Machado’s “Real Women Have Bodies” opens with a jarring sentence by the narrator: “I used to think my place of employment, Glam, looked like the view from inside a casket.” The reader instantly knows this is a dark tale and expects death, or something that resembles it, as the story unfolds. The protagonist lives a life that is all too common in today’s society. She recently graduated college with a useless degree and student loan debts and must work in a fashion boutique in the mall, a dead-end job. As the narrator tells Petra, “It could be worse. It’s just that I’m broke as hell and it’s not like this is what I wanted to be doing with my life, but a lot of people have it worse.” (133) Though the narrator leaves the boutique job, she lands yet another dead-end one cleaning the local condiment factory at night. Machado shows the ugly side of education: a useless degree, living on a tight budget due to student loan debts, and the inability to have the dream job. Furthermore, Machado gives a glimpse into the production process of business. Many people don’t think or care about how products are made or from where they come; they just want the product to be perfect. With Petra’s mother, we see the dedication and hard work she does to make each prom dress perfect. She is absorbed by her work, sewing the dresses even at night, working almost mechanically at her sewing machine.
The fading of the girls and women make a dark story even darker. For reasons no one can explain, the women of the world slowly fade, but do not disappear; it seems as though only their soul remains. We don’t get a good look at this mystery in the beginning, only from a viral video and the TV. It only becomes real to us when it affects the narrator through her relationship to Petra. The narrator sees how the dresses are made, how the fading women desire to be stitched into clothing. This deeply unsettles the narrator for she begins to see the women all throughout the mall in the food, through the store windows, and the cosmetic counter at JCPenney. She becomes more compassionate and sympathetic to their plight as Petra begins to fade away. When the narrator loses Petra, her grief compels her to “free” the women in the prom dresses by hacking the dresses to pieces with her shears. Unfortunately, this is futile as the women do not move or escape.
Numerous meanings could be taken from this story: the misogynistic attitude of men and their desire for the “solid” female body, women only having worth when they wear pretty clothes, terrible things only becoming personal when you lose someone to it, the nature of dead-end jobs, the invisibility of people who make products — the list goes on and on. Machado is too good of a writer for this story to have only one answer.
I agree with you that there are multiple meanings to this story, but I never thought about the whole situation as being a metaphor for how men objectify women. Another detail that I think supports this quite well is the women’s desire to be sewn into the clothing–even after they have faded, they are still bound to something that can be viewed favorably by men. It could also be a comment on how, as they fade, they long to be young again, young forever; by being sewn into the dresses, they are going on to relive their youth after someone buys them.