The Social Club of Gor Pt. 02

"Goreans, in their simplistic fashion, often contend, categorically, that man is naturally free and woman is naturally slave. But even for them the issues are far more complex than these simple formulations would suggest. For example, there is no higher person, nor one more respected, than the Gorean free woman." -- John Norman, Hunters of Gor

While I had my own reasons for going back to the Gor tavern, I still struggled, at first, to understand its appeal, especially for the females. In fact it was the lure of the exotic, the seductive power of the transgressive. The tavern was a refuge from reality, a place to shed inhibitions, to discard conventions, to peel off burdensome layers of refinement and moderation. It was raw, it was primitive, and it was only for a few hours a week.

In the next couple of months I made several visits. I put together some costumes suitable for my new character. My favourite was a sumptuous magenta and indigo dress with gold and silver threadwork trim. The bodice was lace-up and open way down past my belly button, and sat very low on my boobs, which would probably have been too wanton for a freewoman on the "real" Gor; but here in the provinces the proprieties were not so strictly observed. For example, although the rule was that I be veiled, this was hardly ever enforced -- only on the rare ceremonial occasion.

On my fifth or sixth visit the tavern was crowded as usual, everything appearing normal with one interesting addition. In a corner of the room half a dozen slavegirls were kneeling, backs to the wall, knees wide apart, hands clasped behind their bowed heads. They wore iron collars and were tethered by braided leather leashes to a railing. One of them was the imperious freewoman with the green gown... except that the gown was no more.

As was our practice, I came with Richard but we immediately parted company. I joined a group of my sisters, Princess Pea-Green's former devotees, who greeted me with hugs and complimented me on my outfit. I did not ask directly but soon got a clue to the fate of their former doyenne. For there are three subclasses of freewoman -- consort, concubine and companion, or in lay language, wife, girlfriend/fiancé and friend/relative. Every freewoman needed to have a male guardian, and Richard was mine; so I was a companion. Yet in the Gorean tradition this represented a perilously unstable position. A companion could be enslaved on her guardian's order or with his consent. If she entered the tavern without an escort she could be enslaved, although that was rare and usually a pretext. If she broke any of the rules she could be enslaved. If she fell behind in her membership dues, if she said the wrong thing, dressed too provocatively or too much like a male, looked at a man the wrong way, pouted, flirted, strutted or... It was a wonder that there were any freewomen at all!

I never found out what the princess's offence had been except that, given her high-and-mighty manner, it was an enslavement waiting to happen.

This was my first experience of a public slave auction. The proceedings began at eight o'clock, and I had no idea how long the girls had been forced to wait in their corner -- an hour at the very least, as they were there when I came in at around seven. So maintaining their kneeling posture for that amount of time must have been an excruciating ordeal, and even more so the tedium. (I guess it made them more eager to get on with their being sold.) Three of them each had on a loose-fitting tunic called a camisk. This was similar to a poncho, a rectangular piece of cloth with a hole for the head, draped over the body, belted at the waist with a cord and extending to about mid-thigh. Worn without underwear, it was complemented by the standard adornments, a leather collar and metal bracelets. A few kajirae wore it on a regular basis. Generally, however, the garment had a ceremonial or ritualistic purpose -- in other words, it was worn to be taken off. And of course, as soon as the women were ordered to stand up for the sale to begin, the camisks did come off, so the merchandise could be properly inspected.

Those who'd worn the camisks were former freewomen. The princess, actual name Jessica, was gorgeous; but another, slender and raven-haired, was even more stunningly beautiful. Yet the most striking of the three was extremely tall and athletic. With her flowing flaxen tresses she looked like a Norse demi-goddess. I had seen her once before in the tavern, as the freewoman Katrina. Next to her when they stood in a row waiting to be sold was a diminutive girl with an angelic face and pixie-cut blonde hair, looking like a tiny elf beside the Valkyrie. She was a resale slave acquiring a new master.

The six were ordered to stand up and, still facing the wall, had their hands locked behind their backs with heavy shackles. They were then brought forward one by one, to be led around the room on a leash. The auctioneer warned the crowd that touching was prohibited.

The fetters were so tightly drawn as to pull back the girls' shoulders and thrust out their bare chests. Four had smooth pubes, but two, including Jessica, retained their hair down there, albeit neatly trimmed. Two had rouged their nipples and one of these her labia as well. Jessica and Chloé (the elfin one) glared directly, defiantly at the spectators. The dark-haired dazzler and a curvaceous brunette (the girl with rose-tinted pussy lips) stared past the crowd, never making eye contact. The other two, Katrina and a pale, sweet-faced damsel, kept their heads bowed and their eyes downcast. But they could not conceal a smile, and the occasional smirk, as the auction got under way. They were revelling in the role of humbled slavegirl, playing it to the full.

While the sight of naked women was hardly a rarity in the tavern, it was rather shocking to see them so unabashedly displayed and degraded. I had to keep reminding myself that they were not unwilling captives. Jessica appeared dazed, yet she brightened up considerably once the bidding for the possession of her charms had begun. Indeed, she was the first of the slaves to be offered for sale. She was bought by a consortium, in this case four young men; and I was aghast when they took her off to the small back room next to the kitchen. But three of them emerged a minute later, laughing, and my darkening thoughts about the tavern were quickly dispelled. Her new owner was her boyfriend. He still had to pay for her, but the money raised went into the club coffers. This was how it worked. Each former freewoman's most recent membership fee was refunded... to her master, of course. Most spent it buying drinks all round. That won him the roaring acclaim of his fellow warriors while his new slave, who had paid for it, knelt humbly at his feet awaiting his commands.

So the slave sales were essentially a charade. In the fictional, fairy-tale, fantasy world of the tavern it was easy to forget or ignore reality... but it could never go away. No one was going to forcibly enslave anyone. Nobody was going to keep a girl in thrall against her will. A kajira, enchained of her own free choice, had the right to cast off her yoke and rejoin the society of freewomen. In that case, if she had been acquired for a price she was required to make recompense to her dispossessed owner; and a freewoman facing the prospect of wearing the slavegirl's collar could avoid her fate by payment of a ransom, in coin or in services. Indeed, there were some for whom enslavement itself was the thrill, and they had been through the process many times.

And there was another, equally important, especially reassuring facet to the pretense. Despite the routine degradation of slaves, none was going to suffer the abject humiliation of a low price or a non-sale on the block. So while the markets weren't rigged per se, they were prearranged with a minimum set price and a generally agreed maximum. The upper limit was rarely exceeded, although it could be. I was never completely enlightened about the process, but I suspect the bidding on Jessica and the most beautiful girl that night did surpass the price cap.

The other slave to be sold to more than one purchaser was Katrina, now renamed Sharna. (All slavegirls were given Gorean -- or Gorean-sounding -- names.) She towered over her two new owners. They were proud of and even captivated by their prize. She was paraded about the room on a neck tether, her wrists still manacled behind her back, which was how they remained for the rest of the evening. She spent the next few hours like the other new slavegirls, kneeling at the feet of one or the other of her masters. Every so often she glanced up and grinned.

None of the six, by the way, was bought by a freewoman.

After the auction came the dancing. I resisted calls to be included in the entertainment. My skills, despite honing by several years of gymnastics training, was not in the league of those shimmering, shimmying belles. Parvi, the former Jessica, proved to be a talented danseuse.

Once again Richard was willing to cut short his evening to accompany me home around midnight. We left just as Sharna was preparing to go. Like all the slavegirls, she detoured via the cloakroom to put on her street clothes. Still accompanied by her new masters, she stepped out into the crisp night air as a free woman.

As we walked back to the apartment, I began to ponder. I still had no idea how long Richard had been associated with the Goreans, what this had to do with the change in his attitude, or why he had brought me into the fold. My questions on the way to the house were starting to irritate him. Perhaps it was the three glasses of wine; perhaps it the chill of a bracing breeze; but I was insistent, and he started to sound irritated.

I laughed, thinking "Now you know what it's like to deal with the obstreperous!"

"What's so funny?" he demanded.

I shut my mouth, recalling the fate of Princess Pea-Green.

He must have guessed what was going through my mind.

"Yes," he said. "You should be careful. You should watch out."

I took heed of his advice. But as it transpired, I was looking in the wrong direction.

"The Goreans claim that in each woman there is a free companion, proud and beautiful, worthy and noble, and in each, too, a slave girl." -- John Norman, Hunters of Gor

Habits, once ingrained, are hard to break. I fell into the routine of going to the tavern. It was open four nights a week, and I became one of the regulars.

I learned that the Gor tavern had begun its existence as an online community which evolved into a live-action role-play, and materialized as a real-life, brick-and-mortar establishment. Like any such organization, the Goreans had a constitution (under the name Social Club of Gor), by-laws and a governing council. The tavern was the only tangible asset (apart from the treasury). I believe there are several such places worldwide, which have developed independently. And although the original game has long since been abandoned, many members still communicate online and interact on other Gor-themed internet sites.

The social order comprised, in its basic form, two groups. There were the role-players, for whom their experiences and activities in the tavern were an elaborate (if oftentimes extreme) game. Then there were the lifestylers whose participation was not merely an act or performance, whose character was a manifestation of themselves. But I perceived these groups to be overlapping. For when you think about it, if you take your character and the dramaturgy seriously enough, where do you draw the line between role-play and real life?

In any case, what was most interesting was that the females were the ones whose experience was, by definition, the more authentic. The men could only pretend to be stalwart warriors. There were no duels to the death, no perilous quests, no headlong pursuits through the wilderness. Whereas for a woman, free or slave, her persona was her actuality. If that persona was totally different from her "true" nature, this just added to the... well, "thrill" is not quite the right word, while "fun" sounds trivial. But if I have to choose, it was fun.

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-minded, 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 in an "extreme sports" club. I bore some scars as a legacy. And as mentioned, I had joined the university's fetish society. The latter was short-lived, and many of its members eventually migrated to the tavern, as now did I. The Gorean scenario offered sensations equally intense, but in a relatively 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. The Social Club of Gor was deeply embedded in the university community. All the members were either academic staff or students. If there was an off-campus contingent or counterpart, I never learned about it. 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.

Most of the females in the tavern were slavegirls. (This was in contrast to Gor of the novels, where slaves were a minority of the population.) During my first few visits, I saw a dozen new women, all but two of whom signed up to be kajirae. I also saw half the freewomen enslaved. And this did not surprise me. I had personally discovered that with all the restrictions on her rights and activities, the life of a freewoman in tavern 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 Jessica 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 truth, 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 nocturnal 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.

Yet although, as I've conceded, it was not such a hard and fast rule that what happened in the tavern stayed there, generally the two worlds did not intersect. Whenever members encountered each other on the campus, unless we were close acquaintances we might exchange acknowledgements but otherwise kept our distance.

On the other hand, I did socialize with some outside the tavern, such as Marissa and Ethan. I had known Marissa from the fetish society. She at first mistook Richard and me for a romantic couple, and was taken aback by my melodramatic grimace. She recovered with a "that explains everything" nod. She'd wondered why we tended to avoid, even ignore each other inside the tavern.

She and Ethan 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. However, having exchanged places after the agreed-upon interval, she found herself consigned permanently to slave status. While she voluntarily gave up her power, when it came time to revert to their original roles he balked and she had no recourse to any rule or convention. For unlike in the fetish club which espoused gender equality, the tavern's rules entitled the male as privileged partner. Yet after some initial requisite grumbling, Marissa seemed to take delight in the asymmetric nature of this new and unfamiliar power dynamic. It was in submission, not domination, that she could reveal her true strength, not just through her willingness to surrender but in the fact that by doing so it was she who took control and held the initiative in defining their roles. So she found herself able to explore the two sides of her nature not sequentially, as before, but simultaneously.

This intrigued me, because outside the tavern they maintained their role swap. However, I found that even within the Gorean realm relationships could be complex.

After a few months I began to wonder if I was losing interest in the Goreans. I still enjoyed the break from reality (the world beyond the tavern) and didn't want to give it up; but my freewoman role-play seemed to be going nowhere. It had become merely an excuse for standing about in pretty gowns. Meanwhile, for reasons I'm not sure of, it was becoming almost de rigueur to be veiled, as any virtuous woman should be. I had several veils to match my dresses. They covered just the lower part of my face but were of the gossamer fabric that brides wear, so they didn't conceal much. Indeed, worn with plunging décolletage the veil was not exactly a symbol of feminine modesty. But it did act as a barrier, a social distancer; and being impractical for eating and drinking it served as a reminder of our constraints as females.

(It should be added that some of the men, when they entered the tavern, wore a scarf or shawl over the mouth, which represented their warrior status -- protection from the harsh clime of the wilderness or concealment from enemies. Within the sanctuary of the tavern, of course, masking was unnecessary.)

So life as a freewoman in Gorean culture was like being on the outside looking in.

It is for this reason that despite some reservations I accepted an invitation which breached the barrier between the tavern and the rest of the world. And it turned out to be a revelatory experience, the sort that you look back on and ask yourself: "Why?"

Charlotte was a fellow freewoman, a co-founder of the club and, in her late thirties, one of its oldest members. She was a professor at the university. Statuesque and very attractive, with champagne-blond hair and the figure of a showgirl, she exuded sensuality like a potent perfume. I saw her occasionally in the tavern. She was there the night Jessica was enslaved, and I remember the thinly disguised look of satisfaction on her face. Unlike Princess Pea-Green she never held court, preferring to remain aloof, cultivating her retinue by more refined means. Invitations like the one I received for that night were part of her methodology.

When Charlotte invited me and four other freewomen to a Saturday evening soirée in her home, I found it interesting that even beyond the tavern's walls the segregation of free and slave was maintained by the more faithful Goreans.

Indeed, although it was hard to imagine her as one, Charlotte had herself started out as a kajira, with husband James as her master; but then they switched roles. This was an extremely rare occurrence; for as Marissa discovered, in Gorean culture it is the natural condition of men to be free and 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.