the doll games
shelley and pamela jackson

MATRON: THE ABJECT

S: But I first wanted to say something about the baby dolls, how they were different. Wasn’t that a different sexual model from Harvey and Dawn, because they were in the same way really flagrant about their sexuality but they were much more bestial. They were sort of grunting and animalic about it—and they sort of charged at people with their butts.

P: They were huge and fat and infantile, so it was particularly obscene. There was a different kind of obscenity to it. Like putting awful makeup and slutty clothes on the baby doll.

S: Matron would jack-knife, and rush at people with her butt like a projectile. Which is really different from Dawn, because with Dawn we were playing out our resentment of the more feminine girls at school, because Dawn was kind of sexy, we thought.

P: She was dainty, she had big breasts...

S: And piquant and snotty features...

P: And Matron was just this bubbling, shapeless mass of sexuality that was much more gross.

S: Very acquisitive, completely without restraint: no shame. She would never be embarrassed to be rejected, because she had no ego, whereas Dawn and Harvey were very vain and felt that they were the sexual ideal.

P: Plus Matron was a dominatrix. She had power, so she didn’t have to be seductive in the way that Dawn was.

S: But there was also Sue, that small pale plastic baby doll, who was the fat ugly friend of the sexy slut, and she also had no shame.

P: I don’t remember her so well. Did she have sex like Matron did?

S: I don’t know if she succeeded, it might have been that her function was to be completely humiliated and denied over and over again.

P: I’m sure that was part of it, because it was the completely abject aspect of those characters that allowed us to play out the humiliation fantasy so pleasurably on them, without any danger, because they deserved it.

S: And also they didn’t particularly feel it.

P: Dawn didn’t feel it either, because she was heartless.

S: Right. That’s interesting, though, because Harvey was more of a romantic. He grieved.

P: And wrote poetry, and slicked his hair back and had a romantic mustache—

S: And he would fall in love. He was the one who had trouble telling the difference between romantic love and sexual love, so he would fall excessively in love with one of our inaccessibly wonderful heroines and write poetry to her, and then try and hump her leg! And he would have no sense of having broken the template of romantic love by doing that. Just like those poems, "Ah Mara, how I long to be fucking you long and hard..."

P: Right. So I wonder, what are the mythological models here? Because these are totally types. Matron is not only a maternal figure but a baby. A sexual mother and a sexual baby at the same time.

S: Yeah, she was the matron, so she was the mother, and she was infantile not just because she was a baby doll but in her boundless greed and primitive conception of desire. Just sort of "smear the ice cream on me." "Let me be covered in —" I don’t know, we wouldn’t have known what to say she should be covered in I don’t think. Did we have a concept of sperm?