|
Leonidas -> RE: Gorean bashing and Exstensiary service (10/6/2004 2:48:48 PM)
|
Alright, as is often the case when questions about Goreans come up, I find myself in the position of having to set the record straight about some things. It's the downside of being an old guy, I guess, to have to step in when all kinds of cockeyed claims are being made about the way things were, and are.
I've been around the D/s world, actively, since the 1980s. I have a number of friends who have been involved much longer, back to the early 1960s. I don't have any first hand knowledge, nor have I ever read of, a group that espoused a "natural order" theory of D/s prior to 1967 when the first Gor books were published, as has been stated on this thread. In asking around some to the really old timers who have been around longer than I have, I can't find any living memory about such a group or groups, or any literature about the same that anyone can site.
The earliest groups who called themselves "Goreans" that I know about for sure appeared in the late 1970s. Echoing what occured much earlier in leather culture, the earliest "Goreans" were motorcycle clubs, though the earliest Goreans were not gay men. They were men who identified primarily with the values of strength, independance, freedom, honor and D/s sexuality that they found in the books. I say that these are the earliest groups that I know about "for sure" because I have spoken with a few of them. Similar "Biker culture" Gorean groups still exist, and are thriving. One group in Ohio even invented a distinct language for its "clan".
In the 1980s, here in Los Angeles, specialized D/s groups, both for fem dom only and male dom only started to appear, and some clubs started having nights devoted to one or the other. This may have been going on earlier in other places, but I have no first hand knowledge of of it. These groups didn't espouse any kind of a "natural order" theory of D/s that tried to say that domination by the other sex was invalid. They were just "birds of a feather" type groups that formed to enjoy fellowship with the like-minded. The Gorean group that I was first a part of was a splinter from one of these groups.
The term "Natural Order" when applied to D/s or Goreans doesn't appear anywhere in the Gor books as far as I know, and wasn't in use among any of the early (70s - 80s) vintage Gorean groups either to the best of my knowledge. I am very aware of the first place I saw the term used. It was in an essay on a website for an IRC channel (chat room) called the Silk&Steel in the late 1990s. The two founders of that chatroom went by the names Bear- and Zeb online, and I think I can say without too much fear of contradiction that one or the other of them coined the term as it relates to D/s or Goreans. So, representations to the contrary on this thread notwithstanding, I'd have to see some hard evidence or corrobrated accounts by people who are old enough to know that the orgins of the "Natural Order" theory of D/s pre-dates the publication of the Gor books, or, for that matter, is anything but an invention that originated in online circles.
The last thing that I will say is that someone who says that adopting some kind of ideological male supremecy view of the world called "Natural Order" is the only "real" thing that can be gleaned from the Gorean experience, and that everything else is role-play has missed just about anything of value that could be gleaned from the way of life that I've pursued over the last 16 years. On the contrary, "Natural Order" as it has been explained in this thread is an unrealistic, myopic view of the world that I think could only have spawned and been nurtured in the fantasyland that is online interaction. Goreans do believe in biological determinism, as I have tried to explain earlier, but it's an informed view that isn't blind to the realities of the world that exists outside of chatrooms.
I hope that I have managed to clear things up a little here. If I have said anything blatently inaccurate, and anyone has some evidence to the contrary, please, by all means, say that I'm full of shit, and back it up. I don't like writing posts like this. I think that they the written equivelent of cleaning up horse-shit after a parade. What I would like even less though, is having to explain again and again in conversations with anyone that might have read this thread that I'm not a male-supremisist ideologue because I identify myself as a Gorean.
|
|
|
|
