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.

"Sex Station Slut" is hardcore sexual bondage rape socialist propaganda science fiction porn!

 

Get it here at Smashwords! (Kindle format available)

Here’s a little scene from a great sports movie, “Bull Durham,” that describes my creative process. I don’t know where the story is gonna go!

Take “Sex Station Slut” for example. Like some of my stories (OK, a lot of them) it had its beginning in a pornographic image. [This image here, a hentai.](https://i.imgur.com/MA1F4il.jpg) It’s not the best hentai in terms of graphic quality. Particularly bad is the left leg, where the artist CLEARLY had some issues with handling foreshortening properly, so that the left leg appears to be about half the size of the right leg. 

But that’s not important. What really matters is that the image is insanely hot. The figure of the bound, naked woman is ripe and round and her breasts are large. She’s posed in what appears to be mid-writhe. Why is she writhing? Some of it might be the giant buttplug in her ass. (The butplug n her ass doesn’t bear looking at closely, or thinking about at all. It just serves to make her look sexually impaled.)

But the real clue is her pussy, which is reddened and damp. It looks like someone has been fucking it senseless, or at the very least vibrating it with a wand or finger banging it. Whatever, her pussy is the very picture of female sexual arousal.

Combined with her dynamic pose straining against the ropes that hold her, and the big gag that covers her mouth, and her wide open eyes, she’s just a vision of helpless female sexual arousal. You just want to jump on that pussy and fuck it senseless and make her scream with pleasure into her gag as she writhes helplessly beneath you while you fuck her brains out.

And that’s the feeling I wanted to capture in my story, that jump-on-it raw lust fuck it now feeling.

So I started out writing a story about a horny young dude with money in his pocket wanting to get it on on a Friday night, and wound up writing hardcore socialist bondage rape porn about the way capitalism alienates people from one another, and from their own feelings.

Really. That’s what happened. I had thought about capitalism and alienation before, but never from the perspective of bondage porn. It was always political in nature when I thought about it.

But my main character said early on “That’s capitalism for ya.” It was a throwaway comment, comparing capitalism to the weather, something huge you can’t do much about, just shrug and go on.  And the crux of the story is what sort of relationship might arise from all the intense bondage sex they have. But the male character kept having issues because of the female character’s job.

And that’s when I figured out what was going on, and I went with it, and that’s how I wound up writing socialist propaganda hardcore bondage rape porn.

Now, I tried to go easy on the socialism, and I think I did a pretty good job It was easy in a sense, because it was a relationship story and it was porn, so I kept things focused on their sexual action and their personal relationship, and tried to keep it to the natural thoughts the protagonist would have … no sudden outbursts of speculation on the nature of capitalism and its debilitating effects on human relationships. I just showed the relationship being degraded by the inbuilt assumptions of the protagonist.

I strongly suspect that no one would recognize it as socialist propaganda if I didn’t point it out as such.

The female protagonist is not the POV character, and she spends a lot of time gagged, but when she does talk she is not very forthcoming. She has the kind of clear perspective that people sometimes get when they are on the very bottom of the social totem pole. But she also knows that, being on the bottom of the social totem pole, nobody cares about her opinions. (Something being bound and gagged a lot while strangers rape her has taught her.)

I also found it easy to keep my socialist propaganda in the background because I set my story in my Basic universe, where most people are the survivors of a genocidal war between regular folks and oligarchs that damn near wiped out both sides, with the regular folks survivors, still numbering in the hundreds of millions (but no longer in billions) guaranteed a Basic Income since almost all jobs are automated and the oligarchs own all the machines.

The resulting society is kind of utopia, and kind of a dystopia, depending on your point of view and your experiences. For the oligarchs, it’s a utopia, they have wealth beyond measure and can do whatever they like, constrained only by the knowledge that there are only a few hundred of them and if they make things too tough for the regular folks they might just get wiped out if there’s another war. As they learned in the previous war, they might have all the weapons and all the tech and be able to kill regular folks en masse, but when millions of people are willing to risk death to kill you, you die, even if the chances of your dying are a million to one.

Still, if you can just resist the impulse toward genocide, life is pretty sweet for oligarchs.

Life is also very sweet for Premies, or Premium citizens, those few people whom the oligarchs need to perform important tasks for them. They live like rock stars, with beach mansions and very comfortable lifestyles in general, including the ability to obtain Basics who have misbehaved as sex slaves through the Pet Girl program (I’ve got a freebie book about a Pet Girl called Pet Shop Slave Girls #1 Katie -- feel free to check it out, better yet check out the novel I wrote about a Pet Shop slavegirl, Nataly: Virgin Auction. 

Premies live like medieval lords when they aren’t working for the oligarchs, and there is a lot of media interest in their goings and doings and parties – they are celebrities, in essence.

Life is also pretty damned good for Basics if they can stay out of trouble, which mostly consists of not committing acts of violence or stealing. They get all their Basic needs (housing, food, clothing, medical care) taken care of for free, and a lot more than that, actually. Here’s a bit from the promo for “Nataly: Virgin Auction” that shows how good Basics have it:

>Everything went to hell for Nataly when her dad lost his job as a programmer and he and the family went broke and had to fall back on Basic Income to survive. Nataly, her father and mother found themselves trapped in a nightmarish reality in which they had to eat PRINTED steak and lobster instead of the real thing, when they couldn't charter a private jet for a family vacation, but had to SHARE a jet with other Basics on vacation, and in which they couldn't buy first-run designer fashions straight from the runways of Paris, Rome and New York, but had to wait a MONTH to buy incredibly cheap knock-offs (once again, PRINTED instead of handmade), and endure other such indignities too numerous to mention. 

As you can see, Basics have it pretty good. Vacations, designer clothes, lobster and steak for dinner every day if they like. Cheap 3D printer tech has made material want a thing of the past.

And if you’re a Basic with any intellectual interests, the ollies will not only allow you to pursue them, but will actively HELP you pursue them. And if you want to be a rocknroll star and spend all your time playing music, you can do that, you can do pretty much whatever you want except hurt other people. The Ollies don’t care, and they make no pretense of having religious or moral concerns about the Basics, they just want to them to not be violent. (Though various forms of recreational violence, such as boxing, MMA fighting and football are allowed – useful for giving release to the violent impulses of hormonally swamped younger males and sometimes females.)

And even though jobs are rare, gigs are not rare, many Basics have gigs, like our protagonist, work that can disappear overnight, often very short term work, just things that need to be done and can be done by your average Jamie. And if you have a gig you may not be a rockstar, but you can easily afford to buy the use of a woman like Vanessa for an hour or two – any kind of use you like.

The only people who have it rough are the Basics who can’t live by the rules, for whatever reason. People like the Pet Shop girls Katie and Nataly, and Vanessa.

The Basic universe is hence a cross between Super Ultra Late Stage Capitalism and Super Gay Luxury Space Communism. The oligarchs own it all, but what does “ownership” mean in this case? Not a hell of a lot, to the Basics.

The point of all this is that I could embed my socialist viewpoint in simple descriptions of Basic society – it’s already there for me to use, I don’t have to do tons of exposition.

Well, now you know. Buy the story, get turned on and propagandized! You have nothing to lose but your capitalist propagandizement!