1. You do realize that about half the female avatars in sl are actually men. Even if the entire gor idea turns off a lot of men. There must still be a significant amount of men playing kajira in sl.

This makes the idea that gorean role play in sl is designed to condition women into the slave position, also in rl, highly questionable.

2. it seems that things have changed significantly. Because i haven’t had any of these experiences on any of the gorean sims i visited (playing a kajira).

This makes me think that it really is all your own ideas you are trying to push and it’s not happening on any of the major sims in sl.

I agree that many BDSM’ers do gravitate towards Gor, often they call themselves Life Stylers, etc. I hate to sound culturally insensitive, but personally i think Life Stylers, should leave their Life Style out of Gor, and just focus on playing in Gor. There really weren’t that many slaves in Gor, and if you read many of the books, you will see the behavior between Master’s and slaves in Gor, was far different than in SL. I think in SL there is a masochistic bent that is not “Gorean” just people bullying other people. If you are rp’ing a slave role…read the books. You ARE not a bdsm slave. You are playing a character, and if you are on a sim where people act this way, then leave. I think it takes a lot of fun…this bdsm philosophy out of actual Gor. Gor is an adventure, romance, fighting…Not Master/Slave relationships only.

If you don’t want to RP get the fuck out…SL Gor is not RL and you make rp shitty for the rest of us.

As to the idea that Gor is not about sex? What a farce. In what reality do you people live in where BDSM is not a life style choice that is based sex? Its about control yes but ultimately it starts in the bedroom. There is a strong reason why BDSM figured largely in many online dating services. It certainly isn’t because fulfills some sort of existing moral code. One only has to look into the Gor sims or Norman’s novels to understand that. Why do you suppose that the ‘kajira’ wear basically nothing where the men are dressed in clothing that highlights a misaligned physique. Gor is simply an extension to the kind of men who find rubber ballsacs on the back of pickup trucks amusing.

As to the specifics of the ‘article’ itself. This is nothing more than a blighted op-ed piece by someone without the journalistic integrity to a little research beyond a few quotes that probably came from the Cult Statistical Manual. Where are the quotations from the opposition? Where are the case studies done? The writer later asks if someone will ‘teleport out or just leave?’ The question is why would they? Do the Vampire Hunters in COLA when set upon by a gang of slavering Nosferatu simply teleport out because they are rent asunder? No, its a game. There is no such thing as Gor and there is no such thing as a Vampire.

The Vampire idea bears some remarkable similarity. There are thousands of Live Action Roleplayers cavorting around city parks during the weekend in bad vintage clothing, heavy pancake makeup, and manic panic hair dye. Are they a cult? Certainly they, and Gor seem pretty silly to the outside observer but no one seems to be having a ‘free the ghouls’ campaign. Ghouls, btw, are typically defined as humans who have been given vampiric blood to bind them totally to their vampiric masters. Think Renfeld from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

So note cards and tours of Gorean Sims aside some of you are lending as much value to some of the worst sci-fi/fantasy books ever written. It also just goes to prove that SL is still full of nothing more than the most amateurish ‘journalists’ I’ve ever encountered.

>GOR IS NOT ABOUT SEX

Yeah, that’s what the furries said and everyone know they’re full of shit. Might wanna try another line of argument there.

You focus FAR too heavily on the nitwits running rampant on an ONLINE *ROLEPLAY* game, versus real life people, and the books themselves; stop taking out your vendetta with moronic BDSM and D/S people who obviously have serious issues that they need to work out either with themselves or a professional, on Gorean people, who, when serious about what they do, are the LAST people to be 99% of what you’ve spewed about.

Where to even start with you? First of all, the books are not a bible, or a religious scroll; they’re not anything other than a fictional series of writings that touch on, sometimes very deeply, the raw inner instincts of man, AND woman alike. They by no means are something to be held into a light that is anything other than possible guidelines, written by a man who had the balls to write about a world that, quite frankly, a great deal of people in reality are too afraid, or too socially beaten down, to accept and embrace; they can barely be honest with themselves about how they feel about what size their pants are, let alone about what they crave in a relationship. And, no, I’m not talking sexually. The sexuality is an aspect that is ALSO far too focused on and bastardized, when it’s barely the basis of anything other than self expression of inner instincts that all humans have, some more than others at that. So stop making it out like it’s some CULT or religious sect; it’s NOT. It’s people who agree on beliefs, who see something that others don’t, who have the GUTS to stand apart from ‘normal’ society in their relationships and actions. They’re NOT blind faithed zealots.

You want blind faithed zealots that are dangerous to women? Go study up on Mormonism while you’re on a tirade about woman’s rights, or being manipulated and brainwashed. Take a good, long look at the Mormons sects that have women, no, excuse me, GIRLS, who are married off to fifty year old men against their will, and have to bear their children, while they’re not given ANY education, or shown anything other than total and utter control and manipulation so they do as told, and are good little bitches to their ‘father figure husbands’. And don’t tell me that’s crap either, it’s well documented, especially in the last few years, how these women are used and treated, not given education or lives, practically just bodies to carry children and hands to do work a man is too lazy to bother with, so when he dies, he can inherit his own goddamn planet. Do that, THEN you can come to me and talk about cults, because you’ll be well versed in actualities, versus your pathetic attempts to box up Gor

Anyway, as I said, Gor is in no way a cult, nor is it a threat to women; EVERY WOMAN SUBMITS WILLINGLY. No one is told to, and no one SHOULD, go around LITERALLY collaring women in reality and holding them against their will. If they are, or did? They should be dealt with according to the law, and then have their ass beat for bastardizing something that is no way about that. But that’s not the point anyway, none of it is about a man using a woman as a ‘slave’ in the terms that the word slave has been used in for hundreds of years. Please, don’t be so naïve and afraid of words like ‘master’ or ‘slave’, and instantly assume that its’ something being put in victim and another in villain.

There IS NO VICTIM in willingly giving yourself to someone, and accepting what you FEEL inside yourself. NO ONE is made to feel a way that they shouldn’t, about themselves. If they don’t feel that way, they can, and this especially applies to SL, LEAVE.

A woman in Gor is not an animal, not a dog, not to be stupid. A master in Gor is not a controller, not a nitpicking scientist behind a microscope micromanaging what a woman does. A woman in Gor is to be just that, a woman, and a woman is meant to be intelligent, and have her will, and have her grace, and beauty, and sexuality. And it’s to be brought out of her by a man who can help to teach her, educate her, embrace her, and provide an environment where she won’t get treated like some leper or horrible person for being what she is. THAT is what Gor is, not an uneducated, mindless drone who does everything their Master says like a two braincelled pet.

A slave and a master are an equal partnership in loyalty, respect, and hard work. Woman may be below man in Gor, but she is by no means WORTH less than him. By no means.

Which gets me to another point, in this tangent of mine; SL is the worst possible place to base any real knowledge of Gor off of, considering that more than 80% of it is BDSM and D/S people gone array, who want an excuse and a fun world to fuck around in. They’re not by ANY means actual Goreans, or they wouldn’t do half the shit that they do. Anyone who really believes in the world or rules of Gor has a straight head, and understands that the sexuality of it is barely the main thing to focus on in the first place; the learning, teaching, growing, providing, being provided for, and doing is what it’s about. It’s not about dominating a woman and turning her into a beast; it’s about helping her to learn about herself, and about man, and freeing her of social bonds.

Digression here; speaking of which, SOCIETY is the biggest brainwash of all, what with how we’re taught as children that white lies will get us places, and being powerful is stepping all over others to get the biggest wallet and smallest waist. What kind of shit is THAT? If you stopped and looked at the world around you, INCLUDING religious groups, you’d realize that you can compare almost ANYTHING to Hitler at this point (you should be glad I’m baring touching on your comparison to that yet, by the way), what with how everything is geared toward being THE BEST!!1oeoen!! in the eyes of others.

Back to the point; offline Gor and SL Gor are two very different worlds. Of COURSE there are sane, educated, intelligent people on SL (IE myself and my girl), but you obviously have not come in contact with them, or have, and are a jealous little creature. The rest, however, are more than likely CHILDREN playing out some sick fantasy that should be in a BDSM club, or sick minded adults who crave control. It’s not very hard to pick out the smart ones from the idiots; the shit you’re talking about would be someone who is far more geared toward BDSM.

Why do I say so? Because in no way does GOR teach you to monitor and nitpick your girl 24/7 like she’s under a microscope, blocking her IMs or saying she can’t speak for herself, or has to speak in third person. Those sorts of things, blocking her IMs or speaking for her, are PUNISHMENTS when she does something wrong, as anyone would discipline another who is being taught; TEACHERS discipline students all the time, don’t they? Regardless the age or gender. So don’t even bother to tell me that it’s wrong to punish someone when you’re TEACHING them. Gor Master = teaching, not controlling. Gor in no way says that she should be an idiot and speak in third person and have no education; WHAT real master in their right mind would want an IDIOT by his side? The slaves spoke first person in the books, by the way, and the third person is used as it’s used in REALITY, for other means or reasons; the people who use it constantly and say that’s how it is in the books are obvious IDIOTS. And sex, fucking around in public and only screwing, is by far NOT how it is. Sexuality is a part of it all, and to be had and to give and to explore, but it’s a PRIVATE matter, beyond the look of a slave, who, really, if a girl wants to show some skin, what’s new about that? The view of a woman showing her body is so fucked up and taboo in America, it’s insane.

But in SL, all these things are done, and shown, and taken as what Gor is. It. Is. Not what. Gor. Is. How many people have to rebut you for you to even SLIGHTLY get it? How many people have to tell you to READ THE BOOKS, or hey, coming from someone who hasn’t done that much reading, USE YOUR BRAIN to figure out what is meant by it, instead of believing a group in a role play game.

WHICH brings me to my biggest point. WHAT THE FUCK are you smoking to judge something like GOR by ROLE PLAY? Role play is by far the worst area to judge anything on; if you want to judge how ROLE PLAYED Goreans are, by all means, go for it, and say this shit, since it’s predominately true, but to say ALL GORs, lifestylers included, do these things and act this way and believe these things, and are a cult, is the most ridiculous and ignorant thing I have ever seen, based solely on the fact that role play is widely known to be fucked up in general. Furries, anyone? WoW or maybe AOL? Come the fuck on, use your head. If you SERIOUSLY think all Gor is like role play, you are by far the biggest fool I have ever come across. Oh, and? As for outsiders, I think you may need to shove your foot INTO your ass, considering almost every Gor SIM has an OOC badge for people to evaluate or watch RP in progress. YES, that is SO banning people, isn’t it? That is the EPITOME of shunning newcomers, as is passing on information to them for THEM to decide if they want to join or not.

HELLO, AGAIN WITH THE WILLING PARTICIPANTS, NOT BRAINWASHED SCIENTOLOGISTS.

And honestly, even if you are comparing RP Gor to HITLER, you’re still, to be crude, a fucking moron. HITLER? Please. There’s all these quotes and comparisons, and yet you could take a multitude of books, fiction and autobiographical, and compare them to passages from Mien Kopf; it’s VERY easy to do something like that, to spin something your way, when you’re that hell bent on disliking something.

When you get down to it, however, I still DON’T see how Gor is at all like Nazism, or Hitler himself. The man was a cruel, hate filled bigot, an ignorant angry little man taking out his hate for himself and his heritage on the world; Nazism was fueled by others who agreed with him, and took it even further. HOW is Gor like Nazism? NO ONE pushes it on anyone else, NO ONE is MADE to do anything they want to; THEY DECIDE TO, NO one is forced by any means in REALITY and even in SL YOU CAN TURN IT OFF IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO DO IT, oh my god you’ll be banned or shunned DDDDDDDD: big fucking whoop. If you’re stupid enough to continue to involve yourself when you don’t like it, you deserve to be miserable.

Gor is NOT a hate mongering group that is bigoted toward non-Gorean people, and most importantly toward women. Do you so easily forget about FREE women? About MALE slaves? About panthers? Or hey, outlaws, who are mixtures of slave and free? PLEASE, your ignorance is so astounding it’s painful and irritating like a stink bug shoved up one’s nose.

You ignore so much, you focus on so little, and have such a warped stance on it all. You’re sickening, to be quite blunt, because you’re one of the biggest things wrong with this world; a judgmental nitwit, without a concept of what she’s talking about.

P.S. – As for people who say they’re lifestylers and yet commit criminal acts, refuse to let their girls talk to others, or refuse to let their girls talk to ‘gamers’ on SL? They’re not ACTUAL lifestylers either; they need serious help. ANYONE who does ANYTHING you’ve listed for real, and takes it to that level, should not be considered Gor, period, whether it’s online or off. Because that’s just being one sick, fucked up fuck. Who, by the way, are in ALL religions and ALL beliefs and ALL games. Because, face it, the world is full of nutjobs and zealots; again, look at Mormonism, or hell, Catholocism and their rituals and restrictions. Look at ANY religion, and THAT would fit into your rant even more fittingly than Gor, which, by the way, is not a religion, and yet you like to box it up like one. Sure, maybe some people act like it is, but again, they’re the nutters. There are plenty of sane, intelligent, gift people who agree with and will practice Gor who are looking at you as if you just sprouted four heads and spewed bullshit. Oh wait, you did.

P.P.S. – From the mouth of my girl, ‘Though I think gorean slave girls may be more animalistic naturally than people think. I personally enjoy being owned and reminded I’m owned and property. I like it, spiritually and psychologically and sexually But- sexually is actually last on the list. It’s only a plus. We DESIRE to be owned, this is a freedom to us. At least from my personal experience and knowledge. No one told me I wanted to be a slave. I told me.’ And to touch on her, no pun intended, I have not in my years of knowing her EVER seen her as confident, self assured, happy, and fulfilled as I do now. Neither of us spoke about our beliefs before recently, and since then, our relationship has been more full of life than ever before, hers and mine both. We’re relatively new to it all, and though SL has made us WTF at times, there are people who are like us, who are sane, and do it in real life, and bring THEIR beliefs and Gor’s beliefs, and reality, and it works out wonderfully. End of story.

P.P.P.S. – Something dawned on me; you’re not only ignorant, but an absolutely imbecile to base your experience in ONE SIM with ONE idiot master and his cohorts as what GOR is about. READ the books, woman. Also, if someone doesn’t LIKE what is going on as a slave on an… ONLINE ROLEPLAY GAME, uhm, do you know what your mouse does? You can move it. You can even move it to the X in the corner, or the ‘quit’ option, and sign off. And then go rant to your friends about the fucked up experience you had. As I said before, ANYONE who is stupid enough to hang around when they don’t agree with it, ESPECIALLY ONLINE, deserves to be miserable for being so fucking DUMB. God, that’s moronic.

Okay another addition, as I should have more thoroughly read your SECOND spewing of bullshit, which is worse than the first by far.

Any LIFESTYLER who lives by Gor’s beliefs and has a BRAIN will not commit murder, or go against the law. Hell, they won’t even judge their friends or their family or someone who looks upon them as being below them or bad. WHY should they? Live and let live, for Chrissake. What is so hard about that concept, seriously? No sane person will shun someone else because they do or don’t believe something; they’ll live with it, and go on with life. All of my friends, besides my girl, are not into Gor, and yet we’re INCREDIBLY close knit, regardless. They find it interesting what we believe in, and RESPECT US, and we, in turn, respect THEM, and that’s… that. You’re so ignorant and foul to box EVERYONE into the same box because of SOME people, who, AGAIN, I stress this, HAVE ISSUES.

Like religious zealots; they’d do the same damn thing if they were Christian, or Mormon, or Wiccan, or Catholic, or hell, NOT religious, and instead, BDSM, or D/S. That is NOT NORMAL.

Then again, I could be against the grain, and see in Gor something that others don’t; maybe I see into this fictional writings a part of my own beliefs and wants since I was a child, and since I’m inclined to be sane, I do it healthily. As do others I know. But regardless, to caste everyone who reads the novels and feels a twinge in them or wants to live part way like is written, is ridiculous.

One last thing, before I actually stop; lifestylers who are like me, don’t treat the book as a to-do list, that has to be followed word for word and does no wrong; there is ‘wrong’ or things not agreed with. It’s instead an idea, to grow from and meld into one’s own beliefs.

And with that said, toodles.

OH I LIED, one more thing, about the aspect of children; what, pray tell, is wrong about a child being aware of OTHER cultures/lifestyles? GOR IS NOT ABOUT SEX. Parents are not going to fuck in front of their children, and if they do, that’s THAT parents fault, not all. I think it’s wrong how children are kept in the dark about adult issues; how does that prepare them for teenagedom and adulthood? It leaves them in the situation of having to find out for themselves in UNHEALTHY ways through others; IE violence, early pregnancy, bullying or being bullied, ignorance and so forth. They SHOULD learn at a young age about many things, not just what their parents do or believe, but the world around them. PERIOD. And as for defending oneself, if someone hits you, you damn well have the right to hit them back, and I know NON Gor parents who teach that. Because it MAKES SENSE.

Okay, done now.

Ultimately, the Gor phenomenon, in RL and SL, highlights the depressing banality of life in the chunk of the world that has money to burn and leisure time to waste. It’s a symptom of how trivial and up-ourselves we have become, how keen we are to retreat from a world where people really struggle and really suffer and really get hurt. A constant complaint is that you can’t comprehend the Gorean lifestyle unless you’ve lived it. This written by people who, presumably, haven’t actually been taken from their families, trafficked, used primarily for sex and physically abused to ensure compliance – yet still they claim to have some deep understanding of what slavery and punishment is REALLY all about. Irony, anyone?

Perhaps Gorean evangelists should go and find victims of the above and preach to them about their ideas of the “natural order of things”. The politest response they’d get, I would suggest, would be along the lines of “Go back to your brain-free philosophising, your sad little suburban games and your one-handed typing, you flabby social inadequates.”

Another riposte is that critics have obviously never read a Gor book (let alone the whole series). While others have mentioned that SL Gor sims bear only a passing resemblance to the books, they are the source material, so this is a valid point. However it should be pointed out that I wouldn’t wish the reading of a John Norman novel on my worst enemy. I tried to get through one, God knows I did, but the sheer direness of it was too much in the end. You’ve got to hand it to Goreans: with the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Iain Banks producing provocative views of alternative worlds (to name but three), they went and chose Norman. Which offers a nice symmetry: banal, unimaginative, formulaic books attract banal, unimaginative, formulaic people to act out banal, unimaginative, formulaic fantasies.

Which is ok, really. That such people should voluntarily round themselves up and parcel themselves off to where I’m not going to meet them is very decent of them and shows that whatever their other flaws, they do at least understand that many of the rest of us don’t suffer fools gladly. If there is an evangelising element among them looking to prey on the vulnerable then they should be exposed and opposed, but then that is true of any grouping, be it religious, political, lifestyle, whatever. Let’s leave consenting adults to get a bunch of pixels to do whatever they want somewhere out of sight. And for those that venture forth to tell us how great it is to be Gorean – just point at them and laugh, long and hard.

A few posts back, I found this comment.

“That’s exactly my point. Gor isn’t causing Low self-esteem and these “victimized” women, it’s taking advantage of it, and I would argue, making it worse or at the very least not improving it.”

I want to comment in the Real World practice, Me and my woman put the lifestyle into practice before even leaning what Gor was. So when I first learned of Gor, and it’s claims of the “natural order of things”, it was fully inclined to believe it. Since implementing the lifestyle, my woman is 10 time more self confident than she ever was in the 15 years I’ve known her.

Despite the poor criminal reference, I enjoy a good debate and I think both sides have come up with very good points. No, Gor is not for everybody but statements like this show that the author truly does not understand even the slaves perspective. I would say that the lifestyle would be demeaning to the author. I don’t however view the lifestyle as demeaning to everybody. People thrive and truly bloom when they finally find their natural place in life. For some people, it is to be slave, for others, Masters, and yet others, simply to be free.

I think that any one group should not consider any other group as lesser or degraded simply because they are not like them. Such is the very definition of prejudice. In the modern culture of “tolerance”, I always amused at the amount of preaching that this lifestyle or that is wrong and intolerant because it doesn’t fit in my ideas of write and wrong but find endless debates on how it’s good or bad.

I think the author and some who disagree with her should stop and think before rattling on about how (W)e (A)re (R)ight…it just perpetuates hate and prejudice.