This was originally a roleplay ad, but it has enough world-building and length that I hope it can be admitted as a small story on its own too.
It’s 2048, Western liberal democracies still exist on paper, but the top 0,01% owns 85% of the wealth, which in practice means a level of control of politics, law and media that makes the early 21st Century be remembered as impossibly good times. AI cannot sustain a proper conversation yet but it now allows a very efficient, simple and discreet control of social media content, identifying and silencing opinions and ideas that might make people act against the system, and creating massive amounts of astroturfed content that justifies hardships as unavoidable lesser evils and sows division among those suffering them. Now, social media is just one more branch of top-down traditional media, which monopolizes the access to information, just as in the second half of the 20th century, but even more tightly. Any political agent that is not meant to perpetuate the system is filtered out and silenced, and in the rare case where it reaches a bit of a size, infiltrated and broken from inside.
Corporate analysts consider that some apparently non-political fashion trends correlate with political views, so these are closely controlled and steered together with the clearly political ones. Overall, all trends that appeared after 2010, political or not, have been deactivated, but it has been estimated that an extreme reversal to pre-modern times is not the most efficient choice. People need a surrogate sense of modernity and progress. So instead, trends from the 1970s up until the 2000s are promoted, just with slight cyclical variations, enough to satisfy people’s needs for chasing after something new. So in 2048, most social views that are made publicly acceptable on topics such as gender and race, are recycled from the 1970s-90s, and fashion and body standards are just those from the early 2000s.
Most of what was the middle class lives now in extremely difficult conditions, just a few details away from those who already live in slums. Truly higher education is only affordable for the elites, while affordable education has become a training ground for rote jobs. The closest remnant of upwards social mobility is a very small trickle of people, most often men, who may be given a chance by distinguishing themselves at climbing the narrow and high ladder by knowing how to lick butts from above, knowing which ones to betraying those around, and ruthlessly exploiting those below.
Although only occasionally a man makes it from the bottom to the top, at a functional and mostly static level there’s a transmission belt between the 0,01% and the rest: around a 5% of cronies and enforcers who consider themselves lucky to live somewhat better than the rest even though they are not at the top. These are the bureaucrats, low-level management, and the police.
Not everybody in this “new middle class” makes a living by making the lives of people under them difficult, though. The elite also needs a significant army of servants to make their own lives simple yet luxurious, and some people get there just as a desperate attempt at surviving or helping their family survive. For example, it has recently become popular that some of the high-rise luxury buildings where the elite lives have now lift attendants as a mark of luxury, even if it’s absolutely unnecessary from a technical point of view. It’s just a way for the rich to show to other rich that they are rich. AI may be efficient for many tasks, but there’s an extra sense of power in having another human being doing something low for you and even being thankful for being given that “job opportunity”. And actually, from the point of view of many below, it’s really a great job opportunity, because the conditions are just better than cleaning toilets—if you are nice and smile even at the tasteless jokes, you even get some good tips.
Wealthy people, especially single men, often rent luxury apartments because they have a highly mobile lifestyle. A similar trend that has become popular in the last few years among rental apartments is having a sort of fixed live-in maid. It is technically part of the apartment so they are colloquially referred to as “a furniture”—it started as a jocular expression but it has stayed as the everyday term, used as a count noun to distinguish from the other, non-sentient, furniture. When a new tenant moves into an upscale apartment, there is usually furniture, which includes *a furniture*, but some tenants may choose to kick her out and get a new one, or in a few cases of people who don’t like changes, bring the one they had in the previous apartment. The duties of a furniture are not just all household tasks but also entertaining the tenant 24/7, which is coded loosely in her (generally abusive) contract and everybody knows what it means, even if lawyers are too refined to write explicit terms in the contract. While she’s not considered at all like being a wife or even a girlfriend, and she’s considered below them in most regards, it’s usually considered socially distinct from a whore, and generally better. It doesn’t carry the taboo nature of prostitution, but more in a category like booth babes, Hooters waitresses, and other sexualized and somewhat denigrating but not-underground activities. Details may vary to some degree with each contract but most furniture can have access to things they could not afford as just regular “middle class”: the same high-quality natural food as the tenants—as opposed to the cheap, industrial one other people eat—, warm water, air conditioning, space despite being in a city, access to exercise equipment (this is a luxury but also a requirement), safety from crime—at least from the crime perpetrated by the lower classes. They usually don’t get health insurance, though: that would be too much, and only the upper classes can afford that. If she gets seriously sick, she’s out and on her own. There’s also no job security: she’s furniture so if he gets bored, she’s in the street and he gets a new one—usually the company owning the building provides with new options following the tenant’s stated preferences. Considering how small the group of elite men is with respect to the population at large, there’s few positions available with respect to the amount of desperate young women, so it’s a very coveted position and the physical standards are very high. Quite often, renting companies choose to directly fire a furniture right after a few dismissals, sometimes as few as three, because they consider it’s likely that whatever a few tenants didn’t like about her may be disliked by other tenants, and given the amount of young women hoping to get a chance at eating well, access to unpolluted air and water, and other luxuries of sorts, they consider it’s cheaper to get new “fresh” ones—between the age of 18 to 21, which is when most women get a chance of getting hired, their health is usually not affected to a point where it negatively affects their looks. Once fired once, it’s mostly over and most will have to move to other jobs typically to young women without studies, without the perks and for an even lower salary.
A few furnitures may get very lucky and manage to get a ring around their fingers, but this is very rare because most upper-class men may like fooling around but they come from good families and prefer an upper-class girl to marry, and while a home chair is not a restaurant chair and furniture are not usually seen as whores, they are still just furniture. But it can still be a distant dream in the head of many. Media will take care of amplifying this sentiment to make people feel that the obvious cases of abuse are a natural price to pay for such opportunity, and even churn out a few romance novels out of it. As for working-class men, a similar promise that some of them, if they do things right, may turn out to have a large, high-rise apartment where he can eat steaks cooked on a daily basis by a furniture in lingerie—heck, maybe even two!—is enough to keep the most optimistic ones going. The rest may keep themselves entertained with sports, Hooters restaurants and daytime-raunchy TV shows that offer a cheap surrogate for the luxuries of those above (NB: look for: 90s tutti frutti tv show, in Google to get a feel of these).
Gender roles alone (leaving wealth issues aside) are those from the 70s-90s, so people are equal on paper irrespective of their gender. But so they are irrespective of their wealth. However, women from the elites rarely complain. Marriage and divorce laws have been made somewhat fair for both sides (the elites know how to do this when it’s about their own issues), so plain gold-digging is not possible but they still get a certain protection so they won’t end up in a slum, especially if they have children in common. This has actually nothing to do with women’s rights but it’s a necessity to make nuclear families stable in the upper classes. The ambitions of some men may also be fuelled by the backstage ambitions that some wives have for themselves and their children. And just like in the 70s and 80s, a small minority of women can occupy positions of leadership, at the cost of learning to play by “the boy’s rules”, which means among other things not pressing any further on women’s issues at an individual or political level, letting boys be boys, and learning to navigate sexual harassment and sexism by being able to swallow their pride when it’s bad and take advantage when it’s an opportunity for promotion. It also means learning to behave like aggressive men when necessary, stomping on others below them. Of the few trying, even fewer succeed because it requires a combination of fake submissiveness and occasional cut-throat behaviour that is only available to nearly psychopathic personalities, but there are some Margaret Thatchers here and there, and they even serve as poster children for how women’s issues just don’t exist. Other wealthy women, as well as a very small proportion of wealthy men with a lot of free time, may feel genuine pity for those who are less fortunate and they may run charities, some of them actually helping a handful of lucky unfortunates at an individual level, just like a lottery, but not even close to making a difference at a global scale. Their efforts may even be co-opted and exploited by slier elements of the elites as a good-cop facade for the system, especially during political campaigns: we do care and here’s the proof that we’re trying to make a better world.
On a daily basis, most furnitures get a debit card to do shopping of their own, since most tenants prefer that she can take care of buying some things such as food, attire, cleaning products, etc. The card draws on an account that the tenant tanks up at his will, although there’s usually a certain amount when he moves in which allows many furnitures to try to prepare his arrival. In general, expenses must always be things that serve a purpose for him, and exceptions are only possible if he allows them (how often this happens depends a lot on the type of interpersonal relationship there is between them, and the range is huge). He can review the expenses at any time and unjustified personal expenses for her own enjoyment can easily lead to immediate termination or even a huge fine as allowed in her contract. In any case, for most furnitures, being able to shop in the spacious and clean malls of the rich, without crime, with their climate control and filtered clean air, is just a luxury on its own.
I hope this is enough to give a general sense of the world.
I would like to roleplay a story about a young woman employed as a furniture. Her employer, a company renting out luxury apartments, has a policy of two strikes: the second time she is dismissed, she’s out. The previous tenant was satisfied with her but he died of old age, and unfortunately for her, that counts bureaucratically as a strike because it’s a change of tenant. Her mother has developed a sickness after years working in a factory and being exposed to chemicals with no safety equipment, she cannot work anymore and sick benefits are something unheard of. While the pay as furniture is miserable for anyone above, it’s less miserable than in any other job she could get, and it’s enough to afford some of the medicines her mother needs, besides giving herself access to proper water and food (she sometimes even dared to smuggle out some for her mother).
Now a new tenant is moving in and he will decide what furniture he keeps and what he wants changed.
This story is fiction and I can write either character in it, but it’s a fact that people here who are good at writing realistic female characters are few, so I will only play the male if you can play a female character realistically enough.
There are also other aspects of this world that could be explored besides the occupation as furniture, if you are interested. These are some ideas that I have not developed completely.
I am also interested in workplace sexism. It could be some kind of internship program that is supposed to be to give chances to young women but it’s actually meant to exploit them in return for peanuts and vague promises for more permanent employment, which are rarely fulfilled. It would also be seen by many men as one of their favourite hunting grounds for sexual harassment. One could play a new intern and the other one the boss and optionally a few background male coworkers (but usually more than one or two characters in detail becomes too difficult).
Something involving an entertainment media company organizing some kind of raunchy and sexist show under the pretense of a charity event, and filling their pockets with it. For example, some kind of beauty pageant with a degrading way of rating the women and humiliating questions they have to reply, while the organizers present it just as good-willed fun because a part of the profits will be invested in a social cause, such as homeless kids or even something about women, such as women’s shelters or breast cancer among women who had to work close to radioactive waste. It’s legal so they are not lying, but they are making women denigrate themselves under that excuse, and the organizers still pocket a big share of the profits they squeeze out of it.
The two ideas above can also cross paths if some bros at management in a company decide to have fun organizing something like a “charity wet t-shirt calendar” (this actually happened in the 1980s, you can google King&Spalding 1983).
Exploring new kinds of humiliatingly sexualized jobs for young women who need money very badly. I prefer things that they manage to push into the mainstream, so not only they exploit the girls but they move the overton window of what’s acceptable. Actual sexual services may happen, but rather backstage. Classic examples are bikini wash booths, ridiculously dressed promotional models in computer and car fairs, podium girls, etc. As a more curious example, in the late 2000s there was in Wall Street a place that let yuppies have their shoes shined by young girls in sexy uniforms, just like a shoe-cleaning Hooters (I am sure it closed in the 2010s, but it worked for a while). Things like that or even worse could be possible in this 2048, especially if it’s some kind of “new concept” within the story. We could play a girl being hired for this and some scenes from her new work.
If you write me a PM, please put the title of the ad in the subject, and include your preferences and limits.
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/p6wu3f/fm_story_dystopian_nearfuture_with_extreme