The Grumpy Old Bookman tells me that the infamous Gor books have been resold to Dark Horse Press.
You may not have heard of the Gor books; they aren’t exactly Harry Potter. They do, however, have quite a loyal following. Why? Well, because
Elaborate set pieces of sexual torture and slavery are the essential core of the stories; they are not plot devices insomuch as they become the plot. Sadism, rape, and violence are repeated ad nauseum, pushing the storytelling narrative into a place at the back of the whole enterprise.
The libertarian author in me is quite pleased to see someone exercise their freedom to write this trash. The libertarian woman in me is quite pleased to exercise mine own freedom by letting as many people as possible know what horrific trash the Gor Novels really are.
OMG.
Sex sells (even the really violent kind), I guess.
I just rented the TV series, Dante’s Cove, because I heard it was a gay-themed show with a fantasy/magic/witchcraft element to it. Seems to me more like the network decided, “Well, we can’t afford talented writers or actors (the actors may genuinely be doing the best they can with the script give though), so we’ll just get a beautiful-looking cast and have them run around in as few clothes as possible. I won’t be watching anymore, but I hear they’re starting season 3!!
When I was playing Second Life, I happened upon some very large Gorean fantasy sims. Why anybody would want to be the woman in one of those sims is beyond me. However, the dudes generally had tons of cash to spend, and I’d take their slaves out shopping with me for clothes, hair, skin, etc. I made quite a bit of SL money doing that.
Of course, what amused me most was the fact that the slave owners would complain that their slaves had no sense of style like I do. Of COURSE not, I’m a real woman behind the SL woman. All those slaves were clearly men. Hee hee.
You know, one of the most challenging things for an author, at least a male one, is portrayal of female characters.
First, there’s the obvious. We don’t understand you. We accept you, but we do not understand creatures that can actually have opinions on things like curtain patterns, get haircuts recreationally, and look at magazines full of famous people with their clothes on. We do not understand why any piece of furniture needs to be pillowed so heavily that it looks like a tribble infestation (Am I the only guy that wonders if the tribble episode of Star Trek was written by a man who was in dismay after looking at his furniture?).
But even beyond that, we have tremendous difficulty in figuring out how to portray them, and I know on my own part, it leads to tremendous amounts of second guessing. I hate fiction where women are portrayed as weak people that exist solely to give the hero someone to rescue, so I portray them as strong. Too strong sometimes. I have a screenplay that I rewrote eight times before shoving into a drawer because I kept bouncing from one extreme to another and never found a comfortable middle ground.
I’m currently working on a horror novel, and absolutely nothing is giving me more fits than my portrayal of women. When my male characters are the focus, I complete 15-20 pages per day. When it’s the female characters, I’m lucky to pull off seven because of the time spent second guessing.
The Gor books sound disgusting to me, and have all the earmarkings of fiction written by and for the crowd that never gets laid. It’s a means of passive/ aggressive retaliation against the women that rejected them.
Rick, I have both a couple of questions, and a couple of suggestions. Among the questions are: have you read/do you read books that contain strong female characters (if those are what you want to write)? That might help. The other is much simpler: Write your fifteen pages for strong male characters. Then change the names to something female.
Women aren’t that much of a mystery, really. Truly. But thanks to Teh Internets, there are places where you can get some insights: right here with Kat, over at Aunt B’s, and, heaven help us, at truemomconfessions.com. There are women who are offering insights into the feminine, all over Teh Internets, for free. There’s enough material out there you could write yourself a first-person Cinderella story with a fat female central character (who stays fat throughout the story), and have it believable, sympathetic and salable. The women characters you want to write about are already writing about themselves; all you have to do is decide what you want. Everyone’s out there, all the heiresses of Medea through Emily Dickinson.
Hmmm. “We don’t understand you. We accept you, but we do not understand creatures that can actually have opinions on things like curtain patterns, get haircuts recreationally, and look at magazines full of famous people with their clothes on.”
I suggest you definitely do more reading. These are the kinds of matters that DID used to occupy and preoccupy men in times past. Beau Brummel was not exceptional in his interest in clothes (and haircuts), just in the way he expressed it. And for centuries, it was the master of the household who decided what was purchased for the household, in terms of curtain patterns, furniture, cushions and carpeting.
Oh! A good rule of thumb for horror stories: by and large, women don’t want to die, any more than men do. No matter how untrained and ill-prepared, a woman will fight for her life. She may not succeed, but she WILL fight. I’ve never had a problem with books/movies where women have been overcome, but the books and movies in which no attempt to survive is made at all? Those instantly lose all possible credibility.
(Heh. As an aside, I once went to a convention as Buckets O’ Gor, infamous space pirate.)
Rick, you might want to take a look at Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s book Writing the Other.
I’m currently working on a horror novel, and absolutely nothing is giving me more fits than my portrayal of women. When my male characters are the focus, I complete 15-20 pages per day. When it’s the female characters, I’m lucky to pull off seven because of the time spent second guessing.
You sound like you have the same difficulties with gender that I sometimes have with spatial-movement writing. (I.e getting my characters from point A to point B.) I’m half tempted to write an entire book about people sitting at a dinner table or something. ;-p
There’s enough material out there you could write yourself a first-person Cinderella story with a fat female central character (who stays fat throughout the story)
What I wouldn’t give to read THAT book! Bless Jennifer Weiner’s heart, she still had her Good in Bed character drop a bunch of weight at the end.
You want freaky? I was browsing yahoo profiles once and discovered that there are a HUGE number of people, men and women, who consider Gor to be a full-time lifestyle.
Takes all kinds. Now if I can just convince Mrs Schwartz…
All I can say is that I’m glad I sold my copies of the Gor books several years ago because now that they may be printed, I wouldn’t have gotten the money I did.
It was sort of lucrative for a college student.
I read the first 10 (my favorite was #5, Assassin where Norman still had an editor who cared. After that, I think the editorial staff jumped ship – only looking for typos) and had all 26 of them at one point (re-selling them for a little profit on eBay).
Norman is said to be a libertarian. He wrote a book called “Imaginative Sex” that outlined roleplaying scenarios for couples that mostly had to do with power play/dominance and submission. The activity didn’t change – only the location. Football player/cheerleader. Virgin on the sacrificial table to the priest. All with male dominant, female submissive. All that kind of fun stuff.
Gor is one of those things that I know far too much about… it’s like all those programs you can’t delete on a PC but take up space on the hard drive.