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The Lolipunk Manifesto (as prepared by AnonyMPC, August 2018)
It started with a joke. I was working on a story that fell into the genre of cyberpunk, and, I was thinking a lot about the genre, and I had the thought, "There's cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk, even atom- and dieselpunk... why isn't there lolipunk, where the majority of technology is run by lolis?" Well, the first thing I did was look it up and see if there WAS such a thing, but I couldn't find anything under that name at least. There is "loli-punk", but it's a musical or fashion genre, not a set of story tropes. So I started thinking up what would be the elements of lolipunk that defined it as a fictional genre, if one existed.
I'm not naive enough to think that I invented these tropes... I'm sure at some point someone else has done a story where energy from loli-orgasms powered machines, but, as far as I know, nobody's set out to deliberately make it into a subgenre. If I'm wrong, it's still obscure enough that I couldn't find it. So I'm going to take that leap and see if I can maybe inspire people to follow my lead, to help make lolipunk "a thing." To that end, I'm not only writing a lolipunk story myself, but also offering to host other lolipunk stories in a subdirectory on my ASSTR page (assuming ASSTR remains functional). I'm fully prepared for this to go nowhere, but let's give it a whirl for fun.
Like steampunk, there's no one world history that's shared in common between stories that may decide to call themselves lolipunk. They may be set in alternate past, present, or even some hypothetical future that branches off our own world (where, perhaps, the brains of orgasming children function as quantum computers, or are required to open gateways to hyperspace, or maybe this is discovered through alien technology after a spacecraft full of alien lolis crashes in a public location). I may have sent my initial story, "Hidden Talents" in a time period evoking the 19th century, but that was just because I wanted to experiment in writing something set in a different era and by no means be taken as a standard.
But the basic premise that makes a lolipunk story is: The orgasms of underage children are found to produce a surprising amount of energy when properly collected, and/or can be used for specific effects useful to society, such as computationally interesting tasks or long range communication. Crucially, this ability isn't present, or is much reduced or much less common, in adults. Because of this situation, the orgasms of children begin to be exploited on a large scale for non-sexual tasks.
Despite the name, writers may well make this ability present in both male and female children (but the genre's called Lolipunk because historically straight male scientists were more common, so it stands to reason that they discovered and refined the phenomenon using girls... still, stories which are centered on boys can be called shotapunk, and writers are free to say it is exclusive to, or more common in, one gender or the other in their universe).
That's the simple core of lolipunk, one simple idea... child sexuality has become extremely useful, perhaps even essential, to industry, and therefore society has to gradually change. The pace and extent of that change, as well as whether it's recent or long-established, public or secret, is up to you, whatever makes the best or hottest story in your mind. If you like the idea of super casual sex, practical sexual education can be a part of every school curriculum. If you prefer the thrill of underage sex to rest in it being the ultimate taboo, then you can decide that the effect is known about in certain circles but making use of it is still considered as illegal and immoral as today. Or you can put the balance somewhere in between.
There are no rules but what you build into your own story.
But, optionally, here are some other general guidelines, most of which will apply to my universes, that any potential future lolipunk writers may wish to follow, or deliberately ignore:
1) The basis of power collection is the Humbert Collector, a device which absorbs underage orgasmic energy from the environment and converts it into electricity. This energy can be collected at a distance, even without the cummer being aware of it (and many may be built into orphanages or anywhere that there are a large number of children and one might potentially have an orgasm at any moment) but if collected this way a good deal gets lost... physical contact of a part of the body with the metal leads of the collector during orgasm captures the most energy. As such, many collectors are built into sex seats and, in more abusive setups, bondage restraints, although the exact appearance of the collector is up to any individual writer. Humbert collectors usually include batteries that store and transmit orgasmic energy at a steady rate so that it can be used in a variety of applications.
I hope for the name 'Humbert Collector' to serve as a unifying element across Lolipunk stories in vastly different universes, even if the specific details differ, but it's by no means mandatory. You might find it more interesting, for example, to set your story in a world where 'orgone', the hypothetical life force energy theorized by Wilhelm Reich, was real, and uses the terminology he developed, or maybe you just want inborn powers unlocked by sexuality that can't be stored, and no Collector exists at all. It's still Lolipunk if you want it to be.
2) Before puberty, the age of the child doesn't seem to make much difference to the level of power generated (individual stories may make their own rules for this, however, and for the comfort of the author, many universes will probably have a starting age before which the effect does not work at all). After puberty, the power and usefulness of the ability drops steadily, to almost zero at age 20. In some universes, power can temporarily be extended through pregnancy, or hormone treatments that delay physical maturity.
3) The orgasm may need to be induced through natural stimulation of genital area (or anus or nipples)... drugs or electric stimulation of the brain to produce orgasm does nothing (but produce the orgasm itself) and cannot be used to circumvent the need to sexualize children... the reason for this is usually attributed to a "chemical cascade" that must precede the orgasmic effect, or it's a partially telepathic effect that depends on their conscious awareness of their growing arousal. Stimulation with vibrating devices or manual masturbation are sufficient, but contact with another living being may produce measurable benefits and mutual orgasm + love could give the best all-around results (even when one of the partners is an adult). Pre-orgasmic arousal of underage humans may also generate power, if that makes a story better for you, although often to a lower degree. In my own story, such energy was negligible, but capable of being detected, however long arousal heightened the energy of the final release.
4) Techniques can be developed to extend the orgasm state for much longer periods, or reach it faster (but again, in my story, the more arousal buildup before orgasm, the better the results on all metrics). An extended orgasm may not produce significantly more power, but perhaps instead computational or other benefits are increased or extended.
5) Harnessing the erotic energy in children may have become commonplace, but individual children often vary in their natural potential to produce these effects. It could be that most people produce some measurable energy, but enough are at such a low level (for example, their orgasm may only generate enough power to light a light bulb for a few seconds) that it's not feasible to use them in this way. So, under this conception, there are still plenty of girls who never used for this purpose and have what we would consider more or less normal lives, and in fact society may be rigidly divided between those children who are useful, and put to work in factories, power-generating plants, and other purposes, and those who are not and protected by the same laws and taboos that protect children in our world... or even ones that are more strict. Because energy of orgasm can be collected, even at a distance, it means that even in places that don't want to exploit this, it could be repurposed to detect and discourage sexual awakening... in the same way some children had hands tied to the bed to prevent masturbation, a religious orphanage might have a collector solely so they could ring an alarm and bring about a public shaming the moment an orgasm was detected, and this type of thing could lead to a generation of children who are even more sexually repressed than Victorians, while their society is powered by libertine orgies of the small percentage of working children.
Capability generally runs in families, so those from low-performing bloodlines may not bother to be tested as to whether they have industrial utility, although there are always random mutations that can give somebody more (or less) potential than their parentage would suggest.
The fact that child sexuality has become essential to industry may make it no longer a crime even when done just for pleasure, although most nations will still make taking sexual liberties, or harvesting erotic energy, against the will of the child (or, in less sophisticated eras, parent of said child) a crime.
6) Most industrially-valuable cummers fall into two categories: They either have orgasms that produce great power (which can be converted into electrical or mechanical energy), or orgasms that produce great computational ability or other special effects that are similar to psionics. The latter effects took a while to be noticed, and so many bloodlines previously considered useless for industrial purposes actually turn out to be quite beneficial in the information age. Individual authors may wish to decide that the abilities are commonly broken down along gender lines (all boys are dynamos, all girls are computers, or vice versa), racial or ethnic origin, or even if age changes one type into another.
Psi/Computational ability can occasionally be very specialized, with some lolis, for example, being able to produce photorealistic images or transmit messages to others who are in an orgasmic state, others solving extremely complicated math or analyze data, and yet having little to no ability in other areas. In this way, some individuals may fail tests of ability because the right circumstances weren't in place, or the right type of question wasn't asked. Some writers may decide to have specialties trainable to a certain degree. Healing illnesses might be one of these rare specialized psi-abilities that makes things like STDs an issue that can be discarded in your universe. In addition, if it makes your story better, you could decide certain effects last some time after orgasm, perhaps equivalent to the male refractory period (in either sex), or even until the next time they would be naturally horny.
Individuals who generate power may be called "dynamos", "sparks", "reservoirs", or anything else appropriate depending on the setting and the whim of an individual author. Individuals who provide computational abilities may be called "computers" (if this takes place in ages where what we commonly call computers haven't been invented yet), "muses" (since they are often used to inspire insights and discoveries), "oracles", or, again, anything else.
Rarely the two talents (computational and sheer power) are present in one person. These people, sometimes called "reckoners", "flashes", "flares" or anything else, become highly valuable, and it's possible wars have even be fought over them.
Computers may generate power, or dynamos computation energy, as well, it's just usually at such a small degree that makes collection unprofitable, rather like hiring somebody to turn a crank to open a window when you could simply open the window yourself.
7) Computational benefits don't ordinarily pass through the Humbert Collector, but may rather start out in the head of the loli/shota having an orgasm, where they may go into a trance state and suddenly be able to solve a math equation or find a pattern in a lot of data, or telepathically communicate with somebody else, or be able to produce a photorealistic black and white image by tapping a pen on a paper for every pixel, or various other effects. They cannot be used to determine any information not already present in the data, known by the cummer, or subconsciously telepathically received from their partner or another orgasming loli, although insights can be produced based on material known but not consciously. Somebody can't be asked, say, the atomic weight of plutonium and be expected to give an answer if it hadn't been discovered, unless they also had access to experimental data that just needed to be sorted and analyzed. But they might provide a proof for an equation they would otherwise have no idea how to handle, in the middle of the rapture of an orgasm (assuming they, or the person they were fucking, knew the meaning of the operators and how to manipulate them). The problem and details itself may come from the mind of the partner, and is one reason actual sex has benefits (a scientist might have sex with a young girl only to hear her scream out solution to an equation that had him stumped).
Surprisingly, although a Humbert Collector itself doesn't capture it very well, this "computational energy" is also freeflowing and can be harnessed away from the loli/shota into computation engines, through the use of devices often called crowns, which often have some kind of crystal that focuses these abilities. These engines can work on datasets that are larger or more complicated than any one person can handle at one time, or on information that the loli/shota themselves don't know, and the efforts of several people can be combined on one project without them knowing what the project is. However in these cases there is no chance of "inspiration" from telepathic osmosis, all insights must be present in the computational engine itself.
A reckoner who is attached to a Humbert Collector while the device is feeding power to another machine may inadvertently manipulate the machine's operation, but an ordinary computer likely will not. However, these feats are hard to consciously control, and the effect cannot be saved for later, so a crown is often preferred.
Of course if you're telling a more modern day story where power generation isn't going to play much of a role and you still want to use the chair motif and/or the name "Humbert Collector" for computational feats or psi-abilities anyway... by all means!
8) Different cultures/countries will inevitably handle their industrial lolis differently... some are essentially bondage factories, in others they're hailed as national heroes, even celebrities. Just as in the real world, there are sweatshops that are only focused on profit for the top and there are places with loli unions and where there's a benefit package. There are areas where a child is killed as soon as they're no longer useful, and others where they are granted a lifelong pension after they're used up, in recognition of their unusual service and that they were giving up a normal upbringing. Likewise, there would inevitably be some countries where sexual contact with children, outside of officially sanctioned uses, is still strictly restricted, and others where the new technology has made a society where there is no longer any such thing as an age of consent.
9) All of the above rules are just tools to build ideas, or be ignored. The sole 'defining feature' of lolipunk is that child sexuality can be harnessed to produce a benefit that will be desirable outside of the sex itself. With that in mind, you can go any way you want, from serious to silly. There's room in lolipunk for Battlemechs powered by orgasmic lolis, an alternate WWII where government lolis frantically fuck to break nazi codes, tense modern day stories about organized crime or terrorism exploiting loli sex to get a supernatural edge over the police (imagine lolis attached to explosives that go off when they do, sent out to masturbate in public!), post-apocalyptic Mad Max style universes where gasoline is extremely rare but the roving gangs kidnap and cultivate mutant power-generating lolis to charge their vehicles and camps, and even X-Men style stories where each character has a different sex-power. Generally speaking, if you're willing to call your story lolipunk because you think, after reading this manifesto, that the term applies, it probably does, and with your permission, I will happily host it on my ASSTR subpage (or if not that and I find another place that's suitable).
If you think you want to try to write a lolipunk story, but don't have an idea, here are a few story prompts donated by people who thought them up but didn't want to write them:
- A young girl meets an older guy who showers her with money and gifts. Turns out, he's trying to lure her into his gang of hi-tech hackers who have discovered that underage sex can be used to crack encryption and hack into banks.
If you want to comment or suggest story prompts, feel free to use this form. If you wish to submit a story for the archive, please do not send it in this form, but rather send me a message expressing your interest with a valid e-mail address, and we will communicate more naturally.