What would that look like, and how can 'Sex, Swords, and Sandals' writers take that forward?
John Norman never gives us explicit sex. Sometimes he comments in between bouts of sex between characters, but you don’t get a gritty, sticky, blow by blow (pardon the pun) of what happens after Tarl drags a girl to his bed. Let’s look at possible reasons why, and what Gorean slave may actually have been like if presented in explicit detail.
Possible reasons why:
1 - It’s not his thing.
Sexual bondage of Gorean slaves is the dominant feature of the Gor books, but also, so is story. Characters have changing fortunes and opinions, there’s the politics and life of a whole world to present.
I don't think this is the reason though: Norman spends so much content talking about how slaves are taken, broken, and trained, why would he then hold back right at the most fun bit?
2 - He may have been squeamish.
This doesn’t hold water, either. Firstly, why would a squeamish person write about the hunting, training, and use of sex slaves, at all? Also, Gor is the product of the ‘60s. By 1970 he had 5 books out firmly establishing his universe - and giving him plenty of room to experiment with explicit writing:
Tarnsman of Gor (1966)
Outlaw of Gor (1967)
Priest-Kings of Gor (1968)
Nomads of Gor (1969)
Assassin of Gor (1970)
John Norman created this sub genre. He isn’t shy about a damn thing.
3 - He was not allowed to by the publisher.
Consider that right before, or just as as sex begins, his slaves make clear how much they want to have sex with their masters. Their cries are always of pleasure. They beg for their masters’ touch. Why is Norman so keen to make clear the slave girls are giving active consent? Because otherwise, his books can be slammed for dealing with rape just for the sake of titillation. That’s an open and shut ‘no no’ for any publisher.
Leaving out explicit sex wasn’t enough to protect the Gor books; in the 80s they suffered a backlash no one should have been surprised by. Nowadays however, after a generation of Internet use, we know a lot more about the staggering range, diversity, and truly eccentric nature of human sexual interests and fetishes. People aren’t worried about fetishists being weird monsters who will kill them and rape their children, because they’ve discovered that THEY are those fetishists. 50 Shades of Grey is mainstream - who would have seen that coming? Judging people by their sexual interests and fetishes is invitation to a circular firing squad.
Now, 54 years after Tarnsman of Gor was published, let’s try and figure out what it was about Gorean slave sex that his editors likely found so disturbing. Fortunately, John Norman has given us plenty of clues.
Buckle up - this is going to get disturbing, even for Gor fans. You’ve been warned.
A Look At The 'True' Gorean Lifestyle - Abject Sexual Slavery
Slavery is never practiced by kind-hearted people. Slave owners aren't known for taking the time to think about how their slaves might feel about what's going on. Look up how women are treated in human trafficking right now. And whenever slave owners did stop to think about such things, their slave holding culture had the institutions in place to make sure they didn't think about it too long.
Aristotle wrote of what he called 'natural slaves.' In Hinduism the less fortunate are suffering for actions in their past lives. Then there is always the argument that 'someone else will profit from this, if I don't. It’s better if its me.'
Picture if you will a man, fully celebrated by his culture for keeping gorgeous, naked, young women in cages. Is he one day going to give them some clothes, and ask them to be on their way with an apology and a handjob, for old times sake?
Some men will do that (in any slave holding culture). Most men though, won't. Ask yourself; does your phone or tablet have chips in it made by a manufacturer who exploits their workers? If so, what have you done about that?
With the choice made to set aside all empathy for a group, this allows the choosers to impose any treatment upon said group, without reservation, be it forced labor, sex, sadism, cannibalism, or extermination. This choice is the central characteristic of Gorean slave sex. The choice to enslave.
The Rape and Dubious Consent of the Kajira
No Gorean slave girl decides within a couple of days that actually, she loves master, who also coincidentally has chosen just that moment to pin her down, force her legs apart, and fuck her. This is done to imply in the Gor books that people are having sex.
They are not.
Sex is consenting between two people who just really hit it off, even if they don't understand why, or each other. Or brain wave patterns sync with our partner's when we're having sex. There is eye contact. There is participation. There's chemistry (sex without chemistry is very unsatisfying. Just go to the bathroom and use your hand, next time).
Goreans never have sex with their slaves. Instead, they impose power over them. In Julius Caesar's words, 'the strong take what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.' John Norman doesn't hide this from us; this is what the 'whip of the furs' is. Gorean slave girls are 'used.' They are used to teach them their place. They are used to break resistance. A Gorean slave girl is likely used as soon as she is captured or bought -- it sets the tone of the relationship at its start. They are used often, to reinforce their understanding of where they kneel in the hierarchy, and for the double rush it gives their masters: one of sexual delight, and the other, a tremendous sense of power.
In my John Norman inspired books, the main characters almost never kiss slave girls (and when they do, its because there's something weird going on between them). Instead, the most common sexual encounter begins with a naked slave girl kneeling at their feet, to suck them off. This is common, low impact, and not often noteworthy to the characters.
Consider this excerpt:
“Before me were two naked girls who had opened the door for me. Both knelt at my feet, thighs tightly together, and resting back on their heels. One had her wrists bound in front of her, a slender, dark-haired Shemite who was fit for a harem of ancient Assyria. The other had her wrists cuffed behind her back, a gently tanned, petite, Caucasian girl with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. It was the slave girl he had kidnapped from the criminal Lukor's mansion.
"He has not returned yet, master," said the Shemite. Ninli, I think he had named her.
The blonde looked up at me, her blue eyes wide.
A mistake.
"He said he would be back by dawn," I loosened my belt and pulled out my penis. "It is not like him to be incorrect about such things."
I grabbed the blonde by her hair and pulled her to me. She quickly opened her mouth and took in my penis. Her mouth was warm; she began to bob her head back and forth.
"What's this one's name?"
"Master Fogrim has not named her yet," Ninli shook her head.
I surveyed the girls hanging chained along the far wall.
“Where is Yura?" I asked. The Shang girl Yura was his current favorite. A subtle beast; she looked like a swimwear model whisked away from a Beijing fashion week.
“He took her with him, Master.”
The blonde Armanean pushed her head forward till my penis touched the back of her throat. Well-trained, she did not gag.
"How old is this one?" I asked.
"She is 19, Master," said Ninli.
"Did your master say anything about where he was going? Or why he took a woman with him? Anything at all?"
"No, Master. I am sorry."
The blonde stroked my penis with her tongue, rolling back the foreskin and licking clean the area around the crown. I seized her hair with both hands and pumped her head until I came. I did not let her move until I was finished. Then, I pulled myself clear. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth wide for me to see.
She remained like that, awaiting my command.
"Excellent girl," I wiped my penis dry on her bared throat. "Tell your master when you see him, but I need to speak with him urgently."
"Yes, Master," said Ninli.
I cupped the blonde’s jaw, shut her mouth, and nodded to her.
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. Then she opened and showed me her empty mouth.
"Good Slave," I stroked her hair.
I turned and left the room.”
-Temple Girls and Spies, Book 7 in the Tales from Hyperborea
This is a non reciprocal activity. It is performed from a vulnerable position. It is demanded casually, and failure to obey - and to satisfy - have grave consequences. It also literally leaves a taste in the slave girl's mouth to remind her of what her status is. In Tales from Hyperborea, free women do not even know what semen tastes like - oral sex is so correlated with slavery, free women will not perform it. As such, slave girls in the stories find fellatio a truly degrading activity - to commit it, is to accept and actively support their own enslavement, and the idea that the taste of cum belongs in their mouths.
It may seem unfair to block the trivializing (and glorification?) of rape, when we trivialize and glorify murder all the time, presenting it casually and callously, however we see fit based on genre, medium, and intention. And it is unfair. However, when you look around a crowded room, some of those people haven’t been murdered. But, some of them have likely been raped. It is a sensitive matter to write about because for many it is the stuff of nightmares, not fantasy stories.
So, is it genre appropriate to write a graphic, detailed, elaborate rape scene in a Gorean style book?
Absolutely.
Is anyone going to then? Not any time soon, and not on most publishing platforms.
In one of my books, the main character tracks down a slave girl who has run away in part because she was to be given to him, for breeding. In that brutal world, a master may give one of his slave girls to another man, so he may stud her, as token of comradeship. The main character is annoyed the hot little slave is missing - but more than that, angry that in running away, she has caused her master, his friend, to lose face.
After he captures her, he scolds her for what she has done - and then he uses her. An explicit sex scene follows. It is not a rape scene. Yet, I try to make clear that the slave girl is not not enthusiastic. She doesn't protest, refuse, or otherwise resist - but she is very much shown her place:
"You cannot breed me!" She had the defiance of the wronged in a courtroom. "Only my Master can breed me!"
"I am not interested in your weird lovers’ quarrel," I began to disrobe, "and any man who puts his dick between your perfect little buttocks, can make you pregnant. As I am going to do to you now, Slave."
Her expression changed; fear stilled her tongue.
I lay down my clothes and my pack. From inside my pack, I produced four, sharpened, wooden stakes, some rope, and a hammer. I hammered each stake into the ground around her, forming the points of a rectangle. I released one slender ankle from the hogtie, and tied it to a stake. Then the other ankle, to the other stake. Last I tied her wrists to the forward stakes. Thus, Layla ended up on her hands and knees, each limb secured to a separate point of the invisible rectangle.
"Just like in the breeding hut," I slapped her behind. It was warm and soft. "But I want to breed you here, so you will always remember what happened to you when you ran away."
She looked straight ahead, trying to blank her face. I could make out a suppressed pout. Forgrim had spoiled her: no female back at the Red Water slave camp would have behaved this way. Much less a woman under his cruel discipline.
I knelt beside her. I gripped her throat and ran the other hand down the gentle curve of her back, feeling the muscles on either side of the spine, the rise of her buttocks, how they felt cupped in my hand. Her ankles tugged at their ropes, her hands curled into fists.
"Lovely beast, I reached under and stroked her flat belly. "You are perfect." I gripped her by her chin and forced her head to face mine. "A fine little bitch, Layla."
Her dark brown eyes rebuked me.
Afterwards he whips her. Then, he leads her away, naked and bound by her wrists.
Gorean Slave Sex Would Have Been Rough
The intersection between sex and violence is so strong, it is one of the world's biggest social problems. The brain pathways for the two are closely related. The plight of female migrant domestic workers in the Middle East makes clear how vicious this can be. It would only be worse with actual sex slavery.
Graphic, rough sex is (sadly) abundantly missing in John Norman's Gor novels. Slaves are certainly whipped and beaten, but it is never implied that this may be a part of the lovemaking.
Let us leave aside truly vicious sadism - John Norman's men are quite happy to own beautiful young women in excellent physical health, and take pains to keep them that way. However, that does not preclude rough sex. John Norman doesn’t dive into it, but you know these girls are getting thrown about and manhandled. At the very least, some slapping, biting, spanking, and very hard drilling must be going on. This feeds back into imposing dominance. On the worse end, these girls would be getting thrashed just to hear them squeal. This quickly moves into sadism, which would be another aspect of graphic depictions of Gorean slave sex.
Sadism: Whipping, Branding, and Torturing the Kajira
Imagine that the world has ended, and you are stranded on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific. It is idyllic, quiet, and it will be centuries before anyone ever comes here again.
Trapped on this paradise island with you is stunningly beautiful girl. Maybe you capture her by accident in a hunting snare. Maybe she says she'll do anything for you if you keep her alive. Perhaps she just always wanted to crawl after a man, on a leash. Whatever the genesis, you now have a delightful slave girl.
It would be a real shame if you didn't string her up by her wrists and whip her - just a few times, while she insists yes, as she jumps from foot to foot, that you are her master. If she drops something, you would have no choice but to make her crawl round and round in circles on her hands and feet, chanting that she will do better next time master, with you sitting watching her with your whip at your side. You find some metal flotsam - wouldn't her thigh look good with your initial branded into it? As the sun goes down, you wait for the iron to heat as she struggles beside you, bound to a tree trunk.
Sadism is literally the delight we get in the suffering of others. Whether it is glee at an idiot's failures on a Youtube video, or the spanking of a slave girl on the furs. Everyone has a little bit of it. Owning helpless slave girls would see it developed. Gorean slaves suffer a great deal of sadism in their training and general duties - it follows that they would also suffer sadism in sex.
What sort of sadism would Gorean slaves be put to? It depends on their owners and their owners' cultures, but they are least protected in that John Norman never writes about masters who mutilate or scar their girls. An explicit Gorean sex scene would involve 'non bruising' actions such as slapping, spanking, and whipping with soft and wide-bladed whips. Tension and physical tortures such as long kneeling, squatting, or suspension by feet or hands may feature.
In one of my books, the main character uses two slave girls but finds a way to add a new, sadistic element to his pleasure:
“Come, pets.”
They smiled and crawled forward on their hands and knees. I pulled their heads into place between my thighs and they got to work. They licked my balls and penis, taking turns blowing my cock. They kept looking at each other and giggling, and then up at me.
I wrapped their leashes around my hand. In the other, I held the whip.
It is another indescribable feeling, seeing beautiful slave girls such. You are their universe; all they want is your approval. Everything they fear, is your whip.
I could feel the ejaculation coming on. I stood up in the bed, my foot on their chains so they could not rise up from their elbows and knees. I grabbed my penis and sprayed semen over their backs. I squeezed out every drop, both girls remained still.
I got off the bed, pulled up a stool, and sat to watch them.
"Keep very still," I said, raising the whip. "If any of my seed drips off your backs, I will will thrash and crucify you."
-Tendrils of the Mi-Go, Book 5 in the Tales from Hyperborea
(Crucifixion here involves no nails - the slave girl is just tied in position to the cross and left hanging like that, for a few long, painful, hours.)
A slave owner has already decided that cruelty and the denial of empathy are going to be the foundation of his relationship with his slaves. As such, he is freed to explore his sadism with them. A Gorean would do things to his slave girls he would not dream of doing to anyone else. The slaves will suffer what they must.
It is not only physical tortures that a Gorean would use to torment his slave girls with. Psychological ones would be as prominent, if not more so, and far more powerful. It's time to talk about degradation: the wheel upon which so much of Gorean sex would spin.
Going Well Beyond Slave Positions - Degradation in Gorean Sex
The first thing that happens to a girl when she falls slave on Gor, is that she's stripped naked. She may be kept in a tight cage, or crammed into an overcapacity cell with other naked captives. She will be fed slops, perhaps by hand, if she is even fed at all at first. Most powerful of all, her name will taken from her. The most insulting renaming I can remember from a Gor novel is a slave girl who is renamed ‘Pudding.’
Everything about a slave girl's life from the moment she is stripped, is utterly degrading. Goreans enjoy degrading their Gorean slaves, John Norman certainly does. Degradation isn't just another form of sadism - it is a tool of domination. When a caged girl is given a hunk of moldy bread, she will wait till she is desperate before she finally breaks down and eats it. When she does, the casualty is her dignity, her pride.
The next step is to give her a piece of bread her master has stamped on. She eventually capitulates and eats that too. The step after would be bread used to wipe up her master's piss - or his semen.
The gradual stepping down teaches the slave girl to reset her bounds of what is acceptable. After a week of semen-bread, she will be delighted to have stepped-on bread. After a month of mashed and fermented insect guts, semen-bread will make her cry tears of gratitude and lick her masters' feet, rubbing her breasts against legs in true adoration.
Degradation makes a slave girl stop acting like a kidnapped princess, and start acting like a slave girl. The more servile and base she becomes, the more contemptible her master will find her, and the more degrading his treatment of her will be. It does not matter; as long as she is clean when he drags her to his bed, and when she comes into his view as, naked and with a bell at her throat, she goes about her duties, he is satisfied. He will treat her worse than a dog, and she will find such treatment unremarkable. She has come to find it acceptable.
Whatever else we may conjecture about what explicit sex scenes in the Gor novels could have been, we know at least that they would have been utterly degrading. In my writing I've got slave girl's eating cum off the floor. They lick their master's penises clean of smegma every morning. They eat out other slaves for the entertainment of men, swap cum till it spills down their necks and breasts, and eat it off their skin.
Nothing is off the table. This randomly happens to one slave girl who is unfortunately in the right place at the right time:
"Why are you in cages, and not chained for milking?"
"We are waiting to be bred," said the Shang.
I pulled out my knife. There were gasps from some of the girls, and the caged ones tried to shrink back. The Shang stared at me; her eyes were large, dark, intelligent.
I went to her cage and cut away the leather thongs that tied it shut. I opened the cage door.
"Out."
The Shang crawled out on her hands and knees.
"There," I pointed to the brick square.
She crawled to the middle of it. I took one shackle, opened it, and fastened it around her ankle. Then I secured her other ankle, and then both her wrists. She knelt on her hands and knees.
I pulled down my pants, got down behind her, and got to work. Her body was thrown forward with each stroke, her hair tossing. She started to moan; I cupped one hand over her mouth.
When I ejaculated, I pulled her close against me. I held her like that for a few moments, she lowered her head down to the tiles and began panting. Then I stood and shook myself clean; semen dripped onto her back.
I uncuffed her wrists and ankles and led her by her hair to one of the milking shed.
"Kneel."
She knelt under a bar, the collar hanging down by her face.
I lifted her long, silk-soft hair out of the way, and pressed the collar against her warm, sweaty skin. It clicked as it locked. Then I took each of her wrists and shackled them as well.
"What do you say?" I said.
"Thank you, Master."
I left the stable.
-Dagon’s Price, Book 3 in the Tales from Hyperborea
The character was just investigating an area of a camp. He had no idea what he would find there. After he was done with her, he didn’t give that slave girl a second thought. The thoroughly degraded slave girls of that universe expect things like that to happen to them, and worse.
Stockholm Syndrome: Gorean Slave Sex would Have Been Sustainable
Stockholm Syndrome may as well be called Slavery Survival Syndrome: it is a behavior that took root early in human history. Those enslaved who had it, survived. Gorean slave girls survive quite well, which is all their genes care about. Becoming a powerful animal's pet is good survival strategy; I cite the existence of pets as proof of this.
Being utterly powerless before a master who thoroughly degrades her and is amused by her suffering, is not a good place for a slave girl to be. Yet, what most threatens her is that she is easily replaced. If a Gorean doesn't like his slave girl he will sell her - or even kill her.
Given these, the Gorean slave girl learns first not to resist, and then to participate (as best as she is allowed). This protects her from the dangers of not being 'pleasing,' and ultimately what little favor there is to be had. In the Gor books, slave girls compete for little pastries or a piece of ribbon. This is how John Norman shows us the complete power their masters have over them. Their slaves will do anything for a pastry - it is the nicest thing that can ever hope for.
The successful Gorean slave girl is one who:
is utterly subservient to her master
has no expectations about her treatment
is a great performer in bed, and adores her master.
Is truly happy in the rare moments when she wins tokens of his favor (a pastry, a real kiss, be given a blanket for one night)
believes she deserves to be treated this way, and will actively fight to remain so.
Her master will always find her pleasing, and will delight in having such a servile sex pet, likely one of several he pits against each other for limited favors.
The less successful slave girls don't make it. They are killed 'off camera.’
Dark shit, eh?
I did warn you. Gor is a dark world, where people do dark things to each other. Never forget the gravity of this or its subject matter. John Norman sanitizes Gor for us with sword fights that Tarl Cabot enters without fear and wins within a few lines.
And that’s fine. This is a fantasy.
Just as fun is the fantasy of markets filled with beautiful, twenty-something, slave girls, who mysteriously have no VDs, and are all somehow just a good, hard, fuck away from lying gratefully leashed and oiled at a man’s feet.
Reading Between the Lines
Whatever the reason we don’t have deep, explicit, slave sex in the Gor books, John Norman has still given us more than enough hints as to the possible nature of the Gorean lifestyle. It is for writers inspired by his work to explore this, and see where this takes the Slaves, Sword and Sandals genre, next.