By kessia{Sage}

Accepting a treatise as a model for an ideal sort of life means that one recognizes and identifies with the philosophy found within its pages. Some, like Christians or Muslims, have an element of faith, but beyond their convictions lie an acknowledgment that the texts revered by either group contain truths that describe reality. Both groups, collectively, love the wisdom found in those ancient texts, and pursue knowledge of them as a means to explain reality and provide a moral framework for life. People identify themselves with these belief systems, not out of a sense of personal emptiness or weakness, but out of a willingness to align themselves with a belief system that best describes their convictions. As with many philosophies, there are those who blindly believe everything they read. These people are analogous to “religious fanatics”, and as with any sort of fanaticism, they are rare. However, it is by the loud extremists or the most vocal of the deliberately ignorant that a philosophical system is often judged. Detractors then make the argument that all of the people who ascribe to a certain philosophy are nothing more than religious nutballs who have so little in their lives that they are driven to filling it with some untenable belief system.

Extremists aside, most of those who would call themselves followers of any given philosophy or belief system tend to spend time in both introspection and in examination of the philosophies' treatises. Stories are investigated, picked apart, in the search for modern truths that are reintegrated into the followers' outlook on life. Perhaps due to the age of the stories, there are fewer arguments made against the sanity and rationality of those that employ ancient parables to define and describe their lives. The use of more modern ideas, more modern allegories for human experience, seems to be easier to attack.

Such is the case with Gor.

Many dismiss the Gor books as being only “fantasy stories” relayed in badly written prose. Looking past the fantasy setting and stilted language to the subtle dissertation on the human condition is simply impossible for some people. They see only men congratulating themselves on their physical prowess while rendering slave girls helpless with need. They see only the sword fights, the sea battles, the strange creatures inhabiting a made up world. The relevance of the evolutionary arguments, the modern lesson of a man's journey from denial to self-awareness and pride is lost on these people. The echoes of applicability to reality found in the Gorean ethos get lost in the determined refusal of some to look the beyond the obvious to the fundamental spirit of the stories. Even if there is a grudging admittance that there is a philosophy of natural order in the books, critics deny its applicability to modern life.

Those that find truth in the Gor books are often castigated for not living in reality, for being so simple minded as to find any gems of truth in the redundant descriptions of an imaginary planet where giant bugs perform the occasional role of deus ex machina. Some guy accepting a moral challenge from a flaming bush is easier to accept, apparently, than finding any thematic truth in the dualism of man as represented by Kur and Priest King. The unwavering repudiation of the tenability of the philosophies within the books is often imbued with saccharine sympathy for those who are bereft enough to accept the wisdom discovered within the pages of the Gor novels as a valid description of an ideal human life.

Nowhere is this false sympathy more evident than in the consistent, probably deliberate, misunderstanding of Gorean based relationships. Again and again detractors cite the harshness and cruelty found within the books as if they are actual occurrences of the conversion of normal healthy women into fearful doormats. Nowhere do critics admit that, just as one needs to look at the themes of the books to discover the ethos and philosophies therein, it is also necessary to look to the themes of treatment rather than the details to understand the functionality of the Master/slave relationship within the Gorean mindset. If it is pointed out that there are many other, older treatises in which women are beaten, starved or drowned for disobedience, many detractors dissolve into a righteous fury at the use of “valid” philosophies to defend the demonstration of an applicable reality within the Gorean ethos.

Instead, details of beatings, sexual coercion, starvation, and forced labor found within the books are waved aloft by critics, as if these details must be a literal manual on how to manage a Master/slave relationship in real, modern society. In focusing on the verbatim rather than the conceptual, the fundamental expressions of joy in living true to one's nature are more easily ignored. These truths, and the essential philosophies behind them get shunted aside, so that detractors may more easily argue that the only difference that exists between Gorean based Master/slave relationships and all other types of Master/slave relationships rests in the superficial. Since the only difference is in the details, critics crow, then it must be the same as any other Master/slave relationship.

In and of themselves, the day to day details of any absolute Master/slave relationships likely differ very little. The human experience from culture to culture is not so exceptional that there is some way of living that is so different from others' as to be totally unique. Some women work, some stay home and raise children. Some kneel at the arrival of the head of the house, some simply fix coffee and smile. Some men want their women covered, others want them naked. Some women need to be physically corrected, others need only a sharp look. In all of this the Master of the house sets the rules, defining his wishes in unqualified terms. The palpable details are not what separates absolute M/s relationships, it is the motivation for the relationships that provides the differentiation.

In Gorean based M/s, like Christian M/s or Muslim M/s, the rationale for having a relationship based on dominance and submission does not lie solely in sexual preference, but in an acceptance of a larger philosophy, or larger belief system. For those in many Muslim and Christian based M/s relationships, a man's right to wear a mantle of power in his house is seen as a responsibility granted by a Supreme being. Goreans, however, do not regard dominance as an imperative from an external source. A man who accepts the philosophies found within the Gor books regards the submission of the women in his household as an statement of biological inclination, just as his dominance over them is an statement of the innate inclinations within himself.

On the whole, those that subscribe to the philosophies found in the Gor books are, like the men in the books, fierce in their individuality. It would naturally follow that the particulars of statement of each man's relationship with his women would be somewhat different from man to man, yet still similar. For a Gorean man, it is not necessary for a woman in his household to submit because she believes he has been granted his power, or is entitled to his power by God. She submits as an inevitable reaction to his dominant nature, fulfilling the equation of dominance and submission that the Gorean philosophy regards as right and natural. The details of the submissive behaviors may differ from relationship to relationship, but fundamental to each and every one of these relationships is the demonstration of the more basic Gorean precepts that men and women are different, are not meant to be the same, and that the strength and will of a man elicits the femininity and submission of a woman.

And therein lies the difference.