the doll games
shelley and pamela jackson

HOW TO HAVE SEX

S: We could talk about the way we got rid of the parents, either by having games that were explicitly about runaways or orphanage or schools—

P: Or pirates—

S: We had to have our main characters be kids, but they also had to function as adults, completely separate and freestanding and able to act on their own behalf. So the only time we ever had parents in there they were always forces of prohibition that had to be gotten out of the way. That was their role, to be flouted, to have their authority flouted. Shipwrecks, desert islands, anything that would get our kids away in a group from normal society. In fact a lot of our games—and this included my sex games—had devices for getting the characters outside society, breaking them out of the rules and constraints of the ordinary world so that they could function in this kind of neutral, free zone.

P: Which later on at least was specifically a sexualized one. So getting captured by pirates was an opportunity for our dolls to be forced to have sex.

S: Thank God! Right, it’s a place where some kind of morality still exists, but it’s free of convention and nobody’s enforcing it.

P: There was definitely a difference between the good lawless characters and the bad ones. But what was—what was rectitude under these circumstances?

S: The doll games asks: what is rectitude?

P: I mean it was partly, with sex, that our characters had to have their inhibitions overcome.

S: We were defining a way to behave that was sexual but that also gave our characters dignity and power and meaning, and we were down on the sexual characters who just wanted to couple wantonly with everybody in a lascivious way and weren’t actually interested in them or interesting themselves. It was a kind of model for real relationships.

P: But it was those other characters, the ones we disapproved of, like Harvey and Dawn, that allowed us to express our more transgressive impulses ourselves.

S: Right, they were expressing the extreme of raw sexuality, which we had to cast as negative and ugly and even ludicrous. But I don’t know whether it just set the upper limit high enough that our regular characters were able to look virtuous even though they were pretty sexual, or...

P: Well the way I remember it, we had to set it up so that the good characters would become sexual against their will. I remember it as a really prudish thing. There was this model of pure romantic love that was opposed to the sexual nastiness of the bad dolls.

S: But didn’t the good dolls also eventually become sexual? But just in the way that we defined as good and serious?

P: Probably, but what I remember are the scenes where we got our characters into sexual situations by basically having them violated. In at least one game they were fucked while sleeping by invading boys from the boys’ dorm. And they were ravished by pirates.

S: They were always being spied on through peep-holes or having their clothes removed through some trick.

P: I don’t actually remember what happened when they were actually in love, big Josh and Aina or whoever. What did they do, do you remember? How did they get started? Did they just start bumping pelvises?

S: I don’t know. Definitely the most enthusiastic and energetic sex that we performed with the dolls were with the bad characters. We would just slam them together. But Mara and Melanie had the clay breasts, and I have a very clear image of those breasts all smashed by contact with some boy’s chest so there must have been something going on.

P: Maybe I just remember the other ones because those were the ones that were more—

S: Exciting?

P: Yeah, and which made more impact on my sexual fantasy life. In my memory it’s all violations and invasions.

S: There was also the way we rounded off plots by humiliating the sexual bad guy, Harvey or Dawn or whoever, as the wonderfulness of the main characters won out over the sluttish behavior—like if it was Dawn trying to seduce Laurie away from Aina then Dawn would lose.

P: Love and purity and romance were definitely always victorious. But the other option was just as compelling, obviously. And somehow between the people who rutted like wild animals and the lofty pure heroines we were working out our own—

S: I don’t remember it that clearly, but suddenly I even have the suspicion that we tried to create scenarios where our main characters would somehow find themselves having sex entirely by accident on both parts. It would be very contrived, like they’d be put in bed naked together and accidentally in their sleep start having sex.

P: We didn’t really have a good idea of how the mechanics worked anyway, at least I didn’t.

S: I think one function of the manly dolls might have been to give us a character who was good, but sort of fallen from grace, who wasn’t pure. Who was nice, but grown-up, and maybe had had sex already.

P: You mean like big Josh? [shocked] Was Josh not a virgin?

S: Or Alonzo. A pirate. Pirates aren’t virgins. So the woman was entirely virginal, but there was a tinge of nastiness on the man.