What happens when you take the legend of the Golem, cross it with Pygmalion, and author it from a woman's point of view?
Meet Sera Gamble, author of "The Clay Man," one of my favorite new stories in BAE 2006. In her tale, a disgruntled young femme named Leslie has bought 200 pounds of clay to carve her dream man into reality:
...He takes me a week to finish. I work in the evenings, surrounded by candles and takeout Chinese.
First I create the basic form: lying on his back, about six feet tall, broad shoulders, lean frame. Then I begin the real work, adding detail, carving muscles, scratching in curls of hair with my fingernails.
For this I steal reference books from the bookstore where I work as associate manager: Gray’s Anatomy, Da Vinci’s sketches. Renaissance sculpture— which I look at till my eyes burn— trying to copy the face of one of the smooth church angels. By the weekend, he looks positively pornographic.
Finally, on Saturday morning, I carve the magic word into his forehead: Emmet. It means Truth. And then I sit and I wait, leaning against his chest.
The first thing I notice is that the clay grows warmer. At first I think I am imagining it, but soon it’s unmistakable. Something is happening.
Then vibration: first at the toes and fingers, moving inward. It’s working. I don’t know why, but I’m not surprised. I sit and watch as the figure begins to flex, to move. Shortly after sunset, he sits up and opens his eyes.
“I’m Leslie,” I tell him. “I made you...”
Your story is a twist on the Pygmalion tale— we typically hear about a man creating a woman, but not a woman creating a man. Why is it a traditional masculine fantasy, to sculpt a woman who would come to life?
The fantasy has a lot to do with the desire to control another person. Real relationships between adults involve vulnerability – you open yourself up, with no control over the outcome. There’s no guarantee that your partner will respect or value what you give them, and there’s no contract in the world that will prevent them from leaving you. We all carry around some version of these fears, and they’re not gender-specific.
As to why this story keeps getting told from the male perspective… here’s my guess: Historically, women have been idealized as benign and accommodating. Which makes the truth – we’re so not – kind of a bummer. It makes sense that a man would fantasize about creating a mate who will listen and be grateful, whose body won’t change from its “perfect” state and whose mind won’t grow away from, or beyond his. A mate who will never quite be his equal. Because really, it’s no more than he was promised.
Societal expectations of women have changed drastically, of course. These days, that nurturing, submissive housewife isn’t lauded so much as caricaturized. (Apparently, they’re “desperate.”) I bet I’m not the only one telling the myth from a female perspective these days.
But I’m a good example of why this shift would be happening: I’ve got a career that’s important to me and a life I’m enjoying the way it is, and I don’t know when or if I’ll settle down. I could use a hot guy tailor-made for my every need— preferably one ordered out of a catalog, so I don’t have to go barhopping.
Sadly, I already followed that idea to its conclusion in the story, and discovered it probably isn’t a good idea.
"I'm not going to hurt you," your heroine reassures her Clay Man, in a transparent lie.
"Then why did you make me?" he asks.
Whew... what a relationship summary. Care to comment?
It's easy to act out our dark shit in relationships. I've certainly been guilty of that.
I sometimes listen to "Loveline" when I’m driving home at night, and the doctor is always telling these confused, fucked-up young callers that if they find themselves attracted to someone, “run the other way.” His theory goes that the person you are wildly attracted to, is just another way of saying “this is a person who will push all your buttons.”
Psychological pain is a weird thing. It can burrow down inside you and hibernate, but it doesn't ever just disappear on its own. It winds its way into your life and makes itself known through your current relationships.
And when it comes to lovers…it isn’t pretty, but I do believe that sometimes we “make ‘em to hurt ‘em.”
I had one relationship in particular that taught me this; it started shortly before my father became terminally ill. Under other circumstances, I would have quickly lost interest in this man. But the opposite happened – the less compatible we proved, the more I dug in. The relationship rapidly devolved into dramatic 3 AM arguments, temporary break-ups, long-winded letters, the works. I barely recognized myself.
Even while it was happening, I would surprise myself with my own intensity. I was so mad at this guy. I would wonder how I could possibly be this invested in someone I had only known a few months.
The answer, of course, is that I wasn’t. He could have been anybody. He was just conveniently standing in for all the pain in my life. (Poor guy.)
Men take a lot of shit for buying those "real doll" figures, the plastic fuck dollies. Yet, women are the original doll connoisseurs. Your "Clay Man" is incredibly titillating; what woman wouldn't toy with him? How come when women want a living doll, it's not considered perverse?
When a girl wants a doll, we assume it is a manifestation of her natural mothering impulse. What’s funny to me about this is that a lot of little girls are pretty abusive to their dolls. Who didn’t make their Barbies fuck? Or give their baby dolls a monstrous haircut, shove pins through their ears, draw on them, toss them around, and neglect them face down in the bathtub? What exactly are girls rehearsing? Not good mothering, that’s for sure.
As for grown women with doll collections— while I didn’t look at them and think, “This woman is perverse,” I do have a reaction. I look at the dolls and wonder why this woman is collecting legions of fake babies. In the end, my response is a visceral one. Dolls are creepy because they so closely resemble real children– pretty, well-dressed, frozen children. Those "Real Dolls" creep me out because they look a little too much like a real woman. Specifically, a staring, motionless, dead woman.
I used to be in a kickboxing class that used a plastic dummy that looked like a man. We would practice aiming kicks at various body parts. Punching a dummy feels different than punching a bag. There’s a strange feeling that you’re almost doing something… wrong. Like you’re beating someone up who has to just stand there defenseless. Like you’re doing violence with no accountability. Then came the day when someone put a clown wig and lipstick on the dummy. Now we were humiliating him, too! It was funny, but I felt like underneath, we were indulging some ever-so-slightly dark impulses. God only knows what we would have done to him if he was anatomically correct.
