Gor-blimey.
I didn't notice this at first, but in the details of the publication info on Amazon is the niggling little fact that Witlness of Gor is a staggering 717 pages (as well as hardcover.)
By way of comparison, Great Expectations is only 448 pages in the Penguin edition and Hugo's Bellringer only 510. This is literally half as large as War & Peace, which runs in the low 1400s. This is in fact almost exactly the size of the first three volumes combined in Dark Horse's omnibus, so it's also a Doorstop, to boot.
Regarding Norman's Imaginitive Sex - also published in 1974 by DAW (!) - it occurred to me in the course of all this discussion that I was getting a faint recollection with all of this, and then this am it hit me: in Bujold's Komarr there's a brief but telling sequence with the heroine having dutiful sex with her control-freaky, emotionally-abusive traditional-patriarchal husband, in which she has to use the device of private internal fantasies of scenarios which she finds degrading and horrible but which are the only way she can bring herself to the "obligations of the marriage bed" because he's such a nasty, bullying, perfectly nice and respectable all-round jerk. ("He never beat me" is her epitaph for him, when she trying to excuse him from others' condemnation of him as an asshole.)
On another thread, deiseach notes that for all the protracted subjugation-foreplay, there's not much in the way of actual sex going on, really, where you'd expect some typical-for-the-era rhapsodies on female flesh and the unquenchable virility of our manly heroes. It really makes you wonder if Lange simply cannot handle ordinary plain-vanilla het sex between two coequal adults, and needs all these extraordinary psychological aids to make it possible. If only RealDolls had been invented then!-- but that probably wouldn't have helped, given his Spartan fascination with burly, bearded men sticking pointed objects into each other.
Imaginative Sex was hardly very imaginative, as people have noted, for 1977. (Hullo? This was the era of KISS, for pete's sake! Mainstream rock group popular with 3rd graders, dressed like demons from BTVS? I've got a mainstream mass-market paperback from the 70s which features swingers having threesomes, incestuous voyeurism, and explicit BDSM involving gravy and dogs.) Worse than that, neither it nor Gor is even as kinky as a lot of the stuff* in Quo Vadis (1895) - which I queasily read as a teenager - or a lot of other "Christians vs. Romans" novels of the venerable past, some of which have been reissued by modern Christian presses, to my astonishment when I saw one reprint which I remembered having among other things a mention of man-on-tame-lioness - until I read in the foreward that it had been bowdlerized for modern Believers' protection.
(The idea that there was a lot of hypocritical prurience going on in the late-Victorian era tut-tutting fascination with the Decadence of Ancient Rome is not original to me: it's kind of inevitable in art books when covering the Academy's hyper-realistic paintings of the same.)
OTOH, even the hyperfervid sword-and-sandal novels pale by comparison to what Macmillan was peddling a few decades later: the execrably-racist** 007 book Live And Let Die from 1954 has a description of a strip-tease act at a nightclub which beats Norman's vague descriptions of slave girls dancing in red silk hollow:
And now, friends" announced the MC, still turned towards the drums, "G-G..." he paused, "Sumatra."
The last word was a yell. He began to clap. There was pandemonium in the room, a frenzy of applause. The door behind the drums burst open and two huge Negroes, naked except for gold loincloths, ran out on to the floor carrying between them, her arms around their necks, a tiny figure, swatched [sic] completely in black ostrich feathers, a black domino across her eyes.
They put her down in the middle of the floor. They bowed down on either side of her until their foreheads met the ground. She took two paces forward. With the spotlight off them, the two Negroes melted away into the shadows and through the door.
The MC had disappeared. There was absolute silence save for the soft thud of the drums.
The girl put her hand up to her throat and the cloak of black feathers came away from the front of her body and spread out into a five -foot black fan. She swirled it slowly behind her until it stood up like a peacock's tail. She was naked except for a brief vee of black lace and a black sequin star in the center of each breast and the thin black domino across her eyes. Her body was small, hard, bronze, beautiful. It was slightly oiled, and glinted in the white light.
The audience was silent. The drums began to step up the tempo. The bass drum kept its beat dead on the timing of the human pulse.
The girl's naked stomach started slowly to revolve in time with the rhythm. She swept the black feathers across and behind her again, and her hips started to grind in time with the bass drum. The upper part of her body was motionless. The black feathers swirled again, and now her feet were shifting and her shoulders. The drums beat louder. Each part of her body seemed to be keeping a different time. Her lips were bared slightly from her teeth. Her nostrils began to flare. Her eyes glinted hotly through the diamond slits. It was a sexy pug-like face - chienne was the only word Bond could think of.
The drums thudded faster, a complexity of interlaced rhythms. The girl tossed the big fan off the floor, held her arms up above her head. Her whole body began to shiver. Her belly moved faster, Round and round, in and out. Her legs straddled. her hips began to revolve in a wide circle. Suddenly she plucked the sequin star off her right breast and threw it into the audience. The first noise came from the spectators, a quiet growl. Then they were silent again. She plucked off the other star. Again the growl and then silence. The drums began to crash and roll. Sweat poured off the drummers. Their hands fluttered like grey flannel on the pale membranes. Their eyes were bulging, distant. Their heads were slightly bent to one side as if they were listening. They hardly glanced at the girl. The audience panted softly, liquid eyes bulging and rolling.
The sweat was shining all over her now. Her breasts and stomach glistened with it. She broke into great shuddering jerks. Her mouth opened and she screamed softly. Her hands snaked down to her sides and suddenly she had torn away the strip of lace. She threw it into the audience. There was nothing now but a single black G-string. The drums went into a hurricane of sexual rhythm. She screamed softly again and then, her arms stretched before her as a balance, she started to lower her body down to the floor and up again. Faster and faster. Bond could sense the electric tension in the room. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.
The audience began to shout at her. "C'm' on, G-G. Take it away, baby. C'm' on. Grind, baby, grind."
She sank to her knees, and as the rhythm slowly died so she too wnt into a last series of juddering spasms, mewling softly.
The drums came down to a slow tom-tom beat and shuffle. The audience howled for her body. Harsh obscenities came from different corners of the room.
The MC came onto the floor. A spot went on him.
"Okay, folks, okay." The sweat was pouring off his chin. He spread his arms in surrender.
"Da G-G agrees!"
There was a delighted howl from the audience. Now she would be quite naked...
Like the pasties that allow the fiction of non-nudity IRL and online art galleries, this Erté-inspired scene is more explicit than any of the bits where Bond and Solitaire actually get busy - but Fleming has gotten away with showing a woman orgasming*** and scores of onlookers experiencing le petit mort with her in public, so he doesn't need to risk getting foul of the censors. That it is in validation of white Anglo-American tropes of racial superiority via the unholy linkage of sexual appetite, animalism, and criminal depravity with blackness is just gravy for the target audience. (Count the dehumanizing catchwords!)
But I don't think there's any doubt that Fleming is describing an uncomplicated straight-guy hind-brain appreciative response to a physically-fit woman dancing in the almost-nude - from personal experience. (One is also forced to remember that no matter how hard it is to type one-handed, one can certainly use a fountain-pen with only one hand, even if it is a little awkward...) Despite plenty of potentially-slashy moments of injured/naked-buddy tendresse between Bond and colleagues, which don't come off at all the same way that such moments do in the Gor books.
--And this was the mainstream, back in those simpler, more innocent Fifties...
I should also add that the leper/leprosarium theme which figures as strongly in Tarnsman of Gor as the arena-combat and slave-revolt themes in Outlaw, comes right out of Ben Hur - which was full of barely-subtexty slashiness contributed by scriptwriter Gore Vidal.
"Do you like movies about gladiators?"
What's both funny and sad to me is that someone who apparently thought he should be ashamed asked Tom of Finland**** if he wasn't ashamed of his art career drawing men having sex with each other - to which the artist replied "I draw proud men having happy sex!"
--Which is far more than you can say for 90% of the het porn/erotica out there, which is both part of, and symptom of, our problems today.
*Climaxing in naked Christian heroine tied to the horns of a gigantic bull which is then sicced against one of the good guys, before the eyes of her boyfriend (who is also her reformed wannabe date-rapist, hooboy) in the Circus. When I heard that they'd done a movie of it back in the Sword-and-Sandal days, my mind went "sproing" trying to figure out how they'd deal with it all. Unfortnately the time it was on TV it turned out to be sooooo boring and stodgily done - I mean, if you're going to take out all the really bawdy stuff in the original all you've got is a bunch of guys in togas not doing very much - that I fell asleep before we got there...Apparently the pre-Hayes Code version of its most famous knockoff is a lot racier. (I remember being surprised that they allowed the scene of the milk-bath back then, and I only saw the edited version.)
**It's even worse than the movie, imho.
*** Unfortunately G-G Sumatra doesn't show up again and turn out to also be an ass-kicking assassin simultaneously using her limber dancer's body and sultry beauty to stun her victims, which would be at least an improvement over the goopy, drippy Solitaire (as well as in keeping with the later, cinematic tradition of 007 Bad Girls.) As they're waiting to be fed to the sharks, and Bond plans to drown Solitaire if the cavalry doesn't arrive in time:
He shared all his hopes with Solitaire. None of his fears.
She had lain opposite him, her tired blue eyes fixed on him, obedient, trusting, drinking in his face and his words, plaint, loving.
"Don't worry about me, my darling," she had said when the men came for them. "I am happy to be with you again. My heart is full of it. For some reason I am not afraid, although there is much death very close. Do you love me a little?"
"Yes," said Bond. "And we shall have our love."
..."Strip her," he said to Solitaire's guard.
Bond flinched. He stole a glance at Mr. Big's wrist watch. It said ten minutes to six. Bond kept silence. There must not even be a minutes delay.
"Tie some strips around his shoulder. I don't want any blood in the water, yet."
Solitaire's clothes were cut off her with a knife. She stood pale and naked. She hung her head and the heavy black hair fell forward over her face. Bond's shoulder was roughly bound with strips of her linen skirt.
"You bastard," said Bond through his teeth.
Under Mr. Big's direction, their hands were freed. Their bodies were pressed together, face to face, and their arms held round each other's waists and then bound tightly again.
Bond felt Solitaire's soft breasts pressed against him. She leant her chin on his right shoulder.
"I didn't want it to be like this," she whispered.
Bond didn't answer. He hardly felt her body. He was counting seconds...
****I'm not the target audience for his style of slashy graphic art, in several ways; but I can appreciate what others appreciate in it, and the fact that everyone in those of his pictures that I've seen is clearly having consensual transgressive fun, even in bondage situations. And "proud people having happy sex" is a motto everyone who wants to depict healthy eroticism of whatever flavour should metaphorically tattoo on the backs of their hands.
By way of comparison, Great Expectations is only 448 pages in the Penguin edition and Hugo's Bellringer only 510. This is literally half as large as War & Peace, which runs in the low 1400s. This is in fact almost exactly the size of the first three volumes combined in Dark Horse's omnibus, so it's also a Doorstop, to boot.
Regarding Norman's Imaginitive Sex - also published in 1974 by DAW (!) - it occurred to me in the course of all this discussion that I was getting a faint recollection with all of this, and then this am it hit me: in Bujold's Komarr there's a brief but telling sequence with the heroine having dutiful sex with her control-freaky, emotionally-abusive traditional-patriarchal husband, in which she has to use the device of private internal fantasies of scenarios which she finds degrading and horrible but which are the only way she can bring herself to the "obligations of the marriage bed" because he's such a nasty, bullying, perfectly nice and respectable all-round jerk. ("He never beat me" is her epitaph for him, when she trying to excuse him from others' condemnation of him as an asshole.)
On another thread, deiseach notes that for all the protracted subjugation-foreplay, there's not much in the way of actual sex going on, really, where you'd expect some typical-for-the-era rhapsodies on female flesh and the unquenchable virility of our manly heroes. It really makes you wonder if Lange simply cannot handle ordinary plain-vanilla het sex between two coequal adults, and needs all these extraordinary psychological aids to make it possible. If only RealDolls had been invented then!-- but that probably wouldn't have helped, given his Spartan fascination with burly, bearded men sticking pointed objects into each other.
Imaginative Sex was hardly very imaginative, as people have noted, for 1977. (Hullo? This was the era of KISS, for pete's sake! Mainstream rock group popular with 3rd graders, dressed like demons from BTVS? I've got a mainstream mass-market paperback from the 70s which features swingers having threesomes, incestuous voyeurism, and explicit BDSM involving gravy and dogs.) Worse than that, neither it nor Gor is even as kinky as a lot of the stuff* in Quo Vadis (1895) - which I queasily read as a teenager - or a lot of other "Christians vs. Romans" novels of the venerable past, some of which have been reissued by modern Christian presses, to my astonishment when I saw one reprint which I remembered having among other things a mention of man-on-tame-lioness - until I read in the foreward that it had been bowdlerized for modern Believers' protection.
(The idea that there was a lot of hypocritical prurience going on in the late-Victorian era tut-tutting fascination with the Decadence of Ancient Rome is not original to me: it's kind of inevitable in art books when covering the Academy's hyper-realistic paintings of the same.)
OTOH, even the hyperfervid sword-and-sandal novels pale by comparison to what Macmillan was peddling a few decades later: the execrably-racist** 007 book Live And Let Die from 1954 has a description of a strip-tease act at a nightclub which beats Norman's vague descriptions of slave girls dancing in red silk hollow:
And now, friends" announced the MC, still turned towards the drums, "G-G..." he paused, "Sumatra."
The last word was a yell. He began to clap. There was pandemonium in the room, a frenzy of applause. The door behind the drums burst open and two huge Negroes, naked except for gold loincloths, ran out on to the floor carrying between them, her arms around their necks, a tiny figure, swatched [sic] completely in black ostrich feathers, a black domino across her eyes.
They put her down in the middle of the floor. They bowed down on either side of her until their foreheads met the ground. She took two paces forward. With the spotlight off them, the two Negroes melted away into the shadows and through the door.
The MC had disappeared. There was absolute silence save for the soft thud of the drums.
The girl put her hand up to her throat and the cloak of black feathers came away from the front of her body and spread out into a five -foot black fan. She swirled it slowly behind her until it stood up like a peacock's tail. She was naked except for a brief vee of black lace and a black sequin star in the center of each breast and the thin black domino across her eyes. Her body was small, hard, bronze, beautiful. It was slightly oiled, and glinted in the white light.
The audience was silent. The drums began to step up the tempo. The bass drum kept its beat dead on the timing of the human pulse.
The girl's naked stomach started slowly to revolve in time with the rhythm. She swept the black feathers across and behind her again, and her hips started to grind in time with the bass drum. The upper part of her body was motionless. The black feathers swirled again, and now her feet were shifting and her shoulders. The drums beat louder. Each part of her body seemed to be keeping a different time. Her lips were bared slightly from her teeth. Her nostrils began to flare. Her eyes glinted hotly through the diamond slits. It was a sexy pug-like face - chienne was the only word Bond could think of.
The drums thudded faster, a complexity of interlaced rhythms. The girl tossed the big fan off the floor, held her arms up above her head. Her whole body began to shiver. Her belly moved faster, Round and round, in and out. Her legs straddled. her hips began to revolve in a wide circle. Suddenly she plucked the sequin star off her right breast and threw it into the audience. The first noise came from the spectators, a quiet growl. Then they were silent again. She plucked off the other star. Again the growl and then silence. The drums began to crash and roll. Sweat poured off the drummers. Their hands fluttered like grey flannel on the pale membranes. Their eyes were bulging, distant. Their heads were slightly bent to one side as if they were listening. They hardly glanced at the girl. The audience panted softly, liquid eyes bulging and rolling.
The sweat was shining all over her now. Her breasts and stomach glistened with it. She broke into great shuddering jerks. Her mouth opened and she screamed softly. Her hands snaked down to her sides and suddenly she had torn away the strip of lace. She threw it into the audience. There was nothing now but a single black G-string. The drums went into a hurricane of sexual rhythm. She screamed softly again and then, her arms stretched before her as a balance, she started to lower her body down to the floor and up again. Faster and faster. Bond could sense the electric tension in the room. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.
The audience began to shout at her. "C'm' on, G-G. Take it away, baby. C'm' on. Grind, baby, grind."
She sank to her knees, and as the rhythm slowly died so she too wnt into a last series of juddering spasms, mewling softly.
The drums came down to a slow tom-tom beat and shuffle. The audience howled for her body. Harsh obscenities came from different corners of the room.
The MC came onto the floor. A spot went on him.
"Okay, folks, okay." The sweat was pouring off his chin. He spread his arms in surrender.
"Da G-G agrees!"
There was a delighted howl from the audience. Now she would be quite naked...
Like the pasties that allow the fiction of non-nudity IRL and online art galleries, this Erté-inspired scene is more explicit than any of the bits where Bond and Solitaire actually get busy - but Fleming has gotten away with showing a woman orgasming*** and scores of onlookers experiencing le petit mort with her in public, so he doesn't need to risk getting foul of the censors. That it is in validation of white Anglo-American tropes of racial superiority via the unholy linkage of sexual appetite, animalism, and criminal depravity with blackness is just gravy for the target audience. (Count the dehumanizing catchwords!)
But I don't think there's any doubt that Fleming is describing an uncomplicated straight-guy hind-brain appreciative response to a physically-fit woman dancing in the almost-nude - from personal experience. (One is also forced to remember that no matter how hard it is to type one-handed, one can certainly use a fountain-pen with only one hand, even if it is a little awkward...) Despite plenty of potentially-slashy moments of injured/naked-buddy tendresse between Bond and colleagues, which don't come off at all the same way that such moments do in the Gor books.
--And this was the mainstream, back in those simpler, more innocent Fifties...
I should also add that the leper/leprosarium theme which figures as strongly in Tarnsman of Gor as the arena-combat and slave-revolt themes in Outlaw, comes right out of Ben Hur - which was full of barely-subtexty slashiness contributed by scriptwriter Gore Vidal.
"Do you like movies about gladiators?"
What's both funny and sad to me is that someone who apparently thought he should be ashamed asked Tom of Finland**** if he wasn't ashamed of his art career drawing men having sex with each other - to which the artist replied "I draw proud men having happy sex!"
--Which is far more than you can say for 90% of the het porn/erotica out there, which is both part of, and symptom of, our problems today.
*Climaxing in naked Christian heroine tied to the horns of a gigantic bull which is then sicced against one of the good guys, before the eyes of her boyfriend (who is also her reformed wannabe date-rapist, hooboy) in the Circus. When I heard that they'd done a movie of it back in the Sword-and-Sandal days, my mind went "sproing" trying to figure out how they'd deal with it all. Unfortnately the time it was on TV it turned out to be sooooo boring and stodgily done - I mean, if you're going to take out all the really bawdy stuff in the original all you've got is a bunch of guys in togas not doing very much - that I fell asleep before we got there...Apparently the pre-Hayes Code version of its most famous knockoff is a lot racier. (I remember being surprised that they allowed the scene of the milk-bath back then, and I only saw the edited version.)
**It's even worse than the movie, imho.
*** Unfortunately G-G Sumatra doesn't show up again and turn out to also be an ass-kicking assassin simultaneously using her limber dancer's body and sultry beauty to stun her victims, which would be at least an improvement over the goopy, drippy Solitaire (as well as in keeping with the later, cinematic tradition of 007 Bad Girls.) As they're waiting to be fed to the sharks, and Bond plans to drown Solitaire if the cavalry doesn't arrive in time:
He shared all his hopes with Solitaire. None of his fears.
She had lain opposite him, her tired blue eyes fixed on him, obedient, trusting, drinking in his face and his words, plaint, loving.
"Don't worry about me, my darling," she had said when the men came for them. "I am happy to be with you again. My heart is full of it. For some reason I am not afraid, although there is much death very close. Do you love me a little?"
"Yes," said Bond. "And we shall have our love."
..."Strip her," he said to Solitaire's guard.
Bond flinched. He stole a glance at Mr. Big's wrist watch. It said ten minutes to six. Bond kept silence. There must not even be a minutes delay.
"Tie some strips around his shoulder. I don't want any blood in the water, yet."
Solitaire's clothes were cut off her with a knife. She stood pale and naked. She hung her head and the heavy black hair fell forward over her face. Bond's shoulder was roughly bound with strips of her linen skirt.
"You bastard," said Bond through his teeth.
Under Mr. Big's direction, their hands were freed. Their bodies were pressed together, face to face, and their arms held round each other's waists and then bound tightly again.
Bond felt Solitaire's soft breasts pressed against him. She leant her chin on his right shoulder.
"I didn't want it to be like this," she whispered.
Bond didn't answer. He hardly felt her body. He was counting seconds...
****I'm not the target audience for his style of slashy graphic art, in several ways; but I can appreciate what others appreciate in it, and the fact that everyone in those of his pictures that I've seen is clearly having consensual transgressive fun, even in bondage situations. And "proud people having happy sex" is a motto everyone who wants to depict healthy eroticism of whatever flavour should metaphorically tattoo on the backs of their hands.