Confessions of a Gorean slave.

Parts I and II

Our weekly installment commemorating Carmen Hermosillo (aka humdog). Read the original as printed in The Alphaville Herald here and here. Incredibly, the original publication date for these was 2006. I believe it’s Gor that mainstreamed BDSM, not 50 Shades.

The seeds of Tumblr Dd/lg roleplays lie here: and, of course, sex workers and Lana del Rey. But also very much with Joe Norman.

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As I said in the comments to my retirement post, I have a few things left in the hopper that I will be posting, so that I might go out with a bang, rather than a wimper. The following is part 1 of a 5 part story by humdog on her life as a Gorean Slave in Second Life. Oh by the way, today in Toontown I saw a character named Kajira! (Has Gor come to Toontown?!?!) –Uri

It was early in the evening when I met a man I will call Soames Forsyte. I met him in the recesses of one of those cesspool of the spirit that SL calls clubs where they have dungeons and private rooms and escorts and objects like that. Nobody dragged me there. Tell you the truth, I was bored and just wandering around. Now Soames was handsome – but that’s not unusual, because everyone in SL is just about as beautiful and sexy and desirable as their skill with sliders permits. These strangely and also clone-ish surfaces are an important part of the lucid dream that is Second Life. It makes me want to quote from that song “Round Here” where they say:

Round here we all look the same
Round here we roar like lions
Round here we sacrifice like lambs
Round here we stay up very very very very late (– Counting Crows)

To me, that SL in a nutshell, but to make it short:

I met Soames, and I went with him into his world, and his world is called roleplay Gor.

It would be very easy to write a story about roleplay Gor that would begin something like this:

“In December 2005, in Pakistan, a man called ======= killed his 24 year old daughter for dishonoring him, and then he killed his three stepdaughters, all under age 10. He then threatened to kill his wife for screaming while he killed her children. Mr. —- was very matter-of-fact when confronted by police about these so-called honor-killings, and explained to them that he had picked up the machete used in the killings on his way home from mid-day prayers. According to Human Rights Watch, there were at least 250 honor killings in the Middle East during the year 2005, and those are the ones they know about. In roleplay Gor, honor killings are acceptable.

In Afghanistan, and in other so-called conservative Muslim cultures, the honorable women of Muslim families are expected to wear a long robe called a Burka, which conceals a woman from head to foot, and includes the use of a face veil. Women in these cultures are expected to wear these robes whenever venturing outside their homes, and are not allowed to travel without an escort, preferably male, of some sort. In roleplay Gor, the Burka is called “Robes of Concealment”, five to eight face veils are required, and a freewoman wears this regalia and does not travel un-escorted….

A person writing an article about roleplay Gor that began that way would be opening themselves to a certain amount of screaming from the roleplay Gor community in SL. A person who wrote wondering why roleplay Gor celebrates human sexual slavery – an activity that continues to roll merrily along in modern Thailand and Africa, for example – would be accused of Sensational Tabloid Journalism about activities that simply are either exaggerated, happen by mutual consent, or just don’t exist. No doubt at least one irritable Ubar in some Gorean backwater of SL would get on the horn to His legal advisors and send a couple enraged letters to the editorial staff of the publication unfortunate enough to attract His attention should He see such awkward statements in print. After all, an Ubar’s work is never done.

No one here, however, is foolish enough to draw parallels between Taliban fashion statements and the wardrobe requirements of the Gorean Free Woman. No one here is silly enough to wonder why so many apparently well-heeled and apparently bored middle class Western European and American wives, mothers, students, and career women are willing to sign up and pay the cost of entry so that other well-heeled and apparently bored middle class men (and women) can roleplay social and sexual crimes against women in this very unusual and intriguing manner. Human sexual slavery is, after all, a RL problem. RL human sexual slavery with kidnapping, beatings, and forced prostitution is different, isn’t it, from the RP fantasies of a few thousand people waving the “safe, sane, consensual” BDSM flag? Anyway, it is clearly obvious that nobody is recruiting newbie women for these RP Second Life activities, and it goes without saying that absolutely no SL resident is recruiting RL subs and slaves from the SL population. That never happens. We all know that.

But I did go off with Mr. Forsyte. He had a room upstairs and I went there and he said undress and I did and then he made requests which I performed in the most cordial way possible. When I was leaving he said something to me and at the end of the list of his requests/orders/desires, he added “and you will wear my kol’lar…” and I felt shocked at this request and said no. Then we had this loop where he said you will and I said no, I won’t, and we went through that a few times until the loop lost its charm.

For those few people left in SL who do not know what a collar or kol’lar is, I will tell you that it is a complex symbol. The collar is an extremely tangible and visible symbol of a very powerful multi-level relationship of surrender. Putting on a kol’lar is a statement of transfer of personal power and control from the person wearing the kol’lar to the person who has given the kol’lar. The kol’lar itself tends to be made of metal or leather or some such material, and looks in many cases like the collar worn by a dog or some other pet animal, and in fact often the person wearing the kol’lar is addressed as “my pet” or is referred to as “my pet”.

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In our last installment, humdog took us from her introduction to Gor to her collaring. In part two, she talks in more detail about her Master, why she was so taken with him, and the psychological devices he uses to control her. –Uri

A kol’lar is either given, or requested – in RP Gor, however, even though the Gorean Master will offer the kol’lar to a desired female, the kol’lar is said to have been “begged” of a Master. I didn’t know this until I found it out later on in the most unfortunate way possible.

Prior to my submission my Master and I had these discussions primarily because I found that I was very intrigued and charmed with the way he appeared to spontaneously express himself like an old Scottish ballad at times. It is very true that I have always enjoyed listening to this man talk. It was clear to me that Mr. Forsyte was not from Mainstream America, that he did not think every-day thoughts, and that he had clearly experienced life in a completely different way than had I. He was, when he wanted to be, articulate and eloquent. He seemed scrupulously honest. He was perceptive and intuitive in the extreme. He definitely understood, and raised to art, the act of seduction and he also scared me. A lot. The thing that finally made him irresistible to me was that he was clearly very strong-willed and emotionally intense, probably even more so than I am. It was my intuition that I would never, ever, be able to out-will this man that pushed me over the edge into submission. Nowadays I think that this man must have been extremely charitable in outlook to accept me, because I had absolutely no clue about what I was signing up for. Later on, I’d find out that he knew exactly how clueless I was, but that he also had more patience than a whole handful of saints.

About 3 minutes after the collar locked around my neck, I learned that there was a further cost of entry into Gor, or in fact any kind of D/s relationship. This cost of entry to accepting/choosing/begging a collar is, in fact, any and all constructions of personal identity, habit, and/or personality that are deemed undesirable by the Master. The psychological and emotional requirements exacted by the collar are such that they are also not easily left in-world, if, in fact they can be left in world at all. One astute Master has written: “You should realize that when you put a collar on somebody, even online, you are, in fact, fucking around with a person’s real life.” I am not going to dispute the words of an experienced Master. I am just going to say: so much for the myth of in-world only.

I think it is important to say at this point, that most of the writing I have seen about D/s around here has been horseshit. When I say this, I am talking about the long-winded essays against D/s that only seem to make real discussion of D/s ridiculous, and degrade what is really a serious, and in the wrong hands, dangerous practice, into something you do on Saturday afternoon instead of watching a football game or something.

Dominance/submission (D/s) is called a “power exchange” because it is a kind of relationship between consenting adults that is difficult to describe. I mean if you know absolutely nothing about it, you can describe it for sure. You can say oh yeah, D/s is like, He/She says “do this” and she/he does it and its exploitative and all that. OK fine. Probably if you know nothing about Mozart you can tell me that he writes nice music and how he was a smart kid, too. In both cases, obviously, you have missed the point if you say stuff like that, and nothing shines like ignorance.

D/s is a highly mediated, highly negotiated relationship between two persons, and it is absolutely not a transparent relationship. In D/s it is absolutely not clear to persons outside the relationship what is going on in the relationship, and in D/s, appearances are absolutely deceiving. In the course of studying under my Master, I read about, I think, five books on D/s, and wrote a journal of approximately, I think 300,000 to 450,000 words or maybe even more, in total. (I think that’s about the size of a doorstop by Tolstoy, but maybe not.) My writings were read every day, and when deemed necessary, I received feedback about my writings. My Master was very careful about me, and his punishments were devastating precisely because they were specifically designed with yrs truly, here, in mind. He was also extremely sensitive to the fact that I had a real artistic calling in the performing arts, and was, in fact, the best psychological personal performance coach I’ve ever had. I am saying this so you know that I am not talking about some run-of-the-mill jerk. I was very fortunate. Some are not. Most are not, actually.

In D/s, with a good master, the slave or submissive, may appear to, and does in fact, give up control over the process of personal identity construction to the master. This is called “training”. However – and this is important – the Master is held to a much higher standard of self-discipline and self-honesty than is the slave/sub. The Master is also held to a higher standard of self-responsibility. A responsible and experienced Master will never ever inflict anything on a slave/sub that a sub/slave does not know about, and has not agreed to, even if only in a general way through use of some written protocol or contract. The Master is honor-bound not to violate the limits of the sub/slave, and He/She knows exactly what they are.

A D/s relationship between consenting ADULTS can be a relationship of deep emotional mutuality that requires a level of communication and trust that most people can’t do because either they don’t have the skills, or they have blocks. I failed because of blocks. I have lots of abandonment experiences in my childhood, and they basically overwhelmed me because I had put them away in a box, kind of. It is not unusual for this to happen to people because of the emotional intensity of D/s. When emotionally threatened, I would become the five year old girl I had been once, whose mother kept telling her that someday she was going to come home from school to find nobody home. Finding this five year old alive and well in my psyche was a devastating experience for me, and I paid for it in a big way.

I am saying this so you know that D/s is a real process of inner exploration. It is not about showing up in SL, sliding into buffness, putting on a titler that says Master and then telling some cute toon to suck your cock. No serious, responsible Master is going to be that kind of fool. No serious, responsible Master is going to sign up for a case of what is called “top-drop” over some toon. No self-responsible slave/sub is going to sign up to be psychologically abused. But this is not what happens in SL. In SL any jerk can put on a titler that says Master and any airhead can flutter her eyelashes and :smile sweetly: There are, at this time, at least three organizations in SL dedicated to cleaning up after the SL Master and his airhead. These organizations are probably able to speak to cost of entry. In Japan, at least one person has committed suicide over his/her experiences in virtual worlds. Several people in SL have commented to me that they expect, at some point, to hear that someone has committed suicide over events/relationships in SL, and they say that because it is their feelings that the Lindens appear oblivious to human cost of entry/experience in SL. Think about it.