Aswad
Posts: 6618
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Elisabella
In other words, we're descended from women who played it safe and men who took risks.
More to the point, women minimize the variation in competition by devaluating anyone that's willing to have sex without requiring commitment, i.e. those that are independent or adventurous. These values are then passed on to male offspring and acquaintances. Prostitutes, sluts and the like are excluded from the "good company," shunned, reviled and generally made to be non-status partners. Venice had a side track in the form of courtesans, which were a higher class than street prostitutes, but not viable to their clientelle as partners. Vikigs had a side track in the form of shield maidens. And so on and so forth.
As a result, there's only a very limited, but very fierce, competition going on. It's about who can toe the line without that fatal step over it. On Gor, this mechanism has been formalized by putting the promising girls into collars, devaluing all of humanity as a consequence, and depriving men of those partners that are most desireable. In the real world, it's a fair bit more subtle, of course, at least to men, who aren't used to spotting fine nuances in progress. Still, the question isn't does the dress look good, is it "could I get away with wearing that?"
A direct consequence of this, is precisely the brand of feminism that Lange criticized.
In essence, by eliminating the outliers and keeping everything level, mediocre, women as a whole have- by way of this strategy- damaged the human species as carriers of half the contribution to anyone's genome, and also through causing a situation in which even those mediocre men that our species should have been rid a long time ago, have had a shot at essentially any partner. Instead of the best among each gender pairing up, the pairings have been dictated by chance and convenience, with no man and no "acceptable" woman left behind. Cultures have been built that enhance those restraints women initially applied to themselves, and wherein the culture itself aids in stripping the best from the pool. If men hadn't had precisely the opposite way of interacting, with competition hard wired, and results highly praised, the tragedy would be even worse.
That leads to shitty men marrying decent women, leading to a need for women to find a way to deal with that problem.
And they did find a way to work around the problem. As reactionary solutions go, it wasn't all that bad, either.
Jim wrote "There are no weak men in my family. The women ate them."
In a lot of cultures, that was precisely the thing. Among the Vikings, a man accused of being weak by his wife wouldn't make it very far. Among the Spartans, a man running from a fight might find his wife or mother there to strangle him and dump his corpse off a cliff when he returned.
In another thread, someone asked what we would want to keep from each of the two cultures. Seeing as some of those best suited to being free are least appreciated on Gor, while they are highly appreciated here, I would keep that element from the culture we have built here in the real world. The element that recognizes women for their substance.
And, seriously, how many of the FW here haven't been in a collar at some point in time, precisely for being desireable?
quote:
But back to the topic, looking at it through a reproductive lens, a man in slavery, or a worker drone bee, won't have a very good chance to reproduce. A woman in slavery would have a much stronger chance. So for a man, there's absolutely no benefit to staying where he is, reproductively. The ironic thing is that once a woman has a child she's less likely to see the slavery as tolerable.
In our current world, the man has no benefit to hauling ass. Slavery, of a sort, is the safest way to ensure reproduction for a man today. And, incidentally, women that have children and are slaves, will tend to play it safe. So long as slavery is enforced, that means staying around, and trying to catch the eye of someone that might show favor to the children, or themselves. Oppression has never been difficult, but easing up on it has always been problematic. Ask any dictator, any long term kidnapper, anyone that has oppressed people for a long time and then tried a different approach: it just won't work, it's a one-way street.
The Heliots had to live with having their crops taken and the rite of killing one of them as a coming-of-age thing for the free men. It took a long time before they made a bid, and it was a bid to rid themselves of oppression, not a bid to gain freedom. And, of course, as in most such cases, we see Nietzsche's wisdom illustrated: a people that don't have nobility in them, act in opposition to what is inconvenient to them, what oppresses them, but not for what's good, or for gaining freedom. Subsequently, their notion of good is defined in terms of what they opposed, like abuse victims who define themselves as victims and carry the crosses of their abusers. Guess I shouldn't rant about certain religious groups in this connection. Those who see it, see it. The rest will just make noise.
Late night speculation, worth what you paid for it.
Nice post, by the way.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
|
Service-submission-slavery ...OR... Femininity - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread