The dolls who discovered sex through Terra Chat
The sexual awakening of dolls is that clumsy thing: an attempt to find one's own pleasure in another's desire, a doubt that has no consolation, a censored interest.
This year, for my birthday, my friends organized a kind of quiz under the premise 'who knows Alba best?' It's unbearably narcissistic to admit, but it's very likely that I was the person who had the most fun during the game (in which, obviously, I wasn't competing). The wit of their questions reached its climax with the following statement: "What did Alba do in the afternoons when she was little?" From among the possible answers, the one everyone selected was "Watching Disney Channel and eating sunflower seeds at the godmother's." And they're right. A worryingly good part of my evenings were spent doing this: remaining mesmerized in front of the screen, without much control or supervision, while on the other side of the house my godmother did exactly the same.
At that time, they had a contract with Canal+, so flipping through that litany of channels was a pastime in itself. Disney alone had about three channels. Then came Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Fox Kids… And since a new one would appear every now and then, I never stopped browsing the programming. Even though I knew what number the ones I was interested in were on, my greed always pushed me to go a little beyond the borders of childhood, into unknown territory. My short expeditions into more adult universes brought me great discoveries, like the music channels: Los 40, Los 40 Latino, and MTV. I bounced from one to the other, hoping to find the music video for the song I'd just become obsessed with after hearing it on the radio. My PrerogativeBritney Spears's "I'm a Girl" was one of them. For weeks—a life that must have been a hit back then—I waited, sitting on the couch, for the singer to show up driving that Porsche and say, "They say I'm Crazyto then fall into a pool. From the water, she'd emerge dancing on top of the hood, leaving her completely drenched and me speechless. The main event came on the return trip, when Britney made me hold my finger on the remote control so that if someone opened the door, she'd suddenly want to switch to the channel. Shaking my ass in front of a man, half-naked, with a whip in my hand, was best done in secret.
My forays into the confines of cable television turned that device into an inexhaustible universe. Landing, each peak, on a different channel I wasn't yet familiar with made me feel like an explorer who had just colonized a new continent. While I did end up finding series to get hooked on—reruns of Journalists and Companions–, often ended up either in disappointing places – cooking channels, movies western, documentaries–, or too sordid, in which the fright made me turn off the television in a fit of rage, as if I had just committed a crime and the police were pointing a spotlight at me.
However, I soon replaced the television screen with another: the computer monitor they installed for me so I could chat on Messenger. The luminous glass in front of which I spent hours had changed, while the clandestinity was the same. An even more infinite universe opened up before us, some teenage dolls that we had already seen Britney in her underwear rub herself on a bed of silk sheets. Then a rumor began to spread about the things you could find in the webcam of the Terra Chat, so the fun with friends was connecting with some stranger and making him believe our fantasies, shocking ourselves and pissing ourselves laughing. Driven by morbid curiosity, fun and the only three impulses that move any teenager, we ended up like the teenage character Mila in the movie Creature, by Elena Martín Gimeno: watching, with her neck twisted, a screen where mysterious silhouettes were insinuated, accompanied by unpredictable hands, always from a disturbing angle.
The sexual awakening of dolls is that clumsy thing: an attempt to find one's own pleasure in another's desire, a doubt that has no consolation, a censored interest. Or that is the conclusion I came to after reading the text by Beasts, a monologue by actress Monica Dolan, performed in Catalan by Marta Marco. The play poses the dilemma of Lila, a healthy daughter of this hypersexualized society who is in a hurry to become a woman. With her mother's help, the doll, now eight years old, manages to get a breast augmentation and—later—ends up being raped, as an allegory of what it means to be a woman in a sexist world: both victim and culprit. The case of this fiction also begins with a doll who likes to dance sexily in front of MTV. And this makes me wonder: at what exact moment does the path go wrong? Where is the balance between freedom and protection? How can we correct a sexuality that we acquire, manipulated by default?
