Very recently I saw
this article while I was scrolling through my facebook and drinking my coffee, out of an Anthropologie cup, clearly as per the rules of being a blogger, even if I'm only a sporadic one.
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| not from today. |
If you didn't click that link above, the article is called "The Minimalist Pixie Dream Girl: Who She Is and Why I Hater Her". Before I even read the article, I had some feelings about it, and as it turned out those only grew, because the article's title was very accurate to the actual article. No sarcasm here, the author went on to tell us exactly who the Minimalist Pixie Dream Girl is and why she hated her. Or I should say the kind of person she is, because she isn't actually one person, but instead an ideal.
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| the best lifestyle type blogger photo I had |
The Minimalist pixie dream girls is the perfect blonde haired blue eyed life style blogger with the all white everything who graces our pinterest boards and tumblr dashes. Always simply dressed and slightly rumpled she has the ideal perfect life everyone wants....or not actually. It's an aesthetic. How that particular person chooses to represent herself to the world. She's most likely somewhere between the ages of 18-35, a young woman, who loves her life style.
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| Clementine would be proud |
There are other kinds of pixie dream girls, the most popular being the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, this is Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides, Margo Roth Spiegelmen in Papertowns, Claire in Elizabethtown and Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There are Hipster Pixie Dream Girls, and Preppy Pixie Dream Girls, and so on. I decided I'd be an Autumn Pixie Dream Girl, since my aesthetic tends to lean to the more cozy, snuggly autumnal side of things.
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| my most autumn pixie dream girl photo |
But the thing about Pixie Dream Girls is there aren't any. She's not real, which should be clear by the words Pixie and Dream since the first isn't real and the second isn't tangible. They're a fantasy, a supposed ideal girl, someone to fetishize and fantasize about. The original Manic Pixie Dream Girl fed into the male fantasy of needing to save the damsel in distress. She was crazy and kooky and her life was a mess until the "perfect guy" came a long and fixed everything (well except in Lux Lisbon's case, but they tried!). Then he was the hero and as a reward for his heroics he got the girl.
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| much like I'm fantasizing about these jelly beans right now. |
Hating these girls for the aesthetic the present to the world is the same as women not supporting other women. These girls are just trying to be happy and present their best version of their best selves to the world. If you find your self feeling bad about yourself and your life after looking at one of these girls photos, you need to reevaluate yourself. These girls aren't doing anything more than putting a pretty, if edited and planned, picture on the internet. So if you find yourself suffering a hulk like transformation into the green eyed monster, then you need to change your life and the way you see yourself. It's really not that hard to have an all white bedroom with laundry product advancements these days if that's what you really want. There are guides everywhere to minimalist style if that's what you want.
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| artfully styled bun and curated side table |
But more likely you're hating them because of something else. You aren't as thin, young, feel as pretty, or as rich as these girls appear to be. Their lives look perfect and your dog just peed on your bed.
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| Howl would never he is a gentleman. |
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What you need to realize is her dog has peed on her bed too, she just owns a bottle of bleach, or the number to a really good dry cleaner. And she's a lifestyle blogger, so if you just asked she'd probably be more than happy to do a post on how to keep a white whatever white, or probably already has one. Her life isn't perfect, she's just not choosing to share that with the world. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to keep your struggles and messes private. A lot of us were raised not to air our dirty laundry in public.
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| taking photos of your starbucks in public is perfectly fine though |
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But no matter what, we as women, have to stop hating other women for having things that we don't or doing things differently than us. We need to support each other and not squabble and be petty just because someone's sofa is whiter than ours, someone's kitchen has better marble or she has better hair.
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| my hair was really good in this photo | |
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We need to support each other, and open positive lines of conversation. If we find ourselves that upset over someone else's instagram or pinterest then we need to click the unfollow button and move on. Or even better stop and evaluate exactly why we're jealous of them and what we feel we're lacking, and then find away to either change it, or accept our differences.
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| staged photo of cute shoes and an expensive soda bought solely for this picture. |
These gorgeous minimalist aesthetic photos of these girls and their homes and lives are most likely staged. They aren't real. You're real, and your life will probably never be as perfect as that pictures is. Their lives aren't as perfect as that picture is. They have bad hair days, and splotchy tans and accidentally spill their coffee on their all white sofa. But they've learned to cope with it, and they learned how to get the stain out. Or they buy a cushion to cover it up. But hating these girls, is really only showing what you're lacking, and that is confidence in yourself.
If you're wondering about the photos in this post, these are my most pixie dream girl type pictures taken from my
instagram.
