A fighting slavegirl of Gor Evolved runs amok, her slave claws extended, wearing a shield for protection (cause she doesn't have so much as a chainmail bikini to protect her), her slings and broom (I THINK that's a broom on her back) ready to deal outrageous fortune to any who cross her path! Image source: Second Life Gor Evolved.
Well paint me purple and call me Barney! Things are really turning around. I've written how Fifty Shades of Grey has, at least temporarily, gotten some elements of mainstream media to stop putting all those "Eeeew" bookends up whenever they discuss BDSM or BDSM-related matters, though of course the real dinosaurs are still at it. It's gotten to where I expect a certain amount of civility in the mainstream discourse about BDSM, something very new to me.
Still, I was AMAZED to see the Gor movies mentioned in this article on I09 as the potential basis for a TV series along the lines of HBO's Game of Thrones and Starz's Spartacus series. This is of course, a brilliant idea, I know this because I had it myself. I just don't typically expect brilliance from writers on mainstream websites. And I don't expect it to be so matter of fact:
However, a Gor TV series would basically be a pay-cable network’s goldmine, seeing how sex and violence is what sells, and Gor has both in ridiculous amounts. A Gor series is tailor-made for the Starz executive who says, “Yes, our Spartacus TV series was could but what it really needed was more tits and violence.”
Wow. The author, Rob Bricken, is totally right of course. Seeing that much simple sanity in a mainstream site writing about the Gor movies is fricking STARTLING. Mostly when Gor is mentioned in mainstream sites, it's heavily bookended with "horrible sexist rapists who wish to enslave and degrade women wholesale and their deeply disturbed female followers!" crap. I'm not exaggerating ... much. Almost anything written about Gor, including the Gor movies, in mainstream sites will almost always include stuff of this nature, if not phrased EXACTLY as I have phrased it.
And that's what makes the simple recommendation of the Gor movies on I09 so startling. Of COURSE there have to be some caveats, but they're fairly mild by mainstream media standards:
John Norman’s long-running fantasy series had two terrible movies, which, depending on how you feel about the series premise that women are naturally subservient to men, and are much happier being dominated by them socially and sexually, is probably fine. ... And, if that executive were not fully on board with Norman’s gender politics, a decent showrunner could subvert the series’ core “values” much like Paul Verhoeven did to Starship Troopers.
These bookends make reference to Norman's "all women are natural slavegirls" philosophy as espoused in the novels (and that's how I know the writer, though referencing the movies for the sake of the article, which is about movies, is thinking about the books, because the movies were anti-slavery in theme and had precious little in the way of sex or violence to recommend them).
And I have to point out (and this is the point of my illustration at the top of the article and below) that Bricken's hypothetical showrunner won't have to expend a lot of creative energy on imagining a more egalitarian Gor, because that has already done -- that is what Gor Evolved IS. In Gor Evolved, women warriors run around with bows shooting male warriors up on an equal footing. To see how a more egalitarian Gor would work, one need only visit a few Gor Evolved sims and see how they work.
A fighting slavegirl (center) and two female warriors pause while wreaking havoc on a Gor Evolved sim. Image source: Second Life Gor Evolved.
Ordinarily, I'd feel very comfortable in predicting that there will be no Gor TV series even on premium channels, given that the Gor novels still make gender feminists shriek in fury, but given how completely I failed to predict the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, I am a bit shy about doing so. And the premium cable channels cannot fail to have noticed the success of Game of Thrones and Spartacus with all their primitive sex, nudity and violence. As Bricken points out, Gor has that in spades.
