Norman as a Champion of Female Sexuality

by Hersius

Popular anti- John Norman criticisms include casting him as being misogynistic, which in its strictest definition means someone who hates women. Norman is put down for putting women down. This brief editorial places him in his temporal context to show that he has been, even if the world is quick to forget, a champion of women’s sexuality.

The timing of this editorial coincides with the recent DVD releases of Kensey: Let’s Talk About Sex and Inside Deep Throat. The underlying theme of the 2004 Kinsey movie is that misinformation about sexuality has been widespread in the United States, and one related theme of the 2005 commentary on the 1972 movie Deep Throat is that there was debate about female sexuality (specifically, female orgasm) that reached the court system. Watching both movies from the standpoint of today’s unprecedented dissemination of information about sexuality, it is difficult to comprehend (or remember) that it took a number of pioneers to confront American sensibilities and challenge notions of human sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular.

The list of such pioneers is a short list, but each of the people on it made major impacts. Notice the publication dates of the following. The Boston Public Library’s adult booklist of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century as of May, 2000, includes:

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Alfred Kinsey, 1948)
The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking (Alex Comfort, 1972)
Our Bodies, Our Selves; A Book by and for Women (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1973)

The “second list” of the Boston Public Library’s adult booklist of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century as of May, 2000, includes:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but were Afraid to Ask (David Ruben, 1969).

My personal honorable mentions regarding sex-related influential books add:

Each of these pioneers effectively made the American public confront its notions of sexuality. Some of the recurrent themes championed by these pioneers - seems that the public did not accept it all at first - were that women can enjoy sex in a variety of ways and that women can and morally should experience sex as something fulfilling. They advocated non-vaginal orgasm as legitimate and not somehow inferior to vaginal orgasm. All that seems so simple and so taken for granted these days, but there was a time when such fundamental ideas were hard-fought.

John Norman stands with those who were actively standing for such principles. Other than the Kinsey report, the sexual revolution books above span from 1966-1976, with most after 1970. Norman’s Gor series produced 10 books during that time period. In addition, Ghost Dance was published in 1969, Time Slave was published in 1975, and, mosy importantly for this editorial, Imaginative Sex was published in 1974.

John Norman has always stood for the propositions that women can legitimately enjoy sex creatively, that women’s orgasms should not be limited to those achieved only through vaginal intercourse, and that sexual fulfillment is an important part of a women’s total fulfillment as a person. Instead of shunning or downplaying sexuality, Norman has portrayed it as something fundamental to human identity and existence. For Norman, female sexuality is an active, positive force, deserving of fulfillment, and not something that is at best irrelevant and at worst destructive and needing to be repressed.

When Norman’s work began and developed, his was a voice liberating women from certain stereotypes that had historically constricted women’s sexuality. In the feminist backlash against the sexual revolution, his work has been mischaracterized as reducing women to stereotypes. Seen in his temporal context, Norman is most honestly seen as a pro-woman advocate. This should, after all, be expected, since he is a fierce champion of a humanity that is not shackled by anti-biological propaganda. Through the years, Norman has had the integrity to speak out as a free thinker, and the fact that he confronts the herd mentality means that the system that he critiques will always condemn him for never getting on board with certain agendas, be those agendas social, environmental, or whatever agenda works to the detriment of humanity. It is easy for “politically correct” propagandists to criticise and even blacklist Norman for not going along with certain contemporary gender-related political agendas, but it is a lie to malign him, for he is a man of conscience who does not recant against what he proposes as truths, and he was vocal through his writings in the struggle for the public and private acceptance and fulfillment of women’s sexuality.

I wish you well,

Hersius