Amy Frykholm

This week, while I was at Duke University for a conference, I ran across an exhibit of Jennette Williams' photographs of women in bathhouses in Istanbul and Budapest. Since I have begun work again on my book on American Christianity, bodies and sexuality, the exhibit was timely for me. It was also timely because I was sitting for hours in heady meetings, jittery from too much coffee. I started to wish passionately for any kind of embodied experience. 

As an American woman, I grew up with perhaps an odd wish to be a mannequin rather than a body. A mannequin--the bloodless, lizardlike relative of the human--celebrates a lifeless perfection of limb and cleavage that always has me feeling an old sadness when I am in a clothing store.  A sadness of utter inadequacy.  At some point in adolescence, I unconsciously decided that I would rather be a mannequin, in a mannequin’s “body” than in my own.  I decided that stasis was better than flow, better to be white and perfectly shaped, draped to perfection, than in the flawed raw material of myself.  When I am in a clothing store, I have this odd sensation that mannequins are mocking me.  If one came to life, it would only be to sneer at me or to be breezily indifferent to the difficulties and innate imperfections of being human.  Upon entering a clothing store, I am immediately aware, with new clarity, of my myriad imperfections.  Stains and rips appear on my clothing where they weren’t before.  My skin looks sallow and blotchy.  I avoid glances in the three-way mirrors with increasing desperation. Within five minutes, I am ready to cry out, “One of each please!  If only it will make me more like her, the her of the mannequin.”  But overwhelmed by desire, I usually don’t buy even one thing.  Instead, I slip out the door and retreat to a silent and sad place, a place from which a greater desire even than to be a mannequin is built, the desire to be invisible.

I had a professor in college, the illustrious Jim Farrell, who perhaps understood the strange power of the mannequin. He propped one in this office and decorated it with every bumper sticker he could find.  “No nukes.”  “This way to Jesus.”  “The Personal is Political.”  “Whirred Peas.”  She was stuck, fastened, fixed by all of the messages slapped to her smooth plastic.  Every space of her was covered, sometimes many times over.  Using the mannequin, he was saying to me, “This is your body too: tapestried by the sound byte, embedded in so many conflicting messages about who you are supposed to be that you can hardly breathe or move.  This half-metaphysical, half-materialistic jarble will consume you completely if you let it.  You will become as absolutely numb and lifeless as this mannequin.”

But I still couldn’t reckon with that only partially conscious jealousy, that even when I saw “her,” the mannequin, my eyes went first to her breasts and her flat stomach, to the body I thought I wanted and couldn’t have.  It is truly a weird thing to be jealous of a mannequin, but that couldn’t change the fact that she got to sit in his office, propped up in a beguiling pose and told what her existence meant every minute of the day.  I had to go out and forge a reality with this body, this flesh, this historied self.  And that work seemed and still seems so much harder.