Actual Rape, Not "Fantasy Fiction": the Politics of Gor.

I wonder how many people see through the
rhetoric of totalitarian liberalism and recognize what is being done to them the country is moving toward fascism with ever more power being consigned to the omnipresent paternalistic later to be omnipotent state that was his reply when he was confronted with the difference between rape fantasies and actual rape we've seen all these other evasions before but now he is in effect saying well if you think what he endorses is bad just take a look at UM you know how totalitarian life in the modern 1990s United States of America is mind blowing and I don't think he's putting on an act I think he believes this I think he's deeply committed to the role he's playing and to the philosophy and political position that he is preparing the interviewer presses further here of course a rape fantasy cannot harm a woman whereas a rapist can reading about being a slave is a lot more intriguing than actually being a slave so again can we press the author can we press John Norman to recognize these are two very different things we're no longer talking about dress-up playtime we're talking about his stated political ideology his philosophy on actual abduction kidnapping and enslavement Norman replies perhaps but within the privacy of their own relationships many women do live and love the life of a female slave no they don't no they don't John those women you're talking about they read books they have jobs right they have a whole life outside of the life of a slave in a slave Society have you read even one book about what slavery was like in the United States of America just a couple hundred years ago no no they don't some people it's not even a very large percentage of people let's let's be honest what number people enjoy pretending to be a slave it's a pretty small minority there's small minority of people who like pretending that for how many hours a day is it even two hours a day all right this is way less popular than video games let's face it people would rather pretend to be the Super Mario Brothers I mean this is really not that common a pastime but the people who do that is a pastime they still care about their Liberty they still care about their political autonomy they still care about democracy about having the right to vote or write a letter to parliament participa they still care about whatever ecology and rights so whatever the issues are they care about all right no it is not the case that any percentage of women not even 1% not even 1/2 1% actually want to be slaves in the sense of losing those liberties which let's face it also includes loss of access to education from childhood forward I just mentioned really briefly I value the fact that I used to live in a society where I was surrounded by people who had zero formal education when I lived in Laos and Cambodia at that time there's still war people who had never been to school but never been to a classroom at all not even great one and you got to see how human intelligence develops in the total absence of literacy total absence of formal education and people can still be smart and they can still be clever but you know they cannot read the warnings on a can of beans or something they can't read a cigarette packet they can't read labels they you know their their place in society the 21st century is is really quite tragic you know being illiterate no no no John it's not anyone's fantasy to be a powerless safe there's more than one unspoken problem here that's right and ready for critique if you have a slave society like that of gore you don't just have enslaved women you also have enslaved men the interviewer asks in your books men regard slavery as a fate worse than death the women on the other hand fight slavery but come to understand that it is their highest state I cannot remember if anyone in your book Hunter's of gore says kiss the whip but the sentiment which is echoed frequently in the later novels aptly expresses the breakthrough moment for the women you depict doesn't that express violence against women the author's reply the issue is not violence but dominance and strength many women respond to strength and force they like it they want it most women want a man capable of mastering them I asked simply if that is not an evasion of the ethical philosophical and political point what is the interviewer continues as in romance novels Norman the genre is referred to as bada strippers at a fiction writers convention a few years ago I intended a panel on romances one woman author accounted a criticism she had received from her editrix to the effect that the hero had not raped the heroine that was supposedly something to be corrected why the interviewer just asks why but look what Norman jumps to say in response quote I frankly suspect that the matter is biological and this does lie somewhere within all women one supposes that there is a man in a situation in which any woman could be mastered and would respond as a loving slave our intrepid interviewer David a Smith does not let him off the hook that easily quote there was a large difference between power romances where the heroine succumbs willingly to the heroes greater strength and the rape romances where the heroine has to be enslaved and bludgeoned into submitting only to be liberated later on while you may take issue with the word rape your heroes put women in Chains brand them starve them and use force to make them succumb to sex that the women come to enjoy or even to crave their submission does not change the fact that force was used to obtain it in the first place I am sure that many women who want to swoon for mr. Heathcliff or mr. Rochester would draw line at using force to procure sex and here is the ever so disappointing reply from John Norman when confronted on this fundamental problem not just with his fiction but with his deadpan serious philosophical and political claims quote there is very little bludgeoning in the gorian books women slaves are mastered but there seems to be a little physical abuse involvement there seems there seems to be little physical abuse vil there seems to be little balance you would think we were talking to someone here who hadn't read the books and we're talking to the guy who wrote them alright there's little violence compared to what have you ever heard of a series of books that had more violence against women that had more rape that had more abduction kidnapping sexual slavery we continue there is of course the actual control of food and the threat of the whip that would be normal in a barbarian Society and I remind you this is being said by someone who presents this vision of the future for our own society as the best possible world given human nature it's quite quite a claim he made there quite a claim that there's there's there's very little bludgeoning so well people are whipped and starved and branded and abducted and raped but there's very little bludgeoning so what John Norman draws the line at bludgeoning and therefore thinks he's presenting us with some kind of utopia and some kind of model for a better political society a better society than our own in the 21st century that he reviles in a lot of verbiage he's borrowed from Ayn Rand he reveals as being some kind of terrible totalitarian dystopia from the perspective of a slave I think any slave living in his parallel universe of gore would regard our society right here right now as a utopia including the fact we have access to running water electricity and free government provided education upward mobility employment that goes beyond mere slavery quote so in this book tarah sets out for the north and on the way gains the trust of a group of Viking raiders with acts of heroism and one-liners the Vikings from Torvalds land ransack a temple of the priests kings and take quite a bit of gold along with the choice women of the surrounding town this is where the story gets really kinky for about 60 pages straight during which Tarla break from his quest and enjoys a little erotic vacation in Torvalds land while we get to learn firsthand about breaking in slave girls yep initially I found Ivor Forkbeard Jarl of the Viking rose to be a pretty interesting character up until he began whipping women and repeating mantras like a brand improves a woman while laughing continuously then I felt like he was a psychopath and not a funny haha psychopath as you often see in pulp novels only a few days of indoctrination wholly transforms the slave girls into giddy sex maniacs completely dedicated to the service of their master and any other free man around who has the consent to bang them let's be clear that would be consent from the slave owners not consent from the slave there are so many things outrageously obviously wrong with John Norman's philosophy of a better future built on rape and sex slavery um even if you can construe as John Norman tries to that a particular woman may love a particular man enough to be enthralled by him shall we say enough to act out some kind of master slave dynamic in their relationship there is no argument for why buying and selling women in a slave market which happens in these books all the time there is no argument for why women being kidnapped and abducted by force as just happened in this description and happens these besson there's no reason why men sharing these women sometimes in the basis of prostitution that happens in the books sometimes the basis of them playing kinds of games or sports where the winner gets to rape the woman and so on what's actually described and put forward for the readers delectation as satisfying and necessary given human nature it would be impossible to imagine this being anything less than traumatizing and horrible for the women involved I don't know even using your imagination and the most liberal way possible to imagine the most kinky BDSM obsessed when possible but to reorganize all of society on this basis to imagine and insist as John Norman does that this is something innate to womankind and Universal in human nature and that women feel this way regardless of who the man is regardless of which man it is that happens to dominate them use them and abuse them in this way that is truly mind-blowing I mean I'm sure by the same token he couldn't imagine that he himself would feel the same way about all women he wouldn't feel attracted to all women you know even just talking about it physically let alone mentally he does by the way constantly share with us his judgments about what is and isn't an attractive woman and how he feels the modern decadent West has slid away from an of true beauty all of his personal sexual predilections he regards as scientific facts they're either scientific facts under the heading of psychology or under the heading of biology only very rarely is he put into a corner where he has to claim their facts under the heading of philosophy it seems to be his area he avoids as much as possible but he thinks it's a biological fact that the women he finds attractive are really attractive whereas what our decadent society puts on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine the women who in our modern Western study are considered attractive that's somehow demented and bad and wrong and reflects the extent to which we've all fallen away from the primordial and Stone Age perfection that he is trying in his way as a creative author to return us to how dare you say John Norman that there's relatively little violence how dare you say that there's nobody gets bludgeoned or nobody gets hurt you have very explicitly described throughout your books precisely people being bludgeoned precisely people being physically destroyed physically hurt what you leave unstated is what the emotional and psychological consequences would be for any particular people and what the consequence would be if you actually scale this up to look at a society of millions as a whole and the sad fact is there's a whole you know shelf full of books in the library that really can describe that for you you can look at the history of slave societies you can look at what life is like in societies even more just there were really really high levels of prostitution and interviews with the prostitutes and what their lives are like when they look back on the decades they lost sometimes being an outright captivity and sex slavery sometimes more in a gray area and so on you know it would actually be very easy for him to read about the real-world implications of having a society that permits this kind of sex slavery domination all right and yes I'm sorry to say I think he would run into some ineluctable impossible to obviate scientific facts that really do prove that he is in the wrong and this is a man whose whole life was based on the concede that he alone was writing science fiction whereas the other authors in his category had no interest in science at all because he alone he felt took the lessons of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud and applied them scientifically to psychology he had discovered the key to human nature and you see now in this short video what it is he felt that he unlocked only a few days of indoctrination wholly transforms the slave girls into giddy sex maniacs completely dedicated the service of their master and any other free man around who has the consent of the master to bang them Tarleton's quite a few girls to the Furze since there don't seem to be any coaches around in the north the slave girls end up thanking their captors for freeing them sexually through rape if you can imagine that John Norman's intense attention to detail was a bit too much in this third of marauders of gore and ended up not being sexy whatsoever just vile and ludicrous I'd like to thank the author of that review for really taking the time to put some verb and panache into it many of the reviews instead read as follows which are brief and to the point I just draw your attention to fact this guy gave it three stars many of the people who condemn these books harshly still see some value in them but why does he have to go on and on about the same all women need to be dominated they just don't know it yet scenario honestly most of what he drones on about lasts for ages it seems and he puts it right in the middle of the action as if the characters stop and rethink their whole lives every other minute a female reviewer here who read this book because of the cover art she's into belly dancing and she thought this would be an interesting science fiction book about belly dancing how wrong she was the dialogue is atrocious it's full of pointless conversations such as master you are chained slave yes master master you enjoy being chained slave yes master I am a slave master you enjoy being a slave slave yes master followed by the slave begging for sex although what she's all hot and bothered about remains to be seen this brings me to another point yes this book is about women being slaves to men I was not expecting it to be a feminist book I could appreciate it if it was the fantasy sexy fun I figured it would be instead it's filled with pages full of Norman's own insistence that modern women are somehow denying their true femininity by not enslaving themselves to men Norman constantly bashes feminism to the point that it pulls you right out of the fantasy at every turn slaves are constantly insisting that they love to be a slave that explaining they were meant to be a slave how they are now fully aware of their femaleness and how badly earth women are missing out on this slave paradise etc instead of feeling like I'm taking to another world where things are different than on earth I feel like I'm reading a book that is the author's soapbox for his anti feminist views and his sexual fantasy land despite the fact that he conveniently skips describing the sex scenes and spends all his time detailing how the women are chained instead in the book hunters of Gore after many encounters most of which involved the victor staking out the vanquished naked on the ground the men eventually conquer the women whereupon a remarkable to me transformation occurs all of the women all of the Panther girls except their leader fling themselves joyfully upon their conquering men ecstatic at becoming sexual and social slaves delighted that in overcoming their pose of Independence their captors have genuinely freed them from themselves this plotline is qualitatively different from the previous stories where slavery and sexuality are present but the main story is adventure we've seen again and again how Norman replies when he's pressed on this issue when he's really pressed on the point this is violence this is rape and he's not going to disappoint us with his evasive and dishonest reply now he takes the most cowardly route of all again and again of trying to represent himself as the victim here as if the problem is that he has all his life been hounded and persecuted for political reasons by these feminists who see some projection of all in his work for no valid reason at all when Anne Rice gets away with the same thing blah blah blah here is John Norman's reply betty Ballentine objected to the book hundreds of gore we had a signed contract but the book was rejected with their explanation I heard nothing further for some time finally I asked Ian Ballentine who was rather embarrassed with the whole matter speculated that Betty's problem with the text was the fact that the book contains sexual matter as part of the rich background of a barbaric culture the interview were asked so the problem was the sexual content Norman's reply I was told the problem was not sex I inferred it must be political John Norman is an inspiration but not at all in the way he imagined himself to be I knew professors who lived a bookish dim windowless existence at the university Anto and for me they were a negative role model I looked at these men and thought I don't want to end up like that I want to actually go to Cambodia well I'm young and strong and can take some risks and I want to go to northern Laos and walk around with the landmines and if a land mine blows off my leg so be it I want to see the Mekong I want to see these archaeological dig sites in their native habitat I don't just want to see them in a museum in Europe I want to actually go to Southeast Asia and have this experience I want to do humanitarian work I want to volunteer to work on a rice farm I want to get my hands dirty and I'm not gonna be able to do it when I'm 65 it's got to be now now now and I knew professors who live their whole life back and forth between the library and the endless bureaucratic meetings that you know define life for most career academics I thought I don't want to end up like you there's a really strange sense in which you can look at the work and life of John Norman as this guy he was he a PhD of philosophy he became a career University professor and he decided not either to rebel against that in the way I did and get out and actually start living the life that he really thought was worth living nor did he rebelled against that you know within you know the the sphere of philosophy he became passionately obsessed with promoting this philosophical and political view of the world that made sense to absolutely nobody but himself he worked in this strange isolation where I think probably aside from this one interview he probably never heard anyone say to him or suggest to him just how bad his repeting was just how fundamentally stupid and wrong his sense of mission and purpose in life really was and he's remained devoted to it he's never taken a step off that long and narrow path from 1966 to 2020 John Norman proves that you can't save the world alone and he shows how dangerous it is to work in that kind of isolation where you're never challenged in your way of thinking where you convince yourself that you're saving the world when in fact all you're doing is digging yourself ever deeper into a narrow pit of your own self delusion frankly of your own narcissistic fantasies you do me good guys cuz I come in here every single day poverty flutter covered in booty shorts do not the Terms of Service so they each every one of your peanut [ __ ] on the keyboard so you can enjoy the stream so you could have a good time listening to me playing me singing with me styling with me enjoy your life would you and jus you do you do deserve to enjoy each and every moment of your life you enjoy it and every one of your life is worthy you guys you can do it you can be the best that you can be and we can do it together it's gonna take effort it's going to take patience it's going to take a lot a lot a lot a lot of work but if we don't try then what the [ __ ] is stopping us from this throwing ourselves off a bridge and giving up and saying that the planet is deities the government hates ID the animals are leaving the aliens are contacting us we might be alone it just might be you and me but that's okay because you really need anyone else