Cherchez la femme

Wherever there's a problem, look for the woman. That's part of what I'm doing with the doll project - looking for her, looking for the problems with her. And she is problematic. Tricky. Full of things that on first glance seem natural or normal. Obvious. But actually turn out to be smoke and mirrors, diversionary tactics. Take shoes, for example. High heels = feminine. There's a fairly common social staple, but thinking about why this might be so, suddenly causes all sorts of confusion. There's nothing natural or inherently "womanly" about high heels. They make us taller, when "naturally" we are generally shorter than men, they make us walk funny and cause all sorts of problems for our biologically-issued real bodies. But they do make us "feminine". Our legs are elongated, feet bent in a mimicry of the throes of orgasm, our bottoms and chest thrust out to compensate for the fact that we are constantly trying not to fall over. And we have to walk slowly, more carefully, with more thought for how we look - they make us into a display item.

The only real woman in the doll project is me, and she has very little to do with what I actually look like. The contrast between who I am and what I do when I become a doll is part of the fetish - the clash between my own flesh, my own personality, my own feelings and the artifice of the feminine, passive and empty doll. The important thing, I've found, is to draw a line between my own identity as a woman and the feminised doll. The two aren't the same. A man could also do the latter (which would be extremely interesting, and anyone who wants to come play should contact me). I'm a female drag queen, playing up and performing my own socially constructed gender and trying not to slide into pantomime damery.

The doll project is in part, about looking for the femme/feminine, that mysterious "other" traditionally ascribed to be the stuff of woman, but really a fabricated form that fascinates, full of faerie glamour, vanishing in the morning. A woman is born, more or less. The feminine is built. It's a doll, through and through. The doll is put on and taken off. Very little of what it does is real. I'm a big fraud, a fake, but a knowing fake, with my knowing smile. Which is another problem - sometimes I wonder if I'm cheating, because I am dressing up and putting on an act. Does that mean that part of my BDSM is faked, or that being fake is part of my kink? I like to think that the latter is true, that the doll fetish is a fetish for the unreal, for the fabricated, plastic and wipe-clean. A space in which to play.