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Roleplayers: Gor on Elm Street
Introduction
Introduction The online world of Gorean roleplay is not a topic area for The Gorean Voice except for the occasional warning. As the new editor, I offer two warnings in the form of companion articles. This piece focuses on the dangerous, serious side of online predators and has a serious tone. The other article, Roleplayers: Gorsketeers, focuses on pathetic ignorance and has a lighter tone. Both articles are written for people who are fans of John Norman and who find that what he has to say about life, relationships, and, in a word, philosophy strikes a chord. Whether you are new to Gor or have been around a while in roleplay settings that now cause you to think, “Something is not right here,” what distinguishes you from the growing pack of people in online Gor is that you take Norman seriously. You see a clear difference in attitude between the thoughtful discussion sites and those places of pure fantasy that emphasize control, appropriation of time, bullying, and demands for crossing the line from online to phone or actual meeting. The encouragement for newbies is that you do not have to put up with abusiveness and danger, and my hope is that you will not put up with such once the dangerous has been labelled for what it is. The affirmation for you older souls who have found Norman’s works for real is the certainty that online roleplay Gor is not a harmless environment to be taken lightly but is instead a cyber-realm like any other and as such hosts predators. People have their own definitions of roleplayer. For purposes of these companion articles, a roleplayer is a person who is not what he or she postures as being. The self-presentation changes with a flick of the computer power button. The Gorean appearance is only a costume, a mask, an illusion. The point for this cautionary article is that the public persona, while at first appearing to be Gorean, is in fact not like the person behind the keyboard. For roleplayers who are cyber-predators, Gor becomes merely one of many online environments in which to manipulate and victimize. Cyber-Predators The phenomenon of online predators has hit cyber-Gor. Cyberspace is more anonymous than many people wish to admit. Predators wear Gorean clothing as easily as they camouflage themselves in other environments. There are even websites alerting Gorean people to safety issues and showcasing personal testimonies of persons who have been deceived by people pretending online to be Gorean. Some predators have real time interactions as their goal, while others gratify themselves with abusing people through online time. Either way, they give Goreans a bad reputation and represent anything but the high ideals promoted through legitimate Gorean publications and forums from Norman’s own works to the Gorean Public Boards and The Gorean Voice. The 10 examples below illustrate some of the situations in which red flags should pop up and cause you to figure that the person exhibiting them is in fact not Gorean at all. Your time is precious. You are precious. Do not waste your time with any kind of dangerous or negative pretender. Do not waste your time with the simply incompetent pretenders, because through them, you will, guaranteed, become exposed to and vulnerable to those who are truly bad news. Physical danger to yourself or your loved ones, whether from violence, pain, or disease, is the obvious first risk of associating with predators, but the risks to emotions, finances, employment situations, and reputation must never be ignored. Each of these risks can be found among the 10 examples below. Whether you are free or slave in real life, you owe self-important posers nothing, and you gain nothing by associating with them. They will steal or confuse your sense of what it means to be Gorean if you let them, and that is absolutely unacceptable. The List Run from anyone: 1. Trolling for Victims through False Advertising. Who dresses in Gorean male clothing for the express purpose of finding lonely women, and upon finding one, shoves Gor aside and substitutes some BDSM variant, such as Total Power Exchange, first arguing that the BDSM variant is the heart of what it means to be Gorean and then promoting the details of that BDSM variant with no further attention to Gor, with the sole objective of the increasingly insistent interactions being to meet and scene with the woman in real time, possibly gaining access to her children in the process, or who demands to receive nude pictures of the woman which might then be displayed on porn sites for the profit of the one who has the pictures, or 2. Cruel, Harsh, Unfair. Who invokes his or her own rights while constantly admonishing others to meekly accept whatever abuse that he or she heaps, using the oft-repeated adage that “Gor is cruel, Gor is harsh, Gor is unfair” and making sure that his or her private Gor is not about beauty or the virtues but rather is characterized mostly as a punishment fetish dungeon or a paradise for humiliation fetish sluts, or 3. Bad Feelings. Who presides over emotionally abusive interactions that continually make people leave the keyboard feeling bad and actually dreading having to log in later, or if interacting in such a place, puts up with it rather than affirming his or her own value, or 4. Pseudoleadership. Who misidentifies leadership with bullying and finds lasting happiness only in controlling both the real time and the virtual time of others through micromanagement and endless tasks and processes, or 5. Immaturity. Who demonstrates a juvenile temperment and criticizes constantly, placing blame and shame on everyone else without ever accepting responsibility for encouraging the growth of others, or 6. Everyone has Membership Privileges. Who obliges kajirae to treat every first time visiting unknown Earth persona uppercase and Horny Net Geek as if they were Gorean personae, or who treats every stranger as an authority figure and not as an enemy fit for a collar or virtual impalement, as this pressures people into subjecting themselves to abusive anonymous visitors, or 7. Numbers Hungry. Who, in the groundless belief that mere registered numbers, whether or not people are happy or actively participating, constitute “quality” and make a place “strong,” solicits every visitor to join the group or the site and thereby commits the group and the site to that visitor without even getting to know the visitor first and without any regard at all for what might be best for either the visitor or for the people already in the group, thereby subjecting everyone to the eventual predators that will gain apparent legitimacy through the group or the site, or 8. Fickleness. Who changes personal commitment to a place with as much frequency as most people change their underwear, with the point here being that people who follow such unstable people will eventually become subject to the predators they will inevitably hook up with, or 9. Pretended Longevity. Who pretends to have been at a site before it was even created and online before the Internet was even developed and Gorean from way back somewhere probably in the Eisenhower administration, since the false aura of authoritativeness generated by the pretended longevity will predispose people to allow abuses to happen, or 10. Pretended Antiquity of One and Only One Vision. Who constantly resorts to invoking nonexistent “Old Gor ways” in order to decry whatever someone else does or to justify whatever he or she wishes to do, thereby imposing his or her own agenda while deflecting criticism, stopping group input in making decisions, lowering the defenses of the intended victims, and concealing his or her true nature as a cyber-predator. Conclusion Cyber-predation goes beyond someone merely being a jerk. Predators are expert at impression management and have no empathy. Predators are by nature destructive and will seem to affirm only to victimize. Predation harms people and reflects badly on legitimate Gorean experience as Goreans become mis-identified with people who abuse the name. As sincere people who look for community and who want to believe that those professing the label adhere to common values, Goreans are vulnerable to deception. The more widespread that Gor becomes online, the greater the dangers become as well. Keep your wits about you while online, take nothing new at face value, and reveal nothing on impulse. Lasting relationships take time and are grounded in common sense.
I wish you well, Hersius |
