Slashers of Gor

[julesjones]

Okay -- yesterday's contextless link was contextless partly because I wasn't up to the task of giving context...

What happened was that james_nicoll mentioned that Dark Horse are reprinting the Gor novels. (If you don't already know about Gor, you can find out more than you ever wanted to by reading the comment thread to that post.) In the comment thread was a link to a critique series by bellatrys, and somewhere in *there* I found the link to the exciting new community "Slashers of Gor".

http://community.livejournal.com/slashersofgor/

The community is a piss-take, but there's also some serious discussion going on at Bellatrys' place. Under the very nice piece of slash art in this post there's a serious discussion of whether Norman's misogyny is an actual, real-life example of the closet queer who hates women and has a hyper-masculinised, mysogynistic attitude to sex. Something rang a bell with me -- the comment about not having ever knowingly encountered it in real life, but then one wouldn't if one's gay friends were happily out.

Comments

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I always reckoned that John Norman knew that soft porn would sell.

Lots of women like rape fantasies (with the emphasis on the word 'fantasy').

I remember one Guide patrol leader I knew reading one of the books aloud in their tent by lantern and the girls thoroughly enjoying it.

Heck, at that age, I enjoyed the early ones. But by the time I'd read four or five, I got annoyed at him. The early ones were reasonable pulp fiction in their way - the later ones were plain porn and increasingly insulting to women.

My favourite character was always Misk, the priest king.

[julesjones]

I know lots of women like rape fantasies -- I write commercial romance, remember? :-) (And that's before we get into the demographics of BUARA fandom...)

What sets people off about Gor is the ideology (and it is ideology with him, going by reports of his behaviour) that *all* women are naturally submissive and desire to be slaves.

My experience with it was browsing through the library as a teenager, looking for anything with the SF sticker on the spine, and picking up a Gor book perfectly innocently. I can't remember now how many chapters I managed to read before deciding that even with the soft porn which I was of an age to enjoy as porn, it was Not My Thing and I didn't have to finish it just because I'd started it. I think it was almost as much the prose style as the general message that women are domestic animals, not people.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I'm curious as to how he explains the existence of fem doms and male subs, but not interested enough to go and find out.

[julesjones]

Bizarre ranting about Evil Feminists Denying Their True Nature and men indoctrinated by same, going by the samples of his editorial writing I've seen. There's a species of circular logic in there...

[julesjones]

Ah, but in John Norman's universe, your male sub was first indoctrinated by an Evil Feminist In Denial Of Her True Desires before he met you...

(Yes, I know precisely how accurately this describes *your* male sub. :-)

[strix-an-stones.livejournal.com]

Ezboard used to have a great Gor community, very strict to the books but they went closed, membership by application only a few years ago.

And I'd have to say no, after reading those books and meeting folks who really are into the Gorean lifestyle, it has very little to do with homosexuality. The original author, that I cannot answer for, but the resultant phenomena? That is a subculture of people who want to dominate and be dominated. NOthing more or less.

[julesjones]

No, the analysis is all about the books and their author, not about the fandom. That's a separate thing from what's being addressed in that post.

[strix-an-stones.livejournal.com]

oooh I misunderstood. But does it matter really? I mean if the desire is inside a person to dominate or to be dominated does it matter if it originates in the mind of aperson who is straight or gay? Or am I looking at this catty-wampus?

[julesjones]

Did you read the actual post? It's not about whether D/s behaviour is straight or gay, but about how if you're a heavily repressed gay man with submissive leanings, you might well project your own desires onto women, and believe that *all* women feel that way.

I don't know if they're right or not (especially given what slashfen can do with subtext) -- but it is actually a fairly plausible argument when you look at the excerpts they've selected from Norman's own work.

[strix-an-stones.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read the post. In fact I'm reading it again, despite the annoying side to side thing I have to do that makes me slightly nauseaus.

My reactions are

1. I am sick and tired of this sort of statement: here we come to the interesting problem of those Gor books which so enraged us female readers

Speak for yourself and only yourself. I've read some books about dominant and submissives without getting into some "mode" of thinking. The "rape is love" books of the 70s my mom adored totally turned me off. These chest thumping men's adventure books were totally different because they were so cheesy and corny and badly written that I actually enjoyed them. I still enjoy men's adventure novels I've all the Deathlands (Axler) books. They were so far out of the realm of plausibility that they were fun. The crap my mother read actually deluded a person I met into playing with fire, getting raped and discovering that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be - we met a rape victim meeting. I didn't labor under her delusions but she was seriously messed up in the head, still thought she did something wrong that the rape wasn't the problem but her reaction was flawed. She drug bags of those stupid simpering romances everywhere and cried real tears that her assualt didn't lead to real true love. I've never heard tell of the same with Gor styled books.

2. I had a professor who was ostensibly straight, and celibate (this being a religious institution) who spent a lot of class-time talking about how icky women were, using much longer and more acceptable words, but all of it coming down to how icky our goopy, blood-and-mucus producing female bodies were, under the guise of discussing the absurdity of Gnosticism

I attended Catholic school for a number of years, this man is not alone in his viewing females as flawed, filthy or the like. He probably was very devout in his faith. There was a movement in the Middle Ages where women were encouarged to be as manly as possible as that was the only way to begin to atone for the filth of being born a woman. I do not believe this had to do with homosexuality but with a serious hatred of women.

That the writer felt the need to pass along what amounted to hear-say or possibly gossip to support the contention that the man was possibly homosexual or had those inclinations isn't relevant IMHO. My neighbor lost his job a decade ago after a rumor was spread he was a child molestor. His kids were interviewed, the ex-wife too and it was found to be groundless but the man lost his job and still struggles under this. People can say anything it doesn't make it true.

3. The smarmy "oh it clicked" crap, that the man was hateful to women because he was supposed to desire them but forced by his own represeed sexuality into hating them? Possible, but why not end up the victim of hag ridden dreams bedeviled by succubae or incubae as was the case in the days of the Inquisition when things were even more sexually repressive? Most religious men who hate women hate them for being temptresses - not because they're closeted gays who revile having to touch them sexually. The greater the temptation the greater the revulsion, at least that was my experience with the Catholics. YMMV.

Finally...why couldn't the man have written a book that he wanted to write? Maybe he fixated on being the bound woman while a part of him yearned simultaneously to be the muscled, masculine aggresor? Both parts are equally espoused, why must he be only the one - can he not have held both parts inside - and why is it all dependant on his own sexuality?

Oscar Wilde fought with his wife...so did Socrates and Xanthippe. Yu don't have to be gay and married to please thecontentions of society in order to have a turbulent spousal relationsip. My parents are wonderful examples as well. Vern, my Mensa sponsor, was married had four children then came out of the closet. His marriage was amicable - so was the divorce.

Maybe I'm thick, but I don't see why people can't see the totality outside the box and quit shaking what is inside until the contents fall into neat holes. Those folks miss the shaker and the realm they stand in.

[julesjones]

That set of posts is partly in reaction to a particular fanboy mindset, so it's deliberately extreme in the opposite direction. But my Not My Thing reaction to Gor was based on the "*all* women are submissive and desire only to be enslaved" message, not the idea that women enjoy being raped -- I only read part of one book so have no idea what the series as a whole was like, but I don't remember that idea being part of the one I read. Some of the excerpts I've seen certainly look as if they're pushing the idea that women enjoy being raped, but I don't know how much of that is because they're being taken out of context. I do know women who liked the Gor books precisely because they read the books as making the point that women could be submissive because they enjoyed being submissive, rather than because a man had forced them.

(One of the things that does bother me about Gor is that I don't like those rapist hero romances either -- and I have seen Gor pushed as a "if you liked that you'll like this" by people who are into the "rape her till she likes it" sub-genre of romance.)

The folk in the discussion spread across several blogs are well aware of the spectrum of dominance and submission, and how complex it is -- some of them are leather people. It's Norman's incredibly narrow "all women are submissive" that they're primarily objecting to, with a side order of the "and women secretly enjoy being raped" that some of the fanboys like to add to it -- which god knows some of them do.

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I know this is a serious subject, and one I'm somewhat uncomfortable with to boot, but I just wanted to comment on this line:

the "rape her till she likes it" sub-genre of romance

How unromatic can the romance genre be, eh? I dunno, it just struck me as very incongruous. Like a "cuddle'm and hug'em" hate preacher.

[julesjones]

The rapist hero was enormously popular in 70s romance, went away for a while, and has made a comeback, to the point where a lot of erotic romance readers think that BDSM and forced seduction are one and the same thing. There's been a lot of discussion about it in the romance blogosphere over the last year or two, which I have decided I don't want to touch with a bargepole. A lot of it seems to be about the redeeming power of Love And the Magic Coochie, and about Taming the Beast, and about some entirely different stuff to do with women feeling guilty about enjoying sex. Me, I can't see it as anything but Stockholm Syndrome, and I don't see it becoming retroactively not-rape just because He Did Not Realise His True Feelings For Her and because she forgives him in the end. (Or he forgives him, given that most of the examples I've read were in slash fanfic.)

It causes major ructions, because people can get very polarised about it. I don't like the genre, but some of my best friends do, and they seem to be otherwise perfectly sane people. (For fannish values of "perfectly sane", of course.) I've written "rape him till he likes it" myself -- the difference is that mine doesn't have the bit where it magically becomes not-rape in hindsight as soon as He Realises His True Feelings. Instead they actually have to deal with it.

There's an interesting discussion here:
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2007/03/30/claiming-the-courtesan-by-anna-campbell/
about a recent book that got people wound up about whether it was romanticising rape and a throwback to the good old days of rapist heroes -- the conclusion a couple of the reviewers was that it was actually a much more solid and realistic look at what it would *really* take to repair a relationship after a forced seduction.

[strix-an-stones.livejournal.com]

*nods* I saw that the discussion spanned a lot of people and places, I'm having a not-so-good brain day so I didn't force it.

When I read the Gor books (and I read a lot but not the entire series, they can be hard to come by) I didn't see it as the writer stating "this is how women should be treated" but rather as "on this world this is how women are treated." There was no real basis of comparison, no conflicting cultures but for the occassional warrior women who were treated as aberrants and either killed off, disappeared or subdued. Ironically, I remember being in high school and reading one and forming the notion that perhaps it was a dig at our own history. I've read books on the "myth" of matriarchial societies and had to laugh, look at Judacia - totally not a myth and still relevant today. It was the Roman "barbarians" who when they came to power demonized the women - long before the advent of Christendom. Evidence lay in the corruption of the birth/death goddess Hecate into the demoness who spawned not priestesses but the cubae to steal the lives of children and men, perverting the icons she was once revered by.

Sorry, derailed, again.

Our society stands on the ashes of a time in history that was a great deal like the Gorean landscape. Think of the period in history where wives were not to lie naked with husbands (different bedrooms in fact) but to be clothed and the man would approach her likewise clothed, in the dark, holding a candle so he could see enough to part the bedding to do the deed to insure the creation of the next generation...and how the lewd and licentuous acts carried out naked, with full visuals, in the arms of courtesans was reviled - but heartily embraced. But women grew up in those settings, those cultures and knew no different so they accepted and even looked forward to their different assigned roles. Both roles were very submissive. The courtesan had the illusion of power in choice and in sexuality but still was a social pariah, the wife had the power of respectibility - but both were ruled (as it were) by man. That was for Western Civ about 100 years ago? Give or take a decade...

A better example is the way Western women look at devout Muslim women who want to wear the hijab - all of it. They wish to be as their culture inculcated them. Is it wrong? de Sade nailed it when he said it all lies within and as much emerges should be embraced as being true to one's nature to do otherwise is to do wrong. For the Muslim woman her choice is right, it resonates within - for the western it is abhorent, discordant. But is it wrong? No, it is not.

Sure the author could have been gay and hated women and saw his books as the perfect revenge but he could have also been straight and done the same thing. Heck, he could have been a pen-name for a she...hate knows no sexuality or gender. Personally, I detest a male family member who shall go nameless. The longer I have to sit on my intense dislike for this person the easier I find it to write a story that would utterly unman and demean him - but that has nothing to do with my sexuality and everything to do with a festering emotion I cannot express.

Gor was so badly written that it was almost impossible to hit the point of "suspension of belief" for immersion. The one "bodice ripper" romance that freaked me hugely where a fat Italian count raped a serving girl with a broken champagne bottle as the bubbly spirits filled and made her horny despite it all - that was so well written as to make you wonder if indeed those emotions and feelings couldn't be engendered by such an act.

Sorry for the tangents.