Mall of Shame: It’s Sexual Bondage Porn! No, It’s Socialist Propaganda! Stop Arguing You Two – It’s BOTH!

 In my previous post I told you that Mall of Shame is almost entirely sexual bondage porn – and I was right, it is! That’s what makes it such GOOD socialist propaganda. Good propaganda isn’t noticeable, it hovers in the background, unnoticed while it weaves its magic.

For example, I was five or six books into E.M. Foner’s Union Station series before I realized I was reading pure-dee libertarian propaganda disguised as humorous light space opera. I only figured it out when I was brought up short one day by realizing what an utterly miserable life one of the minor characters must be leading, a life of unceasing toil at a dull job he had little interest in, with almost no reward for his toil other than the very barest necessities of life. It wasn’t slavery, but it was close enough for all practical purposes. And it was presented as just a normal thing. This wasn’t SUPPOSED to be a horrible fate, it was this guy’s big opportunity. Of course, things go very well for the guy later in the story but with a very subtle change his story could have been a living hell.

So I did Foner a favor and satirized “Date Night on Union Station” with a story that pointed out the hellishness of a libertarian system in Late Nights On Onion Station which, frankly, is a very ham-handed story that clubs you over the head REALLY HARD with how rotten things are on Union/Onion Station. But hey, that’s parody for ya. It’s not intended to be propaganda.

SPOILERS BE HERE! YAR!!!!

So, I’m going to go into detail on how I injected socialist propaganda into “Mall of Shame” with descriptions of specific scenes and so forth. It will give away plot points, but given that the story is hardcore erotica (or “porn” as it’s also called) it might not matter much to you. Your call whether or not you continue. You have been warned!

One of the themes I wanted to work with was the alienation that capitalism imposes on human beings. There’s a scene early on in the story where Karen notices that the shopgirl’s tone with her has become polite but distant, she is no longer friendly. This sends a chill up Karen’s spine: she recognizes that tone, she has used it herself in her works as a human resources manager. It’s the tone you use to calm an employee whom you are going to have to fuck over in some way. When you hear someone using it, you should be very, very alert.

The shopgirl because of her job in her capitalist business, has to alienate herself from Karen, because she’s “making a scene.” Karen needs help at this moment, but she will have none, because she’s in a mall, the very belly of the capitalist beast, and the only thing that matters in a mall is if you have money to buy the goods and services on sale. The natural impulse to help Karen is alienated, replaced by a responsibility to take care of the business imposed by management, which is why the sales clerk summons the mall cops.

I don’t spell any of this out in the story of course. That would be clumsy, club-you-over-the-head propagandizing. Some writers are clumsy and can’t help such writing, more often, they feel that their Message is Too Important to be rendered subtly, so out comes the Reader Club. This is always a bad idea.  People don’t like being clubbed over the head like baby seals, even with ideas!

 In the story we just note the chill Karen feels when she hears the shopgirl’s tone. Karen ignores it, she is too caught up in her reversal of fortune to realize she should back out of the situation quickly and quietly. 

Karen also ignores the feeling however, because for most of her life she has been a member in good standing of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) which typically includes doctors, lawyers, corporate managers, academics, etc. She’s a Human Resources Manager for a mid-sized corporation, her husband is a tenured professor at a small college. 

And the girl who’s telling her she can’t have the bottle of “Joy of Ecstasy” perfume that she wants is a shopgirl, someone lower than her on the capitalist totem pole: let’s face it, a prole (proleterian). The shopgirl also has brown skin, so there might be some racism in there, too. But Karen would probably ignore a white shopgirl, too. Karen is alienated from the shopgirl and can’t “hear” her because she belongs to a different class than her, so she doesn’t catch the cue that she’s giving Karen that the boom is going to be lowered if she continues to act out.

In any event Karen can’t help acting out, her world is collapsing on her. Specifically, she gets bad news from her husband when her card is declined: he has been laid off -- his tenure turns out to have had limitations (part of the belt-tightening in academia imposed by capitalism). 

Karen herself is currently unemployed but she thought herself secure, that they could easily survive on her husband’s salary indefinitely, and he was tenured! Also, Karen is sure she will be rehired by her old firm soon, they hinted at that when they laid her off. This is just the sort of lie that she as a human resources manager has told employees when they got laid off, but she doesn’t recognize it as a lie when it is told to her.

That’s because she’s a meritocrat, a creature of capitalism’s class structure. She feels that she and her husband have gotten ahead through hard work and skill and that because of that they live by different rules than other, lesser beings (proles).  Meritocrats are deeply alienated not just from the proletariat, but from one another and themselves.

Karen in fact arrives at her situation precisely because of the effects her job has had on her personality. She’s a terror, a ruthless and successful corporate climber. Nobody dares to cross her. She wasn’t laid off because of incompetence, she was just what the top managers wanted in a human resources manager, a ruthless force. Her job was simply automated out of existence, as Artificial Intelligence made further inroads into mid-level management. If they had needed a human mid-level human resources manager at all, they would have kept her.

Like most meritocrats, Karen never believed she could lose her job to automation. She was so wrong.

And the ruthlessness and general “Karen-ness” that made her so successful carried over into her marriage. Her husband had not told her about his job loss because he was terrified to do so. The bad investment that sealed their financial doom was a desperate attempt on his part to restore their fortunes without Karen ever finding out about it. Desperation created by fear.

And that’s how Karen found out about her economic woes so suddenly, and so unfortunately, when her credit card is declined.

When the financial rug is pulled out from under Karen, she panics. The shoplifting isn’t a product of necessity or anything like it. She doesn’t need a $600 bottle of perfume in any real sense. But what Karen desperately needs is to be the sort of woman who can afford a $600 bottle of perfume. And what she finds out from her husband is that she is not that. THAT’S why she is so insanely intent on getting that perfume. It represents her still being a PMC member of the bourgeosie. And she is DESPERATE for that.

This being a mall, Karen can get herself out of trouble just by coming up with the money for the perfume. But her husband can’t do that for her, he has emptied all their accounts to maintain his deception and make his very bad investment. The Punishment Pit being so final in nature, the mall cops know she’s dead broke because if she had ANY financial resources, she would have used them.

(Karen is the least likable character I’ve ever created, but she and her husbands are victims of capitalism, too. They’re just utterly incapable of understanding it at present.)

Karen’s poverty is why the mall cops feel safe in manhandling Karen and dragging her off to the Security station to be tried by the mall arbitrator. Which given all the security cams, is a VERY pro forma process, and Karen is found guilty in minutes.

Then she’s processed: stripped, bound, fitted with a shock device and a dildo wand, and set out for public viewing. Now that’s she a poor person, she’s just so much meat for the machine.

Of course all of this social analysis does not show up in the story, it would stop it cold like a pig in a python. It’s the underpinnings to the story, which is pure porn on the surface. Which makes it more effective as propaganda as readers aren’t aware of the hidden structure of capitalist alienation that feeds the story, disguised as an excuse for nonconsensual kinky sex displays in a mall.

And of course when the action of the story really gets going we move way beyond what’s currently acceptable in terms of public nudity and sex, especially in malls. I explain it away as a program needed because actual jails are full of criminals who are killing people and blowing people up for revolutionary reasons. (The proles are getting restless!) But it’s actually because this is hardcore erotica, dammit. Gotta provide those kinky thrills to the readers!

Plus it’s fun to violate the upper middle class norms that govern malls so very, very thoroughly in my story. And it’s important to enjoy one’s work. And it’s important for one’s READERS to enjoy one’s work.

Star Treque: Attack of the Kinky Slave Girls! -- An Erotic Parody (Collar World Book 6) Now On Amazon

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I enjoyed parodying "Late Night On Onion Station" so I thought I'd give parody another shot, this time a SLIGHTLY better-known property, "Star Trek." I'm a fan, watched TOS, the Next Generation and some episode of Voyager and Enterprise, as well as all of the movies. I even married a woman who went to Dragoncon wearing a tribble suit. I didn't marry her FOR that reason, but it should be noted that it didn't deter me in the slightest, in fact, it was cool to me.

So I felt fully qualified to parody Star Trek. I decided to base my parody on TOS, because let's face it, there's a LOT of room for parody there. Most especially sexual parody, since The Original Series was an unreconstructed product of the sixties, with Captain Kirk jumping on any green-skinned alien woman he can find and Lt. Baskethead (I mean, Rand) sexing up the show for no particular reason, a task soon taken over by Nichelle Nichols.

I didn't entirely confine myself to TOS characters, I included Lieutenant Worf (Lt. Rorf Woof in my story) from Next Generation mainly because I was going to have Klingons, too, and he would come in handy for several reasons.

For the same reason, I had an Orion slave girl ("Aurion" in my story) as a cultural attache on the crew, helping integrate the Orions into the Federation, or as I called it, the Agglomeration. Encountering the Empire of the Collar (essentially, Collar World in space with gigantic men, because why the hell not?) the Participation Prize crew would naturally call on an Aurion slave girl for advice on how to deal with such a sexy menace.

Especially since the Empire of the Collar is technologically far in advance of both the Agglomeration and the Klingons (“Klaxons” in my story). It would have made an interesting story for Star Trek, except of course that Star Trek would never have been sex-positive and kink-positive.

And of course, being an erotic parody I was free to follow the sexiest, kinkiest elements of the story as far as I wanted to, which was very far, indeed. And I did not neglect the humor either, I had a LOT of fun with story and characters.

It's a shame media Trek could never follow where I have gone before. I've been to science fiction conventions, I've SEEN what the fan base gets up to, left on their own. They would have loved it. In the meantime, there's my parody, I'm hoping fans will love it. Maybe you will, too. Either way, live long and pump her.

Why Did I Write A Parody of the EarthCent Ambassador Series?

So, my new novelette, "Late Nights At Onion Station" is a parody of the EarthCent Ambassador series by I.M. Foner.

I have not done any parodies before, though it's very clear I like humor and I read a LOT. Almost all of my stories have been completely original works, no fannish stuff among them. I have my own stories to tell, thankyewverymuch, and although I've taken some humorous jabs at this and that, I've never outright parodied anything.

And like most parodists, I'm a fan of what I'm parodying. I've read and enjoyed the entire EarthCent Ambassador series. But the definition of “parody” explains why I did it: “a parody targets or mimics an original work to make a point.” And I wrote “Late Nights At Onion Station” to make a point about something that bothered me about the original work: its libertarianism. I'm more of a socialist.

The libertarianism in the Earthcent Ambassador series is very subtle, well buried in the story. But once you see it, you can't unsee it: the EarthCent Ambassador series is a pure libertarian fantasy at heart. There are little clues: the protagonist, despite being the chief representative of humans on Union Station, is paid very little money, so little that she lives in a slummy area of the human sector of Union Station and has to save up money to buy a comfy chair.

Why is she paid so little despite her important government position? Because she's a government official, of course, and government is not important in libertarian fantasy land. While the protagonist of Union Station makes so little money that the food at diplomatic receptions is an important part of her diet, all her friends and acquaintances who are independent businesspeople make huge amounts of money from their activities. They can't do anything at all without making huge piles of money. Because they're independent entrepreneurs, you see: the good guys.

As a socialist, this was annoying, but what was REALLY annoying was the usual libertarian obliviousness to the fate of those who don't work out well in his paradise. This is in fact my major problem with libertarianism in general: their focus is always on those who succeed in libertarian society, with a general feeling that almost anyone can succeed if you put forth a little effort, gosh darn it!

Most libertarians, in fact, have little or no interest in what happens to those who don't do well in their libertarian fantasy. Often you get a sense that they would be fine with people who aren't good bargainers in the free and open markets starving to death and dying, that they would happily kick their bodies aside on their way to the bank.

You can see this by the way libertarian authors focus on the successes in their stories and ignore the losers. The successful entrepreneurs who make scads of money and get loads of power in their lives are the FUN part of the libertarian fantasy. Of course that's who gets all the attention in a libertarian story.

But if you don't pay attention to what happens to all the other people in your society, you're basically building a hell on Earth, and honestly, that's what I think most libertarians are doing. They don't WANT to create a hell on Earth, any more than the original Communists wanted to create the Soviet Union from Imperial Russia, but as the Soviet Union demonstrated (and China) if you're at all sloppy in thinking about how you get to your paradise, you can so very, very easily wind up with a dictatorship or an oligarchy that commits crimes against humanity without so much as blinking.

And libertarians are even worse than Communists in this respect. They really, really don't want to deal seriously with the hard part of their fantasy, which is how do you handle the people who don't do so well in the free and open marketplace? The phrase “ideological blinders” was invented for this phenomenon. Libertarians are like architects who want to build a skyscraper that will truly scrape the clouds, but have little or no interest in building a solid foundation.

The problem is, when you look at any group of human beings statistically, for almost any set of abilities and skills, including success in business, if you graph the results it forms a bell curve, with the bulk of people falling in the middle of the curve, and a considerable portion (half, even!) falling on the wrong side of the halfway mark. That being the case, you need to ensure that your system, whatever it is, provides a decent standard of living to the people who fall on that wrong side, not just the lucky winners.

Just assuming that everyone will magically be above average in a libertarian scheme is ridiculous, but a lot of libertarians do just that.

I think the reason that libertarians aren't willing to address the “ground floor” issues is that it may require making an exception to their rule that every problem can be solved by the invisible hand of an unfettered marketplace.

It might require some crude actions like taxing the very rich and successful (the beneficiaries of the invisible hand) at higher rates to fund housing, food and medical care for the poor. It might require, in short, some form of socialism.

It's time to call the belief that the invisible hand of the marketplace can solve all social problems and allow people to live free of government of any kind what it is: magical thinking.

And that's what really bugs me about libertarians, that they let this magical thinking fuck them up time and time again, because you know, if they took the time and effort to work out how a libertarian society could help the losers in the marketplace, they might just have a robust ideology that could compete successfully with democratic socialism.

But they can't, they won't and they don't, and so they remain a fringe, though a markedly more successful fringe than their ideology deserves, because many parts of it (the economic parts) dovetail very nicely with traditional conservatism.

And so you have many, many science fiction books written with this profoundly dumb, magical thinking, wish fulfillment hoo-ha presented as a wonderful basis for a society to exist on.

I found a very nice way to dramatize the problems with libertarianism in the story. I also manage to point out how adherence to libertarian principles makes one inherently blind to the suffering of others. And I ramped it all up to 11, to make it funny. And by damn, it IS funny. Some of the best humor comes from annoyance. I hope you enjoy it.

Somebody Has Written A Parody of "Date Night On Union Station" and I'm Pretty Sure It Was Me

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If you LOVED Date Night On Union Station (Book 1 of the EarthCent Ambassador series) you'll LOVE Late Nights On Onion Station the sexy, sexy parody of "Date Night on Union Station" written by the infamous Pat Powers, author of Crazy Aunts and Scary Uncles and Jenkie Jenkins, Interstellar Sex Reporter.

Onion Station lies in the outermost reaches of human-explored space, a gigantic artifact created by the alien Zuks, artificial intelligences that are so badly programmed that they are extreme libertarians. They run Onion Station with a fine disregard for safety, comfort and well-being of the various alien species that dwell in their station, including the humans.

But it's the beings who live in Onion Station that make it the unique, exciting and strange place that it is, and when the Earth Ambassador to Onion Station starts dating an actual human man (much to her mother's relief) everything changes on Onion Station. This simple act of dating will bring together a fascinating group of characters:

Kitty Reinhardt, the human ambassador to Onion Station, is totally dedicated to her work. She earns the 25 cents an hour that the tight-fisted Zuks pay her the hard way, i.e., attending diplomatic receptions and helping Earth firms negotiate trade deals with the many other alien races in Zuk space. She's proud of what she does for humans in her role as ambassador (but it is too bad about the starving people who die regularly in the lower corridors of the human sector of Onion Station). But it's her relationship with her more than just comfortable chair that is a source of deep shame to her, even though she's not at all guilty about her taste for kinky maledom/femsub bondage sex.

Mike Bonus, the trader with a heart of gold who buys the contracts of starving humans by the dozens on the cheap at Onion Station and sells them off to slave traders on crapsack worlds for a fat profit – and who is revered as a saint by the humans whose contracts he sells.

Kitty Reinhardt's chair, which seems sentient to Kitty, given that it converses with her and does things to her that previously were confined to safely nonsentient machines like vibrators -- but which the Zuks SWEAR is not sentient.

The Sisters of Mercy, who rescue starving humans crawling through the mean corridors of Union Station ... but whom many starvelings would describe as anything BUT merciful.

Dweezil the Dreddarian, a six-limbed otterlike alien with a sharp eye for info-trading and a very commercial approach to friendship.

The Fringe, treelike aliens who have a taste for Earth epiphytes to hang in their canopies.

And the Zuks, the artificial intelligences who run Onion Station and live in fear of the massive artificial intelligence that runs the station itself, because it's definitely one of your more godlike artificial intelligences, and it's just as benevolent as the Zuks who created it.

But most of all, you'll have fun, and lots of it, as a favorite series is parodied senseless by someone who has read and enjoyed every book in the series.

What can I say, I'm a sucker for space opera!

So go ahead, dig in already. And if you have not read "Date Night on Union Station" go ahead, get over there, dig in, you'll enjoy it! The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited! It's sexless, but it's fun. And "Late Nights On Onion Station" well, it provides all the kinky sex an adult mind needs to ... adult ... and it's ALSO on Kindle Unlimited!

Get Witless On Lothar!

Get Witless or Be Witty ... It's YOUR Choice! Image source: Hottitude Press.

OK, fans of my adult website Bondagerotica (Google it, I'm not doing any direct links from my wholesome author blog) will remember that I did a series called "Witless on Lothar" way back when, and I realized that I could easily collect them and put them in book form for sale on Amazon, so i did. And when I finished, I realized, "This is not erotica, there's only two sex scenes and they're only a few paragraphs long."

What they were, actually, was political satire. It was all about the contrast between the protagonists (political pundit Anne Coaltar) highly politicized view of the world and the barbaric (and really dumb and unbelievable) reality of Gor. Then former presidential candidate Hilarity Clanton winds up being First Girl in the slave kennels where Anne winds up, because "Duh!"

It was so much fun to write. I'm hoping it will be as much fun for others to read.

Here's the blurb:

When political pundit Anne Coaltar wakes up on a strange new world naked and chained to a huge rock after what must have been a hell of a party, she naturally assumes it's a practical joke. Or perhaps that it's one of those dreams where you think you are awake but really are not. But when she's accosted by hard-looking alpha males who look like they stepped out of a Renfair and subjected to indignities that outstrip ANYTHING she had ever suffered at the hands of even the most rabid democrat, Anne realizes this MIGHT be more than a joke, or a dream. If it is a dream, it is a very NAUGHTY dream.

But this is just the BEGINNING for Anne, as she's drawn farther and farther into this dream, or world, or most likely, democratic plot to discredit her. Anne winds up in a slave kennel and discovers that her superior in the slave kennel hierarchy is none other than Hilarity Clanton, her greatest enemy and candidate for the US Presidency!

It it all a dream, a subconscious demon brew of repressed lust and desire that runs counter to Anne's every conservative desire? Is it a democratic plot to discredit Anne? Or is it a science fiction reality that has launched her across the stars only to be confronted with something out of a medieval fantasy?

Find out as you explore the world of the Witless On Lothar!