Jahnaca
Posts: 729
Joined: 8/28/2006 Status: offline
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Hello patina Here is purely my point of view based on my life and my experiences. It in no way reflects the community at large. If someone happens to resemble my comments so be it, if not, oh well they have their own lives and experience to fall back on. To get it out in the open right from the get go, I have NO BDSM experience. I have never been nor will I ever desire to be a Domme. It is not my kink. I have always strived in my life to be a woman, in totality. Neither ashamed of my womanhood or be made to feel less because of it. To me Norman allowed me to see that the many facets of womanhood are not one dimensional, it is filled with startling colours and a myriad of possibilities. Women can be many things and being told to be cast in only one role, with only one path is impossible for any human being. We are not all the same or equal. If any look to a garden lets say, the beauty is not derived from only one type of flower, but rather it is the combination and mixtures of many colours, textures, flowering times ect that take a plant and make it a work of art. While all may strive to be roses, if every flower was a rose, a rose would be mundane. Trying to make a rose into a daisy is futile, why not love the daisy for what it is, and the rose for what it is. That to me is a fundamental principle in the Gorean philosophy. When Norman created the legal barriers of freedom and slavery he was contrasting facets of womanhood, the good and the evil. He was also using the free bitchy woman as an illustration of being pressed into a mold created by cultural norms, which as he often stated try to make a rose into a daisy, only frustrating the rose and stunting it, in essence creating an unnatural reality. While not discussed in the books, woman have another biological calling, that of motherhood. While Norman never addressed it, it is something that those of us who live in reality must. Can a woman deny herself this very natural biological urge and still remain content to live as a book depicted slave? Logic dictates (as does nature) no. See sexuality and the freedom gained from it is only one fragment of a total woman, other areas must be addressed if we are to remain true to the original fundamental element of the philosophy. Norman indicated more then once, women are both free and slave. Some might gravitate more towards one side or the other, others will gravitate in parts of their lives towards one side or the other while leaning towards the other side in other aspects of her life. That is the beauty of diversity. In my own life, after stripping everything down I have found that I can very much be a slave to a man, totally and completely if only figuratively. That side of me does cry out and beg to understood and accepted, yet, the other part of me also sees myself as able to take on many aspects of freedom, and embrace them as my own. While some who see only lines, roles and stagnant possibilities deny this, others, like myself embrace this totality, this freedom of full and utterly complete expression of total womanhood. See lines, rules, protocol and all that other good stuff created by Norman in his series is just that, a creation of man. While it is wonderful we can place a tidy label on ourselves, labels are generally incomplete unless we broaden the label so much as to obscure the original meaning behind it. We here on Earth have, if we look at it. In answer to your question, most if asked want “slavery” with the consensual attached to it, in essence saying I want many of those elements but I still want freedom of choice. That is not book depicted slavery. When asked most women at some point in their lives also want children, and to be fulfilled as a mother, that is not part of book depicted slavery either. What does this suggest? Hum perhaps we only yearn for elements, concepts that are part of this total woman package, in the absence of a label for this we pick one role over the other, twist it, and call it something it really isn’t. See for me, free woman means something entirely different then how most use it even in the Gorean community. I am a free woman, because I am free to be a total woman. I don’t have to be a rose to be happy, or the daisy, I am very content in being what ever it is I will ultimately become, even if it is just a violet. Jahna
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Mass-produced human beings are attractive only to those who expect to be their benevolent mass producers. John Norman
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