Gor.
So, a couple of weeks ago while at Shadowrun, pujaemuss mentioned he'd gone to a place giving away books for free, and had stumbled across - and taken, for shits and giggles, mostly - a handful of the Gor books.

I decided I'd take a few and give them a read through to see what all the fuss was about - for those that don't know, these things are infamous for their lack-of-anything-to-make-them-readable.

One of them is the book whose front cover is shown in the Wiki article linked above. I just want you to take a closer look for a second - pay particular attention to the man's facial expression.

Yes, there is a man who proudly has a woman.

And has no idea what the fuck to do with her.

So he knocked her unconscious, stripped most of her clothes off, and wondered around the forest with her, grinning like an idiot all the while.

But women are heavy, doncha know, so that grin becomes a grimace before long, and there you end up at the scene depicted there.

Another was Beasts of Gor. I don't know what to say to this cover illustration, becaus it almnost snarks itself. The woman in the background is only recognizable as a woman due to the prounounced curve of her hip. Her face is unrecognisable as human, with cheeks and a forehead so large that you can't actually see any signs of eyes - there are just dark hollows.

The man isn't exactly depicted well either - what I assume were extra shadows put on to make him look muscular and masculine have failed in their purpose, and instead just make him look wrinkly. He looks like my old maths teacher, a 50 year old red head with less than satisfactory personal hygiene, dressed in a fur nappy, and weilding an axe in a rather hopeless attempt to make this giant tiger fuck off.

He hasn't got much luck really.

I can't find an online depiction of the cover of the third book that I have, entitled 'Fighting Slave of Gor', but suffice it to say, the woman on the front is wearing madonna-esque cones on her breasts...but without any straps to hold them in place.

This, I believe, answers any questions as to whether the artist had ever actually had any contact with a real live woman, because the only way I can imagine these things staying on is if the female mammary glands are, in fact, at least semi-gaseous in state, moving to fill all available space and thus forming a vacuum, suctioning the cones to the organs in question.

Which still doesn't explain the lack of droop, but we'll leave some things to artistic license.

Now, those of you who know me will be asking why I'm still snarking something as transitory and irrelevant as the cover art. 'Emma,' you may be crying. 'Why haven't you gotten on to the actual content yet? Are you putting it off?'

Yes, I reply to you. Yes, I am putting it off.

Because these things aren't just bad. They're horrific.

Now, before I really get into this, I want to point a couple of things out to people, which makes the level of awfulness in these books worse than could ever be anticipated. It will cost you your faith in humanity. You will be seized with the desire to bludgeon your loved ones to death, shortly before committing hari kuri with a tea pot, just to spare them and yourself the horror.

Ready for this? Ok.

The first is that these are not throw backs to decades of yore. They are not excusable books becuase they were written back when widely available commercial erotica was in its infancy and had, in its naivete, strayed from the kinked and narrow.

No, these things are modern - there are 27 books currently available - the last of these was released just last year. A new one is anticipated for release later this year. There is no sign of them stopping.

You got that? These things are still being published, are still selling, are still being bought.

While you're reaching for that bucket, allow me to drop the second point on you. It's short and simple:

Some people take this shit seriously.

Okey dokey. Now, put the kettle down, and let's get into this.

I skipped the Hunters book because, it seemed, just too easy, y'know? Too predictable. Man has woman. Man uses woman. Author has to retype several different drafts of the original book because pages keep getting stuck together, thus causing continuity errors. You know the sort.

I went, instead, for 'Beasts of Gor'.

Now, I've read some fairly awful depictions of women. From the Drizz't fantasy books, where women pop up only to be captured, rescued, think enigmatic and admiring thoughts about the party members, and then sod off again, to the chick lit where women loose their brains and require, ideally, a man and children to make their previously 'worthless' lives complete.

So, I was braced. I was ready. I had this plotline figured out - man and woman stuck in primal situation, I thought. Man is forced to use superior physical strength to protect and provide, and woman ends up in submissive role. They get out of primal situation, and discover they liked the roles they assumed. They assume them again. Everyone lives happily ever after, with lots of smutty sex in between.

Oh boy, was I wrong.

For starters, there is no sex in these books.

Yes, you read that right. Despite spawning a sex cult that, apparently, encompasses a quarter of a million people the world over, there is no graphic sex in these books.

Oh, there are references to sex. There are gut-wrenching, vomit inducing, I'd-prefer-a-bager-farting-on-my-head-to-reading-that-again references to sex, practically every other page, but there is no description of body parts, of the acts, the feelings, whose tongue goes where - nothing. It's all fade to black.

It is, however, fade to black a minimum of 3 times a chapter, sometimes as many as 7.

Yes, it's a book that's all about sex that doesn't actually contain any.

Which might explain why the woman in that BBC article wanted out - because when it comes down to the thing itself, these guys are shit at the actual act.

And I'm not extrapolating that. I'll explain more in a little bit.

For starters - I have no idea what the plot is in this book. There doesn't appear to be any. You know the later Laurell K Hamilton books where plot doesn't so much make an appearence in the room, but every 50 pages or so, in between the porn, it licks the window?

Well, this is like that, only, rather than filling it in with porn, they fill it in with descriptions of slave girls, and what slave girls are doing, and how they're standing.

Except they don't actually describe the girls beyond hair colour, skin tone, and if they're really lucky, height. These girls are apparently all clones - there is never any mention of one of them, say, having freckles. Maybe a funny shaped scar on her knee from falling over a rock when she was small, sticking out ears, a nervous habit of biting her lip.

There is no individuality. None. All the descriptions focus on are the clothes - how skimpy and scanty they are, and how they give rise to proper 'slave' emotion in a female.

And despite spending a ridiculous amount of time literarily drooling over these poor creatures, they never notice any differences in their builds - they never describe any of them as slender, maybe, or voluptous. There is no such thing as an outie of a belly button. No one has inverted nipples. No one has big breasts, or small ones. No one has an intruiging curve of stomach, or a waist that nips in.

They're all generic, all undefined, and yet they appear to be the entire focus of the books.

It is, at the heart of it, the very personification of a man who has never touched an actual woman in his goddamn life, so has no idea about what makes them unique, or interesting in bed - so he focuses on the obvious differences because he doesn't know any better. But his life revolves around them, simply because of their unavailability to him.

The author's biography says he's married, and worse yet, he managed to impregnant the poor thing on three separate occasions.

If ever a charity needed to be founded to provide someone with a vibrator, this is it.

But all of the above could be excused if these were, simply, kink books. If it was an indepth, bland, description of a sub/dom relationship. As a matter of fact, if it was anything but an overly desperate attempt to tar women with the same, submissive brush.

But it is. I didn't even make it to the 10th page of the book before stumbling across a page long internal monologue on why all women are inherently submissive.

Quote:
"Part of the correct treatment of a woman is treating her as you wish; she has genetic dispositions for her submission bred into every cell of her body, a function of both natural and sexual selection."

Quick time out to say: sexual selection, you're doing it wrong.

Quote:
"Accordingly, what might seem brutal or quick to a man can be taken by a woman in the dimensions of her sentience as irrefutable evidence of his dominance of her, her being owned by him, which thrills her to the core for it touches the ancient biological meaning of her womanhood."

Did I mention the writing is bad? Because it is. It's really, really bad. I'd read a hundred Anita Blakes before trudging through one of these things again. Hell, I'd read a hundred Drizz't books before trudging.

Fuck it, give me some weasels, I'll read entrails, just not these things.

Oh, and as a sidenote, how's this for an exclamation to come out with during sex:

Quote:
"'I yield me your slave! I yield me your slave!' she cried."

From the same page. What the fuck is this shit? Translation, anybody? Obviously not a typo as it's repeated.

Now, I continued ever onward. I hope you appreciate this shit, the temptation to stab my eyes out with a sewing machine to escape was great indeed.

Now, around page 100 (there are 445 pages in this thing - no, I did not make it through the whole thing, I couldn't, not unless someone volunteers to pay for the bill for me to regain my sanity that will result) we stumble across a concept that made my heart lift the tiniest amount.

Free women.

Veiled from head to generically beautiful toe, mind, for a beautiful woman is too much of a temptation to a man, and what Man want, Man take - highly complex thought processes these characters display in these books - but they were free, and had a male slave, what's more!

I confess, in my cynicism, I didn't buy it. Not for a second - redemption? Some hint that women aren't all the same and didn't all belong at a man's foot and in fade to black scenes? Not me.

And, damnit, I was right.

Of course, through no more cruelty displayed than the male characters have done to the female slaves, she gets her comeuppance, and is reduced to a slave, and enjoys it, which gives us the following quote, which is when, I confess, I stopped reading.

Quote:
"I lay on my back, looking upward.
'Please Master,' she whispered, 'subject me again to slave rape.'
'Earn your rape,' I told her.
'Yes Master,' she said, kissing me."

...I don't think there's anything else I can say or do to express the inherent wrongness in the above statement anymore than is already obvious. I think I'll just let it sit there, so everyone can goggle at it, and wonder what sort of sheltered fucktard of a person, what cancerous polyp on the anus of humanity, what goblet of tuberculotic spitum, thought the above was ever a good sentance to put into a book.

So, I then left that book - I may ask pujaemuss permission to burn it, if I ever get over my own moral object to the destruction of books - and moved to 'Fighting Slave of Gor'.

The plot? Was essentially that above, but told from the perspective of the male slave who becomes free, rescues his owner, imprisons her, enslaves her, and then finally dumps her in a slave market, walking away as she screams behind him at the pain of a brand being inflicted, because she's just a woman.

...

Again...I don't think I can make it any worse. It just...is.

So, things I have learnt from these books.

- No doesn't mean no.
- No may actually mean no, but it doesn't matter anyway, because women have no say in the matter.
- No won't stay no for long, because no mattter what form the sex takes, women will always enjoy it providing it involves domination.
- Applying scanty clothing to a woman will instantly reduce her to a drooling pile of generic beauty.
- Life as a slave is vastly superior to that of a free woman. Despite men not taking enough of an active interest to actually prodce a list of pros and cons for the two situations.
- Sex always occurs in the missionary position. Always. There are no exceptions.
- A man never uses his mouth. Ever.
- Women never have periods.
- Or bruise.
- Or get yeast infections.
- No one ever gets cramps after being tied up for long periods of time.
- It's possible to have missionary style sex (the length of time it takes is as graphic as it gets, I kid you not) with their hands tied behind their back.
- Circulation is a magical creation that no one has to account for in the real world.
- Fear is the correct emotion to see in your partner's eyes when you take them to bed.
- Gay men are a myth.
- Lesbians are also a myth.
- Women who have been properly 'trained' will always want sex. If she doesn't, she must need more training. Which, in fact, just involves having more sex with her.
- Women will always have an orgasm via penetrative sex, with no other stimulation. If this doesn't work, the answer is more training.
- Women, aparently, come ready lubed.
- Pregnancy is entirely controllable with no form of birth control ever being utilised.
- A woman can't enjoy sex without beig inherently submissive.
- No one ever laughs, unless it's cruelly at a frightened slave about to be subjected to slave rape, which she will come to enjoy, and once you're done, will ask you to do again.

...I could go on. Really, I could.

But I won't.

I'll just remind you...

Some people take this seriously.