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hans_the_bold for this one. Over dinner, we'd been talking about James Bond on the page versus James Bond onscreen (I'd recently seen From Russia, With Love for the first time, and I still think it's far and away the best of the Connery Bonds I've seen so far: Goldfinger has the title song and Honor Blackman, but it also has lasers and grandiose plans involving nukes) and while truepenny can undoubtedly discourse more learnedly on this topic than I, it was somewhere in the discussion of the weird casual sexism that characterizes much of Ian Fleming's writing that the Gor books entered the picture. All of which goes to say that I spent about an hour and a half tonight reading John Norman's Assassin of Gor (1970), for which I feel the need to make some kind of academic justification. We shall see if it works.
(Cut for textual analysis and winceworthy prose.)
hans_the_bold has argued that this particular novel is essentially James Bond on Gor—it has secret super-organizations, it has a villain with a colorful household and a nefarious plan, it has our hero undercover and presumed dead, and it has a drop-dead sexy sidekick girl. I could be persuaded to agree, but at the moment I'm still marveling at the unbelievable difference between the standard science-fantasy adventure of Assassin of Gor and the socio-sexual claptrap of later books like Slave Girl of Gor (1977). I am not saying, mind you, that Assassin . . . is a good book. The writing style alone is enough to cause blindness, cerebral hemorrhages, and hairy palms. But it's nowhere near the levels of absurdity that cause parodies like "Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor" to read like false starts from John Norman's own keyboard. The bludgeoning insistence that men are only happy as masters and women are only happy as slaves?* Not present. The finger-pointing at all those repressive feminists who castrated modern men and made them all weak and sexually frustrated? Er, no. The denigration of overcivilized Earth for the clean, biologically-sound modalities of Gor? Strike the third. I was stunned.
For starters, there's the character of the "Bond girl," Elizabeth Cardwell: an Earth woman transported to Gor in some previous book, renamed Vella,** and now working with Tarl Cabot to infiltrate the household of Cernus, a slaver importing immense numbers of kidnapped girls from Earth to Gor and incidentally in the service of mysterious evil aliens with plans to destroy the Priest-Kings' dominion over Gor and reduce the planet's human population to herd animals.*** Far from being Tarl Cabot's inferior, she is a partner who can take care of herself both verbally and physically, who trusts in Tarl's trust in her, and who can tie him in knots when she feels like it.
I laughed. "But it was my intention to discipline you," I said.
She squared off against me, hitching up the loop on her left shoulder which I had loosened with my teeth. "My discipline," she said, "can wait until after breakfast."
"I think you are simply punishing me," I told her.
She laughed. "After breakfast," she said, blowing me a kiss, much as I had her the previous evening, "you can discipline me!" Then she turned and hurried down the corridor.
I kicked the love furs halfway across the room and sat down on the edge of the stone couch.
It was a chipper, fed Elizabeth Cardwell who returned to the compartment, humming and sprightly. "Did you enjoy your wait?" she asked.
"It seems to me," I said, "you lingered long over your breakfast."
"The porridge in the trough this morning," said she, "was simply marvelous."
Their relationship as master and slave, for the length of their operations in Cernus' household, feels far less like a biological institution than sexual role-playing. More than once Tarl observes how well she plays this role, that no one realizes how poorly it suits her:
I remembered her on the Plains of Turia, in the Land of the Wagon Peoples. There were few girls with her wind and stamina, her strength and vitality, few who could run at the stirrup of a Warrior as well as she. How offensive she must find some slave keeper's notion of the pretty hurrying of a slave girl.
Out of character, in her own life, Elizabeth does not conform to Gorean custom. Tarl worries at one point that she will cause a social revolution in the city of Ko-ro-ba:
Elizabeth, besides speaking boldly out on a large number of delicate civic, social and political issues, usually not regarded as the province of the fairer sex, categorically refused to wear the cumbersome Robes of Concealment traditionally expected of a free woman. She still wore the brief, exciting leather of a Tuchuk wagon girl and, when striding the high bridges, her hair in the wind, she attracted much attention, not only, obviously, from the men, but from women, both slave and free.
Mistaken for a slave by a veiled-and-robed free woman and her maid and then criticized for her unseemly behavior, Elizabeth first challenges the woman's assumptions ("After all . . . why should it be only slave girls who are comfortable and can move freely?"), her self-esteem ("Well then . . . what are you ashamed of?"), and finally proceeds to strip the other woman down to her sleeveless tunic and appraise her beauty. Her compliments, admittedly, consist of conjecturing the high price the woman might fetch as a slave—her value to others, not necessarily to herself. By the end of the scene, nevertheless, all three women are on a first-name basis, the Robes of Concealment have been kicked over the side of the bridge, and Tarl Cabot stands dumbfounded as the trio leave him behind for drinks at the nearest bar. These are not actions I would have imagined any of John Norman's female characters taking. Beyond simple costume and cultural associations, the link between sexuality and slavery has no foundation: free women, Elizabeth argues, can and should be as secure and easy in their bodies as the most uninhibited pleasure slave. A woman does not have to be collared to feel beautiful.
(Tell that to the later novels.)
In the same vein, there is a particular paragraph that caught my eye near the novel's close. After Cernus has been destroyed, his slaves freed, and all the romantic pairings matched up, Tarl observes how a former slave now looks as she stands beside her husband, the man who loved her unattainably when she was a barbarian slave from Earth and freed her as soon as he himself was a free man:
Virginia was clad in garments cut from the beautiful, many colored robes of concealment of the free woman. But, proud of her beauty and glorious in her joy, she had boldly shortened the garments almost to the length of slave livery, and a light, diaphanous orange veil loosely held her hair and lay about her throat. She wore the robes of concealment in such a way as not to conceal but enhance her great loveliness. She had discovered herself and her beauty on this harsh world, and was as proud of her body as the most brazen of slave girls, and would not permit its being shut away from the wind and the sunlight. The garment suggested the slave girl and yet insisted, almost demurely, on the reserve, the pride and dignity of the free woman. The combination was devastatingly, tormentingly attractive, an achievement so tantalizingly and astoundingly exciting that I would not be surprised if it were adopted throughout Ar by the city's free women, rebellious, proud of their bodies, at last determined to throw off centuries of restriction, of confinement and sequestration, at last determined to stand forth as individuals, female individuals, sensuous as slave girls, but yet rich in their own persons, intelligent, bold, beautiful, free.
All right. This is John Norman, so certain concessions must be made. (Move slowly away from the style, and perhaps it won't bite.) He still lays a heavy emphasis on the effect of this revolutionary attire on the male viewer: the appreciative response it is designed to provoke. There is the implication that Virginia might never have discovered this side of herself if she had remained on Earth: only on Gor. Even so, what he's written here is a woman who is comfortable with her body, in command of her own sexuality, and who has found a balance between the slave's constant, choiceless display and the free woman's equally enforced burqa that—with the notable exception of Elizabeth, as cited above—have been pretty much the standard options for female dress and attitude on Gor for the last four books. So how in the name of the Lord's little green apples did Norman slip from this reasonably sane portrayal to the absolute equation of female sexuality with shame and submission that marks his later books? I lift an excerpt from Dancer of Gor (1985) to illustrate:
Like most modern women I was concerned to conceal my sexual needs. To reveal them would have been just too excruciatingly embarrassing. What woman would dare to reveal to a man that she wants to move, would dare to move, before those of his sex in so beautiful and exciting a manner, in a way which proves that she is vital, and alive, and female, that she is astonishingly beautiful and inutterably desirable, in a way that will drive them mad with the wanting of her, in a way that shows them that she, too, has powerful sexual needs, and in her dance, as she presents and displays herself, striving to please them, that she wants them satisfied? Surely no virtuous woman. Surely only a despicable, sensuous slut, the helpless prisoner of her undignified and unworthy passions.
*mind*boggles*
(also, *prose*hurts*)
If one can wade through the hip-deep hyperbole, note that Norman is describing a woman who desires a certain power over men—to arouse them, drive them up the wall, make them want her as much as she wants them. Yet somehow this admission of sexual desire makes her a slut? Makes her helpless? How is it objectification when the woman glories in her ability to make her audience react? I cannot explain: I can only skim and stare.
The aroused sexuality of the slave girl is surely the strongest of the chains with which she is bound . . .
The dancing of the female before the male, that she be found pleasing and he be pleased, is one of the most profound lessons in all of human biology. Others are when she kneels before him, when she kisses his feet, when she performs obeisance, when she knows herself subject, truly, to his whip . . .
And, interestingly enough, I was not discontented. I could have wished, I suppose, for lesser men, but I did not really want lesser men. I wanted the mightiest men, the most powerful men, the most glorious men, the most ferocious, grandest men. I did not want men who were like me, I wanted men who were like men, men in whose arms, ravished, loving, crying out, overwhelmed, mastered, I could be myself, and find myself. I wanted such men, and knew in my heart that I belonged to them. I wanted a man who was greater than I, and incomparably so, one whom I must, in the order of nature, obey, one to whom I must look up, and I did not care if it was from my knees, black with dust, a collar on my neck, naked, that I looked up to his glory.
(Yeah. My apologies to your brain.)
There is none of this in Assassin of Gor. The closest Norman comes is a passage on the indoctrination of new slaves, in which Tarl repeats some of the arguments used by the trainer to convince the girls of the rightness of their social status, and remarks on the girl who most ardently argues back:
Phyllis seemed to regard men and women as unimportant differentiations off a sexless, neuter stock, whereas Flaminius argued for a position in which women were hardly to be recognized as belonging to the human species. I expect both, and I am certain that Flaminius, recognized the errors and exaggerations of their own positions, but neither was concerned with the truth; both were concerned only with victory, and pleasing themselves.
Which is as fair-minded an evaluation of two extreme arguments as one can expect on Gor. Yet only five years later, John Norman was writing Time Slave, which not only contains some of the worst cod-philosophical speeches on sexual nature versus nurture, but also a several-page digression on Stone Age sanitation.**** I haven't read the next book in the series, Raiders of Gor (1971), but I am assured byhans_the_bold that it plunges off the Cliffs of Sanity and the series never comes back.
Oh, John Norman. You were never Edgar Rice Burroughs, and you were certainly no Robert E. Howard, but what happened to you? Assassin of Gor didn't suck. Alas that that's the best compliment I can pay you. But given Slave Girl of Gor's immortal chapter title "In Which I Bead a Necklace and Am Used for Wench Sport," I think that's the best you're going to get these days. Excuse me while I go read The Birthgrave to fix my brain.
*Eat your heart out, Ian Fleming's flurry of masculine/feminine master/slave signals.
**David Eddings, did you read these books? If so, that's one more thing Norman has to answer for.
***Which I will admit is a little more flamboyant than the plans of most Bond villains, but the sky's the limit when your planet is ruled by gigantic sentient praying mantises.
****Really. I'd cite it if I had Time Slave to hand, but I'm personally rather pleased that I don't.
hans_the_bold for this one. Over dinner, we'd been talking about James Bond on the page versus James Bond onscreen (I'd recently seen From Russia, With Love for the first time, and I still think it's far and away the best of the Connery Bonds I've seen so far: Goldfinger has the title song and Honor Blackman, but it also has lasers and grandiose plans involving nukes) and while truepenny can undoubtedly discourse more learnedly on this topic than I, it was somewhere in the discussion of the weird casual sexism that characterizes much of Ian Fleming's writing that the Gor books entered the picture. All of which goes to say that I spent about an hour and a half tonight reading John Norman's Assassin of Gor (1970), for which I feel the need to make some kind of academic justification. We shall see if it works.(Cut for textual analysis and winceworthy prose.)
hans_the_bold has argued that this particular novel is essentially James Bond on Gor—it has secret super-organizations, it has a villain with a colorful household and a nefarious plan, it has our hero undercover and presumed dead, and it has a drop-dead sexy sidekick girl. I could be persuaded to agree, but at the moment I'm still marveling at the unbelievable difference between the standard science-fantasy adventure of Assassin of Gor and the socio-sexual claptrap of later books like Slave Girl of Gor (1977). I am not saying, mind you, that Assassin . . . is a good book. The writing style alone is enough to cause blindness, cerebral hemorrhages, and hairy palms. But it's nowhere near the levels of absurdity that cause parodies like "Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor" to read like false starts from John Norman's own keyboard. The bludgeoning insistence that men are only happy as masters and women are only happy as slaves?* Not present. The finger-pointing at all those repressive feminists who castrated modern men and made them all weak and sexually frustrated? Er, no. The denigration of overcivilized Earth for the clean, biologically-sound modalities of Gor? Strike the third. I was stunned.For starters, there's the character of the "Bond girl," Elizabeth Cardwell: an Earth woman transported to Gor in some previous book, renamed Vella,** and now working with Tarl Cabot to infiltrate the household of Cernus, a slaver importing immense numbers of kidnapped girls from Earth to Gor and incidentally in the service of mysterious evil aliens with plans to destroy the Priest-Kings' dominion over Gor and reduce the planet's human population to herd animals.*** Far from being Tarl Cabot's inferior, she is a partner who can take care of herself both verbally and physically, who trusts in Tarl's trust in her, and who can tie him in knots when she feels like it.
I laughed. "But it was my intention to discipline you," I said.
She squared off against me, hitching up the loop on her left shoulder which I had loosened with my teeth. "My discipline," she said, "can wait until after breakfast."
"I think you are simply punishing me," I told her.
She laughed. "After breakfast," she said, blowing me a kiss, much as I had her the previous evening, "you can discipline me!" Then she turned and hurried down the corridor.
I kicked the love furs halfway across the room and sat down on the edge of the stone couch.
It was a chipper, fed Elizabeth Cardwell who returned to the compartment, humming and sprightly. "Did you enjoy your wait?" she asked.
"It seems to me," I said, "you lingered long over your breakfast."
"The porridge in the trough this morning," said she, "was simply marvelous."
Their relationship as master and slave, for the length of their operations in Cernus' household, feels far less like a biological institution than sexual role-playing. More than once Tarl observes how well she plays this role, that no one realizes how poorly it suits her:
I remembered her on the Plains of Turia, in the Land of the Wagon Peoples. There were few girls with her wind and stamina, her strength and vitality, few who could run at the stirrup of a Warrior as well as she. How offensive she must find some slave keeper's notion of the pretty hurrying of a slave girl.
Out of character, in her own life, Elizabeth does not conform to Gorean custom. Tarl worries at one point that she will cause a social revolution in the city of Ko-ro-ba:
Elizabeth, besides speaking boldly out on a large number of delicate civic, social and political issues, usually not regarded as the province of the fairer sex, categorically refused to wear the cumbersome Robes of Concealment traditionally expected of a free woman. She still wore the brief, exciting leather of a Tuchuk wagon girl and, when striding the high bridges, her hair in the wind, she attracted much attention, not only, obviously, from the men, but from women, both slave and free.
Mistaken for a slave by a veiled-and-robed free woman and her maid and then criticized for her unseemly behavior, Elizabeth first challenges the woman's assumptions ("After all . . . why should it be only slave girls who are comfortable and can move freely?"), her self-esteem ("Well then . . . what are you ashamed of?"), and finally proceeds to strip the other woman down to her sleeveless tunic and appraise her beauty. Her compliments, admittedly, consist of conjecturing the high price the woman might fetch as a slave—her value to others, not necessarily to herself. By the end of the scene, nevertheless, all three women are on a first-name basis, the Robes of Concealment have been kicked over the side of the bridge, and Tarl Cabot stands dumbfounded as the trio leave him behind for drinks at the nearest bar. These are not actions I would have imagined any of John Norman's female characters taking. Beyond simple costume and cultural associations, the link between sexuality and slavery has no foundation: free women, Elizabeth argues, can and should be as secure and easy in their bodies as the most uninhibited pleasure slave. A woman does not have to be collared to feel beautiful.
(Tell that to the later novels.)
In the same vein, there is a particular paragraph that caught my eye near the novel's close. After Cernus has been destroyed, his slaves freed, and all the romantic pairings matched up, Tarl observes how a former slave now looks as she stands beside her husband, the man who loved her unattainably when she was a barbarian slave from Earth and freed her as soon as he himself was a free man:
Virginia was clad in garments cut from the beautiful, many colored robes of concealment of the free woman. But, proud of her beauty and glorious in her joy, she had boldly shortened the garments almost to the length of slave livery, and a light, diaphanous orange veil loosely held her hair and lay about her throat. She wore the robes of concealment in such a way as not to conceal but enhance her great loveliness. She had discovered herself and her beauty on this harsh world, and was as proud of her body as the most brazen of slave girls, and would not permit its being shut away from the wind and the sunlight. The garment suggested the slave girl and yet insisted, almost demurely, on the reserve, the pride and dignity of the free woman. The combination was devastatingly, tormentingly attractive, an achievement so tantalizingly and astoundingly exciting that I would not be surprised if it were adopted throughout Ar by the city's free women, rebellious, proud of their bodies, at last determined to throw off centuries of restriction, of confinement and sequestration, at last determined to stand forth as individuals, female individuals, sensuous as slave girls, but yet rich in their own persons, intelligent, bold, beautiful, free.
All right. This is John Norman, so certain concessions must be made. (Move slowly away from the style, and perhaps it won't bite.) He still lays a heavy emphasis on the effect of this revolutionary attire on the male viewer: the appreciative response it is designed to provoke. There is the implication that Virginia might never have discovered this side of herself if she had remained on Earth: only on Gor. Even so, what he's written here is a woman who is comfortable with her body, in command of her own sexuality, and who has found a balance between the slave's constant, choiceless display and the free woman's equally enforced burqa that—with the notable exception of Elizabeth, as cited above—have been pretty much the standard options for female dress and attitude on Gor for the last four books. So how in the name of the Lord's little green apples did Norman slip from this reasonably sane portrayal to the absolute equation of female sexuality with shame and submission that marks his later books? I lift an excerpt from Dancer of Gor (1985) to illustrate:
Like most modern women I was concerned to conceal my sexual needs. To reveal them would have been just too excruciatingly embarrassing. What woman would dare to reveal to a man that she wants to move, would dare to move, before those of his sex in so beautiful and exciting a manner, in a way which proves that she is vital, and alive, and female, that she is astonishingly beautiful and inutterably desirable, in a way that will drive them mad with the wanting of her, in a way that shows them that she, too, has powerful sexual needs, and in her dance, as she presents and displays herself, striving to please them, that she wants them satisfied? Surely no virtuous woman. Surely only a despicable, sensuous slut, the helpless prisoner of her undignified and unworthy passions.
*mind*boggles*
(also, *prose*hurts*)
If one can wade through the hip-deep hyperbole, note that Norman is describing a woman who desires a certain power over men—to arouse them, drive them up the wall, make them want her as much as she wants them. Yet somehow this admission of sexual desire makes her a slut? Makes her helpless? How is it objectification when the woman glories in her ability to make her audience react? I cannot explain: I can only skim and stare.
The aroused sexuality of the slave girl is surely the strongest of the chains with which she is bound . . .
The dancing of the female before the male, that she be found pleasing and he be pleased, is one of the most profound lessons in all of human biology. Others are when she kneels before him, when she kisses his feet, when she performs obeisance, when she knows herself subject, truly, to his whip . . .
And, interestingly enough, I was not discontented. I could have wished, I suppose, for lesser men, but I did not really want lesser men. I wanted the mightiest men, the most powerful men, the most glorious men, the most ferocious, grandest men. I did not want men who were like me, I wanted men who were like men, men in whose arms, ravished, loving, crying out, overwhelmed, mastered, I could be myself, and find myself. I wanted such men, and knew in my heart that I belonged to them. I wanted a man who was greater than I, and incomparably so, one whom I must, in the order of nature, obey, one to whom I must look up, and I did not care if it was from my knees, black with dust, a collar on my neck, naked, that I looked up to his glory.
(Yeah. My apologies to your brain.)
There is none of this in Assassin of Gor. The closest Norman comes is a passage on the indoctrination of new slaves, in which Tarl repeats some of the arguments used by the trainer to convince the girls of the rightness of their social status, and remarks on the girl who most ardently argues back:
Phyllis seemed to regard men and women as unimportant differentiations off a sexless, neuter stock, whereas Flaminius argued for a position in which women were hardly to be recognized as belonging to the human species. I expect both, and I am certain that Flaminius, recognized the errors and exaggerations of their own positions, but neither was concerned with the truth; both were concerned only with victory, and pleasing themselves.
Which is as fair-minded an evaluation of two extreme arguments as one can expect on Gor. Yet only five years later, John Norman was writing Time Slave, which not only contains some of the worst cod-philosophical speeches on sexual nature versus nurture, but also a several-page digression on Stone Age sanitation.**** I haven't read the next book in the series, Raiders of Gor (1971), but I am assured by
hans_the_bold that it plunges off the Cliffs of Sanity and the series never comes back. Oh, John Norman. You were never Edgar Rice Burroughs, and you were certainly no Robert E. Howard, but what happened to you? Assassin of Gor didn't suck. Alas that that's the best compliment I can pay you. But given Slave Girl of Gor's immortal chapter title "In Which I Bead a Necklace and Am Used for Wench Sport," I think that's the best you're going to get these days. Excuse me while I go read The Birthgrave to fix my brain.
*Eat your heart out, Ian Fleming's flurry of masculine/feminine master/slave signals.
**David Eddings, did you read these books? If so, that's one more thing Norman has to answer for.
***Which I will admit is a little more flamboyant than the plans of most Bond villains, but the sky's the limit when your planet is ruled by gigantic sentient praying mantises.
****Really. I'd cite it if I had Time Slave to hand, but I'm personally rather pleased that I don't.
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And yes, I am ashamed to say I know this... Clearly I need to eat more pie.