Gorean Question

A lot of interesting discussion. We've been having a series about slavery in SL at Desi's Chick Chat, a more or less feminist weekly discussion group for mostly women, mondays at 4SL time at Verum's place.

To me, it's definitely not for me, but I don't see why people get so incensed about it as long as it's a safe fantasy. And as someone who appreciates the art of roleplaying in general, I find the Gorean 'stuff' fascinating.

To be fair , Goreans can be quite rude reguarding (as later posts reveal) Furry avatars. So its quite possible he was rudely treated. The "rude" person might have been upset that he didnt read the no non-humans policy (every Gor sim ive seen has one).

Compared to their stereotype, ironicly, they are quite polite to visitors who are women - which would be a fairly big surprise to those who have never visited. Female Guests are generally treeted as Free Women would be, and theres quite a bit of courtesy involved usually, even from the more chauvanistic of the Men.

Of course those who participate in Gor are a mixed lot. Theres plenty of sci/fi fantasy geeks, in addition to FPS/playstation type gamers, serious role players, serious D/S and Serious Goreans, Long time online Goreans and even Real Life Goreans. Theres insecure women, as well as those who enjoy online D/S, others who are simply playing house on Gor.

Theres substantial drama cuased by jealous and coveting of sex slaves between the men , theres a lot of Slaves who stop logging in or creating new accounts, etc , becuase they dont have the Master they want and another huge irony the ability to be sold around is less than in Gor Books.


I wonder now after this thread has played out - IS SL gor as a role play community less faithful to the material than other RP communities in Second Life? or is the simple medium of Second Life so open that it leads to this dumbing down and mess that you see in Gor sims?

Exactly. I said earlier in the thread that the only way Gor in SL to have a chance is for it to die, and this is why I've turned My back on it. I won't be the one to kill it, but I'm watching the gradual degeneration and explosive internal conflicts by those who can't see the big picture...it's just a matter of time before it's forgotten by those who came in and mangled it with their personal and political agendas.

Hell, I did My best, instead of complaining about it, BEING the example of the Gorean Master as given by the books, fighting and fucking and training both slaves and Warriors, and I have no regrets, because I had a hell of a time. What everyone seems to forget is the adventure and sense of fun that was there in the books, and you don't have to waste time with people too mired in Earth neuroses that wouldn't survive the light of two days in a place like Gor.

Colette, My posts are pretty short and to the point and don't meander all over the place in response to a challenge much like previous postings. So I'm surprised you didn't get this clearly:
These Gorean islands were not purchased and maintained with an ongoing cash injection so that cartoon characters could pop in all the time and say, "Hi I m me and you must accept me for who i m!" They were purchased to preserve the integrity of the Rp environment from elements that just wouldn't be there in any way, shape, form, or justification. So if you want to insert yourself into that setting as something jarringly improbable, don't think people rip your head off because they like ripping off heads, it's more than likely that you just disturbed the setting with your inconsideration. This inconsideration may be out of ignorance or may be intentional, but the elegant solution is to regard them as equally offensive, and indict and sentence them just the same.


I think you've missed an important bit of subtext in this interaction. I do treat any individual I consider neuter with courtesy. If I call you slut and order you to your knees, it's because I find you interesting. If match blades with you, it's because I find you interesting. If I help you across the street, it's not because I find your safe crossing more interesting than your splattered carcass, it just amuses Me to play along with your self-worth. I am still watching for your fall. It's not because I value your 'freedom', it's because the social structure that preserves it makes possible intrigues that the challenge of hunting just doesn't have, and I do so value a win achieved through those means.

I understand this. However it doesnt stop someone in a Furry outfit from feeling that the Gorean who corrected them was "rude"

People feel that policemen are rude all the time. Or their neighbors, or whatever. People have a tendacy to beleive they are never the cuase for any issues that arrise.

Its entirely possible to break 10 rules, know you broke 5 , and still feel you were rudely treated.

On the topic of privately purchased and maintained sims - Ive often wondered if Gor wouldnt be better served to maintain a "welcome area" with a scribery on some smaller plot - And make all the islands a Gorean group access only (with an actual fee to join).

While recruitment of new Gorean participants would go way down - surely the quality of the average participant is pretty much not what the Goreans really want anyhow.

The quality of their participants are no longer My concern. I have a non-Gorean sim in which women are perfectly capable and encouraged to compete with men on each and every term. And I regret to say that it's lacking men with the nut that the women have shown. Oh well, I had the same problem training slaves, finding men who were men enough to value them.

This is interesting, and good luck with your sim.

Of course the quality of the participants is directly relevant to the original poster's question =p

Agreed, which is why I and others less qualifed have described them in depth. And we all agreed that they were found wanting, for wahtever reasons we had for such finding;]

Yup. The minute anyone tells me that they have the final philosophy/religion/politics/playstyle/whatever for all time, I'm out the door. I've always been that way, because they're not participating in reality once they've decided to stand still, when time will not.

I'm sure that's true. But you don't know if I'm one of them or not.



Do you mind replying to me and Chav as if we were separate people?

Do you really believe that everyone who might disagree, question or ponder, a little or a lot, is doing so only out of aggression, inexperience or willful ignorance?

Isn't this the reaction that persuaded me that some online Goreans are essentially fundamentalists? There is a huge difference between claiming you have great ability, borne of experience, vs. claiming you have the Truth with a capital T. If you really have experience based knowledge you know it can't be taught by writing about it. But you're not the only one who knows that. Not everyone who is coming to Gor from the outside is a child.



Try randomly asking around and seeing if people who have read the books find them consistent. I'm not referring to cultural permutations. If Norman is doing philosophy and not dogma, we can expect him to change his mind on something sooner or later, or even play with ideas just because they're interesting.



The books don't say Free Women had a "sterilized" sexuality, far from it. That's an online-ism. In the books, if a Free Companion was frigid, this was something the Caste of Physicians would consider a problem to be treated. Rather what was required of Free Women was self-control, which is a typical expectation made of women who are primarily occupied as mothers. I refer you to Ubar Luther's essay on Free Women for a more detailed treatment of this than I can give here.

I don't doubt there are people who are freaked out by women in heat, but I suspect they'd be even more freaked out by unchained women in heat. At least, that's been my observation when, in RL, fundies crash gatherings of pagans.

Brenda, slavery is WRONG. It's that simple.

Oh, absolutely. I think on either side one has to admit that the world of SL Gor is generally full of ideas that are repulsive to people brought up in post-Englightenment humanitarianism, since we do have something of a (taught?) instinct to think "Slavery bad." (Because, well, genuine RL slavery is.) Personally I spent a fair bit of time examining RL historical slavery and gender oppression while studying history, and certainly my tipping-point on Gor seems to be "slavery is good," as self-aware roleplay... well, it can squick me out a bit at times, but I don't tend to find it anything like as offensive as sincere defences of slavery and misogyny.




I wasn't a furry at the time (and I'm a she ), though on my latest visit I was kid-appearing. Also had a problem with a texture not rezzing so something I thought was transparent actually had writing on it. Which possibly somehow didn't occur to the man who wasn't happy to answer "what does it say on the sign that I genuinely could not see when I arrived?"

And again, there's the SL context in all of this. Most notecards that spam one on arrival somewhere are lacking in important information; most (even RP) sims do not enforce avatar appearance (for, I would argue, very good reasons including how far it feels rude and disrespectful to the visitor) -- most certainly don't eject you before politely asking you to change temporarily; most sims don't assume you'll know that "rudeness" is normal in that "culture" and not to be taken personally.

I reckon so. Thus the choice for the OP and SL Gor in general between quality and quantity of applicants.




I came to this thread with an opposing opinion. That does not per se make me ill-informed, ignorant or stupid. I've been to numerous Gorean sims at various times for reasons. Observation, commerce, architectural interest, sometime even by accident because of changes in land ownership or simply crossing a border. I've usually been in an avatar that appears adult-human. I've read Gor notecards (both for and against), forum discussions, non-SL Gor sites. I've discussed it in-world with various people of various views.

In this thread I've explained why it's so hard to be entirely "objective" on first approach (true of pretty much anything). You seem to be taking disagreement as by necessity the result of wilful stupidity on my part. Why is that?





And none of that is going to play well to outsiders, who are formed by actual real-life who hold that sort of thing to be antisocial, rude, perhaps even cruel. By all means behave like that if you want, but I don't think it's entirely reasonable to demand that outsiders automatically accept that you're RPing as someone who isn't acting as their culture expects of a polite adult.

Lol--this sounds like just such a final word on final words.

Correction, you came into this thread with a complaint of personal abuse before positing any opinions. So not only did your opinion become suspect, it made Me wonder about the rest of the story. What really happened doesn't matter, because you've already determined that you were unjustifiably wronged, and so it doesn't matter how your behavior may have led to it. And, em:

Perhaps not, but I wouldn't call that pro-survival behavior.

What I object to is your assertion that you ever suspended judgement long enough to objectively observe. And you support your intellectual dishonesty with appeals to ideology that you haven't given objective review. "It's hard to be objective because it's so wrong!"

Consider this when approaching an alien culture: It doesn't have to be right, it just is, no matter what your native frame of references inform you about it. There hasn't been a perfect world yet, not yours, not Mine, not Norman's. Your native frame of reference may inform you what is imperfect about your own world, but it's not adequate to informing you what is imperfect about another. For that you'd have to go native, those who have done that deserve consideration for their perspective, not the casual observer who can't contain her revulsion.

Consider also that the Gorean culture was artificially framed by forces beyond the power of the people, the Masters were in effect merely pawns. Whether a society would develop this way given these conditions of technology and medicine and population control and religion makes an interesting discussion. I may have My own opinion based on RL interpersonal experience, but I still reserve conclusive judgement. I can only gather the evidence, and speculate on the wider picture. It's still possible that our own culture has been artificially framed by forces beyond our power, and would appear abyssmally wrong in the eyes of an alien.

Ah, ha...speak for yourself, there are many outsiders who can appreciate it, but not for the reasons that you think.

SLAVERY IS JUST WRONG...SAVE ME...RESCUE ME FROM THIS MAN!

"It is not uncommon for masters to pride themselves on the depth with which they know their slave girls; this depth is far greater in my opinion than that with which the average husband of Earth knows his wife; the slave girl is not simply someone with whom the man lives; she is very special to him; she is a treasured possession; he owns her; he wants to know profoundly and deeply, the background, history, the mind, the intelligence, the appetites, the nature and dispositions of his lovely article of property....

...they awaken her body, and, of equal importance for the Gorean, though not for the Earthling, who sees sex with the perception of a hippopotamus, as a matter of body rubbings, her fantastic imagination and mind; she becomes curious, soon, about the deeper implications of what she is, a mere article of her master's property; then, with authority, with assurance and power, to the depth and height of her mind and imagination she is taught; the slave girl experiences a paradox of freedom; the free woman is physically free, but miserable, fighting to be what she is not; the slave girl, physically in bondage, even to the collar, sometimes chains, is given no choice by men but to be totally and precisely what she is, slave; such women, slaves, interestingly, are almost always joyful and vital; they are paradoxically, in their feelings and emotions, liberated; they are not pinched, not psychologically restrained; why this should be I do not know; to see such women , their heads held high, their eyes bright, their bodies , movements, beautiful, as no earth woman would dare to be, is quite pleasurable; some of them are so insolent, so proud of their collars, that I have cuffed them to my feet, to remind them that they are only slaves."

Page 42 - 43 - Tribesmen of Gor

PLEASE, OH PLEASE...DON'T MAKE ME RELIVE THIS!

"It is a beautiful moment when the woman realizes that the man who owns her is her love master, and the man realizes that the girl he bought, looking up at him, tears in her eyes, is his love slave. Then the only danger is that he will weaken. One must be strong with a love slave. If one truly loves her, he will be that strong. The slavery in which a love slave is kept is an unusually deep slavery."

Page 236 - Beasts of Gor

MAY I NEVER BE VALUED FOR THIS!

"The most fundamental property prized by Goreans in women, I suppose, though little is said about it, is her need for love, and her capacity for love. How much does she need love? And how deep and loving is she? That is the kind of woman a man wants, ultimately, one who is helplessly and totally love's captive, in his collar."

Page 322 - Mercenaries of Gor


PLEASE HELP SAVE ME FROM FEELING THIS WAY!

The pride of a free woman is the pride of a woman...
who feels herself to be the equal of a man.
The pride of the slave girl...
is the pride of the girl who knows...
that no other woman is the equal of herself.
-Tribesmen of Gor, pg. 332-333

AND MEN...STAY AWAY FROM THESE CREATURES FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!

"It is said that he whose lips have never touched those of a slave girl does not know, truly, what it is to hold a woman in his arms."

Page 438 - Beasts of Gor

HOW HORRIBLE...HOW TERRIBLE...HOW CRUEL!!!!

I've read a lot of defences of slavery. They tend to appeal to "nature" and symbiosis, to the need for one group to be controlled.

If you want to play at consensual "slavery" on the interwebs, feel free. If you (generic) want to defend the concept of genuine slavery in a real-world context, then you've signed up for a political argument.

An anecdote, dear.




It is impossible for a human being to be truly dispassionate about liberty. At best we might be content with a status quo and thus non-active in our beliefs. The only people who could honestly claim to be completely objective about the treatment of human beings are sociopaths.

I feel that certain things are wrong. These include slavery and misogyny. I have yet to see an intellectual argument that has convinced me otherwise. My tolerance for other cultures and sub-cultures stops when they start violating human rights. Now, this takes us beyond the scope of SL "slavery" (which can never be entirely non-consensual), but if you're appealing to my liberalism to gain acceptance for this stuff as conceptually sound in the real world, it simply won't work. I'm gonna have to break Godwin's Law here and say that after all the Nazis' culture taught that genocide was perfectly okay. It wasn't.

This is some of the most absurd bilge I have ever heard.

Are you really, genuinely serious about this view of femininity? I would add that the view of masculinity is a little limiting too, but at least you're only inflicting that on yourself.

People can play little power games, but this stuff is self-serious neo-fascistic sci-fi claptrap!

"Pro-survival behaviour"? Love the lingo - where's that from?

Thank you for this post. It is good to hear an old timer say these things and much appreciated.

It's the sort of thing said by people who don't understand evolution. People who heard the words "survival of the fittest" and assumed it must mean "survival of the most violent."

Lions take down gazelles with no mercy. Both species are now endangered. Bees on the other hand seem to be doing quite well.

I recently went to visit a purportedly "authentic" Gorean sim, upon the invitation of the owner, who had suffered through one of my recent rants against Disney-Gor or Gor-Lite. What did I encounter upon arriving, but a vendor selling motorcycles! Excuse me, but where are motorcycles mentioned anywhere in the Chronicles?

Can you get that jerking knee under control? I don't think I've actually SAID what My views of femininity and masculinity are anywhere in this thread. It may be a safe assumption that I'm a hardliner Gorean, seeing as how I've been persistently urging ppl to look at the culture from the INSIDE perspective before going off. But it's still just assumptions that you won't much find support for from anything I've actually said. And judging from this remark, I don't even think you really know what the Gorean perspective on femininity and masculinity are.


It's also said to people who don't hear the train coming until it hits them, and then blames the train, if they survive their blindness. Or people who go into foreign countries without learning the custom or at least paying attention, and then act confused and indignant when they spend a week naked in a cell. Or people who cruise crack hoods in their Lexus. Or someone who willingly goes into a Gorean sim to bait them first with appearance and then with attitude, then blames them for the hostility. It's not all about the violence, but if you lack wit, you surely will have to face more than you're prepared for.

"Strong men simply need women. This will never be understood by weak men. A strong man needs a woman at his feet, who is truly his."





Yes, those things are entirely equatable. Are you saying that Goreans are mindless animals who can't muster the basic human decency to blind-eye a seven-foot human-shaped lion dressed in tie-dye flares and a wizards hat? Which isn't what I was wearing, but if other RP sims are perfectly capable of that, why not Gor? I've always found that the RP approach is to Pretend This Thing Isn't Happening. I'm sure you're all clever enough and imaginative enough to do that, and most especially in market zones or en route to a scribery. The two things most likely to bring in the disinterested or even leaning-hostile outsiders.

Seriously, I'm over the tears of being insulted for looking wrong by someone who ultimately lost all respect I might have had for him. What I dwell upon a bit in my mind is whether percieved rudeness is a necessary downside of being Gorean and whether the philosophy itself encourages what might be seen as impolite behaviour. (Whether it is impolite being perhaps another issue.)

You didn't hear Me say that. But it does sound like some distortion of something vaguely similar to something I would say, and I'm not even going to bother explaining to you why that is something I would NOT say. But inventing words to put in My mouth further demonstrates that most of your 'observation' is really nothing but conjecture.

This is how things operate in My sim, actually, no matter how obnoxiously and discourteously your appearance shatters the immersion of RP. However, the policies also provide for players or moderators to give you the equivalent of a punch in the teeth you deserve for it, if they choose to let your intrusion disrupt the RP.

But let's just suppose for a moment that it's part of a series of sims sharing a common theme, that has common conventions clearly posted, and has a reputation for upholding those conventions out of respect for the people who have come to get involved in RP. In this case, if you pass the big warning signs wearing what is tantamount to 'kick me' signs on your back, chest and forehead, and you receive a wholly impersonaly kicking in all quarters, who is really to blame?