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.

First experience of sex on Collar World: 0 to 60 indeed!

Town and Gown Bondage Issues

"Hmmm ... does yes mean yes when she's screaming it? 
Image source: Kink.com video 2201, "Brooke Bound" starring Brooke Bound and Matt Williams.What a coincidence!
Well apparently colleges and universities are lettings students have their little BDSM clubs where the students can explore their BDSM fantasies in a safe, consensual environment instead of doing it the old-fashioned way, via the unsafe, nonconsensual environment of fraternity and sorority hazings, which occasionally result in death for the hazees. (For some reason, Harvard's decision to recognize a campus BDSM club is making the rounds of the big aggregator blogs and the mainstream news blogs, even though it's kind of a non-story. Probably because it's Harvard and a lot of the Very Big Deal People went there.)

The New York Observer ran a story on the topic, which said that the new groups while exploring BDSM were having difficulties with issues of consensuality and staying within boundaries. Logical, right? Noobies gotta noob.

But I find myself really dubious about the reporting on the story's nonconsensual aspect. It starts out talking about a student, Maria, joining Harvard's BDSM club, but then when it starts to talk about the nonconsensual behavior, it shifts over to another student, Victoria (a pseudonym) at an unnamed Ivy League school, who didn't even join a club, she went to a meetup she found on the Fetlife bulletin board.

As Jezebel has reported recently, Fetlife has a very dodgy reputation when it comes to nonconsensual activities, though Jezebel's headline about the story was kinda sleazy in and of itself.

Fetlife is NOT a campus BDSM club, it's not allied with colleges, and already had a bad reputation due to many accusations of coercion and nonconsensual BDSM by former members. The article then covers Fetlife's issues very thoroughly and then segues back to campus BDSM clubs without making any real connection between the two.

It's a cheap bait-and-switch, arrant scumbuggery, and the New York Observer ought to be ashamed. It tries through its headline and lead to establish that there is this big controversy about nonconsensual behavior in campus BDSM clubs by deliberately confusing them with Fetlife's issues.

I guess the really big lesson here is that you need to watch BDSM related stories in the mainstream media very carefully. Mainstream media have been lying for years and falling for every trick the political pundits pull on them to make their dubious points, it's little wonder they'll do a terrible job of reporting on BDSM-related topics with all the baggage that mainstream media, which are increasingly appealing only to Very Old People (I'm not talking about Baby Boomers, I'm talking about their parents!) generally bring to sex.

Also, Fetlife is a sleazy organization, if you know anybody who's part of it, you should warn them, just in case they don't know about all the ruckus that is being raised over them.

As for consensuality issues with campus BDSM clubs ... it still seems plausible that it might exist -- look at hazings which are straight-up torture that sometimes ends in the death of the hazee. But when come back, bring evidence of SOME sort, New York Observer.

Partners in Shame: Jezebel.com and Fetlife

"Sure, you used your safeword, but you didn't say "Mother may I!" Image source: Fucking Dungeon.com.
Jezebel.com is running an article about the community at Fetlife slut-shaming a woman who wrote about being groped on a college campus on the Fetlife website. The student wrote about being accosted by a couple of costumed fellows on Halloween day as she walked across campus. The student tried to defuse the situation by smiling and telling the guys to buzz off in a nice way, but when they grabbed her and groped at her, she got shrill and yelled, and still no one helped her.

She posted about her experiences on Fetlife, expecting support from a kink community that understands, and what she got from a lot of them was a lot of slut-shaming. She was derided for not screaming, for not biting them, for smiling at them initially, etc., as if the attack was her fault for not being unfriendly enough.

The Fetlife response was blaming the victim, classic slut-shaming behavior, and it was a shameful way for any kinky community to behave. Kink is supposed to be all about safewords and informed, enthusiastic consent, and yet when this woman got attacked, she's hearing it was her fault because she did not immediately start biting and screaming when a group of men approached her in a not-particularly-threatening manner.

What next? "Well yeah, you were using the safeword and I still put the anal hook in you, but you weren't SCREAMING the safeword, so how was I to know you were serious?"

The thing is, as I've written in the past, it was the sexual freedom that feminism fought for that makes kink acceptable ... if "No" does not mean "no" then "Yes" does not mean "yes." Without the culture that says sex with informed consent is OK, you really can't have kink as an acceptable part of sexuality. Therefore, kinky folk have a particular responsibility to eschew slut-shaming and to condemn non-consensual sexual activities, not just because it's the morally responsible thing to do, but because it's important to our fucking self-preservation!

The people who slut-shamed the woman on Fetlife were not just morally wrong, but promoting attitudes that are dangerous for the entire kink community. They should be roundly condemned.

However, so should the editors at Jezebel.com.

Why? Because look at the title: "Kink Community Tells Sexual Assault Victims It's All Their Faults."

Here's how it should read: "A Kink Community Tells Sexual Assault Victim It's All Her Fault"

See the difference? The article dealt with only one sexual assault victim, a woman named Dayna. It dealt with only one kinky community, Fetlife. But the editors/writer CHOSE to publish a headline that made it appear that all kinky people were slut shaming sexual assault victims, and that's just not true. It was undoubtedly done in a cheap, sleazy grab for recreational outrage readers. Basically the editors at Jezebel were willing to fuck over the entire kink community via their headline for a little attention-getting.

Readers (other than me) wrote in to let them know their headline was misleading and wrong, and they've shown no interest in changing it. So, it's a considered, deliberate bit of sleaze. I've written about the unwisdom of tarring one group for the actions of a subset of that group, but this is not dumb partisanship, I don't think, it's just sleaze.

Well fuck em both I say. The sexual assaulters need to spend some time in a jail cell. The Fetlife slut shamers need some heavy ostracizing. And the Jezebel editors need to get their asses kicked by readers and everyone who reads the site should be aware that the editors will go for sleazy recreational outrage-baiting at the expense of kinksters. There's plenty of blame to go around for everyone.