(This is part 3 of a three part series. Links to parts 1 and 2 are at the bottom of this post.)
A trainee practices customer service at the new TGI Fridays Slut School.
OK, so the question now become, if paga taverns complete with paga sluts have a considerable competitive advantage on Gor, so much so that paga taverns without paga sluts are rare, will they have a similar competitive advantage on Earth?
Well, there’s a big obstacle to them working competitively on Earth, and quite frankly, it is that workers in Earth taverns and bars are not, for the most part, slaves. They get salaries and tips for their work. And there are legal restrictions on what they can be asked to do, restrictions that are really strong in areas like, say, blowjobs.
And although there’s nothing exactly like a paga tavern on Earth (that I know of, though I tend to wonder what goes on various Third World hellholes like Saudi Arabia and the remote fastnesses of Afghanistan) there are various businesses that are SOMEWHAT like paga taverns in certain respects, and so it behooves us to both check out these similar businesses and to check our feet for hooves.
Restaurants Serving food and Drink
There are plenty of restaurants that serve food and alcohol, popular chains such as TGI Friday’s, Applebee’s and Chili’s for example. They cater to a family crowd and have no sexual element at all to them, other than hiring for the most part attractive young people to be servers, which is weak beer even on Earth.
Contrast this to Gor where the most common, if not the only kind of tavern is the paga tavern complete with naked slaves serving as paga sluts.
The closest Gorean equivalent to a family bar/restaurant is the inn, where people of all ages and sexes and genders could stay. There were still slaves at the Inn and I guess if their Masters wanted to use them in public they could, so … hey, it’s not all that close an equivalent. Because I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen a naked woman in a collar bent over a table being fucked at Chili’s. And I’m sure I would remember it if I had.
There are also more traditional bars on Earth that cater to adults of both sexes, that have a variety of sexitude, from no more than you see in TGI Friday’s, to the low-grade sexitude of Hooters, to those places that sponsor wet T-shirt contests that wind up with the the contestants demonstrating that their pussies are as wet as their T-shirts.
A contestant in an actual wet T-shirt contest demonstrates that even without her T-shirt she‘s still very wet … and pink …
Now the bars with wet T-shirt contests is getting a lot closer to the Gorean paga tavern, as naked dancing is often a part of the festivities in a paga tavern. Of course, in a Gorean paga tavern the customers can sexually use the dancer right after her dance for a couple of copper tarsks. And while I’m sure guys that patronize bars that host wet T-shirt contests might hook up with a contestant after the event and have sex with her, the bar takes no cut in any money that might or might not exchange hands, and the woman is under no compulsion to have sex with anyone. She’s not a slave. She’s not even necessarily promiscuous. She might just be an office worker who’s had a leetle too much to drink and took a dare. There’s a certain Gorean flavor there, but it is still far from a Gorean paga tavern.
Strip Clubs
So, you want our Black and Blew Burger special … lap dance, blowjob, bottle of Woodpecker ale, Bleu cheese burger, fries. Gotcha.”
There is however a kind of bar that is very close to the Gorean paga tavern in feel, and that’s a strip club.
Strip clubs come in two flavors -- those that provide lap dances and those that don’t. In both cases you have women dancing naked, or practically naked onstage for tips. In both kinds, you can pay women to dance nearer to you. But in one case, the woman does what’s known as a table dance, and there is no physical contact. In the other case, the woman does what’s known as a lap dance, i.e., she sits in your laps and grinds her butt against your crotch. Now THAT’S physical contact!
(The laws vary from state to state, county to county, and city to city with regard to strip clubs, as the impulse to ban them without being able to simply say “No strip clubs” and/or “no lap dances” has resulted in a literal fountain of absurd laws spewing forth, but as a GENERAL rule, if women can grind their butts in a man’s lap and so forth, they have to wear thongs and maybe pasties. If they can’t touch the customer and he or she can’t touch her, etc., the woman can dance naked as a jaybird. (Where I live, naked dancing/no touching is in force, so my knowledge of lap dancing comes from stuff I read on the Web for this article/post -- really! -- but there’s plenty of information out there for those who are interested in it, and it’s fairly consistent in nature, so either take my word for it, or do your own damn research.)
Strip clubs are of course MUCH closer to Gorean paga taverns than anything we have discussed so far, if only because naked and/or practically naked women are their stock in trade.
It’s also true that in lap dance clubs the women are sexually servicing the men. While there is no penetration, nearly naked women are swarming all over the men who have paid for lap dances, and nearly naked women are dancing for the men who have not yet paid for such services, and nearly naked woman are serving them drinks as well. Let’s face it, if the setting were kinda sword and sandal, and the girls were allowed to, or REQUIRED to fully serve the customers sexually, it would look VERY much like a paga tavern.
Of course, economically, a strip club, lap dancing or no, functions very differently from a paga tavern. The women in them are not slaves, they are independent contractors. The strip club owners make much of their money from the overpriced drinks the customers consume, as well as share in the tips the dancers get from dancing for customers, in their laps or otherwise. Which is to say, the dancers in Earth strip clubs do NOT come with the price of the booze. It’s a VERY different economic setup.
Bordellos
Cofolifafed Foof Fervifef fanks oo for oo fafrronage, mafftah!!
Bordellos, whorehouses, houses of ill repute, Congressional offices … no matter what you call them, these places all have the same purpose … the selling of sexual access to women, to horny men and sometimes, horny women as well.
I am sure that at any of these institutions, based on all reports, you can get a drink and maybe some food as well, but mostly, you can get fucked and sucked and also some specialty stuff as well. The sex is of course the main thing, and the pricey thing. A quick scan of prices on the Web indicates that drink prices in bordellos run $5-10, and sex runs $150-300, with higher charges for specialty sexual acts, like bondage. All these prices are not averages but just what I saw in two or three references, so I could be off by a lot, but I really, really doubt that the major point here -- that actual sex is a LOT more expensive than food and drink in bordellos --will be anything but upheld by further research.
OK, here we get to our central point, which is this … on Earth, whenever there is sex offered along with booze, the sex is so much more expensive and important that the booze takes second place. There are no paga tavern equivalents on Earth because any such institution on Earth would be the equivalent of a whorehouse. The paga (vodka and whiskey being the Earth equivalents of sul paga and sa paga, respectively) would be totally unimportant, on Earth.
Whereas in the classic paga tavern, the use of the waitresses, while clearly important to the appeal of the tavern, is hardly the only thing. Men come for drink, for food, to fight, to play games such as kaissa, to watch women dance, and they may enjoy any or all of these pleasures on any given night, without necessarily using a paga slut.
Whereas the number of guys who go to bordellos just for a drink are probably vanishingly small.
That’s because, as Norman points out, Gorean men are masterful types who take women whenever they like, and slave women who can be taken are plentiful and conditioned to know that they can be taken by any master.
(Caveat: Norman in one book claims slaves constitute just two to three percent of the population, which would make sexual access to them quite scarce unless every last one of them spent their entire lives staked out naked in various public square, and he makes clear in the books that this is not the case, that many slaves are work slaves or are privately owned and hence not accessible to the public. So if the slaves are just two percent of the population and many of them are privately owned slaves or work slaves, sexual access to them is rare except for those few Goreans that could afford slaves. But Norman also repeatedly claims that sexual access to slaves is cheap and easy: coin girls wander the streets with coin boxes tied to their necks, their use available for a coin of any denomination, and paga sluts in paga taverns can be used for free if you have the price of a bowl of paga. But rare commodities which have value are almost never cheap, in fact, rare commodities that are pretty darned crappy are almost never cheap … ask any comic book collector. So there's an inherent contradiction in Norman's claims. Thus, we can reasonably ascribe this to the list of Norman howlers like counter-Earths and birds that can carry half a dozen full grown humans. It's far simpler to just take Norman at his word when he claims that sexual access to Gorean slave girls is easy and cheap.)
Since Gorean men know that sexual access to a beautiful slave girl, entirely on their own terms, can be had for pocket change whenever they like, they aren’t so ANXIOUS when they visit a paga tavern. It’s a place that provides sexual access to slave girls, as is commonplace on Gor, and if they feel like using a waitress sexually, they will, but if they just feel like sitting around drinking and talking, or playing kaissa, or fighting, they’ll do that.
It’s a very different attitude from what prevails in Earthly strip clubs and bordellos.
Old West Saloons
Now there is one Earth institution that is very like paga taverns, so far as I can tell, and that’s the saloons of the Old West.
At one time, every town of any size out in the West had a bordello, often consisting of upstairs rooms above the local saloon. In addition to booze and girls, saloons often offered such amenities as hot baths, shaves and rooms to rent.
This state of affairs prevailed because men vastly outnumbered women in the Old West. Cowboys coming in from a dusty cattle drive, miners taking a break from backbreaking labor, and farmers coming in for supplies, would all find the delights at the saloon of interest. And because the institution of Old West saloons was widespread and accepted (at least, by the overwhelmingly male population of the Old West) they weren’t all that ANXIOUS about the chance to have sex with a whore in the bordello portion of the saloon. Drinking, gossiping and playing poker were also real draws for the saloons.
(In deference to modern mores, the sexual element of saloons is often downplayed in modern movies and TV shows, more so back in the 1950s and 60s than in modern times.)
But that is a moot point of sorts, as the Old West has been replaced by the New West, and no such institution as the Old West saloon remains. Which is to say, there’s no equivalent to a Gorean paga tavern on Earth at present.
That said, COULD THERE BE a paga tavern equivalent on Earth?
It seems highly unlikely, though not impossible. The return of chattel slavery in Western culture is not a likely event. (It can reasonably argued that it has not yet been removed from Eastern and African culture.)
While I do not doubt that modern corporations of the sort that run institutions like Chili’s or Applebee’s would gleefully seize on chattel slavery as a means of improving the bottom line, I really don’t think they’re gonna get the chance. Places where the sexual services of waitresses are available for the cost of a drink are not gonna happen.
That said, strip clubs seem to show the way where something like a paga tavern might exist, with the sexual services of waitresses tacked on for a premium, and not a huge one. The primary attraction would be the strippers/whores, but they might become a place where you cold go for a drink and some gossip or some biz planning as well, perhaps even a little gaming. It does not seem overwhelmingly likely that this will occur anytime soon, but the rise of strip clubs as a business seems even less likely … yet it clearly has happened.
And if strip clubs do eventually morph into something like a paga tavern or an Old West saloon, I can see some bright-eyed, sleazy corporation eventually coming to the conclusion that a great deal of money could be extracted from consumers’ pockets by streamlining and simplifying the strip club/saloon/paga tavern format, much as corporation streamlined the old inn/restaurant formula into motels and fast food franchises. And, well … the status of American workers would have to sink at least a little lower than they are now … just a little … to the point where some women might still accept a minimum wage, but for that wage would be willing to wear a paper hat, smile at all and sundry and ask, “Would you like a blowjob with that?”
It wouldn't be nearly as much fun as the fantasy of a Gorean paga tavern. It would be dull and tacky and cheap, and depressing, and that's for the CUSTOMERS.
The only way it could be fun would be if Gorean paga taverns were reproduced for the sheer fun of it on Earth, staffed by submissive women who would LOVE being sex slaves for anyone who came into the place. THAT could conceivably happen ... but it wouldn't be a tavern, it would be a club.
Paga Taverns of Earth … And Gor
Part 1: A Brief Introduction To Paga Taverns
Paga Taverns: A Viable Fantasy Even On Gor?
Part 2: How Paga Taverns Work On Gor
