Why girls in dog collars look so pretty

When as young teenagers my best friend and I started listening to punk rock, it wasn't long before we decided to change our appearance along with our musical preferences. So, our blue jeans and T-shirts were duly shredded with the help of a pair of scissors and reassembled with the obligatory safety pins. Even though that was all that was needed to get the punk look right, we still felt that our outfits required certain necessary accessories before becoming the "real thing". Leather jackets, and Doc. Marten's were in our perception very much part of the image, another requirement was a dog collar and leather bracelets with rivets. Our only problem was that in the late eighties it was impossible to purchase these items in Istanbul where I was living at the time. Therefore, you can imagine our excitement when we managed to order a collar with rivets from a friend who was going to France for her holidays. She came back with a cheap piece of leather, which we could have put together much better ourselves had we thought of it, though which we nevertheless found utterly beautiful, almost holy. Wearing it however was a completely different issue. I felt terribly awkward with it on, as my self-consciousness had already increased dramatically when people on the streets began to stare at my freaky hairdo and strange clothing. The collar was a sexual object of course, this I could not ignore, and at the age I was then, I neither understood nor liked the sensation it gave me. So, I left it for my friend to wear and never missed it.

When many years later, I found myself dressed up and tied up in black leather, it was for completely different reasons. I rediscovered the dog collar, this time without the rivets, broader and with a D-ring on one side, and I could indulge in the sexual sensation it gave me without fear or shame and even felt so good with it on that I kept it on. It has now become a part of my clothing, or my jewellery you might say, and wearing it makes me feel very feminine in the most essential meaning of the word. When after a long hard day I feel worn-out and ugly, I long to get my collar on, because it almost instantly makes me feel whole and beautiful again. It binds me together, it collects my thoughts and relaxes me, reminding me that I am first and foremost a sexual being, which in turn is when I feel most like a woman. Therefore, I prefer to wear my dog collar regularly as part of my daily life, thus giving my sexuality greater influence on my work, my thoughts or whatever I do. But it is not merely a subjective sensation, because people around me also look at the collar and are unable to abstract from it. I become more sexual, also in their eyes, and so much more a woman. I know my lover looks at it and remembers how he held me by it the night before, and I in turn feel him remembering and the time we spend with each other automatically becomes more intimate, even though we might only be making the dinner together.

Not so long ago, dog collars suddenly came into fashion. Many young girls started wearing them and even though it seemed as if they were not completely aware of how powerful and sexual an accessory the collar is, they looked lovely. Just a thin leather string around a soft neck is enough to make a woman look sexy. You can't help wondering who bound that string around her neck, who her owner is and how far she is allowed to go. Well, I am sure those young girls would be absolutely disgusted if they were able to read my mind.

Nevertheless, I find that women who wear sexual accessories not as fashion items, but mainly as elements of their own lust and womanhood, send out an important signal. "I'm a woman, I'm beautiful and I'm horny!" but at the same time they should of course have complete control over their own bodies and be free to choose their own lovers. Actually, women that radiate a strong sexuality tend to scare off more people than they attract. Yet, women today are not permitted to express their sexuality in harmony with the dictates of their own biology or psychology, while at the same time retaining the right to reject unsolicited sexual advances without running the risk of being humiliated, yelled at or at worst even raped. In fact, in such cases the blame is very often laid at the feet of the woman herself, because women who dress in a sexually explicit manner are not taken as seriously as their more conservatively dressed counterparts. On the contrary, they are usually looked down upon as being dim-witted.

A woman cannot be a whole woman until her sexuality is respected on an equal basis with her maternal instincts and intellectual abilities, which by the way are still not fully respected. We cannot speak of the emancipation of women until then, because we still neglect, ignore and disdain one of the most important aspects of her womanhood. But the collar and other sexual items can be instruments that help us get there, because first of all they make us subjects, not to an ideology, a system or even a lover, but to our own lust, and let us find joy, beauty and strength therein.