible for his own joy - and infinitely capable of tapping into it - will come my way. And we can both be costars of this crazy show called life (oh yes I did). Regardless, I'm nobody's manic pixie dream girl except my own.

(1) My capitalization of "Father" is not to be confused with a reference to God, whom some call Father. I am capitalizing "Father" as shorthand for a mass cultural internal and external referencing to the patriarchal/male gaze/authority that unfortunately shapes how we think about and treat women. Mmkay?

*Note: In a certain light, what I'm saying sounds very individualistic and Western, not taking into account cultures that are more community-based. I'm actually incredibly pro-community and pro-family. I also think that the internalized messages we carry with us do not always serve us and may hold us back, regardless of who taught them to us and how much we love those people. Ok. Moving on.

**Direct reference to New Girl plot point in Season 2.

***How? Well, that might be another post entirely/my life. 

Ryan Gosling is a Real Boy. Or, Why Ryan Gosling?

By K.M. Zwick

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.  And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.' --Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

When you label me you negate me. -- Soren Kierkegaard & Wayne Campbell

Part 1. My complicity.

Once upon a time, the only thing I really knew about Ryan Gosling was that I had liked him in Lars and The Real Girl. The End.

Then, many years later, something, perhaps a Facebook post, led me to the site Feminist Ryan Gosling. This was back in the Fall of 2011. I did not quite understand what was happening or how such a thing came to be, though as someone with a degree in Gender Studies, I did find Ryan Gosling ever-more attractive after viewing photos of him with phrases like “Hey Girl. Gender is a social construct. But everyone likes to cuddle.” stamped on his quirky handsomeness. The creator of Feminist Ryan Gosling, Danielle Henderson, had a note on the blog telling me the site is not affiliated with “Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling,” to which my fast-typing fingers responded, “What the hell is that?” 

Google gleefully answered. 

If you know about the “Hey Girl” memes already, you likely know they originated on the site Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling in 2008. On this site, photos of Gosling include free-floating captions, being presumably spoken by faux-Gosling, such as “Hey girl, can we just sit and watch the sunset together?” and “Hey girl, you’re the chicken soup for my soul.” It became clear to me – and this has been pointed out in other places many times - that women and men are creating these sites in an attempt to position Gosling as an ideal boyfriend. Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling is pretty straightforward – it’s a boyfriend who wants to include you in his daily life, introduce you to his parents, cuddle with you on the couch, someone who “gets” your particular love language and shampoos your hair every Saturday with candles lit and your favorite indie love song playing in the background.

Not long after, wondering how far down the rabbit hole the Hey Girls went, I traversed the Net in search of other Ryan Gosling memes to find a Librarian Ryan Gosling Hey Girl site, a Poli Sci Ryan Gosling Hey Girl site, and a, yes, truly, Classics Ryan Gosling Hey Girl site, on which everything is written in a Classics language, like Latin. I also found the adorable interview in which Gosling reads aloud some of the text from Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling and laughs - this interview is what apparently assisted Fuck Yeah! and the Hey Girl concept in really taking off.

And then I joined the fray. Because frivolity is the spice of life. 

It was after creating my own Hey Girl site based on my particular area of academic inquiry and spending some serious time with photos of Gosling and fantasies about sexy Freudian things he might say that I began to be interested in seeing more of his films. In the last couple months I’ve watched Crazy, Stupid, Love (was jarred by the shirtless-ness, I admit), The Ides of March (jarred by his character’s charming naivete), and Drive (jarred by his character’s surprising ability to kill someone with a curtain rod and fall in love with a woman he has not said word one to). I also found myself suddenly unable to resist reports of Gosling sightings and news items posted on Jezebel.com, Gawker.com, Huffpost, etc. Spending so much time with the guy's face and behind-texting him (ooh!) and figuring out the best font to accompany his pose fed my suddenly increasing interest in keeping tabs on him, someone who, only months earlier, I'd not have recognized in a line-up of Hollywood heartthrobs. 

"So, probably healthily, I forgot about Gosling again."

But I also wanted to understand – because it is what I like to do – why Ryan Gosling? As I watched myself fall prey to a popular trend once again (feather earrings, watching the Oscars, wearing Keens, vehemently loving soy then vehemently hating soy, etc.), I kept asking myself: but what is it, really, about Ryan Gosling? 

Then I got distracted by, you know, real life with a real boyfriend who is...real.

So, probably healthily, I forgot about Gosling again. 

Then, recently, two friends posted an article on my Facebook Wall from Jezebel.com regarding Gosling’s recent heroics in New York City, wherein he reportedly saved a confused journalist from oncoming traffic. The Gosling-loving Internet lit up like the face of a  fan outside his movie trailer (do those still exist?), and once again, I was struck by the hoopla surrounding this one man, early in his career, whom none of us, you know, actually know. 

And then, on the heels of his heroism in NYC, on Easter Sunday, colorful plastic eggs containing printed-out Hey Girls were dispersed around a small area of Manhattan for the general loving public to find. 

(image from perezhilton.com)

Srsly.

I’ve witnessed celebrity crazes before – most recently I was fascinated by the ultra-allure of Lady Gaga  – but the total and utter mania surrounding Gosling, which only appears to be increasing, got me back to a-ponderin’. The sheer quantity of Hey Girl memes now out there is excessive and baffling; the twitch with which we respond to the sight of his printed name in reputable and gossip online news sources alike; the quickness with which we would like to discuss him -- it's reached epic proportions, and I now truly ache to know: 

Part 2. Why Ryan Gosling?

a) He's a superhero/human. For those who might argue Ryan Gosling is an utterly amazing human being and that's why, I will say, on the surface, from what I can gather from Internet research, Gosling seems like a decent sort of bloke. He broke up a street fight, he said very feminist-y things about women being in charge of how they portray their own sexuality, he brought his mom to an awards show, and he is concerned about human rights in multiple African countries. Not a bad dude, probably. Perhaps.

Ok, but, the above-mentioned traits are found in many-a-dude I know personally and many-a-male celebrity.

b) He's the hottest and best thespian evar. While Gosling is attractive, his face is pretty (ha!) idiosyncratic, a sort of poor man’s Christian Bale. Don’t get me wrong – Gosling is gorgeous, but he’s not, say… well, Christian Bale. And there are no Hey Girl Christian Bale memes. Also, no Hey Girl Michael Fassbender memes. I mean here’s a guy - Fassbender - who, when paired with Gosling, was in every major movie of 2011, and he’s apparently not stopping any time soon. Where’s a Michael Fassbender Hey Girl?

All three of the men I mention here have chosen a wide range of films, from independent and artistic to popular and widely appealing; all three are also mesmerizing actors. All three, additionally, are best-loved and given serious cred by the tastemakers for doing off-beat projects and characters.

Gosling is not alone, is what I am saying. His contemporaries, however, get none of the type, kind, and level of attention that he gets. He has the corner on the Hey Girl memes. The entire swoon market appears to be his, despite the fact that earlier in his career he played really creepy murderous sorts. Viewers and fanatics seem to only want Ryan Gosling and a whole mess of him, at that. Just a big Internet pile o' Gosling, with some Ryan on the side and a scoop of Baby Goose for dessert. I'm not just talking Hey Girl. I'm talking people increasingly seem to want to eat, sleep, and breathe Ryan Gosling. 

(As an aside, I also think it’s fair to say he single-handedly has shut down - via his now larger-than-life heartthrob fame - the ridiculous obsessions with Robert Pattinson's furrowed brow and “staring as acting” thing. And I truly thank him and the Hey Girls for that.)

c) The Notebook. Period. While it might be posited that his perfect-boyfriend role in The Notebook is what inspired, at the very least, the original Hey Girl site, I find it hard to believe that one man could get all this attention a full 8 years after the release of said film, which, by the way, I haven't even seen (is this a cardinal sin at this point?). If I can join in the Godling, I mean Gosling, craze having never seen that film, it stands to reason that that movie may not be the shoulders upon which his wildfire fame rests.

Part 3. So, really this time. Why Ryan Gosling?

In the end – and I really hate to break it you and even to myself - I do not think that any quality of the actual Ryan Gosling is responsible for the onslaught of attention paid him, the Hey Girl memes, and fans falling all over themselves when he does a human and decent thing like pull a nearby women away from possible death-by-car. 

Because we live in a meme-y and mimetic world, in which we copy each other on the Internet in perpetuity until we, like a conglomerate of ADHD-riddled meaningful-activity-starved children, notice the next trending hashtag/shiny new thing and turn our ever-shortening attention span to it, our interest in Ryan Gosling was at first probably just a tiny thing that then exploded like every other random Internet meme (I Can Haz LOLcats; Angelina Jolie's leg), regardless of anything Ryan Gosling the person was actually doing. 

The Hey Girl phenom might have only occurred once, on one blog, if our relationship with the Internet, communication and imitation weren't what it has become. If we did not latch onto a meme as if for dear life and replicate similar stimuli over and over and over again as a way of bonding, isolating, and claiming an identity, who's to say Ryan Gosling would have certainly become our dreamboat instead of someone else?  

So this compulsive meme-ing - a behavior, as Richard Dawkins reminds me, we would have likely engaged in whether or not the first Hey Girl was based on Ryan Gosling or Christian Bale or someone totally different - lent itself next to the obsession (should this be a new DSM diagnosis? RGOCD?), which we now mistake as being about Ryan Gosling himself, the person. 

The Gosling Gene.

In the end, then: our now run-amok panty-tossing over Gosling is a statement not about Mr. Gosling but a statement about ourselves. In the end, there is no answer to the question "Why Ryan Gosling?" that concerns itself at all with Ryan Gosling, the human being. 

"No! What do you mean!? No!"

Yes. Here's what I mean:

In no way is Gosling the subject of the Hey Girl memes, with any agency or authentic rendering of a self. In every way imaginable, Gosling is an object. And like any good object, he is predominantly silent or, more to the point, silenced. It is the creators of the memes, not Gosling, who have a voice. In our memes and in our gushing coverage of his heroics, he is a two-dimensional depiction of our deepest longings; these longings say much more about us than they do about Ryan Gosling.

"In every way imaginable, Gosling is an object. And like any good object, he is predominantly silent, or...silenced."

This is not news, per se – this is precisely what we do with celebrity, with icons, with politicians, with musicians, with public figures we do not know. We create of them objects of our desire. We use their image, and sometimes their words (typically scripted), to imagine them as intimate subjects in our lives, when in reality, they are anything but. Robbed of their self-originating identity, they become our part-objects: we pay attention only to the parts of them we wish to pay attention to, we ignore any information that may resist our narrow definition of the person in question, and we idealize the parts of them we create. We project our personalities onto them, knowing nothing of their personalities. It is narcissism at its worst and at its best, and it is our narcissism. It belongs to us. 

In this process, if we are not careful, we mistakenly believe we know more about the object; in fact, our projections, if we can recognize them, tells us only more about ourselves as subjects. What we wish for or crave is about our psyches, not Ryan Gosling’s. People do this sort of thing to a lesser degree in relationships all the time; at first flush, our perceptions of anyone we just start dating are often imbued with our wishes and desires about who they are and what we want. It takes quite a bit of time before we actually know a person; until that time, we rely on trust – or our distrust - and our projections of who we believe them to be. 

That “honeymoon period” everyone loves so much is often a period of idealization in which we project all sorts of “good” qualities onto someone, mutually, so that we can feel safe enough to attach. It’s not pathological necessarily; it is one of the many crazy yet understandable things we human beings tend to do in order to deal with the terrifying prospect of intimacy. However, if we never leave room for the other person to actually be more than our fantasy, more than our own projections, we risk objectifying someone who is a subject in his or her own right; we risk losing actual intimacy, in the long run. When the honeymoon ends and we become more able to see an authentic person sitting across a table from us, the moment of truth appears: will we integrate reality with our fantasies or will we continue to hold a person to the standards of our psyche that in essence ask the other to become something of our creation rather than something of his/her authentic invention? 

I recall Seinfeld, for a pop culture example: Jerry was never able to make it past some annoying and human habit in his love interests. The honeymoon period never lasted more than a few episodes, sometimes never more than 30 minutes. For him, females were part-objects, born first from the recesses of his own desires; once the women showed that they did not belong to him and were not made up of the idyllic parts he was projecting onto them, once they showed they could not fully step into his mold, he freaked out and broke up with them. Narcissism, plain and simple. 

The low talker.

(image from netbrawl.com)

What I find important about the attention paid to objectifying Ryan Gosling, in particular through the Hey Girl memes, is that rather than merely having our purchasing of movie tickets and fan paraphernalia indicate what it is we ideally want in a spouse, relationship, lover, etc., (i.e. “I find Ryan Gosling attractive and I like the roles he chooses, so I’m going to see every movie he’s in”) we instead are going much much farther and proffer a DIY script for him ourselves. A stop-motion series of sexual and smart scenes erupting from our synapses. In some real way, it seems to me that women (and men) with access to the Internet and, at the very least, Windows Paint (ugh), are taking charge of what they find sexy, attractive, appealing, affectionate, intimate, and smart, and plastering it unabashedly on the physique and face of a stranger. If it weren’t so passive-aggressive, I’d posit that this is a revolutionary kind of outcry in which ladies and girls and men and boys are gluing together homemade zines of specific, profound longing and loudly pointing to them saying, “This! This is who I am and what I want!” 

Part 5. The Major Point, I Finally Make It. 

Passive-aggressive, I say? Yes, passive-aggressive. We are one important step away from owning what it is we want and who it is we are. The writer of Feminist Ryan Gosling is the hot one, in my opinion, not Ryan Gosling. She invented the come-on lines that I find so titillating. She stimulated my neo-cortex with remembrances of Gender Studies days past. She communicated profound ideas in less than 140 characters and to boot conveyed them as sexy and funny. That’s the real story, in my opinion: the woman behind the postcard who is, at root, writing brilliant advertisements for the sexiness and relevance of feminist theory. She found a model for her ad, but the model is not the subject (matter). She is. And, as a consumer who connects to her ideas, I am the subject matter. With her, as I read her words, I become the subject positioning Gosling as my object. What he says is only hot because he is saying what I think is hot. Reductively, but no less true, it is I who am hot, to myself. As I said above, our projections tell us not a thing about the other person; they tell us about ourselves. 

"At a very basic level, we are the Ryan Goslings we are attempting to create."

The same is true of all the creators of the Hey Girl memes, in particular (for me) those based on some aspect of academic inquiry. But even Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling, as teen-lit-lite starry-eyed as it may be, is about the person who creates it and the people who like it. So, you want a boyfriend who wants to take you home to meet his parents and cuddle with you under the moon? Then, my guess is, you also would like to offer that same type and kind of intimacy with a partner. And you would like that type and kind of intimacy to be returned. But first things first: what you want from another person is often what you can or want to, yourself, be able to offer. 

Or maybe you, yourself, cannot offer what it is you desire, which is why it can be so soul-crushing often to be deprived of it by someone else. (What? Ok, just quickly: for example, the common trope that many perfectly eligible women constantly run after unavailable men is a fallacy: a woman truly capable of an intimate relationship would not find a totally unavailable man appealing; she seeks what she herself is capable of offering and thus is stuck with a mirror image of herself: an unavailable partner). 

Embedded in the Ryan Gosling Hey Girls are calls for intimacy, but that intimacy is positioned as originating from the other person (faux-Ryan Gosling). And in this way, there is something about all this that undermines the very creators of the memes. What is so impossible about having the intimacy originate with, say, me? 

If Feminist Ryan Gosling, in particular, or even my less popular Psychodynamic Ryan Gosling, really wanted to turn Hey Girl on its head, their creators might have posted pictures of themselves or real-life friends or real-life feminist or psychologist men offering their own self-originating clever quotations, starting with “Hey Girl” or “Hey Dude.” This would make a direct commentary on the othering and objectifying going on with the Hey Girl memes and call into question the broad appeal of so intensely conjuring an “ideal man” from the image of a stranger and scripting his lines while at the same time disowning that it is I (the creator/the viewer) who is awesomely creating all this hotness, not Gosling.

At a very basic level, we are the Ryan Goslings we are attempting to create. We are that clever, that sexy, that intelligent, that affectionate. But the way in which we are owning and claiming it is passive, round-about, and via the use of wide-spread, rampant and unapologetic projection and objectification. It is as if our desires must originate in faux-Gosling. It is as if that – the pretense of origination and ownership being located within this man - is how our desires will resonate, that is how they will be humorous, smart, and sexy. That is how they will be validated.

Yes, it’s hilarious. It’s frivolous and fun. I lerv Hey Girl memes, and I like making up my own.

But, we have made Gosling our blank slate while at the same time behaving as if he is not a creation of our desires and fantasies and disowning that the brilliance of these desires and fantasies originate in the creators – ourselves. It’s not that it’s “bad” to do this, but in my questioning the extreme reactivity around Ryan Gosling – wherein everything the man does or says in public now sets off a chain reaction of gush (in more ways than one, I’m sure) – I have to say, finally, none of this is about Ryan Gosling. I don’t know him. You don’t know him. It’s important to have a fantasy life and to indulge in our deepest longings. It’s also important to own that those longings belong to us and say nothing in particular about the object into whose mouth we are inserting our script for intimacy and attraction. 

"When we think and feel in a black and white manner about people, allowing for no gray, that line between love and hatred is razor thin."

While I now have a pseudo-affection for Mr. Gosling due in part to overexposure, I remind myself that often my psychodynamic scripts for him are loosely based on my own real-life boyfriend and firmly based on my own sense of what is sexy about myself. 

I do honestly wonder how this will end. Will we just get bored with Ryan Gosling? Will he make a terrible horrible film in which he is unattractive? Will he say or do something in public that proves once and for all that he is fallible and that not everything he says and does is utter gold on our hearts and in our panties or boxer briefs? I don’t know. There is always a fall from the idealization grace into devaluation. It always happens, especially when there is this high a level of idealization. When we think and feel in a black and white manner about people, allowing for no gray, that line between love and hatred is razor thin. I’ll be interested to see what the crazed fans think when inevitably Gosling shows us the honeymoon period is over and we are sitting across the table from a real boy. I wonder if he’ll show us that at all. Most of them do, someday, though. Hey girl, just ask Mel Gibson. Or Tom Cruise. Or Christian Bale.*

*This article not meant to imply that Christian Bale is in any way imperfect.

Thanks to D. Clare Tessman, RN, for her "tastemaker" comments on this topic, to Tim Cook for ongoing editorial suggestions, and Angela Trombatore for reminding me about The Notebook and telling me to watch it for God's sake.

(Citations pending, check back lates)

The Warrior Queen: Marry The Night, Trauma, Regression, and Recovery

Update 6:31pm 12/23/11: This is now PUBLISHED on Gaga Stigmata. Thanks so very much to Meghan Vicks for her amazing editorial skills and dedication to this piece and the site in general. 


Here's an excerpt from my piece:

"To say she glorifies sexuality and mortality, or trauma and sex, would be a mistake. The desire to combine those two aspects of life is so normal as to be quaint, in terms of an analytic reading of basic human psychodynamics. To label what Lady Gaga is doing with trauma, sex, death, and invention “bizarre” misses, I believe, how essentially basic and deeply human her themes are. 

What I find perhaps most pleasing about Gaga’s self-transformation in the “Marry The Night” video, which I will explore in more detail below, is that she is bringing to the fore an innocent reveling, often childlike, in fundamental and common intra-psychic processes. Not only is she a gorgeously unhinged libido and aggression, but she is also imaginative, she makes of herself and her world the imaginary, arguably engaging in something akin to pop music play therapy. She aligns herself with her internal complexes and makes art with them. She is pleasure-seeking, even through pain, perhaps particularly through pain. She is polymorphously perverse, but rather than being ashamed of it, she is proud of it."

Please read, comment, and share. :) Thanks, Gaga fans, the world over!

* * * * *

Update 3:50pm 12/9/11: Text removed because guess what! It will be published tonight on Gaga Stigmata, the pre-eminent site for scholarly works about Lady Gaga. Stay tuned for the link to the publication of my piece! Thanks to all who have read so far!


-K.M. Zwick

Superhuman Gay Parents! Or: The Problem With "Two Lesbians Raised a Baby and This Is What They Got"

By K.M. Zwick 

See this video for reference, in which 19 year-old "sixth generation Iowan" Zach Wahls describes his awesome life as a son raised by two married lesbian parents in a speech promoting gay marriage.

I have no problem with Mr. Wahls' message. In fact, I applaud it and him, as well as his parents and their whole family. What he had to say moved me to tears.

The video has gone viral, is now featured on MoveOn.org's website, and I've seen it posted no less than 22 times in my Facebook news feed.

My problem is not with the video itself, but rather with the possible meaning behind its wild popularity.

On the one hand, we need white men to say things like this because we live in a country that listens to white men and is predominantly run by white men. We need white men to be allies to minorities of all kinds. And I'm glad this man is an ally.

On the other hand, it is ALSO normal (normative; ok; acceptable) for there to be kids who were raised by gay people and are not white and do not have such a platform from which to speak; it is normal for there to be folks who were raised by gay people and turned out just as dysfunctional as other folks raised by straight people; it is normal for there to be kids who were raised by gay couples who got divorced; it is normal for kids to be raised by gay people and not excel on the ACT or become an Eagle Scout or a motivational speaker in a suit; it is normal for kids to be raised by gay people and be gay or straight or trans or bi or otherly queer themselves; it is normal for kids to be raised by gay people and hate their parents just as much as so many kids raised by straight people hate their parents; it is normal for kids raised by gay people to struggle with poverty, addiction, family quarrels, oppression, live with excellence, wealth, getting along, live in urban or rural settings, deal with discrimination or less discrimination, speak English or not English or be multi-lingual.

In short, let this young man - inspiring though he is - not be considered a poster child for gay marriage and the rearing of children by gay couples. To say, "Oh, phew, it's ok for gays to marry and raise children because they can turn out like this" denies the basic human reality that gay people are just like straight people. Gay people will raise all kinds of children, not just clean-cut white male do-gooders like this lovely young man.

And that is their right. Just like it is my right, as a straight person, to raise a child and do the best I can, knowing I may unintentionally totally mess up all along the way. My parents messed up. And all of them (six in total over my lifetime, including all my stepparents), identify as straight. They also were all doing the best they could do.

No one would look at me or my would-be potentially messed up child of the future and say, "She's messed up because her mom was straight."

So, yes, bravo,  this video definitely hit me on an emotional level; Wahls is a great speaker and what he is saying is true. "Family values" do not simply belong to the heteronormative right wingers; they belong to anyone who believes family is important and invests in that importance. I teared up and got goose bumps watching this video, like so many others who have helped it go viral.

But let's remember that gay people - just like straight people - have a right to the freedom to be HUMANS as parents, not superhumans who are required to churn out model citizens - according to hegemonic norms - to therefore prove gay people should be allowed to participate in all the myriad activities related to family that straights are allowed to participate in. Gay couples should have the right to marry and raise children because they want to. Not because they have to prove they "deserve to" based on impossibly high (double) standards that deny the reality that gay people are just people. As just people (just like me), they should have all the rights I, as a straight person, have. Those "rights" include marrying, if I want to, and having children with my spouse if I want to; as well as the  broader "right," which is more human than legal, to be an imperfect person and/or parent who will unwittingly make mistakes or fall into hardship or find myself getting a divorce, or not, or remarrying, or not, or being a good enough parent or a great parent, or (hopefully not) not, because, hey, that's what people, gay or straight, do. Live, as humans, doing the best we can.

We all live in glass houses. No one should be throwing stones. Even at the non-sixth-generation-Iowan non-white non-male non-Eagle Scout non-excelling offspring of gay parents.