Pretty Moths Drawn to Hellfire

A woman explains the retardery of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

One of the more striking elements of what is now best described as the Neil Gaiman serial rape scandal is the similarity of the victims. Not only in their appearance, which tends to be youthful, plain-to-moderately attractive, brown-haired, and wide-eyed, but in their sheer stupidity of their behavior.

I’m trying to wrap my head around a beautiful, self-confident blonde woman, be it real (Spacebunny) or imagionary (Elle from Legally Blonde, Beth from Yellowstone, Angela from Landman), reacting to a stranger inviting her to take a bath at his house when she’s there to do a job. My thoughts on how that would go in each case:

• Spacebunny wouldn’t even have made it to the bathtub invite. She would have left as soon as she discovered there was no baby to be babysat. She is not the sort to sit around and wait for anything, especially not at someone else’s house.

• Elle: “Oh, why thank you so much! But if one of us is in need of a bath, I think we both know who it is. And it isn’t me.”

• Beth: (lights a cigarette) “Draw me a bath? No, but you can draw me a bourbon. Make it a double.”

• Angel: “What in the fuck is wrong with you? A bath? No, I don’t want a fucking bath, motherfucker!” (Slams door, speeds off in Bentley.)

But it is otherwise with the Manic Pixie Dream Girls, or as we are told, those who live poetically and are thereby fail to see the danger that is literally standing right in front of them:

For someone thus dedicated to living poetically, the world is beautiful, dramatic, dark, inspiring, and frightening all at once. Everything carries deep symbolic significance. The smallest everyday event can feel like a deep metaphor, or high quest. The resulting behaviour might look from the outside like recklessness, promiscuity, over-emotionality, and self-destruction, but it will feel from the inside like living in a state of perpetual enchantment: a life brimming with meaning, urgency, intensity, and immediacy. To invent an example, someone dedicated to living poetically might make an apparently abrupt and perverse decision to leave a completely serviceable set of life arrangements overnight, on the basis of a casual remark from a stranger, associations conjured by the smell of cherry blossom, and a snatch of music overheard from a passing car.

Reading between the lines of the Gaiman story, it’s clear that the recipients of his at best ambivalently consensual sexual attentions generally fell into the MPDG category. Pavlovich in particular is a textbook MPDG: survivor of childhood abuse, with a history of eating disorders, psychiatric episodes, solo travel from 15, a peripatetic bohemian existence including cabaret work, and celebrity fairy-godmother moments (such as an education scholarship paid by Tilda Swinton) that suggest a powerful personal magnetism. Even in the aftermath of her experiences with Gaiman, she’s clearly still living as poetically as ever: the article’s conclusion describes her gathering with Gaiman’s other victims, at the home of ‘90s rock legend Michael Stipe, taking part in a bonfire ritual to set intentions for the new year.

Let’s be clear: it is not my intention here to suggest that “she had it coming to her” or “she consented” are adequate to account for what Pavlovich experienced in the messed-up dynamics NYMag describes. But it is the MPDG’s poetic relation to the world that makes her both victim and agent: often a sufferer, sometimes a tragic figure, and also to a degree the author of her own difficulties.

For living poetically draws in those around you. It’s almost impossible to ‘get’ the story someone like this is living, without being drawn into it yourself. (This is why MPDGs so often attract suitors who want to ‘rescue’ them). But in turn this contagiously story-driven passion is what makes the MPDG a target for spiritual abusers. For if the magnetism comes from her whole-hearted participation in everything, it also makes her vulnerable to those who, consciously or unconsciously, know how to operate in the poetic, participatory register in order to extract goods: for example gifts, labour, love, or loyalty - or (most commonly) all of the above, plus sexual access.

The lesson, as always, is this: don’t be Captain Save-a-Ho. Not because they’re not worth it, because they’re not. The reason you should never try to save one of the Pretty Moths from the flames of Hellfire that are drawing them in is because they don’t want to be saved. They instinctively seek self-extinction and shy away from everything and everyone that is safe for them.

“Living poetically” is just a nice and theatrical way to euphemize “living in emotive retardery, sans facts, logic, common sense, extended time preferences, and any sense of self-preservation.”

There is, I suspect, an SSH component to this. Deltas and Gammas are drawn to the Manic Pixie Dream Girls for some reason that perhaps the Deltas and Gammas here can explain. High status men, well, if the Beth Dutton quote doesn’t strike a chord of approval and admiration in you, you definitely can’t handle a woman like that.

Fortunately, there is a safe space for Manic Pixie Dream Girls.