Chapter 2: The Slaver As A Young Man

Earlier today my partner and I, together with staff, celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the William Steelforth Agency. A second cause for festivities was that 2136 was promising to be a banner year for the firm.

Our celebration caused me to reflect on just who I, William Steelforth, had been as a young man, what my values had been then and since, how I developed an early interest in slavery, and why I eventually founded a firm to earn my living doing something I not only believe in, but also enjoy!

I was never an egalitarian, even in my high school days, since I always believed that people were essentially unequal in every sense. The founders of the United States erred, in my judgment, in building a nation on the principles that all people should be equal before the law and equal in the voting booth.

But things were starting to change.

In 2089, three years before I was born, our nation, now called Capitallia, had been formed by 38 states seceding from the old United States. All this had happened because of a civil war over the issues of taxation, the voting franchise and slavery.

The new nation had started by adopting a constitution very much like that of the U.S. There were two very significant differences however.

The first was encoded as the Servitude Article of the new nation, and provided that Congress might pass slavery laws or indentured servitude laws which would be constitutional, not only as a punishment for crime, as in the United States, but also as a means for the satisfaction of debt. The article also provided that Congress might pass laws establishing voluntary servitude or slavery, i.e. a man or woman might sell himself or herself into bondage.

The second was encoded as the Citizenship Article. Its effect was to deny universal suffrage in favor of a restrictive definition of citizenship:

Section 1. Citizenship in Capitallia shall be a right that must be earned by demonstrating appropriate knowledge of basic principles of government, and by paying a citizenship tax that shall be apportioned equally among all citizens. No person who has not attained the age of twenty-five years may become a citizen.

Section 2. A person who is not a citizen shall not be entitled to vote, serve on a jury, own real estate, own a business, own or carry a firearm, or sue or be sued in the civil courts of the nation's judiciary.

Section 3. A person who is not a citizen may be required to carry or wear an identification device that shall provide for positive ID, remote tracking, and public display of his or her status. Such device must be presented to any officer of the law upon demand. Such person shall have only such rights of personal, financial, or medical privacy as Congress shall see fit to provide by statute.

Section 4. Administrative tribunals, with limited appeal rights, shall be established to resolve disputes by or against persons who are not citizens.

The Congress soon passed legislation to implement the Citizenship Article and within a few years after the founding of the new nation the number of citizens had been reduced to about half of the nation's adult population. This was to set the stage for still further developments that would make the nation even less egalitarian.

Congress was also under pressure from the very beginning of the new nation to pass legislation implementing the Servitude Article. At first Congress passed laws that only allowed for 'indentured servitude' for a limited number of years. Indentures whether voluntary or for debt, could be bought and sold, but it was said that the person could not be bought or sold.

Only a few years after the Citizenship laws were passed Congress had enacted the "Community Labor and Debtor Restitution Act". I would have been only a few years old at the time this was passed.

The purpose of this law was to provide some relief for creditors by indenturing the insolvent debtor for a term of up to eight years, or until he or she had worked off the debt, whichever came first. The law also allowed a man or woman to indenture himself or herself voluntarily for up to eight years in exchange for some valuable consideration, such as payment of medical expenses of a loved one.

The debtor's indenture belonged to his creditor in the first instance, and could be sold to others. It was said that the indenture could be bought and sold, but not the person. Nevertheless many young women and men wound up having their indentures sold to brothels.

My own first experience with prostitution happened the year I started high school. Prostitution had been legal for some thirty years by then.

The laws, for some time, had permitted boys as young as 14 to enjoy the services of licensed houses of female prostitution if accompanied by their father or male guardian. My first two visits were with my dad. The minimum age for a girl wishing to enjoy a male prostitute was 16, and only if accompanied by her mother or a female guardian.

On my first visit I was 14 and accompanied by my father. This was some 11 years after the "Community Labor and Debtor Restitution Act" so that, while there may have been a few voluntary prostitutes, most of them, at that time, were serving the public on a strictly involuntary basis. Many a young woman, indentured for debt, or convicted of some crime, ended up being forced to serve the public sexually, in either a public or private brothel.

The supply of women available to brothel operators was plentiful and their cost was low, and accordingly the prices charged to the customers were quite reasonable compared to what prices had been for such services when all prostitution had been voluntary!. Perhaps best of all, or so I thought at the time, was the fact that these new involuntary prostitutes had no right of refusal. They must serve all customers, and in whatever way the customer desired!

It seemed just to me that young people should work off their debts in this way if that is where they were most needed, and just also that the most productive members of society should be able to enjoy themselves by patronizing such establishments.

While kinky services were probably available even then, my father thought it best, for my first visit, to sign me up for a very conventional intercourse experience. I never was informed, on that occasion, if the woman who serviced me was there on a voluntary or involuntary basis. Perhaps my father did not want me to dwell on that aspect of prostitution at the tender age of 14. What really mattered to me then was that I was going to enjoy my first fuck!

A year later I talked my father into taking me again. This time I was all keyed up on the idea of enjoying a woman on a non-consensual basis. I asked my dad if special arrangements could be made.

I wanted to be certain I would have the opportunity to fuck, not just any woman, but one who was paying her debt to society for, say some white collar crime! I wanted a chance to read her file first and learn something of her sexual history and what was the crime for which she had been sentenced. That would make fucking her much more of a thrill! It was!

I can remember a rather heated discussion I had, in my senior year of high school, about servitude ideas with Mr. Maxwell, my high school civics teacher. My teacher had given a rather impassioned lecture about the evils of our law that legalized a limited form of slavery. I went back to his classroom at the end of the school day.

"You wanted to see me about the homework, Bill?" My teacher glanced up at me from his desk expectantly.

"No sir," I replied. "I really wanted to talk to you about what you said in class today." I hesitated. "What I mean is, you said you had some serious objections to that law, you know, the one about indentured servitude."

"Go ahead Bill." He shifted in his chair and looked more interested already.

"I just don't get it!" I blurted out. "I thought it was a pretty neat law! Our family gets its grass cut, its cars washed, and snow shoveled, all for next to nothing! We even have a maid to keep the house tidy. Dad says we couldn't afford any of these things before the indenture laws! And all my friends think it is a cool law too!"

"Don't you ever think of the rights of the people who are indentured?" My teacher responded, in his patient teacher voice.

"Well yeah, I guess I think of that sometimes. But these people need to pay their debt to society, or to their creditors, so they really gave up their rights when they committed a crime, mismanaged their money or sold themselves to pay for medical care!!" "Some of us would argue," he pointed out in a calm even tone, "that there are certain rights no person can give up or have taken away! Even if he or she is hopelessly in debt, or has committed a crime!" The prime examples would be the right of a person to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness."

"Sir," I replied with excitement, seeing the possibility of a rhetorical victory, "would that mean that a man who is too poor to feed his family or pay for his family's medical care, for example, should not be able to sell himself into slavery, in exchange for financial support for his family?"

"That had always been one of the core beliefs of our forefathers! It is in the Declaration of Independence of the United States. It was the law we all lived under until radical revolutionaries brought about the secession of our state and 37 others from the U.S. just a few years before you were born. You realize not all of us agreed with the secession, but we lost out to the radicals."

"But Mr. Maxwell, what if the man dearly loved his wife or his child and one of them needed an operation that cost well beyond the amount of money he could ever earn in wages as a free laborer? Should he have to watch his loved one die because he cannot raise money by selling or indenturing himself?"

"Bill, listen to what I am saying! The man should not be faced with such a choice in a civilized society. Medical care is a basic right, and society should pay for this man's loved one to have the operation if he cannot pay himself." My teacher was beginning to show signs of impatience with my argument.

"If medical care is a basic right," I replied "doesn't that mean that some of us must give up quite a bit of our 'liberty' and our 'right to pursue our own happiness' in order to pay for someone else's medical care? Isn't that a form of slavery in itself?" I felt I had him there.

"Sometimes we have to make sacrifices, Bill. If a woman, for example, has to indenture herself just to live, or to pay for her child's operation, she can hardly be equal to other citizens in any sense, can she?" He seemed to feel he had me there.

"Why should we even care" I boldly questioned "if everyone is equal in political, social, or legal terms?"

He looked shocked at my statement.

"Sir, you seem to be saying we should go back to the egalitarian ideas of the old United States. Did that nation not, in effect, allow the slothful and the willfully uninformed to have a huge voice in determining who the national leaders would be and how the tax dollars would be spent? " I was on a roll. How could he possibly counter my argument?

"Bill, when you create a class of people who don't have all the same rights as the rest of us, you create the conditions for that group of people to be terribly exploited for their labor and even for sex! Surely you have heard about all the young women who are forced to serve the public sexually?"

"But why is any of that a problem sir? Maybe certain people deserve to work long hours for low wages or even make themselves useful in sexual ways! That may well be the best way, or the only way, that people with no special skills can earn their living or repay their debts!" I certainly wasn't going to share with my teacher the fact that I had enjoyed non-consensual sex services myself at the age of 14 and again at age 15!

"Bill, I have papers to grade. Let us continue this discussion another time."

He turned back to his work and when I left him I had the distinct impression that I had made the better argument. I did not try again to pursue these ideas further with my civics teacher, but continued to think about them for the next few years.

To be candid, my early interest in slavery was due to the very sexual possibilities it opened up!

During my high school years, I was pleased to see that laws were passed implementing Section 3 of the Citizenship Article, requiring all non-citizens to conspicuously wear electronic bracelets or necklaces. It was fun to be able to see at a glance who was a Citizen and who was not.

At that time I was not yet eligible for citizenship since I was only nineteen. Congress, however, had excused all persons under the age of twenty-five who had no brushes with the law from wearing the degrading bracelets.

It soon developed that non-citizens had little privacy. Any citizen who wished to do so could scan their electronic bracelet, learn that person's identity, and even pull up quite a substantial file on that person. Congress had not, however, chosen to declare the medical and financial records of such persons to be publicly available.

When I was about 19 I had my first opportunity to visit a house of prostitution as an adult and to really choose what I wanted from the full menu of services. I found that one of the services available to me, as a paying customer, was that I might sexually dominate a young female prostitute during my time with her, if I wished. I could even have a rape like experience if I so desired. I did not choose to avail myself of this option.

I did have advance information that a certain Suzanne Metzker, a girl I once knew in high school had been for a year or more indentured in this particular brothel. And that she had had many customers during that year. I knew what shifts she worked and what fees her employer charged customers for her services.