Something to be Said about Gorean Life

Llamas are scarce on the ground anywhere in SL, though.

true that. but they are present and i know where they can be found

Your so right

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More slave girls. Has the slave girl concept been adequately reinforced? Gorean slave girls get whipped a lot, and either like it and “juice” for master, or don’t like it but “juice” anyway. Did bad writing get mentioned?

It goes without saying — nope, wait, it’s too late for that — that Gor is politically incorrect, and the National Organization of Women will take away your membership card if you admit to liking this sort of thing.

Oh yes, don’t forget the slave girls. Also pretty much naked and in chains, or leather cuffs, or binding fiber, or whatever else Tarl Cabot and his fellow hulking brutes have handy for the restraint and entertainment of naked slave girls.



And on another note

Outlaw of Gor, filmed at the same time as its predecessor, Gor, is just as bad and suffers from the typical

fantasy movie idiocy that plagues so many. For example, why are all the villains not only demonstratively evil

but stupid, as well? There's a scene in Outlaw of Gor where the villainess oversees a slave mining operation.

She insures that the slaves are being worked all day long without rests. Slavery is wrong -- we all know that

-- but why do so many movies equate evil with stupid? You get more work out of slaves by giving them time to

rest and recuperate their strength. A realistic slave lord character would treat the slaves like subhuman

objects but would at least know how to manage them efficiently. The villainess in this movie has no such

while the ceiling is collapsing in on them! All they can do is die! And they do. And she orders a new batch of Slaves

slaves to haul the dead away and then says something to her advisor to make sure he approved of her "obviously"


About Free women


There are free women on Gor -- treasured mothers, sisters, daughters and "Free Companions" to free men -- but they generally sequester themselves with their children at home behind high walls. Their freedom, such as it is, is precarious. They are always subject to being kidnapped by a rival city-state's raiders -- or even outlaws of their own city -- and forced into slavery.

Hahaha. I was talking about the humorless-ness of the Gors, which geez, gathering from this entire thread looks like I've hit the nail firmly on the head. I do find it laughable that a perfectly intelligent woman would lower herself and become a pet to a freaking 16 year old. Laughter is normal when encountering something so mind-numbingly stupid you don't want to understand it and laughing is the only way to deal with it. Maybe I should have told her she did good. Applauded her for her right choices. After all it made her 'happy', which seems to be the only thing you Gors use to justify what you do. It makes you feel good. But it doesn't make it any less stupid. *rolls eyes*

Now you're oversimplifying, and dangerously so.

I've been watching this thread go by and holding my tongue because I don't want to give ammunition to the people who are anti-Gorean for no good reason. I enjoy Gorean role play myself, though I am by no means an experienced insider.

BUT

in Real Life certainly, any counselor at a shelter for battered women would tell you it is never so simple as just leaving.

Statistically, the highest danger that the woman will be killed is when she leaves.

So, to the extent any stalking or abuse goes into RL, whether it's physical threats or financial ones, that needs to be taken seriously. The victim should get the advice of professionals, such as the counselors at women's shelters, or the police, if she lives in a community where the police are well trained on this issue.

Counselors who have worked with violent relationships are aware of the patterns involved and can help the victim craft a plan to protect herself while she is in the process of leaving. They also take confidentiality very very seriously.

People, who I do not consider to be nuts, have asserted in this thread that they have been harrassed and stopped by self-styled "Gorean masters" when they tried to help people who were dealing with emotional abuse. This is a really dead serious charge to make. Neither the person making the assertion nor the Gorean community should dismiss it as something trivial or blame the victims. If the Gorean community is seen to be blaming the victim, we lose all credibility with anyone who has RL knowledge of how abuse actually works and appear to be condoning the abuse. This sets us up to be griefed because of the bad behavior of a few.

Emotional abuse and manipulation tend to follow a spiralling pattern which escalates, so that what begins as emotional abuse between avatars may spiral into financial abuse or RL stalking. If someone in SL is behaving abusively, they should not be permitted to use Gor or D/s as a cloak to get away with it.

It's bullshit to say the victim consents to it once a certain line is crossed and actual abuse is taking place. At that point, the victim is trying to ensure her survival. Whether this is survival on the smaller scale of trying to conserve an SL business or social network, or the investment she's made in an avatar, or the larger scale of trying to deal with a RL stalker, in no way is it something the victim should be blamed for, and it is not what she bargained for. Blaming her for the actions of another person just excuses him to go do it some more.

Abuse is not kink.

The stupid flames that go on and on in these fora are generally the result of simple minded people being unable to discern the difference between edge play, which Gor certainly is in some cases, and actual emotional abuse. I have nothing to say to those people, since they are not mature enough to get the point. I certainly have nothing against empowered mature adults engaging in edge play whether RL or virtual. Since certain people in these fora who should know better keep trying to equate edge play and abuse, anyone who has a legitimate safety issue or concern gets shouted down. This is juvenile and stupid.

Lol I got the most posts in this thread guess that makes me a honorary Gorean.

I think that women of power need to take back the night!

I hereby propose the creation of a new order - the Whorean, where women rule supreme, and get to wear all the cool leather stuff. and men have to pony-walk around in silk posing pouches, and have leashes affixed to their nether bits. And be kept as sexual chattel for the Domme Bitch Whorean Mistresses.

And if one of them tries to leave, cuz their "feelings got hurt", they can be chased down, captured and forced back into slavery... I suggest that we only indoctrinate noobie men into the Whorean familia - get em while they are green and can be molded. After all, it is a public service to give them their first SL emotional turmoil early - get it out of the way, so that they can be good little bois...

Wait, the premise is flawed here.... Gor was created from the fantasies of a man with a small penis and self-esteem issues. He created a world where men were strong and women gasped a lot at their muscles... And, secretly, they really WANTED to be enslaved and give the men lots of naughty fun - cuz it was all romantic and heroic and... fantastical... and really, DEEP DOWN, they want to subjugate themselves to the supremacy of men, and the world of Gor just lets them express that.

*rolls her eyes*

listen, people come onto SL, get sucked into Gor, not knowing what they are doing, and they get hurt. Sometimes badly. Men and women. (Often men playing women...) And Gor, because it is shallow and not well thought through, does not have any way of protecting these unfortunates. Is Gor "wrong"? No - live and let live, we're all adults [insert platitude here]. but is Gor hurtful? Yes.

PMSL

Thank you for saying what I've been trying to say, only more effectively and elegantly.

You're very welcome and thank you for your kind praise.

You're right. I tried to state something complex in too simple a manner. You are absolutely right that real abuse should never be trivialized. I have seen situations when a so called dominant needed to be put in his/her place and a submissive needed support and in cases like that believe me I am one of the first people to step in and help where I can. People who know me in my day to day life here, know me by more than just a few posts in a forum, would back up that statement. I apologize for sounding uncaring, I certainly didn't intend to.

The situation I was referring to in my post is an entirely different situation. I was referring to the drama game, gameplaying "subs" and gameplaying "doms" who really know nothing about D/s or Gor or anything else... they jump from collar to collar and weep and moan over relationships that begin and end in the matter of a few days. For people like this the drama is the roleplay, it's a game to them. They want an audience, they want to drag someone into their self created mess. Unfortunately when people look at Gor and at BDSM in SL these are the people they see because they're the ones who stand out. They become examples to everyone else of what we supposedly are.

These dramatic game players not only make the rest of us look silly, they make it more difficult for people to be taken seriously when they are actually stuck in serious situations and needing real help.

When someone comes to you and needs real help, you should drop everything and help them if you can. In SL that means using AR's, surrounding them with the support of the community, removing the abuser from the community as well. In the real world this may even mean physically protecting them, providing them shelter and ongoing support. When someone comes to me and I see this is the situation, then they know they'll recieve the help they need.

But in SL when a sub is "collared" within a few hours of meeting someone and then days later is in my IM after they've broken up trying to get me to kick him out of the community because he's "mean" or "abusive" or "a collector"... Frankly I take that with a grain of salt. I'm not saying I don't keep my eyes open and watch for patterns, I do. But I also don't leap to the conclusion that she is a "victim".

On the flip side I have also had dominants come to me after uncollaring someone and telling me what a "player" that sub is and how he or she isn't a "true sub" (another phrase I can't stand)... and I'm no more likely to jump to conclusions and take sides then either.

Anyway, that was what I meant.

Ah yes. The "you don't fit my notion of what a submissive is to a T, so you are not a Twue Submissive".

*eyeroll*

why is this thread still going?

Because some of us think that talking about things such as what makes a relationship healthy, maintaining boundaries even in D/s relationships, recognizing potential abuse in a community and distinguishing the above from the antics of drama king/queens are worth dicussing. If you do not, move along.

No, this is a re-post of a dumb conversation that's been going on forever.

Let me sum up the correct answer, as Jesus would say:

Let the bitches do what the bitches want and until they're trying to stick their penis into your ear, leave them alone. Merci, au revoir, adios.

Your take on it sounds rather shallow to me, but whatever. Auf wiedersehen.

Live and let live is shallow now? Jeez, the Republicans ARE in control.

To sum up everything that has been said as "live and let live" is shallow. We have talked about much more than that.

Apology accepted, and thank you for the clarification.



It seems to me that trying to spin our image in a constantly expanding environment like SL would get exhausting pretty quickly. Maybe we should not care - those that have eyes, let them see.

Some people will fall for the drama queens, but to a lot of other people they will just look immature. It's not so different from the way it's easy to spot the underage unverifieds by the way they behave. Sure some days I feel I've stumbled into "jessica Rabbit does Gor" which is pretty hilarious really. Oh, and I laugh at griefers.

Wouldn't our best defense in this case be to educate? The RL D/s tradition has years of depth and can be invoked to locate ourselves in the context of something more enduring than just SL. If the viewer is not sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a cartoon of D/s and the reality of it, we're in a position to at least make a concrete, three dimensional version of it accessible.

Already it appears the Gorean community in SL has located itself as a part of a larger continuum, most of which is outside SL, and this is a very anchoring tactic.



This is very very good of you and admirable. I am very glad to hear it. I hope more will follow your example.

You do have to be very well resourced to help RL. I can't, I have to refer someone to other resources for that. I have a support group going in SL for a topic which, though not similar to D/s, certainly touches on issues of RL relationships, abuse and trauma. What I can do is help inside SL on a peer to peer level for anything for which I am already a culture insider.

The best kind of resource for survivors is other survivors, which brings back the idea of a survivor group. And if anyone tries to grief me should I start one, they will stand exposed as scum less than men.

Someone who is picking their way out of a genuine problem will probably have to leverage more than one source of help before it's over. It is also an easy test to tell who is who, as someone who's just stirring up drama would have no use for something like a RL support hotline.



Cool. Well, you can always help someone without having to exile the person they are complaining about. This is also a kind of test of who is who - I suspect that in most cases a genuine victim is more focussed on conserving her own well-being than on revenge.

But trying to administer justice in cliques of people who've known each other for too long, that is a whole new ball of wax. It really makes for claustrophobia if a group that runs mainly on consensus absorbs an abusive narcissist who then tries to entertain himself by playing games with everyone else. If the group cannot institute a procedure for identifying such people and removing them from the center, it deserves to turn into a hurricane. In SL either pure democracies which are allowed to fragment and coalesce, or private monarchies of whatever size, turn out to be more efficient than consensus for just this reason.

Though one may be a sub, I agree it's not an excuse to get helpless in this sense - if one clique is a bad fit, find another. I don't have the clique obsessed feminine mindset and I pick out my own friends. But, for the type that have to have a group of belonging, choosing the group is actually far more important at first than choosing your Master. Oh, yes, I'm heretical enough to say that Masters come and Masters go, but sisters are forever ..... LOL.



I have no idea what a "true sub" is, fortunately. What a binary viewpoint. Nature is hierarchial, most can dominate some, but will be dominated by others. If you're an alpha female very few will inspire your devotion, but I've watched my whole personality change in the presence of the one who could, I know it's possible even for me. I didn't turn into a doormat. I just found myself obsessed with HIM. The person who could really submit to anyone, I fervently hope does not exist, adolescent male fantasies be damned.

Good!! nice and soft enough to use for toliet paper then

If I can be of any help with that, I'd love to be involved.

Many thanks. I will send you the info.

Agreeing with this more and more as I read threads like this one... wondering why I've tried so hard. *sighs*
Then I guess we're both heretics. This is exactly my view too.
I think the term "true sub" is a fabrication, it's just a phrase used like a weapon. Coyote said it well.

< wanders in, looks at thread, becomes mind-numbingly bored and overcome with a sudden urge to watch Red Dwarf videos>

Anyone up for a curried tikka masala and lager?

<leaves thread looking for something more interesting>