This page has been a long time coming; long have I reflected, and at last I have found the place and manner to explain my aversion to the subject matter of this page: Gorean roleplay.
I used to be a Gorean roleplayer – and a fairly regular and straightforward one as well. I tried to follow the «spirit of the books» and play fair. I operated under the assumption that others played more or less within the same general framework – follow the books without thumping on them; be fair to others and don’t be an arse.
I did not count on one single little problem.
You see, these rules seem to apply only to women, and only to women who are in a certain position of subservience to men in that the men do anything they want with no consequence, and if a woman sneezes at the wrong place she ends up enslaved.
I’ll be clearer.
One example of the kind of interaction I am speaking of is men finding out magically that I am in disguise, then proceeding to capture me, and when confronted with the blatant metagaming they would say, out of character, «Keep it up and I’ll punish you more in character» followed by that charming slur, «slut», which gets bandied about in Gorean roleplay sims as if it was hot bread.
Such things make me see red and make me want to seriously tear them a new one, and then another.
The more important aspect of why I find Gorean roleplay infuriating is because if your character is male, they can do whatever they want, even bend or break sim rules, while females will get punished for doing the same, and punished harder if they complain, regardless of whether they are doing so in character or out-of-character.
As it is built, if one wanted to delve into the psychology of it, questioning the the need to put down the entire female gender under the patriarchal thumb of men… one could reach interesting conclusions.
I thought about those same motivations, and the answers I found are, let’s say, unkind to Gorean roleplay and the Gorean universe in general.
The world of Gor is a balance outlet, a fantasy created to exalt the getting even with the entire female gender under the guise of a reaction against modernity. Instead of doing the brave thing, the manly thing, which is to seek out balance actively, perhaps through the lost art of talking to his spouse instead of shutting up and keeping the grievance inside to the point of producing 32 books about how women must be slaves of men. That is a major grievance, and unacceptable today.
In the real world, things don’t work like that. In the real world, we as women are aware of our social status, of the fights we have fought to achieve social equality with men, and of our rights. To put is in as few words as I can: We don’t long to be slaves; nor do we long to be under the rule of men. We’ve been servants and under the rule of men for 3000 years and that, by goddess, is enough.
At cost of sounding self righteous, I explored Gorean roleplay because I was curious as to what attracted us women there. I’m sorry to say that the premises of the Gorean mystique are woefully unfulfilled. Gorean roleplay promises a world where things aren’t topsy-turvy, where men are men and women are at best pretty breedable accessories to men like Gorean free women, or equivalent to animals in the case of enslaved women, animals property of men who can be killed with no consequence other than to pay substitution price to their owners. However, in SL Gorean roleplay the basis for setting such a system, namely, the extreme patriarchy that the author of the Gorean books, in his aggrieved, misogynistic, sexually equivocal reaction against the female gender has instituted in his fantasy to subjugate all females to men as they should be, does not exist. There is no structure, no discipline, no constructing anything. The submissive women who go to Gorean roleplay sims often leave them because they feel they have been lied to.
The combination of the reactive nature of the Gorean «saga», whose premises are either changed to the male players’ convenience – or outright ignored – creates a toxic environment where out-of-character drama flourishes and thrives, on account of there being no real communication among players, where the opinion of at least 50% of the players – the female ones – is dismissed patronizingly or outright ignored in favour of the kind of hubris that leads some men to say «I m a man and I do whatever the heck I want, and you girl can either suck it or leave». That kind of attitude leads to a roleplay environment that is toxic from the get go, where bad behaviours are not corrected and out-of-character problems among players remain unsolved until they explode. How can such an environment be anything but detrimental to the mental health of both men and women? How can it not bring out the worst that there is in men and women equally? In light of what I said, I made a conscious choice to never return to Gorean roleplay, because to participate in that roleplay is to validate and normalise that toxic environment, and that is something I will not do, ever.