"How...old exactly are you?" The pause between the first two words of his question conveyed the real, unspoken question.

"I'm of age." I replied, giving a thin-lipped smile and adding, after a pause of my own, "In some countries."


When I run I often make up stories or build out ones that I've previously come up with.  It's fun to do, though I've never been one to write them down. I thought I might start trying to do some creative writing on here, just to see if I can get any good at it.

The above is the opening exchange of a piece I'm working on. The first draft is very clunky, but I hope to put it up when complete.  As it stands, it's only going to be a short first chapter and probably won't get a second for reasons I'll explain.

So I've never really given much thought to the age of consent. It's one of those things that I kind of thought of as standard across the world even as I know there are countries and states that have different laws.  Where I live it's 16, but I saw an article on the BBC website last year about Japan raising their age from 13 to 16. As I understood it, the higher age was already kind of the custom, but they wanted to give extra protection to people at risk.

Age of consent are basically arbitrary, particularly when you bring in Romeo & Juliet laws which don't criminalize the act if the two people are close in age. So like in some states at 14 I can say "sure" to sex with a 17 year old, but not his 18 year old brother. I'm sure there are people who while "underage" by law are physically and emotionally ready for adult relationships, and people who are considered "of age" who lack the mental and emotional maturity needed.  Actually, thinking about it, I think there are lots of people in the second category!!! 🙂

For the record, I'm not good with people, so any sort of intimacy, sexual or otherwise, is not my thing. I only started looking up the age of consent on Wikipedia bc of the exchange at the top of the page. I came up with it while out running, and thought it would be the good starting point to build the story around. I imagined it as between a young female and an older male. Because of how such fiction and real life is, he was financially far better off than her. Such a dynamic has a certain squick about it, bc of perverts like Jeffry Epstein who go for underage girls. Also I didn't want to set the story in modern times bc I wanted the female to be proposing something bc she had no other options that she could see and there are better safeguards now than much of the past. Reading up briefly on age of concent laws on Wikipedia, it sounded like the 16 age became a thing in the 1920s and 30s.  With this period also seeing the Great Depression, I set the story then. If I was going to write a proper story I would probably have to research it better to see if my dates work, but for just a piece of creative writing I'll rely upon the reader being as in the dark of the actual timelines for the age of consent being rasied as I am. 🙂

As I started thinking about the girl in the story, I started to flesh out how she came to be in her reduced circumstances. I won't go into it all here, but her father, a cop had been killed by a bootlegger, and her mother, having drowned her grief in illicit booze has cycled through several men, and when the girl's latest 'uncle' gets a little handsy, she runs away. Living on the streets with only the clothes on her back, she has no choice but to beg.  Because of the Great Depression, jobs are already hard to come by for grown ups, so no one is going to hire a girl in her early teens (I saw the girl as being 14). Her only asset really is her youth which, a few years b4 she could have traded on through marriage or prostitution, as undesirable as each would be to her (like me, she's not keen on the idea of sex). The very laws about consent designed to protect her actually limit her choices. I think that's sort of one of the take aways I would want to build into what I write (it's currently a work in progress). The good people of high ideals who pushed for the consent laws had focused so much on what they believe to be good for people, but they haven't thought as much about the social and other factors that can limit people's options. It's easy to say, for example, that people shouldn't live on the streets, but unless there are means in place for people to avoid this or a way for them to get back into society, and a way for the homeless to know about and access these means, then it's unfair to act as if homelessness is a morale or ethical failing. These same high idealled folk in the 1920s had also been the driving force behind prohibition, which had caused a rise in criminal activity that had, in the story, led to the death of the protagonist's father and the start of her downfall.

The girl in the story has tried to find a way out of her predicament, looking for a factory job or as a maid, but bc of her age and bc she is living on the streets (well actually in a Hooverville, which were homeless shanty towns that grew up bc of how many people were poor at the time) no-one will hire her. Her options are basically sell her body or beg. A decade or so before she would have been 'legal' to have sex with (or even marry), but now her age acts as a deterrent except for the worst type of people. Plus she really doesn't want to do that.

In her desparation she seeks what she sees as her only 'hail Mary' option. Tricking her way into a wealthy businessman's office she offers herself to him...as his pet.  Now this is where progressing the story gets...problematic. Assuming he accepts (which, if this was going to be extended into a full story, he kind of has to), we are now in petplay territory and all the kink assumptions that come with that. Even without sex and her dressed in the most modest of pet costumes, any sort of interaction while she is underage, the stroking and petting you would give a real cat, has very wrong undertones. Similarly if they do develop a relationship that waits until she has reached 'the age of consent' to do anything, the very history of her as his pet makes the relationship uncomfortable as it looks like grooming (and not the sort of pet grooming than you might take you cat or dog to get). I'm not sure if petplay was a thing then, but even if it was, then it is insanely unlikely that she would know about it. She's not suggesting a sex thing, but to basically become his chattel (personal property).

It's kind of funny, but if I make her of age and allow her some agency, I can probably write this as a sort of '50 Shades of Russian Blue'. If I make her into a tragic child prostitute who sells her body and go deep into the angst and horror of her existence, I can probably write some gritty historical novel that highlights the hardships of the past. As it is, I really can't see how the story can progress without me being kicked off WordPress and possibly investigated!

Anyway, so as I say, this is just going to be a creative writing exercise for me so the long term concern about how it plays out gets to be avoided. It will just go up to her making the offer, not his response.  It's a shame as the more I thought about it, the more I felt for the protagonist.  Her offer to be a pet isn't some fun kink but the idea of someone so lost and scared, that she is willing to trade her humanity, pride and self worth and lower herself to the level of an animal in exchange for someone showing her kindness and protection. She has no power she can leverage, no sense of agency. I actually see it more as her desparate desire not to follow the only obvious option left to her, selling her body, whether to him or someone else. She wants to be a pet not a mistress.

And like this is longer than the final product will probably be, but I sort of wanted to talk about the process. There are a lot of people on here who are great writers for poems and novels and factual articles. I'm not really a writer, at least not of fiction, so I wanted to discuss how this writing process was going and share how I'm approaching it.

So far the actual writing is...in early draft stage! I've actually written it through once and revised it a few times which has given me a better insight into how she got there and how she thinks. The writing is far more clunky than I want. I didn't want to straight out state the time period bc it is written in the first person and I was instead inserting references to clue the reader in to it being in the early 1930s, like a reference to the Wall Street Crash and Hoovervilles but they seemed forced. Also, right now, her voice seems too modern. It's tricky, bc she has this crazy plan to try and get out of her situation by getting adopted as a pet and she fully understands - but doesn't want to have to admit to herself - that this is the sort of thing that would only happen in a story (she was an avid reader b4 her father died) or a comic strip. Little Orphan Annie was started in the 1920s and I can imagine her having grown up reading it and now that she is so far down she is hoping, just hoping, that she can similarly be adopted by someone even though she is too old to go to an orphanage even as she is too young to enter the adult world. In a sense, she is retreating into the world of stories bc her reality is so stark.

But, yeah, thanks for reading! I'll try and be more concise with the actual piece when I finally put it up on here.

That picture at the top of the page and below is me as a cat. For Halloween. And, so, just to be clear, I am not looking to be adopted as a pet, nor try the petplay kink!