The part I did not plan for
Kindness Is Not an Invitation
I built a studio where every single person would feel safe. Somewhere in there I forgot to build that part for me.
By Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole. This one started life as a script for a video. It got longer.
Let me brag for a second.
I own a giant pottery studio. Ten thousand square feet of it. Twenty-nine wheels. Four kilns, one of them forty-two cubic feet, which is roughly a small closet you could stand up inside. Hundreds of members. Over a million dollars of my own money poured into the floor and the walls and the clay and every single one of those wheels.
Not to brag or anything. I’m obviously a pretty important person.
Okay. Now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you about one of the hardest parts of running the place.
It’s the small handful of members who have decided it’s fine to sexually harass me.
I never saw that one coming. Not once.
I sat in a folding chair with a notebook and dreamed this entire building into existence, and I planned for a lot of things. Kilns going down. Bad months. Somebody’s kid taking out a whole shelf of greenware. I had contingencies.
I did not have a contingency for this.
We’ve got a list on the wall in here. The Clay Hole Commandments. Ten of them, written in fake King James English, because I think that’s funny and it’s my building.
Number eight: thou shalt not sexually harass others.
To my knowledge, not one of my members has ever had a problem with harassment from another member. Not one.
Nope.
Deep sigh.
Just me.
And look, I don’t get it.
I’m no supermodel. I’m frumpy and I’m old and I’m neurodivergent and there is dried slip in my beard most days of the week. I have worn the same beanie in every photograph taken of me since roughly the Obama administration. If you lined up a hundred guys and asked a room to pick the one most likely to get propositioned at work, I am not in the top ninety.
I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been in the public eye a long time.
I don’t know if it’s something in my energy.
I don’t know if I’m accidentally saying things that land as flirting.
I don’t know if it’s some power-dynamic thing.
I don’t know if it’s a teacher-student fantasy.
I don’t know if I give off a vibe I can’t see from in here.
What I do know is that I hate it. I hate it with my whole heart.
Now. Let’s be really clear about what I am not talking about.
This is pottery. Just about everything in this building can be taken as an innuendo, and I love laughing about those innuendos.
Pulling handles.
Coning the clay.
The constant wet slapping.
Slide your fingers in.
Keep it wet.
Don’t let it get too hard.
It’s too soft. You’ve got to firm it up.
That stuff is funny.
It’s funny with my friends. It’s funny with my members too, if I’m being honest. Little sideways smirks across the wheel. A giggle from the table by the window. Somebody says something completely straight-faced about working the tip and eleven adults lose it at once.
Nothing wrong with any of that. It’s half of why this place is fun.
That isn’t harassment. That’s a room full of grown adults being twelve.
It puts me in a position where I have to be the bad guy in my own building.
Here’s what I am talking about.
Blatant propositions. Sexual advances thrown at me out of nowhere, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, while I’m elbow deep in a bucket, delivered like I’m going to laugh and enjoy it.
And then the worst part of it. They say the thing, and then they go quiet. They just stand there. Waiting for me to carry the conversation the rest of the way.
Awwwkwwaaaaard.
It isn’t cute and it isn’t flattering. It’s appalling. And it puts me in a position where I have to be the bad guy in my own building, in the middle of my own workday, over something I did not start.
I’m tired of pulling that tiny handful of members aside for a conversation neither of us wants to have.
Can we please just stop it?
Oh. And you want to know what’s more annoying than any of it?
When I’ve told a friend about this, the first thing out of their mouth is almost always the exact same five words.
“Well. Are they cute, though?”
Groan. Shake head. No words.
What in the actual hell does that have to do with anything?
I want to be fair here, because I have almost certainly asked somebody a dumber version of that question at some point in my life. Present company very much included.
But sit with it for one second. Think about what that question actually does. It says the answer changes depending on the packaging.
It doesn’t.
But in all seriousness, I’m not writing this to complain. Complaining is easy and I could do it professionally.
I’m writing it because I need two things.
The first one is advice. If you run a room where people gather, a gym, a salon, a shop, a classroom, a bar, and you have figured out how to head this off before it ever starts, I want to hear it. These are uncharted waters for me and I am rowing with a spoon.
The second one is this page.
I wanted something I could paste into a message. A link I can send, and then set my phone down, and walk back to whatever I was doing. A drop-it-and-bail.
So if you’re reading this because I sent it to you: hi. You aren’t in trouble. Nobody is getting thrown out. This is a fence, and I’m just walking you over to show you where it is.
So, for the record, all in one place.
I will never be interested. Not when it’s approached like that.
My relationship status is going steady with a total smoke show, thanks for asking.
And gross. Yuck. No. Please don’t.
Kindness is not an invitation. Warm is not availability. Friendly is not a green light. I’m nice to you because being nice to you is the entire job, and because I actually like people, and neither of those has one single thing to do with the other.
I work every day to make this a great and safe place for my members.
Do the same for me.
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole, Fellow Human
About the author
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole · Draper, Utah
Dan Pearce is an author, artist, and the founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah. Before pottery, he spent a decade as one of the most-read bloggers in the world. His blog, Single Dad Laughing, ranked #2 among personal blogs worldwide and drew more than a billion reads before he retired it in 2020. He has published six books, including the memoir The All-Important, Well-Fed, Giant White Man, and built an audience of more than three million followers. He has also worked professionally as an animal artist, illustrator, body painter, and poker player. Not in that order, and yes, all of those are real.
In 2022 he launched Dan Pearce Ceramics, known for one-of-a-kind pieces he has never once duplicated, and every sale went toward building The Clay Hole: 10,000 square feet, more than a million dollars invested, and a community of hundreds of members built from the ground up to put people first. Of everything he has made in twenty-five years of chasing creative work, he considers the community the best of it.