My daughter, Bethany is 10 years old and she and her friends are always playing Secret Agent games. Beth calls herself Secret Agent Schoolgirl and she is always being called out on missions which always end in her being knocked unconscious and kidnapped by some of the other girls. She is always being chloroformed, gassed, having knock out drops put in her drink or fainting after a neck chop. However, after a while, Beth will use one of her 'gadgets' to help her escape. Her mum thinks this is a bit disturbing but I just think she has a vivid imagination, probably helped by her reading Nancy Drew books. Just wondered in anyone else had or knew of girls who played out similar role play.

Not girls but guys when I was a kid. A girl would play occasionally but it would always be the guys getting ko'ed and fighting.

My sister and I played these games when about that age--I had a sleepy fetish even then and would always knock her out in some way and carry her off. She seemed to be very willing to play. I noticed some of the neighborhood girls enjoyed the games where they were rendered "unconscious" in some way.

Beth really enjoys pretending to be the one to be knocked out and is always willing to talk about it. Before Xmas she was called out to a hotel where the bad girls had booked in but the manager was friendly with them and the 'lift' Beth got into had been rigged to jam between floors and then fill up with knock-out gas, Beth being knocked out instantly and, of course, kidnapped, so there is a lot of thought goes into the game.

I too used to play knock-out games with my sister, who was a year younger than me. Often a cowboy-cowgirl story or a James Bond spy story. My sister would usually make-up the story line, which would involve me playing a bad guy who would sneak up behind her and klunk her on the head with a gun or something. She'd fall on the ground and pretend to be out cold, and I would tie her hand and feet. She would then come to, get out of her bondage, and sneak up on me. We played this until I was about 12-13, and she was 11-12. Funny thing is, a few years later I actually knocked her out (accidentally whacked her in the head on our front porch while I was carry some stuff. Knocked her out cold). For a long time after that, she would regularly tell friends and visitors about my knocking her out. I should add that a few weeks after the accident, I apologized again for knocking her out. Her reply was that it was cool. She said that she always secretly wished that I would have really knocked her out when we played our KO games as children.

It sounds like she also had the fetish. I always wondered if my sister did, even as sh grew out of adolescence. She fainted a couple of times, once in church. Instead of being embarrassed aboutit, she wanted to discuss it later.

I've known so many girls and young women (including my own sister) who seem to treasure their own fainting stories.

I think for most women there's more of a "romantic" than a sexual element to it. Fainting is still sometimes romanticized (and even, in the case of the "Twilight" novels, overtly sexualized) in romantic chic-flicks and novels.

Maybe some girls take pride in fainting simply because it connects them to the fantasy world of idealized female archetypes, just like beating up a bully or scoring a winning touchdown or buying a sporty car connects men to their gender's archetypal idealizations.

My daughter Issy, too also plays knock-out games, based on a Kim Possible type character. called Issy Incredible (my daughter). She is sent out on missions while her friends play goons or robots, who Issy always defeats. However, there is one boy allowed into this girls world, who is the brother of one of the girls and who goes under the quite creative name of Doctor Diabolical! He always has a surprise for the heroine which ends up with Issy Incredible being knocked unconscious or fainting (usually a stun ray, knock-out gas or a super strong robot). Sometimes, he will put a headband around Issy Incredible's head which transfers all her intelligence into a mind stealing machine. I often wonder if my daughter has some kind of sleepy fetish but some of the games are so creative, there is obviously a lot of thought put in and Issy loves talking about them. All thses kids are 8 or 9 years old.