Why Maledom/femsub Erotica Is A Feminist Dilemma

The fantasy that destroys prudo-feminists.

Image source: "Figurehead" artwork by Stahlber. You can find more like it here on his Deviant Art site. 

I want to make it very clear that I am not picking a fight with all of feminism here. I think much of feminism has values that I share. I’m all for equal pay for equal work. I’m for women being able to make real choices about whether they work or not, and about the kinds of work they do. I think homemakers’ work should be recognized as an important contribution to society and compensated as such. I think free daycare for working couples should be a thing. I think the MeToo movement was a good thing and that there are many more abusive people who need to be affected by it in a direct and often punitive way. Overall, I think feminism has had a good effect on society and I hope it continues the good work.

But that doesn’t mean I agree with every tenet of feminism, in fact there are some I disagree with big time.

One of them is the feminists’ tendency to censor works of fiction they don’t like. I call feminists who favor censorship prudo-feminists, because they aren’t real feminists (“pseudo-feminists”) and they’re prudes. This particular branch of feminism, I have a problem with (and so do many others). Basically I think it’s wasted effort: much of the most convincing data points to the conclusion that access to taboo erotica, hell, access to hardcore porn, does not tend to lead to more rape and sexual harassment for women in the real world. In fact, readily available porn can and generally does lead to less real life rape and sexual harassment.

That’s not the issue I want to write about today. (I’ve written other screeds about the flaws in prudo-feminism, most notably this one. Give it a read, it’s very clear, though it covers much of the same ground covered here.)

Today I want to talk about the peculiar issue that bodice rippers pose for prudo-feminists. Feminism has always made it very clear that it aims to be a force for freedom for women, giving them more power and choices over their lives. Anything feminists do that runs counter to those principles should be viewed with deep suspicion.

Prudo-feminist tendencies to view images like this with deep suspicion should be viewed with deep suspicion, since their views run counter to everything feminism stands for.

Image source: Kink.com video 37987 "Anal Bounty Hunter 2" starring Penny Pax and Tommy Pistol.

And of course censorship does limit the choice of women. It has been argued that in the case of visual porn that doesn’t matter much, because women don’t watch much visual porn. But Googling for the percentage of women who watch porn proved very sus. Not that Google was suspicious, but the sites reporting the figures were very often places with names like “Covenant Eyes” and “Fight the New Drug.” A quick examination of these sites revealed them to be NGOs dedicated to fighting porn and porn addiction. So whatever you think of their goals, it’s a safe bet they’re ginning the numbers toward high incidents of porn use/porn addiction among women because that’s how you get the big government grants to fight all that bad porn addiction you claim is out there ruining lives. (It’s the exact same scam the human trafficking NGOs have been running for decades, as per this post.)

I found figures ranging from 41 percent to 60 percent of women viewing porn, but I don’t believe them for the same reason I don’t believe human trafficking figures: the NGOs have ALL the reason to maximize the numbers. (One study cited a number of 76 percent among women between 18 and 30 years old, with a very small percentage of women over 50 viewing porn. This had some credibility since an age variance makes sense. But all the anti-porn NGOs just made the numbers sus to me.)

But regardless of the number of women who watch porn, there are a fuckton of women who read erotica. 98 percent of romance readers are female, and 88 percent of erotica readers are female. The numbers vary by a few percent from source to source but they all show that the vast majority of erotica readers are female.

(The numbers for the number of erotica writers just don’t exist. I saw several estimates, all of which showed that a majority of writers are female, though some showed that number as low as 51 percent while the majority of sites just kinda shrugged and waved their hands. There are no accurate numbers here, but it’s probably safe to assume a large majority of erotica writers are female.)

What’s more, most of those writers are self-published through Smashwords, Direct2Digital, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Kobo Adult, Apple Books, Everand and Gardners and with Amazon, which is by far the largest online book marketplace.

The point being the whole erotica business is largely owned and operated by and for women. There are some men involved, for example, I write erotica and some men read erotica, but we’re a small minority at best.

The bodice ripping fun continues into the present day, only with lots more post-bodice-ripping action! Available right now on Amazon, right here. Have not read it, but it's very much a typical dark romance. Check out the trigger warnings!

And that’s where the problem lies for prudo-feminists. They used to be able to “other” traditional publishers of erotica, because most traditional publishers like Harlequin were led by men at the top in the 80s and 90s. “Those big nasty men are publishing rape erotica to normalize rape so it will be easier to rape women” or some such bullshit was the line, though it was never expressed so baldly because it’s blatantly ridiculous. The prudo-feminists were happy enough to let people think about shady, powerful male publishers publishing bodice rippers because they’re evil males who like to tempt women to want to be raped by men.

This is also bullshit, it has alway been bullshit. The reason the male CEOs of these romance publishers sold bodice rippers was that there was a market for them among romance readers, and a hot one at that. They would not sell the books if they did not make money.

And of course now that the erotica market has largely become women writing sex fantasies for other women to enjoy without the intervention of male publishers, that argument is just meaningless.

And that is where the problem becomes most pointed for prudo-feminists, because it has forced them to go masks off in what they’re actually doing.

And what is it that they are doing?

Prudo-feminists are censoring other women’s sex fantasies, that’s what they are doing. They are saying, “You bad, evil, wrong women should not write those rape fantasy stories, and you other bad, wrong women should not buy them or read them!”

The prudo-feminists have become thought police for other women.

This is not really what you want to be doing if you claim you are all about expanding choice and freedom for women, since you are clearly diminishing freedom and choice for some women.

And the truth is, of course, that prudo-feminists have little or not interest in expanding freedom and choice for all women, just those whose sexual tastes align with theirs, or rather what they think women’s sexual tastes should be, which definitely does NOT include maledom/femsub kink.

This leaves them in a very vulnerable position with regard to their whole schtick as women’s liberators. They’re right on the same turf as the “social conservative women” who are mostly just utterly brainwashed women with religious backgrounds, unthinking puppets of the preists, pastors, imams or whatever that programmed them to submit their sexuality to whatever their particular brand of snake oil demands.

The prudo-feminists have attempted to justify the sexual fantasy policing of their sisters by claiming that women who have the gall to have maledom/femsub sexual tastes exist because they have “internalized misogyny.” They aren’t real, organic sexual feelings, they exist because some women have adopted misogynistic sexual fantasies as their own because they are the helpless, unknowing puppets of the Patriarchy©.

It’s blatantly “othering” women, defining the ones who like bodice rippers as some inferior subclass of women whose sexuality needs to be supervised by other, more sexually mature women, like prudo-feminists for instance.

Prudo-feminists want to "other" women who like to read stories like this.

You can get this novel on Amazon right here. 

I chose it for the cover, have not read it, but it looks like fun.

This take has never gotten very far with women who are not prudo-feminists, since it’s such an obvious dodge to let some women act as sexual thought police over other women. (If you Google “internalized misogyny” you’ll find some academic papers on the topic, but if you look at the authors, it becomes evident that they’re just academic prudo-feminists.)

Most feminists don’t want to be policing other women’s sexual desires, or even to be SEEN as policing other women’s sexual desires. (OK, some lesbian feminists have claimed that women who are sexually attracted to men are maybe not real feminists, but everybody who wasn’t a wild-eyed lesbian feminist saw that crap for what it was and it never went very far.)

This is why prudo-feminists are not exactly at the forefront of feminism (though they continue to exist, ready to suppress other women’s sexuality if the least chance should arise). Other feminists with a more grounded approach have kept the prudo-feminists where they belong: sidelined and ineffective.

The thing we men and woman who like maledom/femsub sexuality in its various flavors need to take away from this is that we have a huge club to beat prudo-feminists over the head with when we encounter them. To wit: “Since most rape erotica is written by and for women and most rape erotica readers are women, you’re just suppressing other women’s sexuality. GTFOH with that garbage.”

And if they try that “internalized misogyny” crap, just tell them, “So do workers who keep voting for Republicans have internalized grifterism? Do socialists who favor free markets have internalized capitalism? C’mon, every single case where someone is doing something that others see as counter to their own ideology/interests can be viewed as a result of someone internalizing others’ values. GTFOH with that stuff. It’s just a cheap dodge to invalidate others.”

Checkmate, prudo-feminists.

OK, it's not a dark romance but what the hell.

You can get the book here on Amazon. Cover art is different but it's the book the Netflix series is based on.

How Feminist Censorship Success Created Its Own Failure

Scenes like this are now confined to porn, which is why porn is so wonderful.

Image source: Kink.com video 105438, "Fresh Meat: Haley Spades" starring Haley Spades with a special appearance by The Pope's foot!

When I described Amathea’s torture scene in my review of Barbarian Queen I said that Queen Amathea subdued the torturer by grabbing his cock with her fantastically well-developed pussy muscles which were probably the result of a brutally intense kegel regimen, probably part of that whole Amazon combat training thing. And I was wrong about that, but I totally forgive myself.

Because I wasn’t aware at the time that I had based my review on a censored version of Barbarian Queen. Turns out there were a bunch of scenes deleted from the movie at the behest of various nation’s film boards. I wasn’t all that motivated to pay any money to see the deleted scenes, but I was able to find vidcaps of the deleted scenes by searching for them, and I hit gold when I found the Movie Censorship site, which provides info on images censored from movies. You can see the deleted scenes right here on the Movie Censorship site, if you are over 18. The site included vidcaps from the censored scenes, like the ones below:

Vidcap of a deleted scene from "Barbarian Queen" that clearly shows her crushing the torturer/rapist between her powerful Amazonian thighs. No wonder it had to be deleted. Well not the whole scene, we still see him raping her from behind, though her legs are not wrapped around him in that shot. So it was probably the leg wrap thing. Weird. Image courtesy of Movie Censorship.com.

You can clearly see what’s happening in these censored scenes via the vidcaps. Amathea is clutching the torturer to her with her legs and squeezing the breath out of him, which makes one hell of a lot more sense than the whole Amazon pussy grab thing. (To be honest, I still like my pussy grab theory, it’s completely in keeping with the over-the-top nature of 80s sword and sorcery movies: “Barbarian Queen: Even her vagina was a weapon!”)

But... why was Barbarian Queen censored? The censored images are not much different from the images that were actually used in the movie.

To answer that question we have to get into what was going on in the early 80s, asking the question, why did these movies happen? Why were Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen so popular? Hell, why were the Gor novels so popular? They had sales in the MILLIONS! Was there a big BDSM breakout back then?

My theory is this: feminism happened. It happened back in the 1970s. And there was a reaction to feminism that manifested itself in the culture in the 80s in the form of the Gor novels and sword and sorcery movies like Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen and then Fifty Shades of Gray just plain blew the lid off everything.

Now, I’m not saying that anti-feminist ideologues in the early 80s ginned up intellectual responses to feminist initiatives in the late 70s. It may have happened, but it’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a natural psychological response called reaction formation. Also known as the boomerang effect. It’s a known psychological phenomenon. You didn’t have to be an ideologue to experience it. You just had to know things were changing in ways you don’t like and respond naturally to those things. You didn’t even have to have a clear idea of what those changes were, or even that what you were doing was a response to them. It’s very much a vibes thing.

A visual representation of a forbidden vibe!

Image source: Kink.com porn video 24100 "The Model: Jessie Rogers Gets Taken By Her Biggest Fan!" starring Jessie Rogers's face and Mr. Pete's cock.

Even so the feminist successes in the 70s were well known in the culture. Many of their successes were generally wholesome and good for America. Title IX was passed in 1972, prohibiting gender discrimination in education. It was overall a very good and much needed piece of legislation (though it probably contributed to reaction formation). Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, and gave women reproductive freedom of choice, a very good thing. (Granted many social conservatives didn’t feel that way. This wasn’t reaction formation, however, as there was a long-standing religiously based opposition to it).

In 1974 there was the equal credit opportunity act, giving women the right to obtain credit on their own, a matter of simple justice, really. And there was 1978’s Pregnancy Discrimination Act, banning workplace discrimination against pregnant women, once again, a matter of simple justice.

That’s why I’m not against feminism generally. Feminists have done a lot of good things, not just for women, but for society generally. But I understand why some people feel diminished by feminist successes. It’s a phenomenon called privilege loss, where loss of privilege over others feels like a loss of personal autonomy and diminished agency, even though what’s diminished is strictly their power over others. They feel victimized, because they are no longer allowed to victimize others.

It’s not a privilege you are entitled to, it’s more the way managers felt when Covid sent their employees home and they couldn’t strut around and boss them personally any more.

So even legitimate feminist successes in fighting sexism could be driving these feelings of privilege loss. But of course, some feminists did not stop there. Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin started working with traditional prudish conservatives to censor porn, but they came late to the game, and were never really successful in the US. But their attempts to censor (basically, eliminate) porn probably triggered a sense of privilege loss among many men, or at least, privilege endangerment.

But back in 1975, British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey really set things on fire when she coined the phrase “The Male Gaze.” She didn’t come up with this out of nowhere. She built on the work of earlier film theorists who described the male gaze as presented in cinema as something that transformed women into passive objects presented for the male gaze, which possesses them somehow by looking at them. (I am not making this up! Link.)

Mulvey’s coinage of “the male gaze” had Rule of Cool riz going for it big time and her essay really took off in feminist circles. It was absolutely irresistible to feminists: a theory that let feminist blame men for just looking at them! Whoa!

This is definitely the sort of thing that would have the boomerang effect going big time. When it started out it was mostly a film theorist thing and didn’t create much stir outside feminist academic because who gives a crap about academic film theorists? But Mulvey’s essay blew it up and the theory leaked over into general feminism and of COURSE the male gaze went from the camera and the big screen to real life. And suddenly you were oppressing women just by looking at them with your big, bad, sexist, patriarchal eyeballs.

Now this is the sort of stuff that REALLY gets the boomerang effect going, because men LOVE to look at women. We find them incredibly attractive, sexually and aesthetically. The existence of the porn industry is a testament to the deep enjoyment men get out of looking at women. And unlike the feminists, I don’t think it’s a cultural thing. I think enjoying the sight of women is baked right into men’s Y chromosomes. From the Venus of Willendorf to Kim Kardashian on the cover of Paper magazine, men have always looked at women and said, “Whoa!” Granted, the nature of the sights that provoked the “Whoas” over time have changed (check out Renoir’s extra-curvy babes from the 1800s) but the phenomenon holds true no matter what the beauty ideals are in any given culture or time. The sight of a woman being beautiful, however that works, conscious or not, gives man a solid hit of dopamine. And it feels so good.

“The Male Gaze” changes the innocent pleasure of looking at a beautiful woman and enjoying the living hell out of her beauty into a brutal act of domination.

(I had no idea I had dominated so many images on the Internet. I thought I was just digging on hot women who had no idea I existed, as I was basically looking at images on a screen. I guess I was just luring these images of women into being the passive objects of my desire through my masculine power. Call me a Master baiter!)

Of course you KNOW the boomerang effect on something like this would be HUGE, but it hasn’t been as huge as it would have if the mainstream media picked up on the Male Gaze ideology. I looked for mainstream media references to the male gaze, doing Google searches for magazine articles, blog posts, Youtube videos and TV shows that dealt with it, and it was almost all in academic, or quasi-academic media. Where it was not noticed by most people. But it was noticed and used by enough feminist bloggers and others (you don’t have to be feminist to think a Rule of Cool term like “The Male Gaze” will bring eyeballs to your blog/podcast/Youtube videos) to get those “loss of male privilege” vibes going. And I believe that happened, in conjunction with all the other feminist successes that also sparked feelings of loss of personal choice and expression that were based on male privilege.

So we have that happening. Meanwhile, something completely different was happening with the Gor novels. (I’m going to put this baldly, because I explained the phenomenon at length right here.) Traditional romance publisher were having booming sales but a lot of readers were craving spicier stuff. So they set up some imprints (basically, books published by the trad publisher but in a different subgenre from most of the books) for spicier stories and they sold quite well.

But the traditional publishers (mostly male, mostly patriarchal, mostly fat and stupid) did not serve the desires of bodice-ripper fans well at all. Spicier rape scenes just weren’t on their horizons.

Women SF fans knew of the Gor novels, and a number of them were also bodice ripper fans. And when they read the Gor novels they realized that the Gor novels were MUCH spicier than any of the trad publishers’ stories. Word got around. In the 70s this cranked Gor novel sales into the millions. (Best reports online are six to twelve million dollars, which is beyond gangbusters by SF publishing standards, or really, by ANY publisher’s standards.)

But except for DAW, most trad SF publishers hated sexy stories of any kind and most especially maledom/femsub stories like the Gor novels. And so they let DAW have the market, until the 2000s when feminists who were influential in the publishing industry (and they very much were influential) were able to pressure DAW into dropping Norman from their author list. And they blackballed Norman among SF publishers generally so he couldn’t get traditionally published in the US, even though his books continued to sell very well in foreign countries.

This was a successful act of censorship and it worked because nobody gave a flying fuck about the (mostly female, according to DAW) readers who made the Gor novels successful.

No videos, movies, TV shows or books can be allowed to get people thinking about this sort of thing, say the prudo-feminists. So of course normal people, including many normal feminists, are FASCINATED.

Image source: Kink.com porn video 44607 "Anal Alimony" starring Penny Pax (femsub) and Tommy Pistol (maledom). 

Feminist Censorship Timeline

OK, now that we have all the background put together, let’s just see if we can describe what happened in a direct timeline:

1970s: Feminism, which had been brewing since the 1960s achieved numerous legislative victories in the 1970s, as well as getting some culture wars going, most notably for our purposes, that whole male gaze thing, but there were also all the assaults on male sexuality, always framed as attacks on sexism. If you didn’t toe the line you got called a sexist pig.

1980s: In the meantime, the fat, stupid traditional romance publishers (almost all were run by men) were losing readers because in the aftermath of the sexual revolution they wanted “spicier” (i.e., more explicit) romances. They were also publishing some of the precursors of bodice rippers, but there was no established line of bodice rippers. It was very much a catch-as catch-can business for bodice ripper fans. And when the Gor novels came along with their stories of women captured and chained and raped and forced to prance around naked and leashed, bodice ripper fans made a student-body left and the Gor novels became million-sellers.

Meanwhile Deathstalker was another huge success for the sword and sorcery genre. It had a tiny Roger Corman budget of less than half a million dollars, and made $12 million worldwide at the box office. Considering that the movie got little or no marketing from chintzy Corman, it was an even bigger success than the original Conan, and like the Conan movie, it had a lot of success in video sales and rentals and later, in DVD sales and rentals. And it just happened to be arguably the most Gorean of all the 80 sword and sandal movies.

1990s: The sword and sorcery movie’s bloomed in the 80s and waned in the 90s, to be replaced by an endless parade of kickass action girls/women, 120 pound women who routinely beat up wave after wave of 200 pound male thugs. It seemed as if the feminists had achieved their final, full victory over the forces of maledom/femsub theme enjoyers (as almost nobody calls them) in the movies and in book publishing. The Gor novels, banned. Bodice rippers, sexually censored by romance publishers. Sword and sorcery movies, rare. Kickass action girls taking over the leads in all the movies and TV shows.

But of course the sexual feelings that made bodice rippers and Gor novels and attractive to so many women, and sexy, sexy sword and sorcery movies attractive to men, were still there, just very underserved. So where were the maledom/femsub fans going?

The answer became clear in around 2009. It boomeranged. It boomeranged HARD. How hard? Fifty Shades of Hard. More on that in another post.

Why Bodice Rippers Are A Feminist Dilemma

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The Visitor to Incel World Is Now Free On Amazon Through May 15

 

Get It For Free At This Link

It's an alternate world science fiction novel, I'm making it a free promo for a few days, hopefully it will draw readers to the sequel, "The Love Invasion" in which one alternate world attempts to stave off war with another. Here's da blurb on "The Visitor From Incel World:"

Ariana Heppelwhite was a promising Gender Studies grad student at Lacy Swanson College for Women in Bayport, Massachusetts. She had actually written a paper describing three hitherto unknown forms of nanoaggression! She was on track for getting a professorship and a actual job with a real salary and all the perks, maybe even tenure eventually.

Ariana had even met an unexpectedly charming incel (a phrase she had never expected to think, much less say) while doing research on incels for a grant she had. Sure, she'd done some nasty academic infighting that had an athletic department coach looking for her scalp over a transmale gaze incident, but overall, things were coming up roses for Ariana.

Then it happened. Ariana got caught in a freak physics accident while running from the gym coach, and was transported to an alternate world. And it was the exact WRONG world for a Gender Studies feminist to be transported to. It was full of women who walked around naked in public and wore collars engraved with “Property of (their significant other)” and who LOVED their collars -- and who seemed to think Ariana was a barbarian from a violent place.

And the thing was, they were all nice people, and calm people, and they just might be right about Ariana. Even more of a thing was that some not-so-nice Collar Land people thought Ariana's world represented such a threat that they should kill her for security reasons.

Will Ariana ever make it back to good old Earth from Collar Land? Will she learn to adjust to these very strange people or will she subvert their entire society? Will the not-nice people kill her? And what about that unexpectedly charming incel?

All these questions and more will be answered -- all you have to do is read this topnotch science fiction comedy!

Two Great Books About Feminists On Alternate Worlds

So, I noticed that Annalee Newitz, one of the founders of IO9, has written a science fiction novel about feminists engaged in a war with misogynists over control of their timeline. Feminists on alternate worlds, gee, sounds familiar ... wonder where I've encountered that before? Oh, right, I just wrote a book with the exact same theme (though a very different approach).

Of course, Annalee Newitz is someone with a little name recognition, and her book is being published by a traditional publisher with all sorts of marketing clout, whereas I am an unknown outside a circle of deeply disturbed fans (Go, fans!) an indie publisher whose only marketing clout is his wits, which is to say, virtually none.

So I decided to emulate traditional publishers and hitch my wagon to a star! (I mean, really, I don't know HOW many publishers announced that THEIR darling's latest magnum opus romance with just barely enough kink to it to even be noticeable was "The Next Fifty Shades of Gray." But I know it was practically all of them.)

So here's my latest publicity effort for my books. Note that I am promoting Newitz's book, too. Just bein' a stand-up guy:

Have you read The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz? (Sadly, not availabe on KU) It's about a group of brave feminists at war misognyists to control their timeline, protecting womankind from a future that makes “The Handmaid's Tale” look like a picnic.

Want another book about feminists on alternate worlds? Try The Visitor From Incel World by Barry Anderson, which is totally available on KU!

Thanks to Barry Anderson, you don't have to wait for Ms. Newitz to get around to writing a sequel. In “The Visitor From Incel World,” Ariana Heppelwhite, a gender studies grad student at Lacy Swanson Women's College, is caught in the aftermath of a physics experiment gone wrong and catapulted into another world, which she names Collar World because all the women in it run around naked except for their collars. And their cuffs. And their shackles.

Ariana finds this an alarming sort of world, and a confusing world. And the inhabitants feel the same way about her, with her tales of crazed incel rapist wannabes everywhere and child armies and constant warfare and sex and money being intertwined. Earth, which they named Incel World in honor of its bizarre sexual practices, frightens them. They fear invasion by the barbaric hordes of Incel World, and some of them, being very logical, decide that they should kill Ariana so she can't return to Incel World and tell them about Collar World!

Will Ariana survive? Can she change Collar World by teaching the women of Collar World how great it is to be equals with men in all things? And what about the surprisingly appealing incel (a phrase she never expected to use) she met back in Bayport?

Only one way to find out: get the book … it's free on Kindle Unlimited. And if you haven't read “The Future of Another Timeline by Newitz," get it, too. You can't have too much mind-bending SF.

Feminism's Big Tent

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Feminism Made Sexual Bondage As We Know It Possible

"Thanks, feminism!"

Image source: Kink.com shoot 44000, starring Angela White and The Pope.

Kind of an interesting coincidence, the way sexual bondage took off in American culture in the 50s and 60s via Betty Page and Movie Star News, after long being a part of culture generally, but not widely recognized. Then it really got established in the 80s

Kinda like feminism, which took off in the sixties after long being part of American culture, then became established in the 80s. The timing isn't exact, but it's close.

But I don't think it's a coincidence.

Here's the thing. One of the key points in feminism is that “No means no.” I'm down with that. Women have the right to refuse sexual roles, experiences, whatever, that don't work for them.

But the obverse is also true. “Yes” means “Yes.” Women have a right to their choices, and the ability to say “No” and have it mean something also implies the ability to say “Yes” and have it mean something.

And for sexual bondage to be possible, women have to be able to say “no” and “yes” and it has to mean something (or whatever the safeword happens to be). The personal and cultural freedom that feminism has created for women is what allows them to participate in sexual bondage.

This is why feminism is essential to sexual bondage play. I'm sure there have been exceptional women throughout history, who could do the sexual bondage play and understand it as play even in a society where women are second class citizens with great limitations on their choices, but that's what they were – exceptions.

There is a tendency on the part of people who don't understand sexual roleplay that if it's maledom/femsub play, that the participants must not be aligned with feminism. They're acting out their social/political agenda in the bedroom. There probably are people out there doing that somewhere. I just don't know if you can call it “sexual roleplay” under those circumstances, because it doesn't sound much like play.

So bondage fans owe a lot to feminism. The feminists may not have been intentionally working to ensure that women have the freedom to participate in bondage play and have it be actual play, but that's what they did. And good for them!

What if there was no rape or sexual harassment -- the Dinosaur Conundrum!

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Maggie Mayhem Said A Mouthful

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Feminism: What's In A Name?

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The New Battle Line On Human Sexuality

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Prize of Gor: Gender Feminist Turns Sex Slave!

What am I bid for this prize gender feminist?
Prize of Gor is the most aptly named novel in the entire Gor series. It is the novel in which John Norman reached for the brass ring and actually had a member of the group he so despised, i.e., antisex feminist academics, kidnapped and taken to Gor to be a slavegirl.

This is the second book written after the long hiatus after DAW dropped him and before he started publishing via Amazon. (it is preceded by “Witness of Gor” which has much less going for it). And throughout the Gor series, Norman has been fuming and fussing about those horrible, antibiological sexual frustrates back on Earth who Ruined Everything for men and women by denying that a woman's place is at her man's feet, in chains, generally in paragraphs-long rants that cranked up whenever a sexy scene started to happen. Or sometimes the rants would just crank up out of the blue, stopping whatever plot or character development was occurring dead in its tracks.

(I'm not calling Norman's rants “rants” not because I disagree with his ideas (though I do disagree with them) but because of the way they are organized. They are repetitive, forceful restatements of the same ideas over and over again with no added depth or background, the very definition of a rant. If you want to find some ideas about evolutionary biology stated as arguments, with lots of background and support, I suggest you watch a Girl Writes What video. She's also a thorn in traditional feminism's side, but a much more subtle and effective one that Norman will ever be.)

This happened a LOT in the Gor novels, but interestingly, Norman never had a feminist academic kidnapped and brought to Gor for some immersive slave training of the sort Earth women tend to get on Gor. So when I saw that the protagonist of Prize of Gor was going to be a professor of gender studies, I was hoping that Norman had finally decided to go full-bore at the issues surrounding feminism and his viewpoint that women are natural-born sex slaves to men, and I was glad, because even it produced a novel that was full of pedantic arguments about the true nature of sexuality, they would at least be (I hoped) different and deeper arguments, and I could handle that. Just no more repeating the same old complaints over and over, please.

What's more, Norman added a delicious twist to the story when he had the gender studies professor, Ellen (it's just her slave name, no real Earth name is ever provided) be old at the beginning of the story. The Greens of Gor, you see, have figured out, not only how to render everyone young and beautiful for a thousand year lifespan, but they've also figured out how to wind one's age backwards in ten-year increments. And so 58-year-old Ellen (let's just pretend her Earth name is Catherine MacKinnon) is transformed into a woman who is physically an 18-year-old slavegirl hottie through four such age-reversing treatments.

And there's a recuperative period between each treatment, in which she's given increasingly strong doses of slavegirl training, or as it would be called on Earth, molestation, assault, torture and brainwashing.

I thought, “Wow, what an opportunity to explore these topics in depth, combining and contrasting youth and age with discussions of sexuality and gender, autonomy and submission, all in one tremendous package. This book is indeed a prize!”

Those who have already read Prize of Gor are laughing their asses off right now,because Prize of Gor contains no such things.

Instead, it had lots and lots of the same exact stuff we've seen in all the OTHER Gor novels, which is to say, lots and lots of exposition about how bad evil old Earth sexuality and how liberating and free good old Gor philosophy is, being 100 percent more natural and all.

I've been describing these rants of Norman's but the rants themselves do more than any mere description ever could. Read this, and imagine it going on for page after page after page:

Someone, you see, may be watching you, you entirely unsuspecting, unaware, unwitting of this so significant a surveillance. Someone may be thoughtfully considering how you might look in sirik, that striking custodial device with its collar, the connecting chains, the wrist and ankle rings, or conjecturing, taking notes, on your likely value, as he watches you, what you might be expected to bring on the slave block, first, and then later, after having been suitably informed and trained. All your laws then, your politics, your ideologies, your legal remedies, your petty threats, your thousand devices to obtain power, to control, reduce, tame and destroy men, would be useless. Remember them, such seekings, such devices, when you are chained naked in a Gorean dungeon, collared, with other slaves, a mark burned into your thigh, waiting to be brought to the auction block.

But with you, on the same chain, perhaps prized even more highly than you, their collars locked as securely as yours, their chains clasping as perfectly, their bodies as bared, may be other women, they selected as carefully as you, quiet, gentle, loving, needful, natural women, women less removed initially from their sex than you, women who disdained to strive to be facsimile males, such monstrous transmogrifications of human reality, those to whom grotesque propagandas could not speak, those who could never bring themselves to believe the catechisms of negativity, horror and hatred, those who had no difficulty in detecting the unsatisfying special nature and hollowness, the idiosyncratic party-serving nature of diverse bromides and slogans, the lies that others would impose upon them, but who knew themselves female, even from the beginning, despite all the propaganda and conditioning, female radically and profoundly, those who even on Earth have longed to fulfill their femaleness in the service of men, men who will understand them and treasure them, but will nonetheless give them the domination they crave, who will supply the masculine to their feminine, the yang to their yin, who will see to it that they are, as they desire to be, let it be stated explicitly, mastered, wholly, and beautifully, and uncompromisingly mastered.

Imagine that going on for page after page after page. Now you have some idea of the effort it takes to read Prize of Gor. To tell the truth, after the first couple of instances of this, I just skimmed the pages looking for unusual words or short paragraphs or quote marks indicating that something interesting might be going on, and then backed up til I was at the start of the non-rant portion of the text, and started reading until I encountered the next rant.

Now I'm not saying that Prize of Gor is an epic fail. I am saying that it was not a fail because Norman never even tried. Instead of working a little deeper on the topic, he just larded in lots and lots and lots of his usual rants into the book. I'd say it's about fifty percent rant, by volume, and I'm being generous. Some of the rants do relate to what's going on around Ellen, since she's a slavegirl and gets molested, furred, whipped and switched and bound and gagged and hooded a lot, and Norman very deftly and thoroughly describes how she feels about anything relating to sexual bondage and slavegirliness, though he continues to avoid explicit descriptions of sex to keep things PG or soft-R rated, even though you know EXACTLY what is happening.

(For example, there's a scene where some captured enemy soldiers are tied up and naked and Ellen is ordered to give them blowjobs and swallow it all so there's no spooge revealing that they've been blown. And she does it, with her hands tied behind her back yet, and apologizes nicely to the soldiers since they are free and she is a slave, explaining that she HAS to give them blowjobs because, hey, slavegirl. And though Norman would never use indecorous language like “blowjob” or describe what she feels like with cocks in her mouth, but he uses much more, um, refined language to let you know exactly what she's doing.)

Anyway, point is, the descriptions of Ellen's slavish activities slide easily into rants about how good sex slavery is and how bad things on Earth are, and if you wanted to be strict about it, you could reasonably say that “Prize of Gor” is 70 or 75 percent rant.

But the sheer amount of it is not really the important thing about all the ranting, in terms of the Gor series. The important thing is, it's a demonstration that Norman has either no ability or no interest in really taking on the issues raised by feminists about his books. (And to be fair, a lot of feminists really hate Norman and the Gor novels, and have raised many objections to them, in terms both snarling and angry.)

I had envisioned … well, fantasized … “Prize of Gor” as a story about a feminist enslaved which would bring forth all the most powerful and cogent arguments of feminism against Norman's vision of sex slavery, and Norman gets in there and responds with his most powerful and cogent arguments FOR slavery, for a really interesting donnybrook of an argument.

Norman is a professor of philosophy, clearly he's CAPABLE of making a tough argument, but he sure didn't do so in “Prize of Gor” and if he were going to do it ANYWHERE, this would have been the place to do it. And Norman did not do it. The man has nothing when it comes to expanding or deepening his ideas. And yeah, a lot of people, especially feminists but quite a few of his fans as well, have assumed that all along, and after more than twenty novels, who can blame them?

The only counter-argument I can see is that the Gor novels are fantasy adventure novels and they're no place for intellectual donnybrooks. But if you are going to take that approach, the Gor novels are also no place for the lengthy, repetitive rants about the virtues of sex slavery, which frankly, could not POSSIBLY slow down the story and character development, such as it is, as much as an in-depth intellectual argument. You can't have it both ways, in short … if the intellectual donnybrook has no place, neither do the rants.

And on the issue of character development, that's where things get REALLY revelatory. Just think of this character, this Ellen, an aging, virginal professor of gender studies who has spent her whole life on Earth in a career as a successful academic suddenly finds herself in a prison on another world, reduced to slavery, and at the same time restored to her early youth and beauty.

This could credibly be a cause for driving her insane, certainly her psyche would have to make some major adjustments. And there are some interesting questions to consider – we know the brain is still growing and developing physically until you reach age 25, she gets aged back to 18. Does this truncate any of her intellectual abilities? Would there be different levels of hormones acting on her brain as a young woman that would radically change her emotional and physical responses? Would she be aware of them? Would her aged, finely tuned, highly developed mind experience these changes as some sort of alien experience forcing itself on her, or would she perceive it as changes in who she was? Would she be AWARE of what was going on?

As an academic involved in gender studies she probably should be aware of these things, but of course there's no mention of any of it in. There's no examination of what she goes through mentally other than the “I love being the slave of big strong men!” “I hate big strong men for enslaving me!” “Being a slave is wonderful!” “Being a slave is awful!” stuff … granted, whole rafts of it, but still, nothing that creates a real, living character.

Of course, if such character development were to occur, it wouldn't really be a Gor novel. Because let's face it, if the mental effects of being broken by Gorean slavers were unstintingly portrayed, it would make for something more like 1984 than a sexy barbaric fantasy novel. That's why Norman stays away from it. And that's why his rants are kind of a cheat: he keeps insisting that slavery is wonderful but he can't go into the real effects of nonconsensual slavery as practiced on Gor … his ideal, apparently … without making clear how brutal it was.

Instead there is just the occasional switching and whipping and of course, all the sexy, sexy bondage.

He also does not go into the innate wastefulness of using a woman whose mind is intelligent and detail-oriented enough to be a successful academic, just to prepare food, sew and suck cocks. Norman makes a lot of how fulfilling this feels to the enslaved Ellen, but he gives us no idea how a mind that can do research, read and analyze long, detailed texts and then write long, detailed texts in response can handle spending most of her time watching eggs fry, pushing needles into cloth and walking around a lot. And furring, of course. (“Furring” is the Gorean term for “fucking” as it is done “in the furs” most of the time. I like it a lot better than fucking.)

As is made plain at the beginning of “Prize of Gor” the manuscript is written by Ellen, so clearly someone (Bosk of Port Kar, who makes a cameo or two in “Prize of Gor”) has recognized that her mind needs something to occupy it. But as the book Ellen turned out is full of even more of the lengthy rants than the other Gor novels, it's pretty clear that Ellen's mind is not what it once was.

And the thing is, Prize of Gor has a pretty good story buried among all those rants. Ellen is kidnapped, exchanges owners several times, gets involved with the opposition to Cosian occupation of Ar and with the mysterious plotting of the Kurii and their human agents. There is much pleasing of different Masters, much intrigue swirling about, much danger and much fun.

Because here's the hell of it: underneath all that ranting, Norman is REALLY GOOD at telling an adventure story. He also has a genius for creating rich, detailed societies for those adventures to occur in.

And of course, he had the masterstroke of understanding that softcore bondage romance works BEAUTIFULLY with sword and sorcery fantasies. He even realized he could sidestep the necessity of dealing with the horrors of actual slavery in ancient cultures by placing the stories in an ahistorical setting (i.e., Gor).

Norman is a genius, period.

But he's a flawed genius. I'm not saying he's an idiot savant, but after reading a few dozen pages of his rants on sexuality you DO get the impression that you are reading the equivalent of an OCD disorder in text form.

If Norman had the ability to constuct halfway decent female characters and focus strictly on the softcore/bondage sexyfantasy and adventure elements of his story, while imbuing them with his normal excellent world-building skills, his books would be FREAKING popular. Maybe even “Fifty Shades” popular, because he writes a much more compelling adventure than E.L. James does and he has a better feel for the appeal of sexual bondage than James does.

Hell, if Norman even had an editor who would relentlessly trim the rants and push him in the right directions, that would do the trick, I think. But as “Prize of Gor” conclusively demonstrates, he does not have any such help.