If you were looking for the ideal parable
to illustrate the sexual objectification of women, you don’t have to look any
farther than Pygmalion’s statue. The most famous version of her story is in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses; I was assigned
to read it in high school and remember being appalled at this little morality
fable. The story, in brief, goes like this. There’s this guy named Pygmalion.
And his hometown is full of sluts! Prostitutes, adulteresses, women who have
sex outside of marriage! Pygmalion, who has no qualms about judging women
solely on the basis of their sexual history, determines that none of these
strumpets are worthy of marrying him, and self-righteously adopts a bachelor
lifestyle. (I bet he was one of those guys who liked to smugly remind people
that he didn’t own a TV.)
Anyway, all the sluts get their
comeuppance when Venus turns them into stone as punishment for their
promiscuity, but Pygmalion still doesn’t have a girlfriend--which is the
important thing, right? So, in a move that probably made sense when he was
drunk and lonely one Saturday night, he decides to build his own girlfriend!
That is, he makes an ivory statue of the ideal woman. (As a side note, I have
to wonder how big the chest was on this idealized woman. In my experience,
men--particularly men who spend an unseemly amount of time thinking about breasts but don’t actually interact with breasts on a regular basis--tend to exaggerate the
chest when they depict women, and meanwhile betray their limited understanding
of how breasts work.) Okay,
well, some lonely guy can’t find a girlfriend in real life, so he settles for
an artistic representation of his perfect woman instead--it’s a little sad,
maybe, but not particularly strange, maybe not even uncommon. But then
Pygmalion gets weirder. He starts buying presents and clothes for the statue. He
lays it down on a soft couch and tries to make it comfortable. He talks to it
and kisses it and pretends it’s a real woman. In short, he has officially gone
off the rails.
But what counts is that Venus feels bad
for him--Venus, the goddess of unrestrained sexuality, someone you wouldn’t
necessarily expect to be impressed by this lonesome loser pining away after a
paragon, but apparently she is. So one day Pygmalion is enjoying a quiet
evening at home with his statue, making out with it as usual, when he realizes
that his statue has become a real woman! And not the kind of woman with
personality or agency, but his ideal
woman: a perfectly passive non-person who will acquiesce to all his whims. Ovid’s
story makes clear that Pygmalion pretty much rips her clothes off the second she
achieves consciousness, without any concern for her consent. I’ve often
wondered what that would have been like for her--she’s essentially just been
born, she probably has no understanding of the world around her; all she knows
is that this guy is tearing off her clothes and climbing on top of her. It
sounds like the most awful sort of rape story. But I don’t think Ovid ever
bothered to consider the story from the statue-woman’s point of view; he
sympathized with Pygmalion, for whom the whole point of this statue is that he
finally has a sexual object who he knows for a fact hasn’t been whoring around
with other men.
Ovid doesn’t say anything about the
aftermath of the story except that the statue had a child nine months later.
The statue-woman takes no action in the narrative; she is only significant as
the recipient of Pygmalion’s sexual attention and the incubator of his
children. In fact, she doesn’t even have a name: she’s frequently referred to
as Galatea, but that name was invented in the renaissance when Ovid was popular
and people wanted to make it easier to talk about this story. Personally, I
wonder whether Pygmalion would have ever bothered to give his submissive
helpmeet a name, or whether he would have gone on referring to her as “you” and
“my wife” forever. Still, I like to imagine what might have happened if
Pygmalion hadn’t gotten the woman he ordered, if the statue had turned into a
real woman, personality and all, who had opinions about who she wanted to sleep
with--and the list didn’t include losers who think statues make good sex toys.
A guy as smug and entitled as Pygmalion deserved a surprise like that--although
I wouldn’t say that she necessarily deserved him.
ETA:
Mark Kalesniko’s graphic novel Mail Order
Bride may be the story I was looking for, of a Pygmalion who seeks out a
docile and limited wife only to find that she has a personality after all.
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