7 Female Movie Characters That Don't Really Exist

Mindy Kaling may be a successful writer for The Office, but what she really wants to do is write a movie. A romantic comedy, in fact, because she loves to watch people falling in love. Sadly, “the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity,” she writes in an excerpt from her book, out next month, previewed in the New Yorker. Below, the seven female characters presented in today’s rom-coms that you will never, ever see in the real world:

• The Klutz: The lead actress is beautiful, but she needs some sort of flaw—other than being “overweight or not perfect-looking.” Enter “the klutz,” who—despite the fact that she’s built like a supermodel—“is basically like a drunk buffalo who has never been a part of human society."
• The Ethereal Weirdo: Referred to in some circles as the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” the “ethereal weirdo” is the type who “wears gauzy blouses and braids,” dances in the rain, and goes skinny-dipping a lot. In real life, “people would think she was a homeless woman and would cross the street to avoid her."
• The Woman Who Is Obsessed with Her Career and Is No Fun at All: According to Kaling, it is possible to work 16-hour days and not spend all your time “barking orders into [your] hands-free phone device and yelling, ‘I have no time for this!’” Yet that’s all this character does, until of course she has to learn the art of seduction by doing “all sorts of crazy degrading crap, like [eating] a hot dog in a sexy way.”

Click for Kaling’s full list. (More Mindy Kaling stories.)