Building a woman from scratch

On Pygmalion and Poor Things

This is the weekly edition of Men Yell at Me. A newsletter about personhood and politics written by me, a journalist in red state America. Normally, this is where I tell you to subscribe to this newsletter, and you should! But today, I just want you to preorder my book which comes out in six days. Preorders are key to determining the success of a book (best sellers lists, marketing budgets, future books). Thank you so much to everyone who already has! And now, let’s get to the actual newsletter.

Image from the Poor Things trailer on YouTube

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion is a sculptor who is so horrified by the existence of prostitutes that he begins to hate and revile women. He then sculpts himself a marble woman, later dubbed Galatea, who is so beautiful he falls in love with her, fondling her cold stone parts and kissing her. He begs Aphrodite to bring her to life, and she does. Galatea and Pygmalion get married and have a child.

Pygmalion is a potent myth (Ovid wasn’t even the first to tell it) — the fantasy of a woman created in a man’s ideal specifications. The story has been told and retold: George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, which became My Fair Lady. The book Stepford Wives. The movies Mannequin; Lars and the Real Girl; and even She’s All That, along with so many others, play off the myth of a man using his skills to create a perfect simulated woman — innocent and untouched, who will meet all his needs without any of the complications of a real-life woman¹.

Each iteration of the story rests on the creator's fundamental dissatisfaction with women as they are now. Women are imperfect: slovenly, ugly, mouthy, slutty, frigid, or otherwise distasteful. Woman must be created again, in man’s reimagining of all that is beautiful and desirable. Each iteration of the story — even the satires — is in a way a warning to women that they have fallen outside of what is acceptable. You women who are fully alive and aware must be less. Do your hair. Fix your attitude. Or the men will build your replacement.

The most recent iteration of the Pygmalion myth is the movie Poor Things, starring Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone. In the movie, Dafoe plays a maniac scientist named Dr. Godwin Baxter with a heart of gold in a steampunk world of the past where everything is lit in garish and vibrant colors, both real and unworldly, familiar and strange. Dr. Baxter finds a woman who has attempted suicide and resurrects her by giving her the brain of an infant. The woman, Bella Baxter, played by Stone, becomes a tabula rasa brain in a smokeshow body. Things get sexy very quickly, as Stone discovers masturbation and sex at the hands of Mark Ruffalo’s delightfully caddish Duncan Wedderburn. Together the two go off together, until Bella becomes bored with Wedderburn’s controlling nature and she disappears off into the world, where she discovers herself as a prostitute in Paris. It’s a clever fuck-you to the original Pygmalion that the ideal woman in this instance becomes a prostitute by choice.

The movie has been declared a feminist masterpiece — a story of a woman finding freedom in a restricted world. 

But even in this fun, weird romp of a movie, where Stone’s animatronic body movements provide slapstick relief, the creation never rises above her creator. When Bella returns to Dr. Baxter’s home, she makes peace with his decision to create her. She calls him “God” throughout the movie. And she takes up the mantle of his work in a violent, vengeful way, by putting a goat’s brain into the head of her abuser — the man who had driven her to attempt suicide in the first place.

Bella, in the end, is still doll-like. Still completely ensconced in the world of men. The critic Angelica Jade Bastién, writing in Vulture, calls BS on the “liberated” sexuality of the movie, noting, “The primary failure of Poor Things’ sex scenes is rooted in the decision to make Stone’s character mentally a child, blasted clean of history. I want to see what a grown woman thinks and feels about sex! Show a woman with a body and brain above the age of 40 getting gloriously railed.” Bastién concludes, “This isn’t a sincere treatise on female sexuality, it’s a dark comedy for people who carry around an NPR tote bag.”

I don’t think it’s insignificant that the other hot feminist movie of 2023, Barbie, is also about a woman created to be perfect. Barbie was invented by a woman, but we all know no one carries more water for the patriarchy than other women — enforcing the rules of desirability, correct behavior, and obeisance to men.

But in that movie, the doll created to embody perfection chooses to become human; chooses to embody flaws and imperfections, and eventually death. And, whatever else you may criticize about the movie — and it is a rich text —the creation does surpass the creator by choosing to be something else. The thing created comes into her own.

Everything and Nothing

I loved Poor Things, but I found in it an anemic version of feminism, one that suggests a glorious, sexy harmony of liberated women espousing the ideas of the men who made them. Here, the tensions between creator and created are swiftly resolved in a deathbed scene. The image of subversion is sex, but it’s not even very subversive sex. Stone’s body adheres to thin, white beauty standards; the sex is all very pleasing and very hot to the male gaze. Cool and fun. But not subversive. Not particularly messy or revolutionary. And then it all comes to an end when Bella returns to Baxter’s home. She was wild, but now she is mostly tamed.

“Every story men love to tell,” Rebecca Solnit once told me in a whisper, before we did an event together, “is Pygmalion.” She was being quippy. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

I see it everywhere. In the trad wives of TikTok, whose beauty and bodies are mere marionettes, the strings guided by wealth, class, and help — glorious, behind-the-scenes help. These women are self-made creations intended to become popular by appealing to all the disgusted Pygmalions of the world.

And they are disgusted. Men are trying so hard to get women back into that box of desirability, obedience, quiet. Journalists interviewing me about the release of my book keep asking me, what brought us to this moment in culture when so many male pundits and politicians are pushing a return to traditional marriage? And my answer is that women got out of control. We cannot forget that 2017 was a watershed year for women — it saw the largest single-day protest in American history, which was driven by women*. And then the #MeToo movement came into full force and a few men were forced out of positions of power. There was a reckoning. An anemic and incomplete one, but more consequences than we had ever seen before. 

In addition, more and more women are refusing to marry and opting out of dating. It’s not insignificant that there are entire movements of men designed to bully and harass women into love. Get back in the box, they say. You are not pretty, you are not worthy. If you don’t comply, we will find another.

But I think they should go ahead. Find another. Build your bloodless, fleshless, ideal of a woman, if that’s what you want. The rest of us will keep pursuing life in all its messy, beautiful, disgusting, rebellious glory. 

The right way to be a "woman"

Further reading:

I wrote for Time about the money trap of marriage and how I found my freedom. It’s adapted from a chapter of my book that was cut during editing. I hope you enjoy it and remember to get the book!

1. It’s worth noting that this newsletter exclusively defines women as people who identify as women. Full stop. Trans rights are human rights.