The letter I remember most vividly was “the fruit one”. The correspondent had confessed to Dolly Doctor the details of a masturbation habit that – from memory – involved not only the somewhat expected banana but entirely surprising nectarines. My best friend, reading the magazine aloud, attempted to intone the seriousness of the young woman’s concern between bouts of hysterical giggles. Am I normal? pleaded the letter. We roared. By the time it came to read the doctor’s soft advice, my best friend was laughing too hard to keep reading.
There were maybe four of us, in various combinations of pyjama, rolling about the floor of my best friend’s father’s flat, stuffed with cake and overflowing with the full flavours of teenage nastiness; judging others without mercy, inflating the self by deflating the other, engaging in a competitive “normalcy” that would avow a solid, conformist puritanism within seconds of pretending to some detailed, wild experience.
We were 14, maybe 15, and many times we splayed ourselves on that floor and other floors across our suburban wilderness, reading Dolly magazines aloud to mock the readership we imagined for them: girls less cool than us, less funny, younger, stupid, too dumb to guess what boys were doing to them, paranoid and insecure around sex, taste, love and clumsy at masturbation.
We were, of course, that precise audience ourselves; awkward and uncomfortable, personalities squeezed and misshapen by bodies fast outgrowing the selfhood demanded to manage them. It’s extraordinary to consider the amount of pretending that teenagers do at the same time they fail to recognise it in others. Our adolescent narcissism insisted on “the fruit one’s” veracity, even as we subsequently spent hours comprising our own made-up Dolly Doctor letters in response to it, outdoing one another’s suggestions for dirtiness. I clearly remember, “What about ‘I fuck Lego’?” shouted across the room.
Now, Dolly magazine, having falling victim to the digital world, is ceasing to print after 46 years. Recalling that precise evening in the early 90s, the slick pages of the magazine, the taste of cake, the fibres of the carpet, I am provoked to profound respect of the adult writers and editors who engaged all those years of teenage nonsense.
No matter how outrageous the teenage suggestion, Dolly’s voice was always steady: yes, you’re normal, but if it’s causing pain or problems in your life, please see a doctor. As kids, we thought the advice was individual but the lesson was collective. I was never too preoccupied with fruit, but when only a couple of years later it took me a couple of weeks too many to recover from a broken heart, the repeated, gentle message to seek out some extra help was soundly heeded. Please remember, the feminist revolution took place in the space of a historical blink – my own generation were offered experiences our mothers had never imagined. These magazines guided us through new social-sexual territories our own parents couldn’t know – and of which we could not tell them.
Australian writer Casey Bennetto was opining on Facebook recently his concern that the “morality plays” of gentle sitcoms that taught our generation of young people mores and consequences has been superseded by years of reality television that instead rewards behaviour at its most entertaining and extreme.
I contemplate the end of Dolly magazine and I ponder similar consequences in magazine media, and its specific effect on young girls. There was a message consistency that came from Dolly – of respect, self-care, boundaried behaviour – that we learned from their careful editorial even as we thought we were laughing at it. The self-selected, click-bait channels of post-truth internet swap it for chaos.
Dear fruit-lover, you may indeed be normal, but whose voice can you now trust to tell you so?
What was the best lesson you learned from Dolly Doctor? Tell us in the comments
