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.

What if there was no rape or sexual harassment -- the Dinosaur Conundrum!

Suppose we lived in a world where dinosaurs lived in our forests and jungles and plains and were dangerous and frequent predators of human beings.

Do you think movies about dinosaurs eating people (like Jurassic World) would be the same experience in a world where most people have uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters and parents and children who were eaten by dinosaurs?

Of course not, the movies would be a LOT scarier and would probably have trigger warnings attached to them. The dinosaurs would probably be treated a hell of a lot less sympathetically, too, not being a fantastic beast of old but a current and horrible problem.

By the same token, I don't think there was a LOT of recreational BDSM of the fun, consensual variety going on in the American South prior to, say, 1860. I'm sure there was some, human beings are human beings and we know that the bordellos of Europe offered entertainment for gentlemen that liked to tie up, cane and flog women, or be tied up, caned and flogged, etc.

But it wouldn't be as open or accepted as it is nowadays, given that nonconsensual slavery was a thing. What's going on in the culture has a LOT to do with how accepted entertainments and behaviors of various sorts of are, including sexual kinks.

That's why I think BDSM as she is now practiced is part and parcel of the success of feminism. Because we have granted women greater freedom and autonomy over their bodies, they get to use them in a wider variety of ways, for their own profit and pleasure, and for the profit and pleasure of others.

This is something many feminists do not “get.” They think BDSM of the maledom/femsub variety is symptomatic of patriarchal control of women. They ignore women who LIKE being submissives and try to deny them agency over their own bodies and decisions, without appearing too flagrantly to do so. They say submissive women have internalized the patriarchy and are acting out that internalization. They say such women are self-hating and need to be healthier and discouraged from doing all those awful things from the era of male dominance in all things.

This is not ALL feminists. There are plenty of sex-positive feminists and others who give submissive women agency to express their sexual desires just like anyone else. That's a mistake that a lot of anti-feminists make, conflating all feminists as one group. Feminism is a HUGE tent, and there are a lot of women who call themselves feminists for a lot of different reasons. Picking a fight with ALL feminists when you've only actually got an issue with SOME feminists is stupid.

But to get back to writing -- and yes, this is all related to writing, it's not just a political screed, though I'll admit it sure sounds like one – how about we take our thought experiment one step further? What if rape and sexual harassment were rare, very rare? I mean, what if women got raped about as often as people get eaten by sharks, or alligators?  We know sharks and alligators are out there, and they're dangerous animals, but very few people actually worry about being attacked by them, because it happens so very rarely.

How would women behave in such a society? How would women in OUR society look to them? And how would THEY look to women in our society?

Thinking about it yields some interesting results for the thoughtful science fiction writer, but maybe for you, too. More on that later.