azurelunatic | Gor (regarding List discussions)

I have read all sorts of things, and I have liked them or not liked them. I am the sort of person whose reaction to book-burnings is to false-politely suggest with the "I am showing my teeth and it is not a smile" expression, that perhaps the roles of burner and burnee should be reversed.

The Gor book that

boojum gave me, which I read perhaps the first twenty pages of, is so far one of the only books I actively wish to destroy.

I have read S.M. Stirling's Draka books. I enjoyed them, because as much as they horrified and squicked me, they are well-written, well-crafted, and ... *shudder* I'm glad that I've witnessed the author himself say onlist that, were they real, he'd be one of the first ones in with a backpack nuke.

It's really not fair to compare Gor to the Draka. Gor is a fantasy. I have also read fantasies that squicked me. (Fantasy in this case would be "dream of the author, unlikely to be carried out" rather than the sword-and-sorcery genre.)

pyrogenic had a particularly ... vivid ... one at the Wash some years back. ("the Wash": a web page with classic e-mail forwards "cleaned up" and presented in a static format.) It was about an office that decided to implement the practice of office whores, and it crept gradually from something on the bare edge of plausibility into... not. And it squicked me more and more the more I read, and finally I had to quit reading it because it disturbed me so much.

This differs from Gor in that I didn't stop reading the Gor book because the practices detailed within completely disgusted me, it was because I could not wrap my mind around the self-satisfied purple prose that the fucking thing was written in. I was left with no desire to do anything with the office whore story other than not read it; Gor left me with the desire to break out FatherSir's propane weed-burner torch.

I suppose my point is this: everyone has fantasies, and Your Kink May Well Be My Squick. (Like mpreg. I can't get my mind around that, even though I'm writing one just to prove that it can be written well.) But for the love of gods, even though it may be squicky as all goatfuck, that's no excuse for poor writing.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That particular series of books is a huge contribution to my auto-squick reaction to any and all things BDSM...I'm pretty certain that IF the people who abused did know how to read, they read those books, and took that shit to an even greater level. My biggest contention with the husband in his utter shithead phase was that the only people he was talking to online were these "Gor Societies", that was his only fucking interest for a while, was the whole Gor thing, wanted to live it, breath it, be it. Hence my "who the fuck are you and what did you do with my husband" response.

I'm not usually up for book burning either, in this case, I think we should burn the author.

I'm pretty big on live and let live, and I honestly have met some women who are happy being Gorean slaves...but it's definitely not somewhere I can *understand*. I can understand wanting to be a slave. Part-time. Or even 24/7 with days *off*...I can *understand* it; it's not for me. But being a slave is addictive, especially when it comes with sexual pleasure...you only have to worry about *one* thing, *one* person, and just reacting. You don't have to be concerned about protecting yourself, or planning anything, or the bills or anything. You just *react*, to one person. It's quite a high, to be sure.

But I could never understand *wanting* to be a permanent bondslave. It's just not a mindset I can wrap my mind around. I know it exists - not all Gorean masters are assholes, believe it or not. (Oh, mind you, most of them are. The newbies, mostly, from what I've seen online; they tend to drop off within a few years.) But the oldline ones who actually *care* about their slaves? *shrug* Well, if I can meet a Gorean slave and purposefully scan them, and be content that they're *actually* HAPPY about their situation, and they've been in it for years? Then I can't condemn the whole thing offhand. I just can't.

Much of my response comes from the fact that as part of trying to desensitize myself to alot of this stuff many years ago I was chatting with people in this lifestyle...and while I think over the course of time I've maybe met oh, 5-10 people who i believe do this stuff in a very safe and sane way and are happy with it, there are hundreds of those who are in it because they were abused as kids and they were programmed, many of them, when they really stop to think about it will admit they are responding to programming, but they are afraid to break it. Many of them are just plain afraid, they got into something not realizing how far it would go and they are afraid to try and get away...and some of the sicko bastards I've encountered (both male and female) who take the powerroad (I can't bring myself to call these people master) part of it are a menace to society. One woman I was chatting with had to have surgery on a regular basis to correct damage the guy was doing to her...she disappeared at one point, and we found out she had hemmoraged one night and died.

Like I've said, I HAVE met people who do this sanely, and I'm glad they are doing something that makes them happy and that it's an okay situation...but there are just so many who aren't that way :(

I might well be someone who'd be happy with that. But I'm very, very picky about who I'd allow to have power over me.

GHA. Gor is to BDSM as the smelly unwashed no-tact no-fun rude guy is to fandom. Can't escape it, and no one but him likes him...

good analogy....

hey, sorry I forgot to call you back yesterday, but between cracking up about the Ned Flander's cable box and then the squirrel homage (lol!) it just kind of got spaced :) Hubby's going to be home shortly and I might go run an errand but if you have no plans tonight I may give you a ring! (on the phone..not jewelry..don't mind me, wierd mood day)

I'll probably be home this evening too -- whee!

(Who, me, hyper?)

Agreed. Blech.

But what's mpreg? (I say, although I may regret knowing; I regret ignorance more, though.)

Male pregnancy stories.

What she said.

The vast majority of them are bad. I'm trying to write a story where it's actually got a reason to be in the story other than "The author thought it would be SO HOT OMG LOL!!!"

It's eerily easy.

Gor..gor,gor,gor...Oh! Oh yeahhhh. I read one of the Gor books years ago (I think, had a woman rescued from a drifting spacecraft, became sort of an agent? Think it was Gor). I'll agree the writing was bloody awful. Poor bdsm erotica. Who was the author? Was he a misogynist? Thats the impression I got, the D/s as portrayed in that book was less sexual fantasy than fantasies of violence and control.
Or could I be making to much of it?

Um. Was she redheaded, name Diana?

That wasn't Gor, if so. Gor is worse.

I know I've read at least one book in the Gor series. Point I was making was that I got a bad impression of the author. Seemed to me to have more than just a kink for slavery, but an unhealthy obsession with the degradation of women in general.
"Disturbed" is the what I was thinking at the time.

Yeah.

No argument there.

In my defense, I did send it to you as an example of execrable writing. Even without the punctuation abuses and other low-level writing problems, the Gor book wasn't a what-if book, just an author-goes-whee book. Author-goes-whee books are fine, but all books are improved with the addition of some good what-if. (Yes, I'm still annoyed at the various English teachers who have told me science fiction and fantasy weren't Real Literature.)

I've been kicking around for a while the problem of squicky kinky stuff. What stuff which I would find unacceptable in real life is acceptable for me to read about or see and which isn't?[1] Does it matter if the unacceptable views are reinforced by society or not? Does it matter if it's visual or words, and if so, in which way? I think there is harmful porn, but not all porn is harmful, and which porn is harmful depends on a whole host of other factors I can't figure out, probably some of which are person-dependent. I also think trying to ban porn in general terms results in more of the harmful stuff being produced, but I can't argue that at all well.

[1] I'm not asking other people this question about me; I'm putting this question forward as a thinking question that can be used by anybody about themselves or just for general discussion of the idea. I just can't phrase it clearly enough to make that obvious.

And awful it verily is! Perhaps I should keep it around as an example of what drek can get published, to encourage me that someone, somewhere, is going to want to publish me, as I'm so much better a writer than that.

I think harmful factors in anything include:

Encouragement of disrespect
Unprovoked cruelty (in BDSM, where seemingly-unprovoked cruelty is part of a scene, the scene is the provoking agent)
Violations of the safe/sane/consensual rule in a context that suggests it's OK to do this outside of a purely fictional environment
Boredom given or implied as a good reason to fuck the next thing that moves (actors who don't look like they care what is going on and just want it to get over with, for example)
Abnormal body types being billed as normal body types
Normal body types being billed as abnormal body types

Gor (regarding List discussions)

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