manic pixie dream boys

Since I started really applying myself to reading YA, in spring/summer 2010, one of the tropes I find myself laughing/shaking my head at a lot is the New Boy whose hair falls into his (green) eyes, who is well-liked, popular even, but still enigmatic, who has Wisdom and Knowledge, probably from Sad Experience, who recognizes the flawed/broken heroine protagonist as flawed/broken, and still cares about her, and helps her recover from whatever her particular trauma is.
This boy often has a name like Jake or Mason or Charlie or Connor. He is, as are the heroines, pretty much always white. He often has some kind of vaguely artistic or intellectual pursuit - perhaps he is always reading Russian literature, or taking photographs with an old manual SLR, or strumming a guitar. He is not a butch jock, but can often play impromptu games of basketball or baseball or soccer well, or maybe he goes for long solitary runs. His hair falls into his eyes. Possibly he has a dimple. Frequently, he loans a jacket or hoodie to the heroine, who then spends time smelling it and feeling comforted by it. Usually, he and the Heroine are at odds with each other, maybe put together by a science project or the school newspaper or an art assignment; they bristle at each other, they become reluctant friends, then of course realize they are In Love.

He's a stereotype, a trope, and I think he is the male equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl - in other words, a function to change the course of the protagonist's life.
Recently, the man who coined the term MPDG, Nathan Rabin, apologized for it and wished to pull it from pop culture. I appreciated his reasons, but since I have never heard nor thought of MPDG in a positive way - it is always antifeminist, it always reduces the female to precisely a dream of the hetero male protagonist/viewer/gaze - I don't feel a need to pull it from circulation. I think it's a useful way of describing a specific trope that occurs very frequently.
I don't know what the male equivalent of this should be called - he isn't manic, he's usually quite calm and collected; he isn't a pixie (but what is the 'masculine' equivalent of pixie?); he IS a dream; and of course, he's a boy, not a girl.
He's not identical to the MPDG, either, because he plays a more serious role: he saves the heroine from self-sabotage. He doesn't bring sunshine and silliness into her life, he brings a life preserver and a solid rock to anchor it to. He is, ultimately, more important than the MPDG, because without him, the heroine would, perhaps, become suicidal, would die, would never identify the rapist/murderer who traumatized her, would never admit to, and seek professional help for, the psychological problems or mental illness from which she suffers. In other words, he saves her life - he rescues her, and he pushes her along to recovery, always standing by her side.
In a lot of ways, he's actually quite like Prince Charming or any other knightly figure who swoops in to save the damsel in distress. He's just figured in a way that doesn't make him look quite so domineering. But he has the power/agency - without him, her story would not continue. Without the Dream Girl, the hero of the story will go on - perhaps boringly, perhaps with an unpleasant wife and children, but not suffering psychological torment or PTSD.

I would like a term to identify this guy, so we can get him the hell out of there.
I like a cute, intellectual boy with hair that falls into his green eyes as much as the next hetero girl, but he's a FICTION. Very few boys OR girls are as wise and sensitive as he is while they're in high school, or as willing to stick it out over the long haul while the girl is hospitalized with an eating disorder or whatever. But this is not the worst of the problem with him -

The real problem is that still, even in books with smart, clever, interesting female protagonists, they need a Man to Save The Day. Why can't a heroine come to terms with her grief over accidentally killing her sister through a relationship with a good friend, or a mentor, or a cousin, or an aunt? Why don't any of her friends, or any of the women in her life, recognize her depression/trauma/helplessness? Why does it take the arrival of a mysterious, hot new boy for anyone to realize our Heroine is in trouble, unhappy, ill?

Why do our female protagonists still need a man, even a teenage boy, to give them a sense of value, worth, purpose, place in life?

teenage boys

I have never been a teenage boy. I do not regret this, but it does mean my own empirical evidence for male adolescence is fairly limited. I'm dependent on second-hand, after-the-fact anecdotal evidence from males of my acquaintance, evidence of the kind that would never stand up in a court of law.

There's a common belief out there that Boys Don't Read. I know this is bunk. Yet! When it comes to YA fiction, I'm becoming more and more concerned that perhaps, in fact, teenage boys don't read YA lit.

The question arose last fall, in Representing Adolescence, and it stumped me: What do adolescent boys actually read? Which books?

When I was in high school, the guys of my acquaintance (if they read at all) were into Tom Clancy and Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Maybe James Patterson, maybe Thomas Harris. Maybe the early, errant John Grisham. One or two standouts read Robert Jordan (in particular, a boy I sat next to in AP European history, who somehow managed to read Robert Jordan almost every day in class yet still pay attention, respond to the teacher, and get staggeringly high grades on tests. In that nerdy way I had and have, I was smitten).
These seem, still, to be the go-to books for teenage boys; at least, at the bookstore where I worked from 2008-2010, Patterson, King, Clancy were still in high demand. The only YA titles I remember any male readers asking for - aside from ones assigned for school reading - were Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak.

So what ARE teenage boys reading? Or, more accurately, what YA books are they reading? Or, more to the point: Where are the really good YA books for YA boys?

Because of my own interests, I know some of the titles and authors that gay teenage boys read; those tend to deal with LGBTQ issues, which - alas for our culture of compulsory heterosexuality/homophobia - are not likely to be picked up by straight teenage boys.

There's something really girly about a lot of YA fiction that's out there, even the good stuff. I try, whenever I can, to resist gender normativity and all that, but the fact is: the publishing world thinks in terms of male/female, and they go all out for the girls in the YA department. All those miserable supernatural romances, all those fancypants girls with scads of money serials, all those books about friends and trauma and first loves and music - all have a girl-oriented feel to them. It may be just in packaging - Natalie Standiford's mind-bendingly great How to Say Goodbye in Robot, while narrated by a female, is not an overly girly book. Yet some jackass decided to give it a vivid bubblegum pink dustjacket, thus dooming it to a life of female-only readership.

The teenage-culture world seems to skew heavily female, in ways that strike me as troubling. There are junior-girl versions of lots of things; magazines make this most vividly clear. You have Teen Vogue and People, Seventeen, and that host of tweenybopper magazines (Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, etc). But there's no comparable set of junior versions of magazines for teenage boys; there's no Teen GQ, no Teen Esquire. The concerns and interests of adolescent boys are imagined to be identical to the concerns and interests of adult men. How can this be?

It used to be that girlhood and womanhood were collapsed into each other (and in many ways, still are), while boyhood (short pants! living in the nursery!) and manhood were two distinct things. Now there's a "training" stage for girls as they grow up into adult women, a phase of life when clothes, makeup and boys are all the rage (as reflected by the teen-girl magazines). This is distinct from women's periodicals mainly by the absence of home decor and organization from the teen mags; women's magazines are mainly concerned with clothes, makeup, Your Man, and your home.  Teenage girls get juniors magazines, junior clothes, junior makeup, even training bras (training for what? it's not like training wheels on a bike, or training a plant to grow in a certain way - is the "training" just a weak effort at desexualizing fairly young girls' foundation garments?). But there are not similar "training" things for teenage boys. Why? Is the teenage boy meant to be read, meant to be, identical to the adult male?

There are heaps of great books with male protagonists; M.T. Anderson's excellent Feed and Octavian Nothing books; Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy; Frank Portman's King Dork; K.L. Going's King of the Screwups and Fat Kid Rules the World.  But it is not at all clear to me that teenage boys are reading them unless forced to by a teacher. 

Among my undergrads, when I ask what the (sadly few) boys in the class read as adolescents, mostly they say - Clancy, King, Patterson.  A few read fantasy: Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman. In the YA world, only two authors get mentioned: one boy was passionate about Neil Shusterman, and several had read and enjoyed John Green's books.

So what's going on here? Where is the abundance of good YA books for guys? Where are the YA guys to read those books? Why is YA somehow the province of teenage girls?