The Alphaville Herald

Confessions of a Gorean Slave, Part 1

by Urizenus Sklar on 16/02/06 at 9:21 pm

As I said in the comments to my retirement post, I have a few things left in the hopper that I will be posting, so that I might go out with a bang, rather than a wimper. The following is part 1 of a 5 part story by humdog on her life as a Gorean Slave in Second Life. Oh by the way, today in Toontown I saw a character named Kajira! (Has Gor come to Toontown?!?!) –Uri

Confessions of a Gorean Slave, Part 1, by humdog

It was early in the evening when I met a man I will call Soames Forsyte. I met him in the recesses of one of those cesspool of the spirit that SL calls clubs where they have dungeons and private rooms and escorts and objects like that. Nobody dragged me there. Tell you the truth, I was bored and just wandering around. Now Soames was handsome – but that’s not unusual, because everyone in SL is just about as beautiful and sexy and desirable as their skill with sliders permits. These strangely and also clone-ish surfaces are an important part of the lucid dream that is Second Life. It makes me want to quote from that song “Round Here” where they say:

Round here we all look the same
Round here we roar like lions
Round here we sacrifice like lambs
Round here we stay up very very very very late (– Counting Crows)

To me, that SL in a nutshell, but to make it short:

I met Soames, and I went with him into his world, and his world is called roleplay Gor.

It would be very easy to write a story about roleplay Gor that would begin something like this:

“In December 2005, in Pakistan, a man called ======= killed his 24 year old daughter for dishonoring him, and then he killed his three stepdaughters, all under age 10. He then threatened to kill his wife for screaming while he killed her children. Mr. —- was very matter-of-fact when confronted by police about these so-called honor-killings, and explained to them that he had picked up the machete used in the killings on his way home from mid-day prayers. According to Human Rights Watch, there were at least 250 honor killings in the Middle East during the year 2005, and those are the ones they know about. In roleplay Gor, honor killings are acceptable.

In Afghanistan, and in other so-called conservative Muslim cultures, the honorable women of Muslim families are expected to wear a long robe called a Burka, which conceals a woman from head to foot, and includes the use of a face veil. Women in these cultures are expected to wear these robes whenever venturing outside their homes, and are not allowed to travel without an escort, preferably male, of some sort. In roleplay Gor, the Burka is called “Robes of Concealment”, five to eight face veils are required, and a freewoman wears this regalia and does not travel un-escorted….

A person writing an article about roleplay Gor that began that way would be opening themselves to a certain amount of screaming from the roleplay Gor community in SL. A person who wrote wondering why roleplay Gor celebrates human sexual slavery – an activity that continues to roll merrily along in modern Thailand and Africa, for example – would be accused of Sensational Tabloid Journalism about activities that simply are either exaggerated, happen by mutual consent, or just don’t exist. No doubt at least one irritable Ubar in some Gorean backwater of SL would get on the horn to His legal advisors and send a couple enraged letters to the editorial staff of the publication unfortunate enough to attract His attention should He see such awkward statements in print. After all, an Ubar’s work is never done.

No one here, however, is foolish enough to draw parallels between Taliban fashion statements and the wardrobe requirements of the Gorean Free Woman. No one here is silly enough to wonder why so many apparently well-heeled and apparently bored middle class Western European and American wives, mothers, students, and career women are willing to sign up and pay the cost of entry so that other well-heeled and apparently bored middle class men (and women) can roleplay social and sexual crimes against women in this very unusual and intriguing manner. Human sexual slavery is, after all, a RL problem. RL human sexual slavery with kidnapping, beatings, and forced prostitution is different, isn’t it, from the RP fantasies of a few thousand people waving the “safe, sane, consensual” BDSM flag? Anyway, it is clearly obvious that nobody is recruiting newbie women for these RP Second Life activities, and it goes without saying that absolutely no SL resident is recruiting RL subs and slaves from the SL population. That never happens. We all know that.

But I did go off with Mr. Forsyte. He had a room upstairs and I went there and he said undress and I did and then he made requests which I performed in the most cordial way possible. When I was leaving he said something to me and at the end of the list of his requests/orders/desires, he added “and you will wear my kol’lar…” and I felt shocked at this request and said no. Then we had this loop where he said you will and I said no, I won’t, and we went through that a few times until the loop lost its charm.

For those few people left in SL who do not know what a collar or kol’lar is, I will tell you that it is a complex symbol. The collar is an extremely tangible and visible symbol of a very powerful multi-level relationship of surrender. Putting on a kol’lar is a statement of transfer of personal power and control from the person wearing the kol’lar to the person who has given the kol’lar. The kol’lar itself tends to be made of metal or leather or some such material, and looks in many cases like the collar worn by a dog or some other pet animal, and in fact often the person wearing the kol’lar is addressed as “my pet” or is referred to as “my pet”.

(to be continued…)