POLLY-MORPHOUS PERVERSE
On perversion AND play AND the danger of filling holes with nostalgia
This piece was commissioned by 16 Nicholson St Gallery to accompany Shae Myles’ exhibition Hush Lil Baby, supported by Henry Moore Foundation and Creative Scotland.
What follows may seem like a bunch of sexy stuff about a toy, a children's toy and Baby Girl maybe you’re down with the kind of imagery that conjures? Fucking and toys. Maybe you like an ambiguous aesthetic, or maybe it’s the underlying violence of it that pricks your interest, after all “They’re only dolls” permits a subtle but very real arena in which sadistic violence can flourish [1].
We live in a time where a feature-length advert for a doll ending on a punch line about having a vagina passes as cinema, so I’m not overly concerned with how writing about fucking and a children’s toy might come across. And to be honest, I like the idea that you might feel some discomfort reading this, why wouldn’t you? Oscar had the right idea when he said “Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” [2] So feel uneasy, because this isn’t so much about fucking Polly Pocket, or more to the point tiny Polly fucking us.
Introducing, new from Blue Bird: Pollytics
Polly Pocket is politics. She’s an archetype of our association of the domestic with play, something you do in your free time, without remittance, freely and for free. A childhood step towards the feminisation and devaluing of care that perpetuates so much global, material inequality and makes Wages for housework! a joke.
She’s also economics. A phantom reified. Femininity as value and then landfill. Karl might talk about her hidden nature in terms of a secret, he might use the word fetish [3] and you might even find that interesting for a moment, until of course he puts the word ‘commodity’ in front it and, oh look at the time.
She is a fetish object, Sigmund might tell you [4]. Which would make those of us playing with her fetishists straddling the state of division between realness and fantasy and you know what that means right? It means living between non-castration and the fear of it [5]. Gulp.
Polly is a conduit for the fetishist caught between having and being. And that of course would be Jacques [6] and also that’s enough of that.
If you ask a fetishist what fetishism is they’ll probably tell you it’s a requirement. Not so much a practice, or play, but a need. Mind you not all of us will say this, like so many terms its place in wider discourse on sexuality (or discourse on perversion) is unstable.
Requirement is not how the dead white guys above would have us think about it either. Fetishism in theory is just as unstable a category as it is amongst those who fetishize. In fact, its unstable nature and its relationship to space are the only aspects of it as an idea that seem, well, stable.
POLLY IS PERVERTED
Fetish takes desire and traps it in space, but otherwise it is ambiguous and ambiguity is perverted.
Polly is perverted too. Dollification, statues, DD/DMLG, Babies and their candy pink aesthetics, I could list any number of more or less commonplace kinks, dynamics or fetishes here, but I’m less interested in the content and more in the form. Myles’ Polly is fantasy, not the content of it. She is the rehearsal space for living beyond opposites, a tiny figure-head of the possibility of embodying alternatives and multitudes. Polly is play and the thing about play is that it’s pretending for real.
Adulthood forgets that play is a safe space and so, as with any repression, its radical potential haunts our culture and our psyches as danger. Adulthood separates play from work, making it notwork, which is fine until you realise notwork still defines you as a worker. Adulthood silos off solo-play into disorders of the mind and collective play into zones of ambiguity, into art, into kink and then much like capital it neutralises what it can through co-optation and devalues the rest through censorship.
In childhood play is being. It is making sense of self/other/collective, an immersive investigation into the hinterlands of you and me and us, into the boundaries that make and define us. It is performance and lived experience. It exists both within and outside of the world we are socialised into. It is the exploration of power and power dynamics. Solo-play invokes our Self as omniscient MCP, group play takes our Self into the collective game.
MAIN CHARACTER PLAY
In adulthood play is no different, except for the complication that as adults we are haunted, by history, by what we’ve forgotten and by the archetypes that link the two. Play like art and kink exists outside of the norms of what it means to be productive, useful or valuable. This makes the artist a madperson, the kinkster a pervert and what of the Polly Pocket player? Polly Pocket may evoke girlhood, its aesthetics, its codes, its house rules, but she and the space she occupies are haunted now too.
Fetishism is the trapping of desire in space. It is the projection of desire onto a thing, which gives it an x and a y and a z axis, which then codifies it in space and in time and therefore culturally, and historically, scientifically even. It is the objectification of subjective reality.
Play can be understood in similar terms, as the formation of another iteration of the Self in space and time, codified and contextualised again, and again, and so on.
Play space dynamics
Myle’s Polly is girlhood solidified in space-time, aware of relational dynamics and her site specificity, which makes her an ethical being. She straddles doll-hood and the ethical realm like a pro, respecting boundaries whilst pushing at them, gently, towards even more ambiguity, towards not only liminal space, but Common space, that space between the Public and the Private [7].
Polly Pocket’s universe is a transgressive interiority as much as a domestic, sovereign realm. A zone inaccessible to ‘boys’ because of its thin border of pink plastic and its layers upon layers of code and secrecy. To them and the gaze they will grow into Polly Pocket is a girlified peep show, “Home to both the exhibitionist and voyeur” I hear the Bataille boys mansplaining. And maybe they’re right, but they’ve never felt the emancipatory potential of those teeny-tiny, pink parts or felt them swell and grow and usurp a narrative.
Polly Pocket is a queendom
Secrets, like play, require space. They require boundaries. This is mine. This is yours. They require active and passive roles. A teller and a keeper; Wanna see what’s new? I’m Polly Pocket and I’m a femme top, didn’t you know? If you’re struggling to see it changing the lens won’t help, you have to dismantle the camera.
What’s new Baby Girl is a universe beyond the archetypes of power dynamics, beyond the whips and chains of femme domme tropes, beyond the dull aesthetics of a monothematic, contained kink and BDSM (sub)culture, beyond the D/s binary and the Switch that only reinforces it, beyond pleasure in control and release, beyond pleasure in collaboration.
I’ll tell you a secret
Look beyond all that and you’ll see a different type of play, an expansive freedom, transgressive, queer. It’ll feel more and more dangerous the closer you get to it.
Now sign the waiver.
The darkest pinks only look black
Adulthood forgets and fills holes with nostalgia. It fills holes with cliché and a melange of conservative politics masquerading as safety. Nostos as in return home, algia as in pain.
Let’s play with our pain as a way of returning home.
Play in adulthood contends with a heavier kind of nostalgia. A radical, unrelenting and disoriented longing, a desperate, prelinguistic feeling, a deep forgotten memory of a time when our desires and ideas weren’t oriented by the social – nostalgia is a yearning for polymorphous perversity.
Play in adulthood is subversive. It’s a subversion of the social order, yes, but it can also be a subversion of the very fabric of material reality, a remaking and transforming of the world into multiple, alternative versions. Pink without pretty. Femininity without submission. Masculinity without toxicity. Gender without a binary.
Freedom is a tightrope between that nostalgia and that subversion.
And play - like art and kink - is a participatory testing ground for our ethics.
Play is very fucking serious.
So now what? Now let’s do it for real, don’t be chicken.
[1] For an incredible investigation of this very idea see Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty.
[2] Attributed to Oscar Wilde by writer Michael Cunningham in 1995 in the journal “Provincetown Arts”, but we can’t be sure Oscar actually said it and it doesn’t appear in any compendiums of his stuff.
[3] Karl Marx babes.
[4] Sigmund Freud in his Three Essays on Sexuality
[5] Apologies for the reductive nature of this bit, but also like, what do you expect from a piece of writing with a title like Polly-morphouse Perverse?
[6] Jacques Lacan. Like Freud, but less dick more power.
[7] For an in-depth look at the idea of space beyond the pubic and private (both in architectural and political terms) see Stavros Stavrides’ Common Space.