Paga Sluts: A Viable Fantasy, Even on Gor?

This is part 2 of a three part series on paga taverns. Links to parts 1 and 3 at the bottom of this post.)

"They guy at table 12 is about to blow a fuse waiting for his Rancho Deluxe Burger ... wait a minute, he just hauled Suzy off to an alcove!"
So if you want to have paga sluts, you’re going to need a lot of them, enough to fuck all the men who order booze and then request sex, with others on hand to serve food and drink while their co-workers lie chained and naked with their legs spread, providing whatever sexual delights their customers order.

If you had the only such establishment in town on Earth, you’d have to figure on a 1/1 ratio of customers to girls, almost. But we’re not talking about an individual paga tavern, we’re talking about paga taverns as an institution. So let’s switch tracks and see how paga taverns work as an institution on Gor, to get a better idea how they might work on Earth … hell, they might not even work on Gor, as described.

Paga taverns that provide the use of a girl with the price of a drink or a meal would undoubtedly have a much higher number of girls working than a paga tavern that did not, if only because squirming in her bonds underneath various customers is both labor-intensive and time-consuming.

If you had to pay wages to these additional staffers, or paga sluts as Norman calls them, it would be MUCH more expensive to run a paga tavern with paga sluts than it would be to run regular paga tavern where the slaves just served liquor and food.

But on Gorean tavern masters did not have to pay wages to their paga sluts, because they were of course slaves. And slaves on Gor are not expensive to keep on hand. Let’s look at the economics of the deal.

FOOD

Mmmmm, Purina Slave Chow, made from reprocessed tarsk scraps, keeps their skins so soft and silky!
Food for slaves is cheap for slaves because of course you are not concerned about taste or appearance, you just want to keep the slave able to perform their duties without passing out from hunger. So you buy a big bag of ta-sarna wheat, mix it with some water and table scraps and leftovers from the previous day’s meals that are too dodgy to throw in today’s soup but not in a poisonous state, and voila! You have a day’s worth of feed for up to 50 slaves.

And of course, patrons will sometimes feed the girls table scraps themselves, right at their tables, for the fun of it and perhaps to give them a positive incentive to perform well in the alcoves, always having the whip as a negative incentive, of course. As far as management is concerned, it's free feed for the slaves, since the customer has bought the food.

And that’s the ONLY regular expense a tavern master of Gor would have for his slaves. Slave wine is a perfect, long-lasting, side effect free contraceptive, so no worries there. The stabilization serums keep the girls healthy, prevent aging, and ensure they live hundreds of years, which means no medical expenses and very little in the way of turnover due to aging and death by aging.

SHELTER

Iron cages do not a prison make, but they make pretty good cages!
So we’ve got food covered, shelter is just an iron cage not much bigger than a cardboard box a large screen TV comes in here on Earth. And the iron cages are stackable so you don’t need much room to house them. Kinda tough on the slaves on the lower levels, but what the hell, slaves are washable.

CLOTHING

A paga slut kneels in the scullery, waiting to be called to serve, dressed for her job.
As for clothing … why would a paga slut need clothing? It would just get in the way. So it gets cold in the winter or rainy in the summer … it’s indoor work! You might have a house winter coat or three on hand for when you want to send trusted slaves out on errands, but the majority of them can stay in the cozy confines of the paga tavern’s serving rooms, kitchens or in the furs of the alcoves.

So food, shelter, clothing are all covered as regular expenses. But there are some one-time expenses associated with keeping slaves: cages, cuffs, chains, shackles, whips, collars and such, so these can easily be amortized over the hundreds of years the slave will serve you in a state of complete beauty and youth on Gor. IN fact, there might even be a tax break associated with the depreciation of collars and cages and so forth because, let’s face it, if there is any place in the universe where you can get a tax break for the expenses involved in keeping slaves, it’s Gor.

Therefore, I propose that on Gor the cost of keeping 20 slaves is not all that much more expensive than keeping 10 slaves, and the difference between keeping 30 slaves and 20 slaves is even less pronounced, once the slaves are purchased.

Furthermore, there is ample precedence for slaves being cheap … really cheap … on Gor. In Outlaw of Gor its stated that ordinary untrained slaves might sell for as little as five copper tarn disks, and as much as 30 tarn disks. (The smallest unit of currency in Gor is the tarsk bit, it is literally one eighth of a tarsk disk (that is, a copper tarsk disk can be broken into eight pieces, each piece is a tarsk bit). Paga tavern owners who are buying girls as paga sluts would of course look for pretty ones, so I suspect they would be paying 20-30 copper tarns rather than 5 coppers tarns.

Still, that’s pretty cheap. For example a copper tarn at a paga tavern will buy food, drink and the use of a paga slut. So it wouldn’t take a hell of a lot of time for a paga slut to pay for her purchase price. Thirty customers in a week seems reasonable, even conservative, so one week after she's bought she's earned her purchase price.

I was going to go into a long dissertation on Gorean economics to support my point, but the more I learned about the subject the more I realized that it made little or no sense, so I chucked that plan. Norman was not an economist, and there’s no reason he should have been, remember, he was writing novels, not world-building. He had a lot of fundamentally contradictory stuff in his Gorean economics, the biggest howler being his claim that slaves were rare on Gor, amounting to just 2 or 3 percent of Gor’s population, even though in the novels the characters can hardly move without tripping over a slave, but most tellingly, even though slaves are consistently described as cheap.

I mean, you ever heard of a rare and desirable commodity that was also cheap?

Still, I’m comfy with my analysis of the expense of keeping slaves, so, yeah, paga taverns made sense on Gor … the paga tavern owner whose slaves were NOT sexually available to customers would be destined to a fast ticket to being an ex-paga tavern owner.

But … could it happen on Earth?

Would You Like A Blowjob With That, Sir?
Part 3: How Would Paga Taverns Work On Earth?

Paga Taverns of Earth … And Gor
Part 1: A Brief Introduction To Paga Taverns

Paga Taverns of Earth ... And Gor ...

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The Simpsons Strike Back!

"Help me, Obi-Kent Brockmani! You're my only hope!"

Marge Simpson has joined the ranks of hotties who have donned the Slave Leia outfit. Further comment would be gilding the lily.

Why Are The Democrats So Fucking Incompetent at PR and Debating?

A whipped-dog-democrat assumes proper fighting stance!

An interesting point was brought up on a politics board I frequent: why are Democrats doing such a TERRIBLE job of debating/PR, with regard to the health care debate?

They should be ALL OVER this debate. They’ve got the numbers, they’ve got the human interest, hell they’ve got the fucking BLOODY SHIRT to wave.

America’s health care system is rated #37 in the world by the World Health Organization, yet we pay FAR more than any other country for health care. There. That number is the bottom line. The Democrats should have been beating the Republicans over the head so vigorously and repeatedly that everyone in America would know the statistic by heart. It is a fucking awesome club for beating Republicans and conservatives over the head on health care policies, especially in tandem with the rising health care costs most Americans are experiencing in their personal pocketbooks.

The Dems have the option of “waving the bloody shirt” (a term coined to describe the practice of waving the bloody garments of downed partisans to incite crowds to more violence in revolutionary times, now watered down to mean any emotional rhetoric concerning victimized people inclined to incite listeners/readers on their behalf) thanks to the insurance companies. The pro-health-care position’s bloody shirt consists of all the people who have lost health care benefits along with their jobs, or who have been denied health care benefits because of the infamous “pre-exiting conditions” and have been dropped from the health care rolls because they got sick, and who’ve died and/or lost all of their money as a result. People are dying because of the way health care is run in this country, and the Republicans/conservatives don’t give a damn about it. It’s a simple and effective bit of rhetoric that should be used constantly by Democrats.

Americans by and large hate these perils of modern society, and only now that the reconciliation bill is under debate are SOME of the Democrats actually using their most powerful rhetoric. Not for the purpose of promoting single payer or the public option, mind you, just to justify passing the current bill via the reconciliation process (which requires only 50% of the vote as opposed to 60 percent) watered down and crippled though it has been in the Senate.

Instead of seeing the Republicans endlessly mugged by Democrats while defending a hopeless position , what we saw was the Republican beating the damn stupid Democrats over the head with the made-up issue of “death panels.” (It’s made-up because there are no “death panels” or anything remotely resembling them in the new legislation.) The Republicans’ made up outrage was more effective as a rhetorical fighting point than the real outrages of our present system.

This is just the latest in a long line of Republican rhetorical victories stretching all the way back to the “Contract with America,” the most infuriating and telling example of which was the “swift boating” of John Kerry. Kerry was indisputably the braver man than his opponent Bush II (I.e., Dubya) during the Vietname War era, as he fought in the very dangerous swift boat campaign and was shot at with real bullets by North Vietnamese troops, and wounded, receiving a Purple Heart, while Dubya did nothing but take a safe post in the National Reserve (it was considered a “safe” way to avoid the draft) flying over the skies of San Pedro Island, Texas, undoubtedly on pussy patrol most of the time.

The Republicans were able to dredge up a bunch of drunken old reprobate swift boat sailors who never sailed with Kerry who were willing to say that Kerry didn’t get wounded as much as the medical papers claimed and that he didn’t get shot at as much claimed either, though they never disputed that he was in action, or that he did get wounded to some extent. They couldn’t deny that because they weren’t on the swift boat with Kerry. And the guys that WERE on the swift boat with Kerry all said Kerry did perform bravely under fire and deserved a Purple Heart.

Didn’t matter. It worked. The made-up story about Kerry not truly earning a Purple Heart allowed the Republicans to say, “Well BOTH men had dubious records during the Vietnam War. On the one hand, Bush got a cushy post in the National Reserve, from which he may have gone AWOL and certainly never was in any danger of serving in combat, on the other hand, the severity of the wounds Kerry received in combat may not have merited a Purple Heart.” To a sloppy, timid or lazy journalist, this constitutes “balanced reporting.” And there were an awful lot of sloppy, lazy, timid journalists back in the build up to the election of 2004.

And the Contract with America worked. And the incredible string of lies and chicanery that constituted the Presidential and Congressional campaigns in 2000, 2002 and 2004 worked. They worked, they fucking worked, and they worked BEAUTIFULLY, and the only reason we STILL don’t have a Republican President and a Republican Senate and House is that the Republicans fucked up so incredibly badly that their lies couldn’t cover them up any more. Doesn’t matter what Fox News analysts say when you or people you care about have lost your job and/or your house because the economy is in the toilet and your health insurance got taken because you got sick.

As I said before, I don’t think the people who lead the Democratic Party don’t know how to fight rhetorically. They’ve been doing it since they started in politics, and for the most part, they’ve been in politics for decades. Real veterans, they were probably fine rhetorical wrasslers in their time.

But I think the particular experiences that these Democratic leaders have had over the last couple of decades, rather than honing their skills and cranking up their abilities at rhetorical fighting, they’ve learned that when a public debate gets hot the thing to do is not strike back but give ground and shield yourself as best you can, because you are gonna get hammered.

The Democratic leadership fails so thoroughly now that they are in a position of strength relative to their Republicans because they STILL don’t have the ability to attack the Republicans when the Republicans tell one of their blatant lies. The Democratic leaderships’ reflexes are all to cover up and protect themselves, what punches they do throw are timid feints and jabs, not the devastating haymakers that the Republicans’ blatant lies and misrepresentations call for.

To be more specific, I’m sure that at one time Harry Reid in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House were tough, hard-bitten rhetorical fighters who knew how and when to relentlessly hammer an opponent for a blatant lie, but those days are long gone. Now all they are really suited to do is count votes and proceed only if the tally indicates things are absolutely certain to go their way.

Considering all the beatings they have taken, you can kinda understand it, but still they are an anchor around the neck of most Democratic initiatives.. The whipped dog Democrats aren’t doing the progressive cause any great favors, any more than the blue dog Democrats are. What we need are some biting-dog Democrats … or at least some barking ones.


"C'mon! You want a piece of me? Hunh? Hunh? Hunh? You wanna mess with me? I'm right here!" A whipped-dog democrat sends out her traditional challenge. By the way ... she's not facing her opponent.

Rigged for Love

"All right, missy. If THAT rig doesn't make you cum sometime in the next eight hours, nothing will!"

Image courtesy of the Hogtied website. Christina Carter models. She once was a glamour model, and I still find her glamourous, in a bondage-y way.

Wrist Ankle Bondage Gets Fashionable

Writhing down the runway ... the new trend in fashion presentations!


Well, if you asked me what I thought would be the VERY LAST bondage technique to be adopted by the fashion industry, I would of course have said "hogties." And it’s true that no hogties have showed up in fashion shows that I know of. But hot on the heels of hogties in the lastness department would be ‘wrist-ankle bondage.” Because most fashions are about clothes, which generally allows you to move fairly easily, and wrist-ankle ties, although allowing more freedom of movement than many other forms of bondage, definitely inhibits walking, in fact, it kind prevents walking.


Wrist-ankle bondage done right. Note that in this case, unlike the one in the fashion bondage photo, the wrists are secured right to the ankles, forcing the bondagette to spread her legs. Not very fashionable.

Of course, the fashion bondage is not all THAT bondage-y because the links between the wrists and the ankles are long coiled cords that don’t actually inhibit the wearer’s ability to move very much. Then again, fashion isn’t ABOUT getting bondage right, it’s about making sly references to it in something you might conceivably wear in public if you are the sort of person who buys that crap. I mean, if you are fashion-forward.


Wrist-ankle bondage is a favorite of mine because it allows more motion for the bondagette, and it allows you to sex her sunny-side up or sunny-side down, without doing any untying and retying.

Images of actual bondagettes courtesty of Fucking Dungeon.com.

Super Friends Logic In Earthquake Weather

Empowered and the Super Friends … add in some Tim Powers and you have something that is so very, very, very … wrong!

OK, because I’m so jazzed about Tim Powers’ “On Stranger Tides” beng the official basis for the next Pirates of the Caribbean (PotC, henceforth) movie (instead of the unofficial basis, as it was for the first three PotC movies) I’ve started reading “Earthquake Weather” the last book in the “Last Call” trilogy.

It’s been hard slogging, to be frank. The best Tim Powers novels (like “On Stranger Tides,” “the Anubis Gates” and “Declare”) grab your brain and hurl it through story so hard and fast that after you finish the book your brain skids for a couple of days.

Earthquake Weather” is hurt by having too many protagonists and by long sections of exposition in which the many portagonists try to figure out the nature of the supernatural problems and perils they keep encountering. Now Powers is famous for doing extensive research for his supernatural stories, filling them with accurate historical details, telling facts, strange but true science and just plain fun, but if you don’t know the basis for all the supernatural background, things can get a little dicey.

It’s a problem because you frequently find characters making deduction and so forth that are not at all reasonably derived from what’s going around … so far as you know. In fact, in Earthquake Weather this phenomenon becomes so pronounced that for me it was a lot like encountering Super Friends logic.

And that’s a harsh, harsh thing to say. “Super Friends logic” is a phenomenon identified by the Internet blogger Seanbaby on the infamous Seanbaby’s Super Friends Page, perhaps one of the most malefic, hilarious examples of Internet snarkery on any topic known to man.

To be fair, the “Super Friends” -- a 1970s Hannah Barbera cartoon based on DC Comics’ Justice League of America series -- is a near-perfect target for snarkery. Badly drawn, badly edited, badly wiitten and badly voiced, it was a truly feeble-minded enterprise that insulted the intelligence of the two-year-olds that were undoubtedly its primary audience. But Seanbaby skewers it with such precisely placed barbs that you find yourself reading the essays on the various character over and over to because you just can’t stop laughing. (Wonder Woman’s travails with her invisible plane and Aquaman’s entire review are my faves … good stuff.)

When the Superfriends were faced with some puzzle or mystery as they fought their arch villainous enemies (also essayed, to hilarious effect) they would of course combine their brainpower to puzzle out the mystery. But because the writers knew the conclusion they wanted the SuperFriends to reach already, and because they didn’t give a damn about how they reached it, the “logic” employed by the SuperFriends tended to be a series of unsupported non-sequiters having no relation to each other at all.

For example:

Superman: All the Fishmonger could say before he died was “Purple monkey dishwasher,” so we STILL don’t’ know where Lex Luthor has stashed Empowered!”

Hawkman: Maybe we can figure it out!

The Flash: Wait a minute! Mountains are sometimes purple … purple mountains majesty … and volcanos are a kind of mountain!

Robin: And … monkeys fear lava!

Green Lantern: And dishwashers spew hot water, just like volcanoes spew lava!

Batman: (Batman always announces the conclusion, the writers undoubtedly hoping you’ll buy it because Batman is “the smart one”) “So, ‘purple monkey dishwasher’ can only mean that Lex Luthor has Empowered trapped inside an erupting volcano!”

And so the Super Friends would go haring off to the nearest erupting volcano and sure enough, there would be Empowered, bound and gagged but not naked because, Super Friends was a family show. Dammit.

This sounds like an exaggeration but really it’s not -- the non-sequiters that the Super Friends actually used in lieu of logic were every bit as ludicrous as the one I just made up.

Tim Powers is on the exact opposite end of the scale from the uncaring hacks who spewed out the Super Friends stories, stories so bad they insulted the intelligence of the toddlers who were its only audience. Yet, surprisingly, the effect of his well-researched, intricately plotted writing is the same. Let me demonstrate with this passage:

Kootie had lifted out of the cardboard boxes an electric pencil sharpener and now the boy carefully unsnapped its wood-grain printed plastic cowl. Underneath, instead of the crossed grinders of a pencil sharpener’s works, a thick stick of yellow chalk was attached to the rotor.

“This middle section is pretty deeply grooved from the last time,” Kootie said, peering at the chalk. “But we can attach the spring to a different section, closer to the motor, and I remember how Edison set it up.”

“I’m not sure Edison himself knew what he was doing,” said Pete.

“I remember how he set it up.” said Kootie.

“Fine,” said Pete. “Good.” He glanced at Cochran and smiled. “That’s our speaker, our receiver -- that pencil sharpener. Most speakers used induced changes in the field of a magnet to wiggle the diaphragm; we can’t do that, because an actual physical magnet would draw ghosts the way a low spot on a pavement collects rainwater. If we did this a lot, I’d hook up a piezoelectric quartz, or an electrostatic setup with perforated condenser plates, but this arrangement actually des work well enough. We’ll soak the chalk with water, and then attach the diaphragm spring to the surface of the chalk, which will be spinning when we turn on the pencil sharpener -- wet chalk is toothy and full of friction ordinarily, see, but it gets instantly slick when there’s an electric current going through it. The changes are variable enough and rapid enough to get decent low-quality sound out of the attached diaphragm.”

Cochran understood that the man was sociably trying to let him know what was going on, so he returned the smile, jerkily, and nodded. “Clever,” he said.

“It was better sound quality than a lot of the headphones out there,” said Kootie.

“I’m not dissing your old orisha, son,” Pete said mildly. In one hand he picked up a rack of glass tubes and in the other a glass cylinder that had a little metal rod rattling in it like a bell clapper. “I’m gonna take the vacuum pump out to the kitchen and hook it to the faucet to evacuate the Langmuir gauge. You might get everybody crowded into the laundry room, Kootie, or out in the back room. Out of this room, anyway.”

Earthquake Weather, p. 116-117.

As you can see, it’s a combination of Amazing Super Science and a kid’s science project, with a smooth patina of supernatural blah-blah-blah. It’s fine in small quantities, but Earthquake Weather is jam-packed with this sort of stuff, and after awhile, your eyes gaze over, if not out-and-out cross, and you start mumbling … pencil sharpener … wet chalk … TV set … jar of penies … bug spray … orisha … Langmir gauge …” of COURSE … THAT’S how you communicate with the dead!

True, it MAY possible to construct a speaker using a pencil sharpener and wet chalk , and you may be able to communicate with ghosts on a TV set if you set up the aerials JUST SO and do the proper chants (I understand this is how EVERYBODY got TV back in the 1960s) but still, jumble enough of that stuff together and what do you have?

Purple … monkey … dishwasher.