The Sisterhood of Slaves Pt. 02

Yet even after I'd been back half a dozen times, I was still somewhat baffled by the appeal for young women like myself, well-educated, independent, self-confident, by no means passive or docile outside or even in the tavern. But I gradually began to understand that it was because I was this way that I was drawn into the culture of the tavern. I recalled the intrepid exploits of my undergraduate days with the "extreme sports" club, and of course my humiliating torture in the Wooden Pony Club. The Gorean experience offered sensations equally intense, but in a somewhat more benign environment where I could experiment with exotic lifestyles and explore worlds of the imagination, as well as push my boundaries, take risks and test my limits.

There did not seem much more to learn about the Goreans. According to the directors' annual report, they numbered were around two hundred. But I only ever encountered about half of these, so I don't know how many of the others were active participants. In fact, I began to suspect that the membership list did not tell the whole story. There were links and associations beyond the walls of the tavern. There was a connection with the Wooden Pony Club I could not yet decipher. What was clear was that it was deeply embedded in the university community. All the members were either academic staff or students (plus a few prominent alumni and alumnae).

Most of the females were slavegirls. (This was in contrast to Gor of the novels, where slaves were a minority of the population.) In my first month, I saw a dozen new women, all but two of whom signed up to be kajirae. I also saw half the freewomen enslaved. And that did not surprise me. I had personally discovered that with all the restrictions on her rights and activities, the life of a freewoman in Gorean society was rather dull. We were supposed to be above the warriors' posturing and prancing. And, naturally, the Goreans adhered to a strict set of double standards. While the men got to play with their soft toys, those females who owned a girl (or a man, indeed) were not permitted to flaunt their possessions. Treated with courtesy by the men, in return freewomen were expected to act with dignity, decorum and discretion. Any displays of arrogance, any suggestion of self-importance, presumption of equality with the men or pretension to male prerogatives risked immediate enslavement, as the haughty Alycia had learnt.

There was no rule that a man could not dally with a freewoman while owning a slave, or share his slave with other masters. Nevertheless, this rarely happened. In their code of honor, I was told, property rights and the virtue of freewomen were inviolable; and it amused me that this noble masquerade was maintained. It was part of the fantasy. In reality, of course, whenever a stout warrior left the safety and sanctity of the tavern, he risked confrontation with an adversary more dreadful than any of his fellows. The night air had the magical property of transforming humble slavegirls and respectful freewomen into implacably vengeful wives and girlfriends. And it happened that every so often the band of brothers would raise a toast to a departed comrade, one who would never again imbibe the sensual delights of Gor.

So it was not a hard and fast rule that what happened in the tavern stayed in the tavern. Generally, however, we held the two worlds separate. Whenever members encountered each other on the campus, unless we were close acquaintances we might acknowledge each other but we kept our distance.

In fact, apart from Stuart and Paul, and of course Richard, the only friends I made from the tavern were Julia and Damien. They were in a "switch" relationship, taking it in turns to be the dominant and submissive partner. When they first joined the Goreans she took the "top" position; but upon exchanging places she found herself consigned permanently to slave status. But she didn't seem to mind the asymmetric nature of the "power dynamic" in the Gor tavern. And I was now beginning to understand why. It was in submission, not domination, that she revealed her true strength, not just through her willingness to surrender but in the fact that by doing so she took control and held the initiative in defining their roles. So Julia found herself able to explore the two sides of her nature not sequentially, as before, but simultaneously. That intrigued and excited me.

Every so often they invited Stuart and me to their home for an evening of "games". They were baffled, somewhat, that we were not a dominant-submissive couple outside the tavern. I explained that my adopted role as a slave was really no different from Julia's acceptance of her submissive role, and she understood that. But when we played at their place, unlike our hosts Stuart and I did not switch. He had no interest in being "on the bottom" and I confirmed that my nature — if not my personality — was submissive.

I did occasionally socialize with other club members, and one of these times proved a revelatory experience... the sort that you look back on and ask yourself "Why?"

When I was still a freewoman, five of us were invited to a Saturday evening soirée in Charlotte's home. She was a co-founder of the club and one of its oldest members. I saw her infrequently in the tavern; but she was there the night that Alycia was enslaved, and I remember the thinly disguised look of satisfaction on Charlotte's face (that a rival had been humbled).

Charlotte had started out as a kajira with husband James as her master; but then they switched roles. This was the only time that such a thing happened in the tavern. For in Gorean culture (as Julia discovered) it is the natural condition of men to be free and for women to be slaves. So Charlotte had to be very careful with James, walking a thin line, treating him with just enough respect to maintain his masculine dignity without compromising her rights as mistress.

There were six of us that night at her place, all accomplished, educated women, sensible and down-to-earth, possibly not the type you would expect to be role-play fantasists. We drank wine, listened to music and discussed literature. It might have been a bourgeois suburban ladies' book club. However, it was a bit surreal because the works we talked about were the Gor novels; and although we approached the topic with ironic earnestness, the erudition of my companions startled me. We analyzed various aspects of the culture, the lifestyle and the mythology, as if discoursing on Virgil or Shakespeare. We pondered the role and status of freewomen, and conversed on the nature of slavery. We got quite involved in a debate about the consensual nature of slavery in the tavern, and were quite critical of John Norman's expressed opinions on women, submission and the "natural order".

After that we shared and discussed our own experiences. Jessica was about Charlotte's age and like our hostess was married without children. I had seen her just a couple of times at the tavern, and she explained that her husband, Peter, didn't enjoy "games". Also like Charlotte she held a senior academic position at the university. In fact, she was Peter's superior, in effect his boss. But when they come home each evening, she told us, "I let him know that he's in charge. I change into something flimsy, or nothing at all, let him relax while I cook dinner, and then I serve him in the bedroom or..." she blushed, slightly, "... wherever he wants to have me." The other women nodded in understanding; and it was only later that I realized that my relationship with Richard was not so much different — without the undressing and the sex, of course. As his elder, the householder and the main breadwinner, I was unaccountably deferential to him. In his presence I suppressed my ego; and I had to admit that I would never do that if I lived with a female.

Indeed all six of us had ambiguously defined relationships with men, and I guess this is why we were intrigued by the Gor books and Gorean culture. However, I was the only one without a husband or boyfriend, though the other women took some convincing that Richard and I were not bedmates. My reminding them of Stuart did not change their minds. But what happened next made the conversation about our partners bizarrely discordant.

Our service and entertainment were supplied by James. I had seen him many times at the tavern, and he had not stood out in any way, except for the discreet silk scarf of the kajirus. But tonight he was collared and clad in a delectably brief chamois breechclout. He was tall and handsome, muscular and deeply tanned, with sandy hair and a square jaw. He addressed his wife as "Mistress" and the rest of us as "Lady". But he was not servile or sycophantic like a slavegirl. He spoke with a strong voice and he looked us each straight in the eye. For in Gorean culture, even among the enslaved, pride had different meanings in the masculine and the feminine.

I had no way of telling if Charlotte and James were putting on an act for us that evening, whether they were true lifestylers. In any case, late in the evening the brawny barbarian tradition of Gor asserted itself.

I had expected that things would take a strange turn some time during the evening. When I was first invited, Charlotte made some allusions which eventually crystallized into a straight-out proposition, though still vague on the details. And to my surprise, at the time, I agreed. After the Wooden Pony Club I figured I was ready and willing for just about anything.

James knelt at the feet of his mistress and removed his loincloth. As the rest of us looked on in goosebumpy silence, a breathtakingly prodigious pillar of manhood arose before our eyes. I gasped in wonder and admiration. Charlotte took a sip of her drink, set it down and unbuttoned her blouse. Then, without any words being spoken, James dragged his mistress down onto the floor, tore off her clothes, including underwear, and had his savage way with her, right there on the rug in front of the rest of us.

None of us watching make a sound or a move. I looked on spellbound at this bizarre spectacle of unbridled lust. And as Charlotte lay there panting, James seized my ankles and hauled me off the sofa. He stripped me and then each of the other women, more smoothly than he had with his wife, but just as firmly. None of us put up any sort of struggle.

After that it got really interesting. I discovered two things that night. The first was that some men have incredible stamina. The second was that I am much more prey to my passions than I'd ever had reason to suspect. James was neither forceful nor insistent. I surrendered to him without resistance or remorse or regret. He ravished us all, in the reverse order in which we had been pulled down and undressed, so I was the very last. In the meantime I had been kept busy, because as he was thrusting into each of us in turn, the rest of us shared the bonne bouche, licking and sucking and gobbling her lips and breasts, fingers and toes. By the time my turn came, we were all quivering and sweating and puffing. James was not particularly gentle, but he certainly knew his way around the female body. And yet the strangest thing was what aroused me most, what made me all tingly — something entirely unexpected. Sharing a man with five other women made me feel intimately connected to them, more so than to James even while he and I were conjoined. I felt that I was a part of something outside of myself and yet rooted deep within me...

Indefatigable, immediately that he'd extracted himself from the last of his ladies, James cast off his condom and tied his loincloth back in place, and then retrieved a carton from behind the sofa. He took out several coils of rope and dumped them on the floor. As I reached for my clothing, Charlotte grabbed my arm and pulled it away. "Not yet," she whispered. She and her pleasure slave organized us all to lie on our bellies with our hands behind our backs. It was a big room, with enough space between the furniture for us to form a line, side by side. I found myself at one end, and Charlotte became part of it at the other. James started at her end.

I heard a loud slap, a yelp that was not Charlotte's, and James's voice growling "Stay down! Keep still! Lie straight!" So not daring to lift my chin off the carpet, I could only tilt my head and catch glimpses from the corner of my eye of what was happening. James was moving slowly along the row, accompanied by a chorus of grunts and groans as he squatted between the bodies, working his way towards me. It was slow work, so I lay motionless for a long time. And it was an odd sensation, in a way shameful, given that the six of us had surrendered so abjectly to one man, and in particular one who was by predilection and his own admission a subservient. But this is when I began to appreciate that the "power dynamic" in relationships is rarely simple.

I had heard of the terms "service top" and "topping from the bottom". Although the relationship between Charlotte and James was not exactly that, I recalled something I had read in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex —

"To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object. Man wants woman to be an object; she makes herself an object, and at that moment she is exercising a free activity... Even when she is willing, or provocative, it is the male who takes the female. She is taken. He penetrates her. Her body becomes, therefore, a resistance to be broken through. A woman may thus envisage her erotic life as a form of slavery, since it seems humiliating to lie beneath the man, to be penetrated by him. But in fact man, like woman, is flesh and therefore passive, the plaything of his hormones and of the species, the restless prey of his desires. And she is a consenting, voluntary gift, an activity. They live out in their different ways the strange ambiguity of existence made body."

I had studied those words long ago, they had stayed with me, but only now did I begin to understand their full meaning. The roles of dominance and submission played by this woman Charlotte and her man were not undercut or overturned by the fact that she was bound and helpless in his power. On the contrary, they were reinforced. Her pleasure was the focus of his attention, in whatever form she chose. Her body was not a gift to him, or a prize to be seized. His taking her (and us) was tribute paid to his mistress. And this caused me to rethink the shows in the Wooden Pony Club, in particular my participation. Had the sole purpose of my ordeal been to entertain the crowd and in doing so to fill the void in my own existence? In that case, was I nothing more than a docile accomplice in my own suffering, an object for the crowd's amusement? Or was the audience, in a way, my own personal pleasure slave, pliable and passive in the shadows beyond the stage lights, subject to and dependent upon the games I played, feeding on the spectacle while sating my own yearnings and cravings?

These thoughts, jumbled and ill-formed, were rudely interrupted as my wrists were roughly seized and bound, my ankles were roped, my wrists and ankles were lashed together. I had never been hog-tied before that night. It was a weird experience, to be so thoroughly trussed, immobile, impotent and disabled, naked, perspiring and panting. All six of us struggled and wriggled and giggled as James played with us for maybe an hour, perhaps two.

Eventually, he untied our feet and herded us, on our knees, to the bathroom. He took us one at a time into the shower to wash away the sweat and other detritus from our exquisite ordeal, while the others knelt on the cold, hard, wet tiles, hands still bound behind our backs, crudely blindfolded and gagged with towels and washcloths. He dragged us each back out again and took Charlotte in last of all, and they were there a long time. The walls of the cubicle shuddered, and so did I at the ravenous ferocity of the clash of bodies. My blindfold had slipped down and I saw Charlotte's breasts and one side of her face pressed against the frosted glass as she writhed and moaned. This shower stall pas de deux was a fitting coda to our soapy operatics.

On the way home, three of us shared a taxi. I was still flustered by the evening's outrageous turn of events. My companions seemed blasé about their partners waiting (presumably) at home. Maryanne in particular was talking loudly and quite graphically about our experience, so I nudged her and gestured at the driver, who could catch every word.

She laughed. "Heard it all before, haven't you Harry?"

Harry winked at us via the rear view mirror.

About half-way to our drop-off, however, as we started talking about pleasure slaves, Nikki suddenly went silent.

"My turn next week," she finally said.

"For what?" I asked, already suspecting the answer.

"To join the other team."

"Liking the girls now?" Harry said with a toothy grin.

"Always have," she replied, reaching forward to flick the back of his neck with a fingernail.

"One less freewoman," Maryanne mourned. "We are a vanishing breed."

"More than you think."

She turned to stare at me, wide-eyed in the semi-dark.

"Not you too!"

"We must strive to be perfection all ways, for anyone. That is part of what is to be a slave. In reconciling myself to bondage I had, also, to reconcile myself to this condition, it is a part of bondage. It is something which the slave must accept. Without it there can be no true slavery... Somehow, interestingly, this acceptance, too, seemed liberating to me. It made my bondage much more real to me. Too, interestingly, in its way, it also made it seem much more precious to me."

— John Norman, Dancer of Gor

Our diminutive, leotard-clad tutor ordered us to sort ourselves into pairs, which we did by the simple expedient of turning towards the nearest girl. There was one left over who became the demonstration model. As she began passing out coils of rope to each couple, the drill-mistress explained (to our audience) that the purpose of a slave's bondage is the three R's — restraint, recreation, reinforcement. Meaning, of course, that the ropes and chains render her helpless for the enjoyment of her owner; they provide visual pleasure, stimulation and inspiration; and they remind us, the slaves, of our submission and servitude. She also called our training the PHD program — patience, humility and discipline. She seemed to like acronyms, because she used some others I don't recall. In any case, I doubt that she was saying much that was new to any of us.

"Let me illustrate this with the gag," she continued, and beckoned five of us to step forward. Exactly which point she was illustrating I had no idea, but my heart sank a little when I was one of those summoned. We were told to kneel, our arms folded behind our backs. Each of us received a different type of gag. Mine was the dental variety, an apparatus consisting of hinged and ratcheted, rubber-coated metal bars to hold the mouth open wide. I had only worn one once before, to have a wisdom tooth pulled. This was worse.

"It doesn't stop her making noises, but it doesn't stop other things either," the little woman said about mine. She laughed at her own innuendo. I squirmed.

After that, the tie-up session was almost an anticlimax... Well, it would have been if I had been permitted to remove my gag. It was not long before my gaping jaws hurt like hell, my entire face ached, I dribbled and drooled. Since I was the tying half of our duo, as I bent and leaned over her to apply the ropes, my partner's body was soon lathered with my saliva.

Unlike our slave positions, which we had carefully rehearsed, this was our first bondage lesson, and most of the knots and loops and ligatures were new to me. The audience was informed that bondage should be challenging, strenuous, possibly awkward and likely uncomfortable, but never ugly or too painful. When done right, the experience could be prolonged indefinitely. I did not like the sound of that. But the woman went on: "Your slave's happiness counts most. Her pleasure will enhance yours. Yours will increase hers."