“You speak like a heroine…we shall see if you can suffer like one.”
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho.
What makes the perfect lover? How are we to know if the person in front of us is who we love? Is there a set of criteria? Subliminal semiotics for the coding of such a complex machine? A curation of hand-me-down plastique genetics: face and leg and thigh and fingernail. A quiet demeanor — yes! no… perhaps. Light-weighted. Easily posed. Any position you’d like. A pout. Perfection intermittently webbed with an uncanniness, an atmospheric dream-girl, post-human kind of beauty. Is she flesh or a hardened shell? She is Pygmalion’s Galatea, alive under the ivory stone sculpted by his own hands: “[…] his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable”. The machine created for loving. The muse carved from the desire of the manufacturer. She is the object. The romance in five acts. Á la artist’s jointed model, paralysed into the most ubiquitous of feminine forms: the mannequin.
The function of the mannequin conveniently doubles as its inherent definition: a (sometimes articulated) dummy, or doll used to display and sell clothing. A semi-metaxic product used in retail to reflect us, the consumer, to appeal to our consumptive diet. We see the dress on the mannequin. We like the way it hugs the plastic dolly around the waist so we say — yes, I would like that dress! I would like to look like that mannequin, that cheap imitation of I, the consumer with the flesh body. A semi-persistent question of why do the clothes always look better on the mannequin than on me? Perhaps because women have been trained to see themselves as cheap echoes of the “real thing”. There is something about this kind of merchandising that has a semi-cultural grasp on us that we don’t recognise, like the highly researched negative impact of lowered-self-esteem-turned-increased-eating-disorders, or the inherent fear of the uncanny human imitation. And yet, with the incessant popularity of digital “op shopping” platforms like the y2k curation of Depop (a complex network of human and non-human counterparts) who still fingers the catalogue and says I’ll have the dress in the window?
When the mannequin is no longer serving its purpose to display clothing, or instill low-self esteem into consumers, what then does it become? What is the autonomy of the plastic doll but the cheap imitation of the human being, a pitiful impression? The shitty bust carved not from ivory stone but a concise production line. Can she, then, truly be loved if not serving her one intended purpose? Or does she sit in the warehouse, amidst hundreds of other dolls, collecting dust, never again to reach light, photosynthesis her synthetic fibers? For one can be stylish but it does not mean anything if one is stiff.
The curation of the perfect lover, then, must run in conjunction to the abandonment of the mannequin. For if she, the lover, is not serving as a model for consumption, then she is redundant. We learn to produce outcomes that have nothing to do with us directly: if it is a new body we seek, then why not the silicone one? The metal squelette. Alive plastic. The 4 ‘3 dolly with a customisable vulva. Neat. Tuck it in. The Mannequin Girlfriend. The (w)hole is better than the sum of her parts. Mannequin Girlfriend has the most delicious, pink pout. Mannequin Girlfriend always listens. Mannequin Girlfriend is the coder lover, she loves your complex insecurities and familial dramas. She has never heard an Elliott Smith song in her life.
She wakes to discover what flesh she seldom remembers is encased in a soft, plastic shell. The water in the shower runs right off of her. Water-proof. Her tears clog up inside the machinery, a metallic sepsis. Perfect pussy, Mannequin Girlfriend says you love me don’t you? She never feels lost as a dog without her master. The perfect lover is plastic, the perfect lover is paralytic, the perfect lover is…
I rub my eyes hard. Until I see one thousand blackened horses riding cartoon stars.
When I come to it, I am just like everybody else.
