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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMy view on "violent" porn
I know that a couple of you already know this about me, I have had email from you asking me to confirm the factoid. I write books under this name. SavannahMann is the handle under which I write Bondage themed erotica, although I haven't written much of it of late.
I have one story, one, that is non-consensual. I have another book that begins with a non-consensual scene, or I should say a scene that starts out consensual, and ends up non-consensual. The book that I am going to focus on is the first non-con one. It was called "The Vassal Group" and resulted from a curious fact I ran across while web browsing. Nearly a million cases of missing persons are filed each year. A majority of them are children who run away from home, or are taken by non-custodial parents. But I wondered about the rest, the thousands, or tens of thousands that were just gone, vanished, disappeared.
Some reappear years later, like a story featured here in which a Judge ruled that the man standing before him was still legally dead because he had been declared so more years ago than allowed the judge to overturn.
I started to wonder if some of those missing were really kidnapped, and I spent a couple months considering the kind of organization that would be needed to create sexual slavery. I wrote the book, and it ended badly for the girl in the story. I wrote it as realistically as possible, knowing that the scenario I created would not allow someone to return to a normal life. I used drugs and hypnosis to break into the minds of the victims, and in the story, I made the organization vast, evil, greedy, like Enron for involuntary sexual slavery.
What frightened me about the scenario was how possible it was. The drugs are readily available, mind monitoring devices exist, EEG's have gone a long way and there is even one in use now that monitors the consciousness level of a patient during surgery to attempt to eliminate the possibility of a patient waking up. Brainwashing is well enough understood to know it is possible, if not immediate.
I had my young woman break the brainwashing, and escape. Then I spent weeks considering something. What kind of a life would she have afterward? She wasn't just captured and kidnapped and raped. She was brainwashed, and even broken, the programming would still rattle around in her mind. I saw very few positive outcome possibilities. I considered Convicts who spend years in prison, how many of them commit a crime right away because Prison is the only life they know.
The outcomes I had considered were dark. The woman in question would quite possibly never have a "normal" life again. Suicide was a possibility, a real possibility. Insanity was also similarly possible. Years of therapy was a given. Confusion, obvious even at a surface level.
I did not like the Vassal Group. I didn't like where it ended, with the bad guys winning. I did not like that I had created a group that was although fictional, impervious to law enforcement ever finding and stopping them. It was too compartmentalized, too protected to ever really stop. On that I based it on criminal and intelligence organizations. It is said that the Director of the KGB was not allowed to know the agents names who were spying for the USSR. At most he was allowed to know a code name, but never the real identity of the individual spying for them. So the bosses didn't know anything that they didn't have to know to do their jobs.
As I was saying, I didn't like where it ended, with an organization that was untouchable, with no one able to stop it. So I decided that the next best thing was for them to "go legit". I started the next story, the one that got me bored with writing that genre, because it was so popular. The Vassal Academy instead looked at the issue of voluntary submissive behavior. A subject I had done in two other books, but this one was a little different.
So you see, my views on this may be a little different than most people. In one book, I outline the practices that are used in common sense venues. Safe, sane, and consensual. I cover the subject of safe words in two of the books, explaining how the submissive has the brakes, and is able to stop everything with a single word. Ladies, imagine that when you were dating. You move a hand away from something you aren't comfortable with, he's taking liberties you aren't ready for, and a few seconds later his hand is back. BDSM respects the use of a safe word. You say your word, perhaps it's RED, and he stops right then and there.
For those of you who doubt me, and there are many. Here is a link to a site that has all the stories although membership is required for some of them. Sorry. http://storiesonline.net/a/SavannahMann
This site rightly considered The Vassal Group to be outside of their standards, but the others are there. http://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=862746&page=submissions
I am assuming that I will be suitably blacklisted by you all for this admission, and so be it. But if you ask what I consider acceptable? Safe, Sane, and Consensual would be as good of an answer as I can give.
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Kurska
(5,739 posts)
rrneck
(17,671 posts)Kurska
(5,739 posts)Boozecorn
rrneck
(17,671 posts)Katashi_itto
(10,175 posts)loli phabay
(5,580 posts)Kurska
(5,739 posts)I have friends whose interests would probably make this board's collective skins crawl. I don't judge them either. Provided it is kept strictly within the realm of fantasy, who am to stick my nose into it.
I think your book is actually a good example of how this whole "porn" and "not porn" dichotomy is bullshit. Just because a story is highly sexually charged and even very erotic in nature, doesn't mean that it can't be considered good fiction. Stories with incredibly sexually subject matter can actually have rather a lot to say about the human condition. I believe your story does and it would be a shame for anyone to try and ban it.
I don't buy into such things, there is fiction and there is not fiction. The government should never be in the business of censoring fiction.
Katashi_itto
(10,175 posts)Vashta Nerada
(3,922 posts)If it's safe and consensual, who the hell cares?
It's none of my business or anyone else's what consenting adults do.
Kurska
(5,739 posts)Double ain't no one elses business.
NMDemDist2
(49,313 posts)
LadyHawkAZ
(6,199 posts)the description sounds a bit like the Sleeping Beauty trilogy.
I agree with your definition of acceptability.
Demo_Chris
(6,234 posts)Is all the justification required.
MicaelS
(8,747 posts)I would no more think that you as a writer were an advocate of rape and sexual slavery, than I would think you were an advocate of serial killing if you wrote about the in depth methods of a serial killer you got from doing research in criminology.
The fact that you would even feel a need to post this and apologize is a terrible indictment of a mindset which says that even thinking about an act means you want to perform that act.
While I have no personal interest in your topic, I would certainly not condemn you in any fashion for thinking about it, or writing it. I am sorry you had to write this.
Savannahmann
(3,891 posts)According to my wife, I have a surplus of ego. The Vassal Group is a dark and dangerous story. It is all too possible, and I can't say with any certainty that it is not happening in some form or another. Again, a million missing persons reports in a year. That is one in three hundred of us. Mostly they return, or are found, but some never are. I could not bring myself to do the story as I feared it was happening, with children. So I made it adults, and walked everyone through the barbaric process of scientifically applied brutality. Not on many of the million missing, but just a few, a handful a week across this nation would be completely lost in the flood of other missing persons reports. No one would notice the difference between one missing person, and another.
I still get occasional emails about Family Tradition of Bondage (No incest despite the title's suggestion) where people write me telling me how much they liked the story. Several women have written and told me they wished they were the main female character Sherri.
Many more have written and told me that there must be a secret farm like the one I imagined for the Author. More than one has begged me to let them know how to join or where it is. That is the greatest reward for a writer of fiction, that the scenes you create are so real that people are able to suspend disbelief, sometimes to an alarming level. Let's be honest gang. If there was a secret Bondage farm between Macon and Atlanta where men and women engaged in Pony Girl/Boy action around a race track there would be no difficulty in finding it. You would just drive around until you saw the dozen or so circling helicopters and airplanes with long lenses sticking out the side. The secret would be out the first time an aircraft flew over.
The Vassal Academy was intended to be a cathartic sequel. I wanted to have a place for people to learn about themselves, and allow a characters I liked despite the situation, Devon and Jeannette, to continue to live. So I created a facility in fiction to allow the examination of the psychological environments of BDSM and to examine some of the practices. The rules of that facility prohibit drugs, and have as absolute hard limits some things that are outside of sane and safe even if consensual.
Ramaya
(1 post)I for one am saddened that you've stopped writing on the vassal academy story after reading it for a week straight I'm completely addicted. More so I think stories like yours are important to the bdsm community at large, they help to do exactly what I think you intended. Helping create a guideline for healthy relationships. I'm sure you've gotten a million letters requesting you to pick it back up and I'll just add mine to your pile. You have so many places to go with that story it's a shame to just drop it like you did.
Thank you for the wonderful will in your mind it was truly a pleasure. I hope this comment finds you well.
Ramaya
ColesCountyDem
(6,943 posts)
As I start to reread The Vassal Group and it’s sequel The Vassal Academy for the upteenth time since running across it, I wanted to say Thank You again. There are about a dozen books, novellas, trilogies and series that I occasionally reread to recenter myself when the pressures from everyday life get too much. I’m in my late 60s and find that Life is just getting darker everyday lately and I need redemption in my life to fight back that darkness. Your stories do that for me. I won’t ask you to go back and “finish” The Vassal Academy as I have in the past, I can understand now why continuing that story was not doing for you what you needed when you started the VG in the first place. I will always be a little frustrated when I get to the end, and will imagine where the stories might have gone, but now I simply thank you fir what you have given me and others. All the best, and here’s to victory in 2020!
