Female acquiescence to submission is one of the most intriguing elements of the male/female relationship. This factor of romantic alchemy can manifest with various nuances and modalities, reaching as far as erotic fantasies of sexual dominance. Western culture itself debuts with the story of a master/slave relationship: Achilles and Briseis. In more recent times, women themselves have been able to describe this aspect of the couple’s relationship, producing a 20th-century masterpiece like Pauline Réage’s Story of O, as well as a major pop success like E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey.
Even the Fantasy genre found an original interpreter of this narrative vein in John Norman, the American author who created the Gor saga. John Norman is actually the pseudonym used by John Frederick Lange Jr., who was a professor of philosophy at several American universities and who, alongside his academic career, developed successful lines of both fiction and non-fiction writing.
The fiction set on the planet Gor unfolds in a barbaric and savage world where gender roles are strongly differentiated and characterized: brawny and courageous men, protagonists of epic feats, own concubine-slaves who live their existential status—made of humiliation and punishment—as an unalterable condition. The relationship between slaves and masters is ritualized and governed by precise rules of conduct: the slave of Gor, called a “Kajira,” observes a rigid protocol in dress, behavior, and body posture.
Norman himself states that his narrative work is inspired by three fundamental authors of Western culture: Homer, Nietzsche, and Freud. From Homer, Norman took the description of the archaic values of a warrior society; from Nietzsche, the concept of hierarchy and the cult of strength; from Freud, the idea that sex is a central element in human psychology.
“Gorean” literature, which began with Tarnsman of Gor in 1966, enjoyed flattering public success in the 1970s: overall, “Gorean” books have reached a circulation in the hundreds of thousands of copies. The latest title is number 38 in the series: Treasure of Gor (2024). Many of these books have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian…
The saga also inspired two films: Gor (1987), directed by Fritz Kiersch, and Outlaw of Gor (1988), directed by John Cardos. These two films focus primarily on the “Heroic Fantasy” aspect of Norman’s tales, while the more sexualized aspects of the stories were significantly toned down. These cinematic productions testify to the popularity of the Gor Saga even twenty years after the release of the first titles.
Needless to say, the success of the “Gorean” series infuriated feminists. “Progressives,” unable to grasp the playful and parodic aspects of a “violence” staged as literary fiction, tried to ban the distribution of the books, succeeding on some occasions in momentarily dissuading publishers from releasing new ones. The series, however, has always managed to continue with continuity…
Indeed, Gorean novels also take the form of philosophical tales that unmask the hypocrisies of the “liberal” world. Particularly indicative in this sense is one of the most famous titles: Slave Girl of Gor. In this book, the protagonist is a beautiful model who is kidnapped from Earth and brought to the planet Gor, where she is forced to adapt to the new lifestyle.
Some quotes from the book provide an idea of the views manifested in “Gorean” thought.
The inhabitants of Gor cannot fathom the catatonic state into which the male population of Earth has sunk:
“Could they believe a world might exist where men, shouting political slogans, vied with one another to surrender their dominance, hastening gleefully to their own castration?”
The protagonist then discovers that her new status corresponds to a more natural condition than that imposed by social conditions on Earth:
“My femaleness had been suppressed on Earth, first by my own conditioning, the confused product of centuries of intellectual and social pathology, and, secondly, by the set of societal institutions in which I had grown up and existed, rather than lived, institutions to which sexuality was irrelevant, if not inimical.”
And again:
“The condition of slavery makes a woman very beautiful. It removes inhibitions to the manifestation of her femininity and her deepest needs.”
What else is there to say? Gorean writing has made “political incorrectness” its hallmark, creating an anti-feminist epic of non-negligible literary quality: this is enough to make its rediscovery stimulating and revitalizing in a time when the “woke” flood risks shipwrecking humanity in an unprecedented anthropological catastrophe…
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English Wikipedia page dedicated to the fiction of the Gor cycle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor
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