Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Rule
Yep: John Norman's Gor series. Mundane doms simply suffer from feminist cultural brain washing. "Come to Gor and be healed from that nonsense! Be a real man!" I guess that in some ways he was right in that.
The first book, at least, sort of touches on the topic, with a slavegirl trying to get the protagonist in touch with that side of himself, and the protagonist taking his sweet time realizing that when life hands you eggs, you make omelettes. It kind of gets lost in some of the parody on contemporary feminist assertions; i.e. that sex and marriage are the tool and institution of slavery, respectively.
Which is not to say he did the best job of it, but most 'mundane' guys I have met would have been embarassed to pick up a Harlequin or the like for themselves. I have commented before that the series actually has a sufficient similarity to such literature- in that aspect of it- that I would not be surprised to learn that his wife wrote the bulk, while he wrote the filler material, the series gradually progressing toward the filler as content and the erotic bulk taking more of a back seat.
Unfortunately, he also misses the point with a lot of what he writes.
For instance, the most glaringly obvious aspect in the series is the whole slavery thing. Let's disregard for a moment that there are figures given for the percentage of the population, ranging from 1 in 10 to 1 in 20, making it clear that he's just devoting more time to a small part of the setting to sell more books. Let's also disregard that he notes they have as many male slaves as female slaves (indeed, it is observed, as it was in Rome, presumably the inspiration, that if one enforced a dress code for them, there would be a slave revolt upon their realization of their own numbers). Let's also disregard how many readers miss, or intentionally overlook, the part where he notes that there's plenty of free men who actually quite enjoy bottoming in private. It's clear most readers miss as much as the author. The readers, at least, have incentive to do so (it legitimizes something certain guys can't claim on their own merits; a surefire way to land oneself in a collar in the series, ironically enough). The author does not have that excuse.
Let's consider the parodied claim that marriage is tantamount to slavery, or even slavery by another name. Sexual capital is a theory that has a pretty solid basis, at least in its most basic sense: women have inherent capital by way of sexuality, to an extent that outstrips what men have. Sexual liberation equates, in this regard, to a free market. Free markets obey various rules, some of which are decidedly overlapping with evolutionary theory, also a theory on solid grounds. That happens to introduce a problem: all trees must grow to their maximum height, because any tree not doing so will be at a disadvantage, while all trees are disadvantaged by growing that tall, leading to a maximally harmful scenario for all the trees as the inevitable consequence without imposed regulation.
This applies to women, as well. Without imposed regulation on the 'sexual market', they bring sexual capital to the table in any competitive scenario, and essentially all scenarios are competitive in one form or another. This means the women that are not willing to put in their sexual capital along with the rest of their bid in a bidding war will be at a disadvantage. The consequence is that, increasingly, women put in what they have in an unregulated arms race. As a result, women are objectified, their status reduced to mere objects of commerce, gradually forced to give away their sexual capital for no other gain than remaining in the race to the bottom (pardon the pun).
Where I live, acceptable party wear is directly derived from porn, primarily 70's movies. It's what the actresses would be wearing, singling them out from the 'respectable' women in the background already during the brief, usually contrived and universally unimaginative introductions to the movie. It's the stuff that would tell the guys these were the ones ready to give it all away for free.
And now it's what you have to wear if you want to be in the race.
Somehow, it doesn't seem to register that the annual doubling of sexual assault cases centers on perpetrators in the age group that grew up with those movies, and presumably internalized that set of expectations, conditioned by those exact same fashions that are now "the thing to wear". Hell, I catch myself making just that association. And not just because we've used the style as 'slut wear' (for which it is eminently suited).
In a scene, it is cool to send the signal "I'm depraved, horny, and need someone- anyone- to do me now". Sending the same signal in a dark back alley, drunk out of your wits, missing a heel and wondering how to get your panties back on (too far gone to realize that will involve removing the fishnets or laddered stockings) after peeing in the street in full view of random passerby... well, not so much.
We can of course argue that men should attend deprogramming sessions to undo the conditioned association, or that the association should not exist, but that isn't going to happen, and the fashions are derived from there for a reason: just that association. They will just keep tracking whatever sends the same signal, with people continuing to be oblivious to the (often, perhaps usually) unintended communication taking place.
We can also argue that men should have more wits about them than the aforementioned stereotypical drunk girl on her way home, and that there should also be no men with the impulses (and lack of restraint) to commit sexual assault. That won't happen, either, as normal male sexuality is inextricably linked to the conquest drive, and as any number of women can attest, men usually have a soft (hard?) spot for women. Unfortunate in a civilized society, but some people will see meat on display (arguably a factual observation), and assume it's for sale. Communicating a price tag that says "no cost" does little to improve on the resulting situation.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not assigning women the blame here.
The burglar that breaks into your home is the criminal, whether you lock the door or not.
Yet most of us lock the door, wear the safety belts in the car, and look out for traffic when we cross the road. It's because what we stand to lose is worth the precautions. When I stop for an aggressive truck driver in traffic, it isn't because he's in the right- he isn't. It's because being right will matter very little to me in the morgue after getting hit by that truck, and neither of us gains anything from whatever guilt the truck driver might spend his life carrying around afterwards. When I put up the fire alarm, it's not because it lowers my insurance policy, but because I donr't care to die in a housefire.
Maybe being raped isn't as big a loss as having our homes broken into; the signal being communicated certainly tends to be that a rather low value is put on it. But I don't buy that. Most women react worse to being raped than being robbed or having their homes broken into. Maybe the illusion of civility makes us deny that the risk can be rationally managed in the same way as all other risks, or deny that there is always a disparity between rights afforded and rights accorded.
Or maybe the greater problem is in the nature of the beast: a race to the bottom, where everyone loses.
This is inherently addressed in the Gor setting, but any analysis is completely omitted in all the various diatribes on subjects the author finds interesting. As in all female dominated societies (of which Gor is arguably one), women are driving factors in imposing regulation on the sexual market. Anyone willing to give away their sexuality ends up in a collar. Anyone willing to sell for coin it ends up in a collar. Neither group is allowed to participate in procreation. The market on that is cornered by the free women.
It's nothing new. Women have always opposed prostitution, and fostered the idea that some women are 'sluts' and thus not good enough, starting with "not good enough for my son" and progressing through highschool gossip and cliques, arriving at adult scorn, rejection and legislation. The trend is especially prevalent in societies where men are the main breadwinners (a situation most women seem to favor), and particularly so where women have limited freedom (this is sometimes the price implicitly paid for having a monopoly position). Men copy this, appropriating the standards set by women, and look down on prostitutes and 'sluts'. The order of the chicken and the egg has been resolved in studies on this. And it doesn't take more than a quick glance back through history to see that it's a pretty universal trend in most cultures at most times.
I'm not going to complain about sexual capital and evolutionary pressures leading to a competition where women lose by choice, and where women are progressively forced into a state tantamount to slavery, again by choice. The reasons I will not complain about that are simple:
(a) Women can choose to make their own choices or not. On the whole, women have made the choice to make their own choices. I will not refuse to respect that choice, nor treat them as incompetents or children who need to be shielded from the consequences of their own actions. I don't impose those consequences. Reality manages causality very well.
(b) As a man, I benefit from this state of affairs. Quite simply put, there's more and more meat on the market, and already everyone is looking to offer more meat and better meat at ever decreasing prices. If allowed to continue, the unregulated sexual market will end up with all the meat being free, and the competition to offer more and better will go on. A meager few decades from now, if I'm not showing my conservative nature by assuming it will take that long, any man that is at least moderately desireable will be able to expect the average woman to do a threeway blowjob after anal simply cause anything less will be nonparticipation in the mating game. That's not a situation I mind, save that my cock will get quite tired after a while.
This aspect of the question of regulation of female sexuality is glossed over, and I don't buy that it's what the author has hinted at with the commentary about slavery bringing freedom (there's other interpretations that are far more likely, and far better evidenced in the story, all of which are fairly superficial; and there's plenty of common interpretations that are plausible, but less likely to be intended, usually slightly less superficial).
So, no, I wouldn't say the Gor series addresses any topic very well, least of all what it takes for a man to come into his own as the dominant party in a relationship with a submissive woman (or even a slave), and all that is addressed gets lost in erotica, romance and a completely shallow and uninsightful parody of a patently absurd contemporary assertion that anyway was no longer fashionable by the time he got to the later books.
My self-identification as Gorean has to do with some others who identify as such, and that the juxtaposition of topics in the book has provided the catalyst for those individuals to think along certain lines that have led them to a reasonably congruent set of beliefs that happen to be closer to my own than what else I've seen out there. I can't claim kinship of that sort with anyone who isn't actively looking beyond that initial nudge in a certain direction. Sadly, most who identify by the label are precisely stuck in a 'scriptural' interpretation of the books, rather than attending to their key point about advocating self inspection, or grasping the point of the elements common to the historical cultures that inspired the fictional ones. Informally, me and my dear tend to refer to those as 'gorbangers', and for a time, they were rarer here than elsewhere.
I can't claim any ultimate authority with regard to the books, but my distinct opinion is that they offer only a most cursory treatment of this topic, fail to address their main topics, and have little to offer a dominant struggling with realizing his own nature, save to catalyze the initiation of thought processes that may eventually lead in that direction.
Actually of raising that topic, and others, is the main merit of those books, IMO.
Whether that is unintentional, I am less certain about.
Health,
al-Aswad.
P.S.: Pardon the circuitous route. I hope it wasn't too far off-topic overall. Replies should probably go to a seperate thread to avoid derailing.
_____________________________
"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.
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