The paramour universe, background to the stories

Motivation:

I have done one story and I am working on a follow-up. I have a list of constraints, of what can happen in my fictional world and what is off limits. The story is inspiring other writers and artists as well, and some follow-up artwork has appeared.

With that in mind, below is the background of my fictional paramour universe.

Our contemporary society

The paramour universe is supposed to be the world that we live in, here and now. It is not a parallel universe with different laws, and it does not play in a distant future. The bondage is non-consensual. (There may be a few exceptions; some women may like to be a paramour, but they are a small minority.) Non-consensual bondage is, of course, illegal. It is important, therefore, that the "patrons" of the paramours try to avoid to attract the wrong kind of attention (like: the attention of law enforcement).

On the one side, patrons portray the paramour scheme as "consensual" to society. Paramour roleplay is promoted, with articles in magazines and booths at trade fairs. So, when people see a bound & gagged girl in the streets, they (hopefully) assume it's all roleplay (because that's what they have read about). In smaller circles, the non-consensual aspect is also explained away with arguments like that her struggles are play, but deep down she enjoys it.

On the other side, patrons try to manipulate the paramours into believing that they have the best intentions for them. As if the restraints are there for their own protection. If the paramours do come to believe that, the aspect of consent becomes blurred. (There is a bit more on this below.)

For manipulating society as well as for manipulating the paramours, it is needed that paramours are treated well. There is no torment/torture in my story, and no harsh punishments. There is domination (by necessity), but no repression. There is no humiliation, no demeaning labor. The idea to get across is that a paramour has a life of a cherished pet.

Of the toys that I imagined, the "exciteur" is at the edge. Or maybe over the edge. It is presented as a pleasure toy (with its electro-stimulus), but it's true purpose is to keep a paramour in control (by giving her an electro-shock if she is moving fast or erratically, as in struggling). I came up with this, because I simply failed to find a device that would be as effective without being painful. You do not want to restrain a woman too strictly (for too long), because that may give issues with blood circulation. The level of the shock is set just high enough to be discomforting and to disrupt a girl's struggling. This is in order to downplay that the mean side of the exciteur.

As an aside, and by implication, the exciteur does not stop a paramour from being disobedient. A if paramour walks away and her patron orders her to come back to him, the exciteur won't stop her to keep walking (as long as she walks slowly).

Another argument that is used to explain away the "punishment" function of the exciteur, is that only the paramour controls what the exciteur does, and if she plays by its rules, she is never "shocked". The patron cannot use the exciteur to punish his paramour, because he cannot make it fire a shock: there is no remote control.

For instance, a couple like this walking in the streets would not cause offense. Some may not even realize that the girl is bound and gagged, others consider the bondage symbolic rather than effective and see it as role play.
    Yet, this girl has her arms crossed in her back, strapped to a harness that wraps around her shoulders; her mouth stuffed and sealed, with fake lips and a sheer veil to camouflaging this; her pussy plugged with an electroshock device, and held on a leash that dangles from below her short skirt. Who knows, this girl is only coming along quietly because she knows that she has no chance of escape...

Plausible scenario

Because the paramour world is our real world, the paramour stories must also be plausible. Both plausible in the sense that with today's technology, the restraints can work, as well as there being a plausible reasoning how all of this is kept secret for the rest of society. As a side note, I used to think that it would be impossible to keep massive on-going abuse of hundreds of girls (and boys) secret for decades, until the scandal of the Catholic church. (So if you happened to notice some parallels between my story and the way Catholic church explains away the massive ongoing exploitation and abuse --that is indeed not a coincidence.)

In addition, I try to keep the technology down to what a hobbyist might produce. I have preferred simple restraints that are just good enough to be effective.

Another aside: there exist shock-collars for dogs, to stop them from barking. Technically speaking, the toy for keeping women silent that is easiest to design, is a shock-collar optimized for the human (female) voice. All it takes is tweaking an existing design. The "voilette" gag, with its sound-activated valves is far more complicated. However, I think that the voice-activated valve system can be made with today's technology. And a shock collar is discomforting, whereas a voilette must be portrayed as a harmless, kinky toy that a girl wouldn't mind wearing for roleplay.

When women get older, they become less suitable for the task of sex services (your beauty fades with age). Therefore, at some point they are released. The stories largely skip that part, but there are some thinly veiled hints why former paramours stay silent. The "adaptation to captivity" theory explains that at some point the state of captivity enters your mindset (chapter 7 of The Return of the Paramour is on that theory). The (completely unproven) premise of the stories is that women who have crossed that line, have formed the belief that it was for their own good (or for the common good) and hence they are less inclined to report their predicaments to the authorities.

Common sense

The key part in many bondage stories is where a girl gets captured, struggles for all she's worth, but then realizes, with every added rope, that there is no escape. In Geoffrey Merrick's novels, the girls routinely nearly escape, just so that he can describe her (re-)capture once more. And since these are often situations where you have to act quickly, the captors often need to improvise how and with what they restrain and gag their captives.

It is common sense, though, that when a man has set eye on a lovely young woman, to capture and keep her as his sex slave, he will come prepared. He will have restraints at hand that are specifically created for that purpose: to keep a struggling luscious body trapped. So for my paramour story, I ruled out (near) escape, because the restraints would be too damn good.

It flows from the same reasoning that the paramours stay in bondage for a long period. Several months at least, but more likely several years. Mental adaption to captivity deepens over time.

Such long periods of bondage require a commitment of the patron: you have to wash her, feed her, dress her and apply her make-up; you have to walk her or give her exercise, and care for her; and you have to take her along wherever you go. In several chapters of The Return of the Paramour, a paramour is patronized by multiple persons (Kayla in chapter 1 has three men caring for her, Princess in chapter 4 has six men taking turns, Fiorina in chapter 7 is amid a team, but even Juicy in chapter 6 has both a man and a woman keeping an eye on her). This is because I think it is probably pretty hard to handle a paramour all by yourself.

Just average Joe & Jane

In many bondage stories the victim somehow owes it to herself, as to what happens to her. Either she completely carelessly walks into a dark alley, or she has arrogantly humiliated the wrong guy, or she's screwing every boy in the block and needs a lesson, or whatever.

The goal in my stories is that the girls (who become paramours) in no way deserve the predicaments planned for them. Instead, the stories focus on women that nobody really cares about. These can be recruited as paramours without anyone objecting. So indeed, two of the paramours in The Return of the Paramour were formerly sex workers with a drug addiction. But these girls are not recruited because of the immoral life they are living. Rather, the addiction makes it easier to sway their family and friends (if they have any left) to turn a blind eye.

Most of the girls that in The Return of the Paramour were vulnerable, in one way or another. But they aren't vulnerable because of the wrong choices that they made (at least, not always; if you are lonely, you are already vulnerable). You can be a successful, well-educated young lady with a job and many friends, and still be turned into a paramour. (A tolerant, individualistic society may "tolerate" sex slavery simply because in such a society people tend to keep their nose out of other people's business. In such a society, your friends may just be fair weather friends.)

Likewise, the patrons are just average guys. They are sex-obsessed, of course, but let's assume that's normal for a guy. The men in my story are not particularly wealthy, and don't have particularly influential positions in society. What connects them, is that these men all value the merits of a paramour higher than her disadvantages (see the "commitment" for keeping a paramour, that I mentioned above).

Tricks that I use, but which are just tricks

I have received some praise for my writing style. That style came from a set of tricks that I came up with, with the purpose of camouflaging my limited skills in writing.

• I cannot write from a woman's viewpoint. So I decided to not include the woman's viewpoint at all. By implication: there is no dialogue (with paramours); no man talks to his paramour or listens to her.
• I am not even good at presenting a man's inner emotions. The trick to camouflage this is what I call "compact writing". It is common for me to first write what I globally have in mind in one-and-a-half pages, and then to rephrase and re-arrange everything so that it fits on a single page.
• My prose is also evasive and manipulative. That is a trick to avoid coming up with a clear argument. I didn't find my reasoning (of why paramours are for the good of us all) very convincing. So I chose to be suggestive, rather than blunt.

So my writing style became as it is by necessity. That's really all there is to it.