It needs to stop because guys shouldn't live their lives expecting a woman like this to exist. No guy should be waiting around for a quirky, blue-haired, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing chick to show up and fix his entire life, because what woman would want to deal with that expectation and level of pressure?

It also needs to stop because I don't want wide-eyed gals to think they need to act like vapid morons to attract guys. Because I'm an average, twenty-something male in 2011 America, I've developed a pop-culture induced soft spot for pale chicks with giant eyes and bangs.

You! You did this to me!

And, unfortunately, Hollywood is trying to convince women who look like this that being brainless goofballs who don't understand how life works is an appealing personality type, and I just can't let that stand.

Hollywood is still teaching women that "dumb" is "attractive," they're just hipsterfying it. I don't know when it happened (maybe after Clueless?), but sometime after the '90s, "Quirky Eccentric Weird Chick" became the new Bimbo. She's just as insultingly one-dimensional as the archetypal Ditsy Blonde Bombshell Valley Girl character that was all over the place a decade ago, except now she wears vintage knee-socks and listens to The Smiths, and that's supposed to be better, for some reason.

And there's the problem. We love those characters in movies because, in movies, a person can be a giant, manipulative, selfish asshole and also a sweet, deep, compassionate softie, because those people are actors, and most actors are capable of playing at least two different things.

If you're dealing with an asshole in real life, nine times out of 10, he's actually an asshole. And not "asshole" in the sense that he's confident and a little bit cocky, that's fine. "Asshole" here means a legitimate terrible person. Not every meth addict is Breaking Bad's Jesse -- an ultimately sweet kid struggling against his circumstances -- a lot of them are just, you know, meth addicts. In real life, the boyfriend who has been verbally abusive throughout your entire relationship won't suddenly wake up one day being kind and apologetic, because he doesn't have a screenwriter in the back of his mind writing empathy into his background.

And, yes, there are plenty of guys out there that are genuinely like Don Draper, they're legitimately kind people who are damaged enough that they throw up a wall and keep people away, but there are even more idiots out there who aren't Don Draper, they've just seen Mad Men and thought "Condescension and verbal abuse: that's what women want!" Hollywood keeps A) convincing women that every shithead is secretly poetic and amazing and beautiful, and B) convincing men that there's a lot of traction to gained in being an irredeemable prick. And there is. Right until you graduate high school, and everyone realizes how awful you are.

How I Met Your Mother is a show about how awesome Neil Patrick Harris is, but there's also a recurring sub plot about a guy named Ted Mosby who, no matter how many of his relationships fail for very valid reasons, is convinced that he'll make just the perfect husband (as soon as there's a woman smart and cool enough to ignore all of the valid reasons to break up with him). In a sentence, (500) Days of Summer is about a guy who invents a girlfriend in his head and then gets mad when his actual girlfriend doesn't conform to his expectations.

Also, this happens.

In more sentences, the main character in Summer is a guy who is ready to meet his dream girl and then does, in the form of Summer (Zooey Deschanel, obviously). She likes the same music that he likes, and even though she explicitly tells him early in the film that she doesn't believe in love and hates the idea of being someone's girlfriend, she likes the same music that he likes so he concludes that they'll be perfect together. He's so excited about the idea of dating someone interesting that he never actually gets around to totally investing in or understanding his girlfriend. He's already fallen in love with Summer because he's a guy who falls in love a lot, and that's what he'll be, always, forever. They date for a while, and it's good for a while, and then they break up, obviously, because dating someone solely because they like the same shitty music that you like is never the best plan.

And there's an opportunity for our protagonist to learn something. He can realize, "Hey, maybe I'm wrong because I moved too fast too soon, or I expected too much based on my own idea of what a girlfriend should be, or because I based our entire relationship on superficial similarities." But none of that happens. Instead, the movie ends with him meeting a new girl. He falls in love with her because she's pretty, and because they both like the same building, or something, (which frankly seems like an even shakier foundation for a relationship than liking the same band). Similarly, How I Met Your Mother puts our protagonist through relationship after relationship, and instead of growing or changing with each relationship, he holds out hope that he's already the "right guy" for someone else, so all he needs to do is coast.

"I'm sure handling my next relationship in the exact same way I handled my last one won't be a problem."

I actually love both this movie and this show because they're realistic (no one ever really does learn anything), but as far as pushing bad lessons on romantic guy morons, they're both very guilty. The basic moral is "Learn no lessons from past relationships: If something didn't work out, it wasn't 'meant to be,' so just wait around for someone who does conform to all of your preset expectations." Whenever a character in a movie has flaws that are objectively detrimental, the movie will never teach us to, hey, maybe work on those flaws; the movie says, "No, you're fine, everyone else is wrong, just wait around for the PERFECT GIRL WHO WILL SOLVE AND ACCEPT EVERYTHING. Because relationships are easy and require absolutely no work, compromise, or self-awareness."

And sure, eventually someone will come along that DOES love all of the weirdest and quirkiest aspects of your personality, but assuming that all you need to do is sit around and imagine him/her is wrong. That attitude is just going to breed generation after generation of lazy people. Eventually, you'll get two people in a room together who were both raised on pop culture, both of them assuming that the other will accept and love all of their flaws, neither of them budging. And what happens then?

It could be worse, I guess. Hollywood could be teaching the opposite lesson and telling everyone that...