Gored
DEAR ANDREA: I am a dominant Gorean male (please look it up and divulge information to the public about us, for we are little-known) looking for a Gorean submissive woman. Do you know of any place in San Francisco? Or of a "Find-A-Date" style searcher?
Love, Dark Wolf
Dear Wolfie: I don't have to look it up; I know what Gor is, and I'm not convinced that "divulging information to the public" will have the effect you're looking for. That is to say, having me explain that there are Conan wannabes out there who base their worldview and their sex lives on a set of '60s-era pulp science-fiction novels where men are men and women are slaves will not bring a slew of fresh recruits to your virtual door, pantin g to pick up the sword (or the slave collar) and start stomping around in loincloths and studded Greco-Roman sandals. Sorry!
The Gorean universe, invented circa 1967 by a pseudonymous philosophy professor (OK, this part I did look up: John Lange, writing as John Norman), had its moment, but Norman, unlike fellow pulp loon L. Ron Hubbard, never succeeded in founding a crackpot empire. Some of the Gorean Web sites do go on and on about censorship and pressure groups and a conspiracy of politically correct publishers, distributors, and retailers keeping the Gor novels off the shelves, and yet I note that the books, including several new ones, are currently available on Amazon. It isn't that you can't get them; it's just that nobody cares. Most people find John Norman's "naturalistic" man-on-top fantasies revolting, hopelessly jaded know-it-alls like me find them silly, and a few diehards are still sewing costumes and writing fanfic. You guys are furries, basically, although unlike people who base their identities and lifestyles on funny animal cartoons and nylon plush, the somewhat Wagnerian, vaguely Nietzschean, faintly Randian world of Gor is essentially humorless. But then, it would be.
There's a lengthy but awfully entertaining article on Gor by Julia Gracen still available on Salon. It's old but not notably out-of-date (although the quoted Goreans are still sulking about being out of print). It delineates the inevitable (but very amusing!) schism between online Gor gamers and the small coterie of "lifestylers" such as yourself. My favorite quote, from lifestyler "Bear" (of course, "Bear!"), complaining about the gamers who take Master Norman's naturalistic philosophy no more seriously than, say, Barbarian gamers might take Edgar Rice Burroughs's: "These people harm us by reputation – our philosophy comes from a series of SF books, we have a hard enough row to hoe here in our pursuit of simple regard and respect, without the kids taking the ethos and philosophy and turning it into a game." I'm tempted to point out that if regard and respect top your "must have" list, you might consider basing your lifestyle on something other than a bunch of pulp paperbacks with cowering slave girls on the cover, but I don't want Bear mad at me.
OK, Wolfie (like I said, you guys are furries in disguise). The obvious place to find a Gorean playmate is online, either on one of the Gor forums (there are quite a few) or on one of the more mainstream (for certain values of "mainstream") leather boards, something like www.leatherweb.com. You asked about San Francisco in particular, but I don't think my answer is specifically local. No, there is no public meeting place for men who believe that they are the naturally superior sex, and that women are happiest in their natural place, kneeling at the feet of their masters. This is not to say that there are not, in fact, plenty of places where you can see women happily groveling at somebody's feet, but they might not really be women, or the master might have boobs, or you might stare and stare and still have no idea what sex those people are, let alone what their "natural" place in the universe might be. There used to be a male-dominant/female-submissive club, but I think they're dead, and there's that "church" that worships Kali and proclaims men naturally inferior and fit only to serve the Goddess, but they aren't so popular. In general, these days, the kink community has an egalitarian vibe so postgendered and polymorphously perverted as to be faintly oppressive in reverse, but the natural superiority of men is not, shall we say, widely embraced. This is not to say that you cannot find a woman who will absolutely adore pretending to be your slave girl. She might come with her own loincloth and Greco-Roman sandals; yo u never know. You're just not going to find a nightclub catering to your kind. Not here, and nowhere else on this planet either. Gor, after all, is a shadow planet on the other side of the sun. It has lower gravity than Terra's, which, as Gracen points out, "probably accounts for the preternatural perkiness of all the women's breasts in the books' illustrations."
Love, Andrea
E-mail Andrea Nemerson at andrea@altsexcolumn.com.