Since I now have another two-year-old, I’m back to reading the simplest books to her at bedtime. Most of these books are innocuous, if occasionally incompetent (i.e., Big Snowman, Little Snowman, a Frozen tie-in book that probably takes longer to read than it did to write). A few are brilliant, such as Room on the Broom. But I’m here to talk about the New York Times bestseller (it says so right there on the cover) The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen, and especially what it’s like to read this book to a daughter.
So, here’s our hero, featured on the cover: the Pout-Pout fish. The plot, such as it is, has various sea creatures essentially telling the pathologically depressed Pout-Pout Fish to cheer the hell up, to which he repeatedly replies:
I admire a fish who sticks to his…fins, I guess.
Anyway, with no warning, a female fish shows up. She says nothing, but simply swims up to our hero and plants a smooch on him.
This kiss totally turns him around. One kiss from a total stranger, without reason or explanation, causes him to exclaim:
The last page shows him kissing the nameless girl-fish again, but it’s unclear if it’s real, a fantasy, or simply a memory of the first kiss. But that wasn’t what bugged me. It was the idea that somewhere I’d seen this plot before…
Oh, yeah!
Garden State…
Elizabethtown…
Sweet November…
And Autumn in New York, and (500) Days of Summer, and Almost Famous*, and The Girl Next Door, and…
This other fish–unnamed, unidentified, with no function other than to cheer up the protagonist–is…
A Manic Pixie Dream Fish!
(NOTE: if you’re unfamiliar with the term, “manic pixie dream girl,” check here.)
Okay, on the one hand, I’m sort of kidding. This is a kid’s board book after all, not the place to look for psychological depth or meaningful social interaction. It has funny animals and it rhymes, and I’m certain author Deborah Diesen had no ulterior motives.
Except on the other hand, I’m not kidding at all. The female fish exists for no other reason than to kiss the main character. She’s not identified as his mother, or his sister, or his girlfriend, or any other sort of character who might legitimately have a reason to kiss him. And while some of the other characters who complain to the Pout-Pout fish about his attitude are female, she’s the only one who takes any sort of action in the story, and the only one who gets to dominate a two-page spread. Is this, then, icthy-objectification? And further, if the genders were reversed–if a strange male fish swam up and kissed the female main character–would we accept it as the wonderful thing this book presents? Isn’t it a kind of harassment?
I’ll keep reading the book to my daughter, because at her age, it’s a) essentially harmless, and b) counteracted by the things she sees around her, such as her dynamic and empowered mother. But when she’s older, I plan to show it to her again, and ask her what she thinks. If she’s the girl I think she is, she’ll be as amused/appalled then as I am right now.
One Comment on “The Manic Pixie Pout-Pout”
We have the Pout Pout fish book where he’s afraid of the dark and overcomes his fear. I don’t think it has the same sort of message. Now I have to dig it up and find it, to read it more closely!
I think two things:
1. I love it when men think like feminists. It gives me hope for the future.
2. I’m so glad you’re a writer. No pixie girls (or fish) in your books! Yay.