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Collars: Status Symbol vs. Sign of Ownership

October 3rd, 2009

veckylee$612205159Okay… This might be rambly.  I’m typing this with my wrists locked together and I’m having trouble thinking clearly.  I keep almost curling up inside myself in this weird slavey head space so my normal ADD issues are out of control.  And besides that, I don’t know where I’m going with this and I might be totally off base so it might be more questions than answers.  Lol.

I was bumbling around on FetLife looking for something interesting to talk about and I came across this scenario:

You put a training collar on someone and remove it for purposes of punishment, but not to uncollar and stop training. Then in the time before the collar was to be given back someone decided to take your trainee and collar them under consideration.

And these questions:

Does the person giving the training have the right to remove the “under consideration” collar?
Did the person who collared the slave when their training collar was removed have the right to collar the slave in the first place?

My knee-jerk response was:

You put a training collar on someone and removed it. Really, everything after that is irrelevant. You removed your claim to her. She moved on. From where I sit, removing a collar for punishment is emotional blackmail and utter bullshit. I’d have moved on, too.

And then I started thinking about it.  And now I’m all over the place with it.

I was uncollared once in the beginning.  I was pissed.  It made absolutely no sense to me.  It was like taking away my wedding ring and telling me I couldn’t be married until I proved myself a good wife.  But I didn’t have to earn my collar.  I only had to prove that I knew what I was getting into.  And that really only required discussing, with Master, the things I’d read and the opinions I’d formed and the type of relationship I saw us involved in. 

I’m pretty sure we were already married then.  But I know for a fact it was, at least partly, a test of my loyalty.  He told me He still owned me.  That He would decide whether He was going to keep me or not.  And how He would keep me.  He said I might not deserve His collar.  That maybe I would just be an uncollared slave that He kept around to play with on occasion.  That maybe He’d find another, more deserving slave to wear His collar.

And I was pissed.  But I was also destroyed.

I’m like the guy on Scrubs.  I have a constant monologue running through my head.  And, since I was a very small child, it always started with, “Oh, please.  Oh, please.  Let them be happy with me! Let them like me!” and ended with “There I go again.  Screwing up.  No one’s ever pleased with me.  I never do anything right.”

I don’t care what anyone says.  Even the most apathetic person in the world enjoys it when someone expresses how pleased Mr. Apathy has made them.  And hearing you’ve disappointed someone is like a punch to the gut if you care what they think about you.  Maybe others don’t quite feel it to the extent that I do.  Let’s face it.  I feel a lot deeper than the average bear.  But they feel it at least a little bit.

Needless to say, I did exactly what He expected me to do.  I started behaving the way I was expected to behave.  I started doting on Him and being respectful.  I started making damn sure there wasn’t a female alive who could be better than me at being His slave.

Oh, I asked the questions on everyone’s mind in those situations.  “Well, what’s stopping me from just walking out? What incentive do I have to behave? Why should I continue to act like I’m owned if I’m not collared anymore? And to just be a play thing while you have a better slave to take care of you? To serve in my stead? Are you fucking kidding me?”

His response, in a nutshell, was “Nope.  Not kidding you.  Shape up or deal with the consequences.”

When it came right down to it, I had to decide what was more important to me.  My damnable pride or the relationship.  I chose the relationship.  And it was the hardest choice I’d ever made.  Because usually I run from situations like these. “Oh, I haven’t proven myself to you already? Fuck you, then.  Buh… bye.”  Even if I haven’t put any effort into proving myself.  Or, worse yet, have actually put more effort into proving myself unworthy.

But when He took His collar away from me, He wasn’t punishing me.  He was seriously considering not owning me anymore.  Or, at the very least, taking my right to present myself as anything more than a toy He occasionally played with.

I still think using taking away a collar as punishment is emotional blackmail and utter bullshit.  If you were in a vanilla relationship and your partner pissed you off, would you say, “I’m not going out with you for a month because of this.” or “You can’t tell anyone you’re my boyfriend because of this.”? Maybe you would.  I wouldn’t.

But I guess in a relationship in which the submissive/slave was required to earn their collar, taking it for punishment might make sense? I’m still not sure how I feel about that.  I guess because I’ve never been in that situation.  But I would make damn sure the submissive understood that the collar was a status symbol and not a sign of ownership.

In those situations, that’s the case.  The collar, being something the submissive has to earn, becomes a symbol of their ability to be what the dominant wants rather than something delineating ownership.  And that’s fine if it works for them.  It’s just not how it works for us.

For us, the collar marks me owned.  I’ll eventually, hopefully, have a tattoo marking me trained to His specifications.  When I get there.

What does the collar mean to you?

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  1. October 3rd, 2009 at 21:21 | #1

    I could never be in a BDSM relationship. I know its consentual, but I could never treat someone that way or bear to be treated that way. I would eventually snap and there would be much blood involved. And if I was married to someone and they did that? I’d lop the fuckers balls off.

    But, I suppose its just not for everyone.

  2. cinnamon
    October 4th, 2009 at 15:34 | #2

    I really had to think about this one, it totally caught me off guard at first.

    Master owns me, and like you guys, I don’t think He would unown me as punishment. I think He would use the collar to keep me in line, simply because He knows how important it is to me, and I am speaking strictly about the physical collar. I don’t think He would uncollar me as punishment, but I do think He would take my actual collar as punishment. Am I making sense here, because it makes sense in my head, lol.

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