From: esr@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,soc.women,alt.sex,alt.sex.bondage
Subject: Gor Considered Thoughtfully --- an analytical essay
Date: 10 Nov 92 19:52:23 GMT

Someone wrote:
> [women as natural slaves]
>   Ok, well, a crank idea, but maybe even one worth a little careful 
> exploration by a thoughtful writer. Provocative, at least. Might make 
> you think twice.

[Disclaimer: I've never had a sex slave and have no desire for one.]

A lot of people space the reasoning behind Norman's "women are natural slaves"
theme.  His rationale was twofold, and quite explicit:

1) Women seek competitively-successful, dominating men because they
   instinctively want offspring with dominator traits.  That is, female
   "masochism" is a manifestation of "genetic selfishness".

2) Women enjoy slave status more than free because being dominated frees
   them to be totally and uninhibitedly sexual.  Surrender of responsibility
   to the male also surrenders all the inhibitions which stand between
   a woman and the perfect orgasm.

I'm going to be heretical and point out that these arguments are not obviously
crazy.  In fact, I'll go further than that and observe that (a) some women
fit Norman's model all of the time, and (b) many women fit Norman's model at
least some of the time.

(Evidence?  For (1), the fact that there *is* a heterosexual SM subculture
in which the roles are male-master/female-slave.   For (2) I have only my
own experience and cultural folklore.  I suspect every heterosexual male
must have experienced times when his partner clearly wanted to be be
*taken*, sexually dominated and swept away.  More about this below.)

IMHO, Norman's error is also twofold.  His *logical* error is to go from
observing that such behavior is *common* among humans to a claim that the
underlying instinctive and psychosexual pattern he posits is *universal*,
healthy, and only suppressed by our `diseased' cultures.

His *ethical* error is that slave status, once entered, is irreversible.  There
are no safewords on Gor and there is no un-branding.  Norman might reply that
anything less than total surrender yields at best a pale counterfeit of Real
Gorean Sex.  We can reply that (1) most human beings have some goal in their
lives other than being Total Sex Objects, and (2) reports from the SM culture
suggest that total surrender in Norman's sense is neither necessary nor
particularly desirable.

(There's a more obvious error in that under many circumstances, free women can 
be made slave without their consent.  But if slave status were reversible by
the woman this problem would go away.)

The point I began this mini-essay wanting to make is a different one, however.
I claim that Gor is a funhouse mirror of the culture John Norman grew up in,
the America of the 1940s and 1950s --- and that in *that* psychosexual surround
(many elements of which are still with us at the end of 1992) John Norman's
premises (especially the second) *made much more sense*!

It's been thirty-one years since the Pill; twenty-five since the Summer of
Love.  It's easy to forget that female "frigidity" was once an adaptive
response to the high risks and high social cost for women of an active 
and visible sex life.

AIDS put a damper on the post-sexual-revolution party, but it hasn't turned
the clock back to 1959 --- easy contraception is still available, and women
who have sex and enjoy it aren't stigmatized as "trash".  We live in the
year of Madonna's "Sex" --- in 1992, the risks of sex are generally seen as
pragmatic and contingent, not moral.  *And that makes a bigger difference than
most people realize*.

Gor is the natural child of the double standard (in both senses of "natural").
In a culture that censures female desire, women who want sex will seek to
evade responsibility for having it.  Men will co-adapt by acting the dominator
part --- in fact, they'll be sexually selected by their ability to do so.
(See Allan Sherman's _The_Rape_Of_The_*A*P*E*_ for a funny and scarifying
social history of this pattern in pre-Sexual-Revolution America.)  Both sexes
will find Gor a convenient fantasy, even a liberating one.

From this angle, Norman isn't *wrong* so much as he is a man who's outlasted
his time.  But if that's so, why his return?  Why is "The Chieftain" viable in
the marketplace?

I think that, ironically, it's because our private mores haven't caught up with
the public morality shaped by visible sexual adventurers.  Most women are still
unable to be sexually aggressive; most men still painfully aware that it's
still up to them to do the pushing, even if both parties understand at some
level that the woman wants sex.

The double standard may be effectively dead in public life, but it's still
alive and well in a lot of individual superegos.  Thus, Gor is still relevant
and Norman's arguments retain some force.

Whether this will always be true is a question for another day...
-- 
					Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written