Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/26/swipe-files-cover-art-refere.html
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A bit sad that he had a real life reference for how the breasts would behave in that pose and instead drew a couple of softballs just standing on her chest.
Not that I’d expect your average Gor reader to know what breasts look like in real life. It always struck me as a series laser focused for the most redpill incel crowd, judging from the couple of stores I’ve read from it over the years. The overarching message of the series seems to be “It would be too hard to talk with women and not worth the effort since they’re so weak and dumb, it would be much better to conquer and own them instead, which they will always prefer in the end anyway.”
Or maybe another way to think about the series is as Romance for Men. Might explain why there are so damn many books in the series.
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“Unpublished Gor Books” is a dig at that crowd.
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Okay, fine. Someone’s going to repost Houseplants of Gor, so we may as well get it out of the way now.
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I found most of Tarnsman of Gor to be an enjoyable pulp read. So I picked up another book in the series. After reading about a quarter of the way into Outlaw of Gor, I now realize that there is a huge fan base that took away something very different from the adventures of the first book. The series focuses on some pretty twisted sexual fantasies that I frankly don’t see the appeal. It always saddens me a bit when a book turns into the author’s exploration of their fetish. And a rather morally dubious fetish at that.
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Lilly!!!
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The MST3K skewering of Outlaw is definitely worth the watch.
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I’ve heard anecdotally from booksellers that women made up about half of the Gor audience.
They thought it was a comedy series.
Mrs. Moses!
“You do not dare post me!” laughed the link.
“You will be posted,” said Bother.
“Do not post me!” wept the link.
…And so on.
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In a way it is, but there is an obvious difference in between soft rape fantasies which put the reader in the place of the fashionably ravished and ravishing victim and Gor style ones, where the point of view is that of the aggressor, even though in-story very little actual violence is being used.
Don’t know if it stayed that way - I came to Gor as a teenager for the pulp fantasy and stayed far too long when the series degraded into even more boring lecturing about the author’s pet previews and pet fetishes. Kinda like David Sim and Heinlein.
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The client wanted softballs, so he gave them softballs.
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Anecdotes are not data. Considering that women are seen as “dominating the conversation “ if they talk 30% of the time, I’d take that claim with a grain of salt. In real life fetish groups, the demand for female submissives generally is greater than the supply…
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Though I wonder if this couldn’t be true. The first Gor books where generic fantasy with a sci fi element, where slave girls got some empathy, were even set free. Then it got progressively worse, with, as far as I can remember, with straightforward rape scenes, which came to the point rather directly. That’s was when I dropped the series. (As a completist, I usually hang on longer than I actually enjoy a series) And just to see what they are up to now, I downloaded one of the latest books and checked that. Lots and lots and lots of verbal foreplay “I am gonna whip you” and “my master is so manly” role playing eerily similar to softcore Romance novels targeted at women. Kinda reminiscent of Shades of Gray, actually.
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That pretty much sums it up in the most succinct way possible.
You have to hand it to Jack Palance, The man was firmly ensconced in the “never turn down a check” school of acting
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I have no data whether that anecdote is true, but one’s literature is not necessarily representative of what one actually wants in life. I like Batman, I like the idea of being Batman, but don’t really want to fight a dozen ninjas/mobsters/evil robots IRL.
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It’s possible. Witness Anne Rice’s non vampire series books, which I vaguely remember being about spanking “unwilling” heroines with every possible object, had a mostly female fan base, I believe. For Gor though I just doubt that it’s 50% or more, based on the memories of booksellers alone.
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Also, I think her quote on the subject was something along the lines of: When I wrote the vampire novels, no one assumed I was a vampire, but when I wrote the erotic novels, people had all sorts of assumptions.
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