According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, author of the study on romance carried out at the University of Hertfordshire, women do not want expensive presents. "Contrary to what many men believe, you do not have to spend large sums of money to woo a woman – it really is the thought that counts," he said. Wiseman, who, by the way, has an amusingly bizarre personal blog, conducted a survey of 6,500 men and women from various countries. He asked men and women what they thought was romantic, and found that among the Brits, there was a large discrepancy between what the ladies want and what men think they want.

Wiseman generated a list of the best ways to woo a woman, which beings with "cover her eyes and lead her to a lovely surprise," and ends with "make her a compilation of her favorite music" (yes, the other eight are also moves pulled straight from your average chick flick). However, British men seem woefully ignorant about the ten magic gestures that women really want: they are, apparently, up to 10% less likely to make romantic gestures than men from other countries, and when they do, it is often the wrong one.

He found that "only 32 per cent of British men had written a song or poem about their partner, compared to 41 per cent of non-British men." Only 32%? That's still a lot of terrible poetry. He also said that only 44% had taken their partners on a surprise vacation, compared to 51% of men overseas. Wiseman concluded that there is a disparity between how men and women rank romance, with men tending to ignore the "psychological impact of small romantic gestures."

This means that men should stop buying expensive lingerie and start drawing women a lot more baths. "Women like them because they show men are into them and thinking of them rather than themselves," he says.

British Men 'Among Least Romantic' [Telegraph]
What Women Want: Top Ten Romantic Gestures [Telegraph]

In his article "Do men really want to get married?" Alex Wellen discovers that, in fact, contrary to popular belief (?) some do. ""Real men" are perceived as committing "till death do us part" for the wrong reasons — they marry out of convenience or under duress, and they acquiesce, kicking and screaming all the way to the altar." Then he gives us a bunch of cases in which guys decided they wanted to get married. One guy realized he did when his dad suggested it. Another discovered he was committed when his girlfriend helped him through a rough time. A third had to deal with a drug addiction.

They're nice to read, as all happy endings are, but it makes me depressed to think that "some men actually choose to get married!" is really that much of a revelation to people. (By extension, I suppose, a voluntarily single dame would be equally noteworthy.) While it's naturally understood that guys have to marry to continue the familial line, produce heirs, strengthen alliances, and fatten the family coffers by means of advantageous marriage, we did realize that a few enter into the state willingly. And by the way, we're assuming this argument is limited to "heterosexual men," since the past year has shown no shortage of gay men eager to make things legal with their partner. Don't get me wrong: bully on all these fellas and I wish them happy. But even as it serves to refute the hoary stereotype, this piece is reinforcing it by knocking down an antiquated rom-com-worthy straw man.

Do Men Really Want To Get Married? [CNN]

• You Are Born: Congrats! You've already done this. I haven't talked to your mother yet, but if the movies are to be believed, she spent most of your birth yelling, "Give me the druuuuugs!" while your adorably befuddled father freaked out and cried a bit. Your grandmother said something sassy to your stuffy grandfather in the waiting room, and at least one of your family members passed out in the waiting room, either from excitement, exhaustion, joy, or the icky grossness of the word "placenta." Someone will make a joke about your giant head fitting through your mother's vagina! Congrats! You're a woman in the world now, and everyone around you is embarrassed about female anatomy in general.
• 
  
  
  
• Elementary School: You're walking, talking, and sassy as all get out, baby girl! Believe it or not, this is the time of your life where you'll meet your soul mate or develop a chip on your shoulder that will take about 20-25 years to remove. No, really! In like, 3rd grade! I know! I can't believe it, either, but the movies never, ever lie, sweet child o' someone else's, and I'm just trying to prepare you for the future. Someone will scar you for life with a 3rd grade break-up or by calling you a doo-doo head. And things don't get any better for you in high school, either, I'm afraid.
• 
  
  
  
• High School Oh man, you are going to be such a geek in high school. It's not your fault, really. Everyone knows that you have to be a geek in high school in order to qualify for the life-changing makeover that will secure you a Prince Charming in your mid to late 20's. And if there's one thing we've learned from romantic comedies, it's that your entire life should really revolve around finding the perfect man. Sadly, this thing called "a career" is going to try and stand in your way!
• 
  
  
  
• Your Career: By your 20s, due to your childhood heartbreak and your high school geekdom, you've become a cold hearted bitch with only one thing on her mind: success! Of course, in the Romantic Comedy world, in order to be successful, you also need to be an uptight manhater who buries her "true" feelings under piles of very important paperwork. You might even score a lame boyfriend or fiance, who you don't love at all, but use to fill the hole that your 3rd grade boyfriend left behind. And you might not even know you're capable of love at all (because successful women are like, totally incapable of having romantic feelings, DUH!) until the dude you loved before you "sold out" and became a success falls in love with a perky young gal who just wants babies and walks on the beach, like "real" women do. When this happens, you'll realize your career was totally a sham and was ruining your chances of happiness with a man. And remember: that's what it's all about. See those little blobs with the blue blankets lying next to you? Hitch your wagon to one of those stars, baby friend!
• 
  
  
  
• Your Life After 35 Oh, wait, I'm sorry, this period isn't covered by romantic comedies, unless you plan on being someone's mom, sassy friend who never gets any, sassy slutty friend, shoe addict, or "cougar." Oh, and it helps to be upper class and living in a big city. If you're over 35, not-upper class, and living in a flyover state, you don't exist! Dream big, little one!
• 
  
  
  
• Your Life After 65 If you're one of the lucky few who escapes the plague of invisibility that will inevitably sweep over the women of your generation as well, get ready to be the wacky grandma who drinks too much and enjoys sexual innuendo and "keeping it real" by rapping and using sassy modern lingo. You are so wacky, Grandma! Your sexuality has been watered down to sassy quips and hilarious dance moves, because god forbid a post-menopausal woman actually have a sex life as opposed to a "hot date with Pat Sajak!"

• You're born in wacky circumstances
• Your life sucks for approximately 25 years, mostly because of a man
• You meet another man (maybe even the heartbreaker!) who will help you see that your life sucks because you've spent too much time working and achieving things, and that is like, so boring
• You will fall madly in love before the age of 35
• You will then disappear, only to make sporadic appearances in cameo roles as "Mom" or "Wacky Granny"- a completion of the "women are wacky!" circle of life
• Bonus: You will sing into a hairbrush at least 487 times.

I'm sorry to be such a Debbie Downer on your birthday, kid, but with any luck, everything I've typed here will be false by the time you're old enough to read it, though I highly doubt it, as Forbes recently noted that romantic comedies are, sadly enough, "box office gold." Call me up in 21 years and we'll cry over it together while drinking some dumb cocktail named after the hottest television show of 2030. For as long as these dumb cliches remain, if nothing else, we'll have something to make fun of together. Hilarity, for better or worse, will ensue. And that's pretty much what life is all about.

Something For The Ladies [Forbes]

Unfortunately, I'm going to have call shenanigans on Taylor Swift for her latest song and video, "You Belong To Me," wherein she perpetuates the tiiiiiiiired stereotype that girls who read books, play in the band, and wear glasses are big old losers who spend their nights dreaming about the slightly douchey football star who, of course, is dating the bitchy, pretty cheerleader. After pining over the hunk for most of the video, she finally shows him that he does, in fact, belong with her, by—-wait for it—taking off her glasses and revealing that she's actually a total babe at the school dance. Because everyone knows that the difference between hot and not is a pair of specs, no? See for yourself:





Can we cut the bullshit here, Swift? This shit was lame and tired when I was in high school, 10 years ago, when Rachael Leigh Cook, also beautiful, put on a pair of glasses and was pegged as a total geek in "She's All That." Of course, after a makeover, she was the belle of the ball. Teenage girls constantly have this this dumbass fairy tale down their throats, led to believe that a makeover is all it takes to feel good about oneself and attract the kind of guy worth dating. It also pushes the idea that the cheerleader girl is a stupid shallow bitch who doesn't "deserve" the hot guy. It's always about trashing the other girl instead of focusing on the fact that the dude might just be a shallow jerk. It's wrong and stupid and stereotypical and misleading and frankly I think we're all a bit tired of it.

Here's some advice, teenage girls: if a dude only wants to date you because you've taken off your glasses and dolled yourself up enough to compete with his cheerleader girlfriend, kick him to the curb. It's not worth selling yourself out to someone else's standard of beauty to date some superficial jerk. Yes, high school is rough, and yes, looks play into it a lot, but trust me: beauty does not come from a dress or a pair of contacts or a trip to the salon. It comes from knowing yourself and loving yourself and all of that good stuff. Perhaps instead of wishing a boy would see you in your glamorous glory, you should try to surround yourself with people who see you for who you are, and think you're beautiful no matter what.

Oh, and just wait until you see Hunky McHighschool five years after graduation. You'll be glad that you had your awesome specs on to see right through him.

The Matryoshka, or nesting doll, has long been both a major export and recognizable Russian icon, iterations running the gambit from the traditional nest of identical, diminishing sisters to a nested roll-call of Russia's leaders, often ending in a miniscule czar, or Lenin. It's as much a part of the kitsch landscape as the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty, and yet, it seems the economic crisis, lax tourism and falling oil prices are posing a threat to the Matryoshka - makers and sellers report that sales are down more than 90%. So dire are the industry's prospects that the Kremlin has stepped in, stating that it would place a 1bn rouble (about $28 million) order for matryoshka and other traditional handicrafts, with an eye to giving them out as gifts. But given that the government is predicting no economic recovery until at least 2010, this may be a mere band-aid.

Despite its storied place in Russian lore, the nesting doll is by no means a traditional peasant craft: it's said to date back only to 1890, and to have been based upon a Japanese souvenir doll portraying Seven Gods of Fortune. A painter named Sergei Maliutin was inspired to create a Russian version, and working with a craftsman, created the first Russian nesting doll for Children's Education Workshop-Salon in Abramtsevo. The name "Matryoshka" is derived from the popular old Russian peasant name "Matryona," and her outift and sarafan mimic traditional festival dress. An industrialist presented the Matryoshka at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition, and the rest is history.

Whatever its antecendents, the nesting doll has become a true showcase of the turner's skill: truly fine Matryoshkas are valued for their thin sides and the number of 'nests,' and the best ones are painted with the precision of a Russian icon. To say that the industry has employed generations of artists is no exaggeration, and the appeal of the doll need not be explained to any child who's felt the familiar squeak of the wood under her hands and waited with baited breath to see just how tiny the dolls will get. And as devastating as the industry's death would be to thousands of artisans and producers, it's equally hard to imagine a world without the "Russian doll" metaphor. In addition to technical terminology -"Matryoshka brain," or the paradigm of Matroska media-container format - the Russian doll metaphor is a cottage industry amongst slapdash journalists and writers everywhere. A neat shorthand for many-layered complexity, the metaphor also manages to invoke the enigma-wrapped-question-mark appeal of the inscrutable east, with none of the earthy stench of the similar "onion" comparison. Will "nesting doll" somehow end up in the morgue of words that are used and not understood, its origins extinct and anachronistic - alongside "brass monkey," "Sam Hill" and "worth its salt?" Say it ain't so! The only upside we can find is the inability to describe any of Mel Gibson's various love interests as "Russian Dolls" - apparently a major challenge for The Media.

Can The Russian Doll Survive The Recession? [Independent]
Russian Bailout Covers Nesting Dolls [USA Today]

Related: History Of Russian Nesting Dolls [Russian Crafts]

Question 1: When someone you're attracted to passes you by, you:

• A: Wonder how Aretha Franklin's lyrics apply to this situation
• B: Instantly start crying, because they'll never measure up to your first love.
• C: Run after them screaming, "Hey baby! You know you want some of THIS!"
• D: Roll your eyes and get back to your powerful magazine editing job.
• E: Instantly head to the MAC counter

Question 2: You're attending a wedding in three days. You think to yourself:

• A: I wonder who the DJ is?
• B: Weddings are a sham put on by people who don't believe in REAL love
• C: I should buy the sluttiest dress I can and hope that the bartender knows how to make a good Cosmo!
• D: I hope I can bring my laptop to the reception so I can concentrate on my powerful magazine editing job
• E: I hope Stacey and Clinton call me back before then!

Question 3: It's Your Birthday! You're going to celebrate by:

• A: Getting your dancing shoes on....and then dancing around your apartment
• B: Go out with that guy you've been dating for 5 years who is perfectly nice but not, you know, your REAL love
• C: Chippendales first, the club second, drunken shenanigans third, and who cares what happens after that?
• D: Celebrating birthdays is a waste of time and energy that interferes with your powerful magazine editing job
• E: Going on a whirlwind shopping spree with someone who is more attractive, and therefore better, than you are

Question 4: Your dream date would be:

• A: Someone who knows how to give me R-E-S-P-E-C-T!
• B: Reliving that time in 9th grade when Bryan kissed you by the swingset you both grew up near
• C: Dating is for losers! I just want to get drunk and get laid! Woo! Cosmos!!! Shoooooes!!!
• D: I'd like to meet someone who will sit silently by while I work on my powerful magazine editing job
• E: Someone who loves me for who I am. Or at least who I am under 80 pounds of makeup.

Question 5: In the end, the love you take is equal to:

• A: Wait, wait, I know that song!
• B: The love that was taken from me 15 years ago by my REAL love
• C: Perfectly acceptable, as long as you wear protection and get him to buy you some shoes
• D: I don't know. But it certainly isn't equal to my powerful magazine editing job.
• E: Approximately $4298 worth of hair and beauty products

So which romantic comedy cliche are you? We'll announce the results in a new post shortly.

I am wrestling with this issue right now. See, we have a mouse who's been leaving the unhygienic evidence of his existence around the kitchen (and yes, I am steadfastly asserting that there is just one and will put fingers in ears if necessary to maintain the fiction.) I want the mouse gone. Like most people, I don't think of myself as being scared of mice, leaping up on a table and screeching like someone out of a dated cartoon. And yet, while I'm not exactly frightened, there's something super-disconcerting about seeing something mobile, something living, scuttle across one's peripheral vision, or hear an ominous after-dark rustling in the bags one keeps under the sink. In our carefully curated lives, it's unsettling to find an aggressively rogue element disturbing our equilibrium and I, for one, am not well equipped to deal with it.

Given the age of my preferred domiciles, vermin are nothing new...a few buildings ago, I had a highly eccentric landlady who, in addition to lecturing me and my friends about the evils of living in sin with boyfriends, would catch any mice in her bare hands and bear them out, squeaking, with an extremely satisfied look on her face. When my boyfriend put out a glue trap once and we were awoken by pitiful squeaking, I broke down: who were we, I said, to kill and maim just because an innocent creature had had the ill-fortune to wander into a space that we had arbitrarily designated as our own and pretended was separate from nature? My boyfriend carefully cleansed the mouse's paws with oil and released him, where he lumbered off slowly, sure to be picked up by the first predator who came along.

I have friends who kill mice with impunity. One couple's apartment was next to a construction site and the resulting flood of mice was so dramatic that at the height of the problem, they were catching a Pied Piper-style seven to ten a day, which he quickly dispatched. To anyone raised with more nature than the occasional rabid squirrel and ratty pigeon - never mind the proverbial "on a farm" — getting sentimental — or scared — about a tiny mouse probably seems unbelievably silly. But I can neither live with them nor kill them, surely some kind of horrible Rousseau's paradox for the modern city-dweller. Worst of all, I make my boyfriend deal with it which, besides being the worst kind of cliché , is really unfair. So come clean, dear reader: Do you kill? Cry? Scream? Catch and release? Pass the buck? How do you deal with one of the few reminders of inter-species cohabitation left to us?

"What," asks producer and novelist Olivia Lichtensteinm, "is it like to live as a Fifties housewife whose life is dedicated to looking after her family?" We're glad she's taken on the brave challenge, because lord knows there's no one out there who actually lives the life of a stay-at-home mom, nor generations of parents and grandparents who actually lived the lifestyle and could talk about it. And besides, it always gives us such an accurate representation of a time period when people step into it without any of the assumptions, conditioning and social mores of the era!

Straw Man is established thusly:

We're transfixed by the programme's visual style, office manager Joan Holloway's hourglass figure, blonde suburban housewife Betty Draper's elegance, her adulterous husband Don Draper's smouldering good looks. All that meatloaf, whisky, illicit afternoon sex and brazen, carefree smoking...But what of this past we are hankering after? Are we looking at it through rose-tinted spectacles?

Hmm, yes, we do have a problem with idealizing the 1950s! You'd almost think we needed a raft of sophomoric cliched films decrying the suburbs and lives of quiet desperation that still somehow think they're revelatory...oh, wait.

For my experiment, I resolved to be bound by the following rules on 'how to be a good wife', which I found online from a home economics high school textbook published in 1954:

* Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal on time. This is a way of letting him know you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs.
* Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you'll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and look fresh.
* Clear away the clutter. Run a dustcloth over the tables. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order.
* Prepare the children. They are little treasures and he would like to see them playing the part.
* At the time of his arrival home, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer, dishwasher or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet. Be happy to see him. Greet him with a warm smile and be glad he is home.

Then there are the don'ts . . .

* Don't greet him with problems or complaints. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soft, soothing and pleasant voice. Allow him to relax and unwind.
* Listen to him. You may have a dozen things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first.
* Make the evening his. Never complain if he does not take you out to dinner or to other places of entertainment.
* The goal: Try to make your home a place of peace and order where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit.

Not surprisingly, the whole thing sucks. Not least because the author is apparently not in the habit of doing any household chores herself and delegates everything to a maid and her husband. (Although they have a housekeeper in Mad Men so this seems kind of arbitrary.) She then sets herself the task, for some reason, of making a dress. Hijinx ensue.

Ultimately she finds that debasing herself is demeaning and horrible, that her husband falls too easily into the role of lordly master of the house (which probably makes for a vacation from being full-time maid), and that doing housework is hard. But! It's not all bad! Doing your own work is, she finds, cheaper than paying someone. Treating people nicely (apparently something she only adopted for this week?) is a Good Thing, as is taking more trouble with one's appearance. Also, portions have gotten really big. But, overall, she finds the alleged myth of 50's perfection is overrated. Almost makes you think someone should write something called the Feminine Mystique...

My Week As A Mad Men Wife: Life As A 50s Spouse - With No Job, No Cleaner And Endless Cooking [Daily Mail]

The essay, "A Guest Star in His Romantic Drama," is about open relationships, but that's hardly the point. Katherine Ruppe is, her byline tells us, a "screenwriter in Venice, Calif." which goes some way, I suppose, in explaining the execrable quality of the better part of Hollywood's exports. For rarely if ever have we encountered such aggressive cutesiness, such nauseating self-importance or such thorium-weight dialogue. "All dialogue in Modern Love is based on memory?" Yeah, memory and a few hundred hours of Friends.

Okay, before I get carried away: Ruppe has bad luck with men. She's drawn to "adventurous, charming, yet fatally flawed boy-men" and so when she meets a nerdy engineer who "also indulged in Red Bull and Jägermeister" she thinks her luck has changed. ("He owned a plane — hot.") They embark on a thing and she's so enthusiastic that she takes a leap of faith: she invites him to a Moby concert. But ah, here's the rub: turns out the mild-mannered nerd is in fact a swinger who's in an open relationship with another woman - who wants to meet our heroine. But...what of planes and aging club kids?!

I told him I had no interest in meeting his ball and chain and hung up. Clark Kent had a secret identity all right. As I poured myself a bucket of wine, I mourned this new blow to my trust in people. Why couldn’t men surprise me with roses or trips to Paris instead of requests like “My girlfriend wants to meet you”?...After my brief pity party, however, the Steven Spielberg (Soderbergh?) in me became intrigued. Maybe there was a screenplay in this.

Of course, things get complicated. ("He explained that he didn’t become emotionally involved with the women he played with; they were just friends.Double ick. I hadn’t been anyone’s playmate since fourth grade.") She and the girlfriend talk and have some false-ringing dialogue about the difficulties of the open dynamic - a weird third-act shift to Serious Emotion after two pages of wacky rom-com antics. Then she ends things with the dude. "I sensed our meeting was destined for the cutting room floor of my imagination, so I finally asked him what I most wanted to know: 'Were your affections toward me just an act, or did you really feel anything?'”

I'm not going to dignify this particularly lackluster episode of SATC with any kind of analysis of polyamory or emotional availability or judging books by covers, because that would suggest that this essay had larger implications than it did. Interesting topic? Sure. But the desperate gloss of would-be hilarity strips it of any power to interest, inspire, start conversations, or even entertain. More than anything, it depressed me: why does this kind of trivial nonsense still qualify as legit women's writing about relationships? And seriously, I couldn't help but ask myself: if this is who's writing movies for women, can we wonder that they blow?

A Guest Star in His Romantic Drama [NYT]

The author and her boyfriend's mom, Mary, originally have the slightly wary relationship typical of mothers and girlfriends, but John's death brings them together by necessity and inclination.

I’m not sure she even liked me until John collapsed and so did our worlds. But I was one of the two or three people she phoned before grabbing the mink, and because she had no other family who could arrive before the next day, I was the one who sat with her a few hours later as the neurologist told us that John had only a 1 to 2 percent chance of survival, never mind recovery.

The two maintain a friendship for the next twenty years; neither woman really finds another great love, but their relationship deepens.

At her 90th-birthday luncheon, she introduced me by saying, “And this is my daughter.” I was too stunned to react outwardly but inwardly rejoiced. And in some ways, I was a better daughter to her than I was to my own mother. But then, we had never hurt each other the way mothers and daughters inevitably do.

What is nice about this essay is not merely the pleasant contrast to the column's usual myopic bill of fare; rather, it's that it seems to arise from a point of real emotion rather than the smug complacency of an otherwise figured-out existence. It's also refreshing to see another take on the "possessive mother in law" cliché — especially as the noxious-looking reality show Mama's Boys (in which mothers apparently find potential mates lacking) gears up. The trope of women competing over the man in their lives is a tired and depressing one; one of the more poignant aspects of this essay is the implication that, had John lived, such a close bond between the two women might not have been possible. Even those of us who've enjoyed warm relationships with a significant other's mom are told by society that we're somehow lucky; the expectations are somehow stacked against closeness. Maybe this is inevitable, but it's nice for an essay like this to remind us of how much of that is construct, and to what extent loss strips these away.

Faithful To His Memory, And His Mother [New York Times]

Earlier: The In Laws: Other Women Are Supposedly Our Worst Enemies

Per our usual scientific practices here at Jez HQ (symbolically speaking), I took a poll. While a quick scan of the shoe rack revealed that the editorial staff on average owned, like, 40 pairs (and yes, we all work from home) we also acknowledge that for the most part this arose from the fact that most of said shoes are too uncomfortable to wear and just slightly too expensive to throw away rather than some fetish - and, further, that the bulk of said shoes were decidedly budget.There's no shame in liking shoes. As we all know, they make the outfit; the purchasing process is considerably less traumatic than for any other garment; some of them are just cool-looking objects. What's more, nowadays people just own a lot of stuff, period: we're kind of past the point of a few well-made basics that take you through life.

But the whole shoes = Narcissistic, Imelda Marcos-like decadence seems like a relatively recent evolution. Shoe-loving has become a short-hand for frivolity and misplaced priorities. Yes, a lot of this can be laid at the door of a certain fictional sex columnist who discovers — adorably, natch! — that her closet of Manolos is why she can't afford to buy her apartment. Because it's not just a love of shoes that's entered the cultural consciousness — it's the fetishization of incredibly impractical, expensive shoes that, as surely as the pallor of a 17th century lady of the manor, indicates the aspirational lifestyle of the truly idle. The new fetish shoe cannot be walked in or worked in; it is made for a lifestyle of cabs and expensively-padded bar stools. The more impractical and exorbitant one's shoe closet, the more glamorous and frivolous one's existence.

I'd venture to say that, however many pairs the average woman might own, her love of shoes is probably not so disproportionate to her love of other stuff as a hundred million commercials and glancing references would have us believe. Certainly it's a cliché shoe chains have embraced with a vengeance — those Payless BOGO ads, anyone? — but it really does seem like a chicken and egg situation. Do we have a ton of shoes because WOMEN LOVE SHOES, or because, um, now we're expected to? At this point it's probably as real as any Hallmark holiday, but it's annoying to be presented, as a sex, with a frivolous truism that seems to have evolved almost without our conscious knowledge. I say as I sport a pair of wedges from Shoegasm.

Hey, Shorty [New York Times]

#1.) You do drugs or you like talking about how you do drugs.

#2.) You use unique, half-witty, half-annoying sayings like “Dudesies!”, “For YAYs” and make jokes about “Rim Jobs” because you are so cool with your sexuality.

#3.) On dates, rather than awkwardness, you manifest your wants/needs/insecurities through aggressive lines like “So when are you going to kiss/fuck/lick my C???”

I'm guessing you're probably not going to discover, upon taking this quiz, that you are a QAF. Because the thing is, I've never actually seen any character besides Olivia Thirlby's character in this movie who pulled all this nonsense. (Okay, maybe Natasha Lyonne back in the day, but only cause I think she was kind of aggressive in real life. And on drugs. And if we're really trying, Betty Garrett in On The Town. ) Maybe she's trying to lump her in with Juno, who's also smart and wordsy? But that does a disservice to both characters. Cause, see, I actually thought that, whatever The Wackness's flaws, they made an effort with the characterization of Stephanie; it may have been borderline annoying, but they did try to round her out and I'd venture to say she was based on real people. I mean, I'm the first to admit that there are a lot of female archetypes at work in film (manic pixies, adorable neurotics, brassy best friends all spring to mind) and I daresay a dearth of really interesting roles floating around. But that seems to me all the more reason to give props when a writer makes an effort, and not try to reduce it to one more stereotype when there are plenty of crappy stereotypes out there. And "smart girls" really shouldn't be considered another.

I get it: people want to coin phrases. Everyone wants to have come up with the next "metrosexual." But a neologism can only catch on if it's labeling a phenomenon that already exists and that people have registered. Everyone's seen the annoying free spirit changing some uptight guy's life with her whimsy and magic. And I would go so far as to suggest there's a "zany" subset of that spectrum (see: Jenna Elfman in Dharma and Greg, Jennifer Aniston in Along Came Polly, Sandra Bullock in Forces of Nature) that almost overlaps with the "Quirky Aggressive" Bans is trying to invent. But the drug-addled eccentric shouting about rim jobs and "Dudesies"? Not so much. I mean, where does it stop? "The One-Armed Eastern European Taxidermist/Housekeeper With A Codeine Habit Who Used To Be A Child Star?" "The Transgendered Old Man With A Shady Past And An Interest In Concert Films?" "The Enigmatic Manicurist?" In a way, I hope The Quirky Aggressive does become an archetype — a kind of female version of the Apatow man-boy — as it would at least provide a change from the spunky cuteness we're used to. But until that happens, I'm afraid we're going to have to look for another phrase to coin.

In Which I See The Dopeness You Only See The Wackness
Related: Manic Pixie Dream Girls Are The Scourge Of Modern Cinema