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Earthling
Posts: 23
(3/26/06 19:59)
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More Musings on What It Is to be Gorean
Alas and alack, after some three years of successfully ignoring the phenomenon of online Gor, I find myself once again drawn to its rank lunacy—enduring my darling wife’s bemused tolerance while she sits across the room reading, in point of fact, an extremely well-written fantasy novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt… not to be confused with John Norman’s pompous and overblown shrieks from the pen. As if I hadn’t seen enough already, I’ve been perusing various Gorean-themed discussion boards and websites—some of which I’d never encountered before, others of which have garnered a great deal of notoriety for several years now—and cannot escape one strongly-held conclusion: That, for all the lifestylers’ pissing and moaning about gamers and role-players, the whole blessed thing is nothing more than role-play, whether one pathetically attempts to extract a philosophy from Dr. John’s mouldy pages or not.
Goreans readily admit that Earth is not Gor, that they cannot truly adhere to perceived Gorean principles while living in, say, the United States. That slavery is necessarily consensual seems to be an accepted, if bemoaned, fact among the lifestylers. They cannot, they know, carry their Gorean bias into the workplace or most social settings. Much bandwidth has been expended in discussions of exactly where one should draw the line between Earth and Gor, a favorite scenario speculating on the Gorean man’s reaction to a female employer or supervisor. Ultimately, I’ve found, the lifestylers seem to draw the line in about the same spot everyone else does—they practice what they wish at home but adjust their attitudes and prejudices for the outside world. A Gorean couple can dress up in tunics and silks, playing Master-and-slave in the bedroom, but heaven forbid that the man should walk his "beast" on a leash through the streets of Des Moines; any rational proponent of the Gorean lifestyle (if, indeed, there is such a critter) would never seriously entertain the notion of so nakedly exposing his leanings.
Some years back, journalist Julia Gracen wrote an excellent article, for Salon.com, about Gor and its online manifestations. (Read it here at: http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/05/18/gor/index.html.) She quotes a self-proclaimed Gorean, Julian of London, as saying, "I personally suspect that in a more natural society, the vast majority of men would have the strength and integrity to trigger the submission instinct in women," his undeclared admission being that we do not live in such a world. And he’s quite right; we don’t. Therefore, everything the Gorean lifestyler does must necessarily be a matter of mutual consent and, for all intents and purposes, scrupulous adherence to the laws and traditions of society—a culture that in no way mimics that imagined by John Norman. And that simply comes down to role-play, the disingenuous Gorean’s argument that there’s some sort of original philosophy buried in the writings notwithstanding.
Even those self-appointed arbiters of all things Gorean, the Silk & Steel crowd, engage in a great deal of role-play, their "slaves" (not captured and force-collared, but there of their own volition) indulging in "serves" and "lapping" despite the fact that a given Master and a given slave may be thousands of miles apart. They’ll endlessly carp on about the "Gorean Philosophy," though what they typify as its core is simply a form of good sense common to virtually all philosophies and much better expressed elsewhere. (Might I direct the reader to Aristotle or Julian the Apostate, for example?) As far as being "truly Gorean" goes, they’re no more so than I—which is to say, not at all. There is no such thing as a Gorean apart from the fantasies of one writer.
And once again (I can't believe I need to say this to 21st-century men and women), trying to cobble together one's world view from the pages of pulp fiction is simply pitiful.
I was walking down the street, Ana caught my eye...and dragged it fifteen feet. |
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