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In 2041, the legal committees totally replaced the relationship laws with a system of associations. There are several kinds of association, ranging from membership associations through marriages. Much of the basic law is similar in all kinds of association.
Associations for people living together include the housekeeping association and the marriage association. These can be embedded in a clan association. Other associations are generally for people with similar interests; these are called affiliation associations.
Housekeeping associations, marriage associations, clan associations and many lifestyle associations tend to be closed: a person can be a member of only one of them, unless the associations are embedded. Other associations, like professional and hobby associations, tend to be open.
A major piece is that children are required to leave their parent's marriage association no later than two years after they leave school (either high school or undergraduate university.) The same applies if they move out of their parents home even if they're in university: two years and they're off of the parental purse.
Individuals do not usually own major property; their housekeeping, marriage or clan association owns major property. This means that the only way to pass major wealth down though generations is through a clan association. Clans associations usually allow the children of association members to become cadet members, but do not usually allow them to deadhead. Successful clans require members to contribute to whatever business the clan focuses on.
The Goreans, who had always felt a bit uncomfortable in the loose federation of BDSM organizations, decided to form their own lifestyle association in 2043. Over time, the Gorean Association absorbed most of the rest of the BDSM organizations, occasionally to the distress of people who wanted to stay close to the Gorean Canon. It eventually became the largest non-religious lifestyle association.
The Gorean Association worked with the Gorean Hunting Preserve (one of the Totalitarians) to get worldwide trademarks on the kef symbol and the stereotyped "barber pole" slave tunic. They license both from the GHP; the license fees provide a significant amount of the GHP's foreign exchange income. (The NAA's Gorean Association membership is several times the total population of the GHP.)
The Natasha Fan Club is based on the extremely popular show, Tumbling Through Time. The show is a fairly mainline situation comedy featuring George and his slavegirl, Natasha. The show itself, as well as the Natasha Fan Club, is sponsored by the Goodwife Institute and their ultra-conservative backers through enough proxies that sponsorship isn't exactly obvious. It furthers the Goodwife Institute's ideological position, which is that a woman's place is in the home, either raising her family, supporting her husband, or as a slavegirl supporting someone else's family.
Many members of the Natasha Fan Club practice the various routines that George has Natasha do on the show. Most of these are conditioned response routines that require a control collar. The Fan Club distributes materials and scripts, etc. It's basically BDSM Lite.
Also in 2043, control collar software was standardized - multiple systems (except for the Goodwife Institutes's system, which was integrated in 2047) were no longer permitted. In 2049 the control collars were integrated with the contract machines, and in 2050 they were completely merged into the network infrastructure: anyone who wore one was automatically authenticated. The authentication meant that removing one, once it was worn, became a criminal offense.
As part of merging the control collars into the network infrastructure, their ability to form a mesh network was upgraded to provide a much higher level of security.
After 2045, the Slave Devotion became the major method of insuring that a slave wouldn't be able to renounce the contract. The Slave Devotion was always controversial. It was only allowed for Transferable Unrestricted Use contracts, and it began to go out of use for them when the Slavegirl mind control module came in. New installations were prohibited in 2093; Core Training replaced the Slavegirl module in 2105.
The Anti-Slavery Awakening (See Strauss and Howe, Generations, for background), kicked off in 2045, almost 78 years after the Consciousness Awakening (1967). It promptly ran into the anti-ideological bent of the rest of the population, and spent its force cleaning up the structure of contract slavery rather than eliminating it. The wave of change ended around 2060, with followup for the next several decades.
The late 2030s and 2040s saw the growth of the Slave Warehouse. This organization pioneered the practice of a modular slave-keeping structure consisting of eight rooms, four on each side of a corridor. Four of the rooms were cage rooms containing 40 slave cages stacked two high; the other four were a feeding room, a latrine, an exercise room and a meditation and training room. They also created a daily routine to go along with the structure, and a training scheme both for first time slaves and for their own employees. This made it easy to clone the entire package, and facilitated creating a pervasive nationwide chain of slave kennels. The 2050s saw more attention paid to system-wide consistency and also to expansion of in-house training and coordination with outside training boutiques and DNA modification boutiques. A large part of their experience went into the lower levels of the rights structure. Eventually The Slave Warehouse became the major slave kennel.
In 2050, the legal basis of contract slavery was redefined by creating a tiered structure of rights that could be ceded by contract. It also standardized the possible contract forms. This redefinition had been in the works for some time, but it had to wait for the control collar to be integrated into the network infrastructure, since that was the base of the rights tree.
Rights could be ceded either to a rights recipient by contract, or to a person's primary association. The two could not be mixed: anyone who ceded rights by contract could not be a member of an association that could receive ceded rights. (Not all kinds of associations can receive ceded rights - most affiliation associations cannot receive ceded rights.) Rights ceded by contract may or may not be transfered to another recipient (Transferable contracts) and the ceders use may or may not be assignable.
While the rights tree is fairly complex (and grew more complex over time) the simplified version has five levels:
There are several other commonly seen rights transfers:
This revision wasn't exactly a surprise - all deliberations were completely open with all parties heard - sometimes at high volume. This meant that most of the major (and minor) players were ready to roll out corresponding changes in their systems at the same time. These included the Slaveowner's Consortium, the Gorean Association, the Goodwife Institute, the Natasha Fan Club, Excelsior Stables and Kennels and the Premier Ponygirl Organization.
The Natasha Fan Club had always been interested in giving their members a high-quality experience of "being Natasha" without having to actually have them cede rights. Together with the Gorean Association and several other organizations, they formalized the mechanisms required for a pseudo slave: a person whose collar is managed (in specified contexts) as if she is a slave, but who retains the right to turn it off at any time, for any reason. This included creating their own collar and association management service. While it was one of the earliest of the services, it's also very narrowly focused, and is a very minor player on the association manager service scene.
The 2055 contract law revisions made it impossible to cede rights by contract without the slave-to-be wearing a control collar when she is at the contract machine. It gave a one year window for any uncollared slaves to be collared or have the slave contract lapse.
This latter provision came close to eliminating the "True Love and Eternal Devotion" declaration, but the Goodwife Institute (who was behind the thing) recovered by including a control collar in the package and calling it a True Love and Devotion Ribbon. The Premier Ponygirl Organization stumbled but recovered; they wouldn't vanish until the creation of the Family Association in 2075 dealt the death blow to the "True Love and Eternal Devotion" declaration.
There were no major changes in the DNA scene; incremental improvements continued apace. The Health Service and allied organizations continued working on a system to manage the inheritance of conflicting DNA modifications. That solution would be mandated in 2066.