Concluding Observations on the Mainstream Embrace of Gor

[bellatrys]

or, Get up on your pedestal, girl, so I can worship you - don't make me smack your ass back to Terra!Having had the chance to see and judge for themselves, many readers are now asking questions concerning the judgment - nay, sanity - not just of Dark Horse's editors but also the editors of the past big name publishing companies which saw fit to

Comments

[anonymous]

I alseo read a Gor book, Captive of Gor, and thought it was ridiculous. It's told from the POV of the titular captive, a dumb spoiled rich bitch who gets carted off to Gor and ends up the property of Rask of Treve, with whom she falls in love.

It starts off stupid: Elinor wakes up one morning and finds she has been branded-- and she's still in her apartment. Huh?! If you're going to brand somebody, shouldn't you, I don't know, take her to your spaceship first?

Elinor, being a Weak Woman, faints. (Standard Trope of Misogynistic Horseshit: Weak Women can't fight or act effectively.) She wakes up again and finds she is still in her apartment and now wearing a slave collar.

Elinor finally flees and, IIRC ends up in the country somewhere. Turns out they were expecting her to do just that, and she is easily captured and taken to Gor.

Now, if I'd been in Elinor's place, I would not have fainted, and I'd have gone to Baltimore, which is 1/2 hour's drive from my home. Have fun looking for me in a city, you bastards

[voxwoman]

That was the book where the line of dialog But... I was a poetess!!!!!1111!!! appeared.

Yeah, I kept hoping she'd die, too.

[archangelbeth]

I liked the panther girls, and wanted her to join up and get some character growth. No such luck.

I think only the leader of the panther girls escaped, at the end? And her henchwenches wound up being slaves? Or is that just me filling in the "well, that'd be the usual sort of thing and I'm surprised even one of them ran back to the woods"?

[voxwoman]

Honestly I don't remember. And I'm glad. :)

I'm even more horrified now

[voxwoman]

to realize I've read 11 of these things during my lifetime, instead of merely 9.

You left off a not-quite Gor book that Norman published... a sex-fantasy book (whose title now escapes me) for couples that had about 100 role-playing plots (none of them were The Pirate and the Cheerleader, I regret to say).

My guess is he had these sitting around for stories he never bothered to write. They are better than the Gor books, in that they are no more than 5 pages long, many only a few paragraphs, so he only winds up repeating himself in the sense of almost all the fantasies involve "uppity woman gets taken down a peg and ravished" storylines. Only the backdrop changes. I think there were a couple of scenarios that had both the man and woman at the mercy of some other being (both are slaves of someone else, a mating experiment run by aliens, or whatever).

[chaoticgoodnik]

Have you heard of the (real life) Tuchux? I only ever heard of them, and Gor, because of the SCA. They come to Pennsic to play. Real info.

Pictures of Tuchux "wenches": http://www.pbase.com/darter02/p35_05

Supposedly they wear horsetails attached to their clothing ... I'm not seeing anything like that in these on a quick skim, but I think I've seen female Tuchux wearing the horsetails at Pennsic. Though for all I know, that's only the "Upchux".

Tuchux vs. "Upchux": http://www.midrealm.org/middlebridge/archives/1998/199809/1303.html

[chaoticgoodnik]

Er, I guess that was supposed to be "more info." Not sure why I typed "real info." It's early.

[violaswamp]

Query: If the Gorean "novels" were based around the ideology that black people were natural slaves and white people were natural masters, would there be as many people defending them and calling their critics "Politically Correct"?

Imagine those slave-girl scenes with a racial difference instead of a gender one.

I don't mean to suggest that racism is any less prevalent than misogyny, because I don't think it is, but we seem to have been semi-successful in making the most overt expressions of racism 100% unacceptable, at least in public. Misogyny, on the other hand, isn't even unfashionable.

someone needs to tell Pat Oliphant and Universal that

[bellatrys]

at least in public.So I thought before the Don Imus scandal. I wish I'd thought to save them when I had the chance, but Oliphant had some of THE most insulting, stereotyped pro-Imus cartoons nationally-syndicated, I really couldn't believe it - but he was just expressing the views of so many young "ironic hipster liberals" I heard IRL and saw on general boards, like FARK - pity the poor white man, artistry strangled by the iron grip of Political Correctness

Re: someone needs to tell Pat Oliphant and Universal that

[violaswamp]

Hmm, true about Imus. But what Norman's doing isn't implicitly supporting a stereotype--he's explicitly espousing an ideology that flat-out says women are natural slaves. I can't think of any currently-popular ideology that explicitly says this about any other social group---though plenty imply it. Implicit stereotypes are as pernicious, or even more so, than explicitly articulated ideologies--which is why Imus was so god-awful--but they are a bit different in how they work

it gets interesting too where you get these intersections

[bellatrys]

and conflicts, like between the Ladies against Feminism/CWA talking about the need for female submission *and public, erzatz-19th-c modesty* - because that's Godly, but except for that it sounds just exactly like Gor. And they'd be all "fetch me my smelling salts!" for public consumption at least, over the "kinky" aspects. And I *so* want to be there with popcorn when the Godless Atheist Old-Fashioned Social/Fiscal Conservatives and the Bible-Thumping Conservatives and the Godless Atheist Pot'n'Porn Libertarians all turn on each other in melee combat. The alliances that will form and disintegrate in the course of it, like Risk only much, much more personal...

If course, these people would be sympathetic to Gor too, but they've also got an explicitly racist agenda backed up by their view of "nature,"There's this wierd little throwaway line in Book II, Outlaw of Gor, where he says something like "we don't fight about race on Gor, we find other things to fight about" and it's all the more odd because we don't even meet *one* person this

[ronin_kakuhito]

Just look for a world that lies a thousand degrees north of monothink, a thousand degrees east of orthodoxy, a thousand degrees west of ideological conformity

So about the distance from the equator to the tropic of cancer from all of these things?

[ronin_kakuhito]

okay so I suck at math... 1000 degrees != 23.3 degrees. 1000 degrees = 80 degrees or 23.3 percent of 360