The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'gor'

2008/1/23

A bus company in Yorkshire is facing accusations of discrimination against alternative lifestyles after a Goth leading his girlfriend on a leash was stopped from boarding a bus:

"Our primary concern is passenger safety and while the couple are very welcome to travel on our buses, we are asking that Miss Maltby remove her dog lead before boarding the bus.
"It could be dangerous for the couple and other passengers if a driver had to brake sharply while Miss Maltby was wearing the lead."
Which raises the issue of when does something becomes discrimination. Is there a difference between Goths (who, in this case, are presumably BDSM fetishists or Goreans or something as well; AFAIK, this sort of thing is not a fundamental part of the Goth subculture) leading each other on leashes and, say, some Muslim women covering their faces? Both behaviours are at odds with the accepted social norms. If there is a difference, is it because religious justficiations automatically bear more weight than non-religious ones?

While we're on the subject of multiculturalism in the UK: a childrens' educational CD-ROM based on the story of the Three Little Pigs has been rejected from a government agency's annual awards because it may offend Muslims.

bdsm culture gor goth islam multiculturalism pigs secularism sexual minorities society subculture uk 3

2006/5/19

Police in Durham have raided a BSDM sex cult after hearing that a woman was being held against her will.

The 29-year-old woman is said to have voluntarily attended the sect after finding out about it over the internet.
She later contacted a friend in United States, who then contacted the police, saying she wanted to leave but couldn't as she had burnt her passport and return ticket.
The Kaotians are apparently a group who keep to a master-slave lifestyle based on John Norman's Gor books, a series of BDSM-themed sword-and-sorcery novels published in the 1970s, fallen out of print (allegedly because of feminist groups putting pressure on the publishers), and now eagerly collected by an underground of gimp-masked acolytes across the world, many of whom see them as an ideal for living; in a sense, they've become a sort of Atlas Shrugged for the BDSM set.

I wonder how long, with this publicity, the Gor books are going to stay out of print. I imagine that, in today's post-political-correctness age, when everybody is free to hold whatever opinions they have, the more abrasive and "politically incorrect" the better, something like a kitschy-sounding pulp novel series with BDSM overtones would seem more like a hipster trash-culture collectible, to be filed quasi-ironically alongside one's Russ Meyer DVDs, 1970s European lesbian-vampire movies and copy of Wisconsin Death Trip, than a threat to womens' liberation. (In fact, it could perhaps even be argued that Gor would fit in with the regressive, neo-Hobbesian muscular-nihilist values of our times.) All some entrepreneurial soul would have to do is license the copyrights from the John Norman estate and run off a run, bound in fetishy leather and priced at a premium, and they'd effectively have a licence to print money.

More recently, I saw an unidentified tabloid's take on the story. It's interesting to note that they stressed that Norman was a university lecturer and philosopher, as if to suggest that the pernicious influence of academic/intellectual culture was somehow to blame for such grievious lapses of decency.

(via Boing Boing) bdsm culture gor sex survival values 0

2003/8/1

Much has been said about the recent trend of libertarians turning into (neo-)conservatives as a result of (the collapse of socialism/the collapse of libertarianism/September 11/the aging process in general). I was wondering whether there was a sexual dimension to this trend, with libertarian/progressive kinks giving way to more conservative/reactionary alternative lifestyles without passing through the mainstream. I.e., are we likely to see Heinleinian polyamorists and hot-tubbers becoming Goreans or old-sk00l-Mormon-style polygamists en masse?

gor libertarianism neoconservatism politics polyamory sex 0

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