the doll games
shelley and pamela jackson

SOME SCENARIOS: BOARDING SCHOOL, PIRATES

P: But I also remember in orphanage or boarding school games—I remember at least one game where the girls were all asleep and the boys all came over to have sex with them while they were sleeping.

S: Including the nice boys?

P: Yeah, well, that was the big problem for this setup, that the nice boys were part of it and we wanted to engineer it so that they would have sex with the nice girls, but there had to be some trick for how that could work without turning them into nasty guys.

S: So what was it?

P: I don’t know! There must have been something where either the ringleader made it happen through some trickery or—I don’t know!

S: Well I remember in my private doll games—but this was maybe an evolution from what we ever did together—I did reach the point where the lovers would have sex of their own accord like grown-up people, even though it was always in a situation where they had somehow been magicked out of the net of socially constrained behaviors, like the princess who had wandered off into the wilderness and suddenly met the roue with the peg leg. So where the social barriers were broken down and also her femininity was—was rent, the veil of her femininity was torn. But I’m thinking now that that might have been an evolution from our joint games, in which we didn’t have our main characters do that because it was too nasty.

P: Definitely all these scenarios where the boundaries were broken were necessary for sexualizing our heroines.

S: Which is classic rape fantasy stuff. How do you get around the fact that women are not supposed to be sexual and yet you’re having this fantasy. You have to set it up so that you didn’t do it on purpose, and your enjoyment of it is completely secret and illegitimate–

P: Making Dawn and Harvey wildly play out unfettered sexuality allowed us to do get our satisfaction without owning up to it. Although we knew we were nasty for playing, so we were kind of admitting our complicity.

S: You are remembering those games more clearly than I am. I don’t very clearly remember the ins and outs of the tricks and scams by which the sex was brought in.

P: I don’t remember that many specific times, but I do clearly remember that boarding school game, or maybe it was more than one game—

S: There were lots of those games, with various sorts of spying, breaking in and rifling through things and finding notes—remember all those Dawn love letters?

P: I just remember the setups, I don’t remember how they played out. I always remember that Aina game on the pirate ship, which you apparently don’t. It was an epic one. It was a long game, with a well developed plot.

S: Was it the one that had the mother and father? And a whole sort of departure and return?

P: I think she might have been on the ship originally with her parents and been captured and taken away from them.

S: Was her father a teddy bear? I remember the father always being a teddy bear. And the mother being a baby doll. Although maybe once the unicorn—that hardly seems possible though!

P: Some of these scenarios I kept using as fantasy templates, so I could be mixing things up. She might have been a fine lady traveling with her parents on the ship and then stolen away by the pirates and gradually ravished and turned into one of them, I feel like that happened, but that could have been my own fantasy, but I’m sure we also had it where she ran away on purpose to join them.

S: We may have played games where we would replay parts of the plot as we changed our conception part way through.

P: So we might go back quite a bit in the narrative to set things up differently?

S: I don’t know if that’s true or not. I feel like we might have done that, because I know I did in my fantasies.

P: I’m sure we went back at least a little way to fork off a different way when we changed our minds. But I don’t feel like they were quite as malleable as my fantasy life, where in my head I would just go through all of the scenarios one after another sometimes, because each one of them was sexy and intriguing in a slightly different way.

S: Yeah, I think that’s true, the games did have more objective reality to us than those.

P: I wonder if that’s because there were dolls to make it more concrete, or because there were two of us.

S: We should try reconstructing one from the beginning.