Collaring on Collar World: How Censorship Imposes Itself on Art

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had to make some rules up for Collar World specifically so my stories could be marketable, not because they were logical extensions of my thoughts on a society that

The biggest whopper I had to tell about Collar World is that teens had to wait until they were 18 years old before they could get collared or collar someone else, and that they eschewed any dating or sexual activity prior to that.

I had to do that because Amazon and most other retailers are not about to sell or distribute (hi, Smashwords!) any erotica that has underage content. It's legally terra incognito for any erotica writer. I don't honestly believe teen characters as a group would hold back from sexual expression of any kind prior to reaching 18, but here we are. Being able to describe the romantic foibles and fumblings of kinky kids sounds like great fun, but not if you're going to get all erotic about it.

To make up for it, once my characters hit 18 and can start collaring one another, they go from 0 to 60, sex-wise. Once a girl reaches that age, she can be collared by any boy (or girl, if both are so inclined) and they both go nuts with the kinky sex. And instead of asking her out on a date, he gets to kidnap her, sneaking up on her, tying her up and taking her home after stopping off at a police kiosk to register it as a collaring rather than a kidnapping.

And that's also how I get around another requirement imposed by the market, the requirement for consensuality, since at the police kiosk the girl has to agree to the collaring for it to proceed. You can't do nonconsensual at all on Amazon, and a lot of other distributors are not gonna touch it, either.

So many legal and marketing choices are disguised as artistic choices. I think it would be a lot more exciting and suspenseful in a story to have the collaring be something more along the lines of a kidnapping, kind of like the old non-erotic romances, where a pirate would kidnap a comely lady, have sex with her without her consent, and then fall in love with her, generally with her consent since she also falls in love with him.

Well in this modern era that won't fly if you include graphic sex scenes, and no amount of falling in love afterward will make up for it!

So off to the police kiosk it is, where a cop records it as a collaring and sometimes a crowd of neighbors watch and “ooh!” and “aah!” at the young lovers. Sometimes even the girl's parents. (“My little girl is growing up -- her first collaring! Sob!”)

All kinds of sly fun to be had there, and I take full advantage of it in my first Collar World story, Stolen Collar, Stolen Heart which is about a girl's first collaring and was the impetus for much of my thought on the topic.

I also have girls subject to this temporary kidnap/collaring up to half a dozen times because they're temporary collars, kind of a dating thing but a LOT more intense since the slavegirl moves in with the guy and wears his collar. (I'm using maledom/femsub nomenclature here, but the same applies for whatever gender pairings comes up.)

After half a dozen tries, generally the girl gets a Temple Collar or an asexual collar, whatever works for her, really, and she has all the time she needs to figure out what she likes. But quite frequently, the first collaring or one soon afterward leads to Collar Climax and the collar becomes permanent. Collar Climax? Well, that's a science fiction psychological aspect of collaring on Collar World that I will be described in another post.