the doll games
shelley and pamela jackson

DOLLS AND FANTASIES

S: Alonzo figured a lot in my later private sexy doll games because he looked like he would move in on you. He looked like a sexual predator. And I didn’t always necessarily want a romantic hero in those games. There was a princess, a sort of independent minded princess who escaped from her handlers and would go out and be naked in the wilderness and do un-princesslike things. And then she’d meet this raffish vagabond with a peg leg and he would romance her, in this zone outside of culture, where all the princess rules were off.

P: That’s interesting for two reasons. First, it reminds me of the question whether for me our sexual doll games were sexual or not.

S: They certainly were for me.

P: It also raises the question of why you kept the dolls as props for erotic games later, and I did not. I just had them in my head. It never occurred to me to try to use the dolls when I was learning how to have erotic fantasies or day dreaming or anything. I left the dolls out. And those are the fantasies I know were for me erotic.

S: Did you use scenarios that were doll-game-like?

P: Definitely. The situational aspect of eroticism in the doll games really imprinted itself on my fantasy life.

S: That’s completely true of my fantasy life too. I wonder if that is specifically because of the doll games— wanting to have characters and setting up the situation very clearly and freely improvising within the boundaries of that charged situation–

P: Or whether the dolls are just one particularly literal and concrete way of setting up the scene for fantasy. Maybe we would have done the same thing in our heads even without them, but because we always had the dolls as props and worked out the scenarios using the dolls as props the fantasies were always more connected to little plastic objects.

S: For me you mean, but not for you?

P: Well, I’m sure they educated my fantasy life.

S: I educated your fantasy life!

P: But it’s funny that I didn’t continue with the dolls.

S: It’s not like I didn’t have fantasies where I didn’t use the dolls, but I found it added a sense of event and embodiment, if I was able to have the dolls interact with each other, instead of the diffuse imaginings that lacked such clear parts.

P: That makes sense, but I think for me the dolls started getting in the way once I became too aware of them as plastic objects and was less able to project myself inside them. So then it was actually a distraction. The plastic hitting on plastic and the blank stares.

S: I don’t think I carried out those private games as a solo version of the kind of doll game we would have done together, I think the dolls were more like talismans. I mean I did make them walk along and meet each other and stuff–

S: At the end of the last tape what I was saying was that in my private sexy doll games I didn’t exactly act them out like a one-man version of our real doll games, I just kind of held on to the dolls and used them as—as talismans, as idols, they just focused my thoughts and made me able to summon up separate entities and interactions and specific situations a little bit better than in the washy world of my imagination.