Why Gor is Pure Evil

"Men, you should understand,” he said, “are lustful and possessive. You may like this or not, but it is the way they are. Those who do not seem so are glandular defectives, less than men, or are liars and hypocrites. Any man who truly desires a woman, who truly wants a woman, who wants her in the robust, vigorous fullness of powerful masculine desire, wants her wholly, all of her, wants to possess her, totally, wants to have her all to himself, wants to literally own her. Thus, what a man wants in a woman is the most precious, coveted and treasured of all possessions, the female slave."
-- Mirus, Prize of Gor

"In any event, Ellen was not discontented in her collar. It belongs on me, she thought. And I love it! I belong in a collar! I love it! I love it!"
-- Ellen, Prize of Gor

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I'm just a no-name blogger who posts once a season. Let's face it; nobody ever reads this thing. But on the off chance that someone does, that someone looks at this blog and sees this post, I ask that you hear me out. Read what I have to say.

It's been months since I last even attempted to write about Gor in any analytical capacity. I managed to make it through the first three books. I've tried to read the fourth, but choked on it, and then just skimmed around randomly in the series. I've written thousands of words as part of various attempts to review those early books, but I'm no longer sure I'll ever finish them or post them if I do.

The Gor series is like a fractal. The text of it occupies a finite space, but the concepts it develops are one-dimensionally infinite. Words cannot convey the full depth of that infinite spiral of hateful, ignorant offal, and yet here I am, tasked by myself to try.

Let me be clear: I do not want to lay accusation upon the author, but in a case like this, it's difficult not to do so. The sheer volume of this body of work, consistent, deliberate and pointed, looks to me like a labor of... not love, but a fetishistic enjoyment. The intimate, prolonged descriptions of the specifics of female slavery and male dominance speak of powerful excitement, unthinking, quick and intense. It's philosophy delivered with the sweaty stroke of pornography, and it is a belief system so superloaded with grievous proclamations-- for so often they are not even implied, but stated-- that this kind of impassioned mishandling can only result in a meltdown, intentional or not.

(If we do want to lay blame upon John Norman, however, there are uncounted sources of quotes from his various conversations, interviews and convention appearances. Please, do look those up to lend more perspective to his writing.)

Further, it's getting worse. Every book is worse than the one it proceeds, even if only by the simple value that there is now more Gor in the world than there was before, that tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of new words have been written to describe it to yet another savage level of granularity. It's been said by many others that the series does enter a decline a certain number of books in, and this has been my experience. To be specific, the books gradually shed their science fantasy or pulp barbarian adventure skins and dedicate themselves wholly to the explicitly misogynist porn. If you liked the early installments of Gor for whatever Robert E. Howard/Edgar Rice Burroughs tenor they might possess, little to none of that remains in later books, at least not without being so deeply stained with what I can only call "antifeminism" as to be worthless as entertainment.

Now, don't get me wrong. Every book is bad. I am talking about a steaming, bubbling canyon of superheated woman-shaming, the rigid walls containing it comprised of the most twistingly horrendous writing this side of Eye of Argon (and really, the lousiness of the writing in these books is worth of an article unto itself, but I've got bigger fish to fry at the moment). The first handful I give the typical pass if only because other things happened in them, and the narration found other foci, even if only for a while. The third book I would call both the best and the worst of that set, in that it both focuses the most on strange othernesses, like exploring the nature of the Priest-Kings, while also making the most powerful declarations of the fact of the True Man and Woman up to that point.

Let me give you some examples of what we're dealing with here.

Look at Tharna in Outlaw of Gor, the second book. The city is ruled by blatant "feminist" strawwomen in burqas and silver masks, who have sent many of their men, and countless others entrapped from other cities, to work in the mines. Tarl-- the hero of the entire series and star of nearly every book-- is sent to join them. He reawakens their male nature, and they rebel, escaping the mines in a filthy bloodbath. That's an important fact here; these men have only just escaped from years of back-breaking slavery, trapped underground, starving, routinely whipped and constantly chained. The moment they return to their city, they begin systematically enslaving every woman there, not even as part of revenge, but out of the sudden realization that this was how it should have been all along, and the reason for all their suffering. Every one of these thousands of men kidnaps a woman-- under the rejoicing edict of their queen, herself bought as a slave by Tarl and her eyes opened to the true place of men and women-- stripping them, putting them in chains and dragging them kicking and screaming back to their home for a life of rape, beatings, imprisonment and starvation. The narrative treats this entire bloody civil uprising, resulting in mass kidnapping, rape and imprisonment, as a joyous, festive affirmation of life and a happy ending to a bold adventure.

Look at Ellen in Prize of Gor. Ellen is the fifty-year-old victim of a literal alien abduction, flying saucer and all-- just one of thousands of people taken from Earth, a process that happens with incredible frequency and disturbing efficiency. She is kidnapped from her home and taken to Gor, where she is injected with chemicals to make her young and "beautiful" (again, something done to, presumably, everyone on Gor). She is taken to a slave market and sold to a man, who all but drags by her hair back to his house to be stripped naked, manacled to a wall and raped repeatedly, a routine intended to last for the rest of her life-- a very long time indeed given the potions of youth and longevity that can be purchased in virtually any shop on the planet. She loves being a slave so much that simply not being allowed to speak excites her sexually, despite there being absolutely no sane reason for her to feel anything but misery and loathing for her captors. There is no brainwashing involved, nor was Ellen raised on Gor and thus would not have received the indoctrinations given to Gorean children.

Look at... well, all of Mariner of Gor. The first three pages of chapter 19 of Mariners, the 30th book in the series and the most recent as of this writing that I know of, consists almost entirely of Tarl Cabot rhapsodizing in narration about how the true sexual passion of a woman can only be awakened once she has been collared, chained and bound to the servitude of a man-- all while a group of slave girls dump chamber pots over the side of the ship, a duty they fought with one another over just so they could get some fresh air.

That one was just weird.

Again, none of this is played for horror or disgust. This is perhaps the single most important fact to keep in mind going into these books. At no point do the books consider these things horrifying, disturbing or even objectionable. In fact, many times it talks about the abject suffering of women as quite a positive thing, necessary for their emotional growth and freedom. Three-quarters of the text of Prize is Ellen being described and spoken to as if she were side of beef at a meat market, measuring her personal value in her sale price and taking pleasure in the devices and markings used to identify and prepare her as a slave. Almost immediately, Ellen begins doing this as well, to herself. There is a prolonged inner monologue in Ellen's head as she kneels at her master's feet, wrestling with herself about how she must never let him know just how mind-blowingly turned on she is by kneeling, and being chained, and being demeaned, beaten, called a slut, and a dozen other things. This man bought her with money, forced her into slavery, and she has fallen desperately in love with him, pretending to hate the things he's doing to her to protect his feelings.

Even if the author meant nothing by these passages, even if the message they convey was intended only to apply to the world he fabricated, the presentation of these passages leaves ample room for doubt on that point. Even if we assume he did not intend anything by his words, even in context we get the frightful perception that these words are frankly, unabashedly sincere, and directed squarely at the real world.

I've searched online looking for other people who also take serious issue with Gor. I've found surprisingly little, though maybe I've looked in the wrong places, or used search terms that were too narrow. So many people seem to focus on the Gor lifestylers, or the Gorean Second Life scene, complaining about the behavior of people who have based their games or even their lives around the books without paying much or any mind to the books that started it all in the first place. It seems to me that people hear the reputation of the Gor books-- that they're sexist and full of bondage porn-- then avoid them for those reasons.

This, I think, is a bad thing. Ignoring the books and their contents is the last thing we should do. Exposure is our only tool for developing an understanding and opening a dialogue. Otherwise, they will just sit there being horrible, and nothing will have changed, and no one will be the wiser.

Let's try a little thought experiment. Imagine the following: a group of aliens go to Africa, abduct thousands of Africans and transport them to another planet where they are made slaves. They also abduct a sizable number of white people, to be masters of the slaves. Through all this, they teach these people-- and their eventual children, and their children's children-- at great length that white people are biologically disposed to be masters, and black people to be slaves, and that not only do both suffer and experience a decline of health and morality when deprived of this specific master-slave relationship for any length of time, but that true happiness-- indeed, happiness of any kind-- is found solely within that relationship. And once this has been sufficiently drilled in, the masters and even the slaves take up these teachings, preaching and reinforcing these beliefs for one another.

Yes, I know that's a tired analogy, and it has its flaws, but it's all I got, and it probably still isn't enough.

Gor is rape culture cubed and delivered intravenously. We do not have any single word for this level of meditated gender-essentialist extra-sexual narrative malfunction. And as monstrous as these books are, I will not tell you not to read them. On the contrary, these books have to be seen to be believed, to be understood, and I recommend them to anyone-- everyone, in fact. When it comes to Gor, and talking about the issues it represents, nothing should be left to the imagination. Make no assumptions, do not take others' word for it-- including mine-- and do not argue. Just get ahold of any one of them, several if you can, and read them, front to back. Then judge for yourself, and talk about it.

That's all I ask.

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For those who do not appreciate or care for subtlety or verbose argument, to give you a rough idea of where I'm coming from, I am holding a stack of Gor novels and doing this.

...I'm going to have an ulcer in my brainstem before this is over.

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Some further reading.

The official Gor site.

Luther's Gorean Scrolls.

David Langford: The Kink in Space.

Hathor Legacy review of Witness of Gor.

And for some counterbalance, T. L. Ryder on Gor and hate speech.