Had a brief convo with a fellow Twitterer about the above photo. She didn’t like its “pornesque” quality, which I can certainly understand. It is obviously highly stylized. But what struck me about the picture, what caught my imagination, is the doll-like quality of the image. To me, the humanness of the model has been stripped, leaving behind an image that is marionette-like, with a porcelain quality that is at once both asexual and charged with a bizarre sexuality that really appeals to me.
There are a couple images that W has caught of me that echo this a bit (at least to my mind.) I have looked at them more than once, caught by the way they distance the real “me” that was experiencing what he was doing to me, and the essence of the image, something that looks like an inanimate object that he has manipulated and place there: a doll.
I even asked W to take the following photo, after he got me down from the ropes above, as I played with the feelings/image of a marionette, bereft of the ropes holding her in place and controlling her:
I don’t watch TV much, but I happened to catch some pictures online of Marie Osmond as a doll is her Dancing With the Stars number. I was frankly shocked by the image, not just by the way she was infantalized, but by the eroticism that (to me) is deeply embedded in the making of a woman into a doll. I wondered if she was a secret fetishist, or if it had been completely accidental on her and her partner’s part.
Later, when I saw this photo of her with her own doll collection, I felt there was no doubt that she knew exactly what she was doing with her dance number.
Some time ago there was a woman called Daisy that I met and shared a glass of wine, sweet touches and kisses with. We also shared a fascination for “dollifying”: she for the concept of making up a woman into a doll, me for being made into one. Combined with W’s prowess with rope, we played with the concept of trying to create some doll images of me. Unfortunately it never came to pass, as family, work, and school obligations prevented us from ever really getting it together after that, but the idea has remained, along with a couple of sketches that she left here at W’s for him to look at.
Seeing that image on Twitter brought the idea back again. I wonder if Daisy reads my blog.
Yoo-hoo, Daisy…where are you??
