Cover

Imaginative Sex

John Norman

No Fantasy, Please, We’re Americans

A Foreword by a Feminist

(Pat Califia, Only Briefly Tempted to Use a Pseudonym)

John Norman is a bad boy, okay? He’s a sexist pig. And I own just about everything he’s ever published; it’s some of my most consistently rewarding jackoff material. So it’s with great relish that I agreed to write a foreword to his opus Imaginative Sex, which is a sort of nonfiction companion to the series of science fiction novels he wrote about Gor, a world where Muscular Men Wield Swords and women have a lot of work to do—kneeling, fetching cups of wine, wearing skimpy outfits, listening to surprisingly pedantic lectures from their Warlord Masters about their True Feminine Slave Natures, and (oh yes) coming tons and tons.

It’s very easy to pick apart the politics of the Gor series (and this book as well). Purchasing and reading Norman’s work makes me feel like I’m doing something really naughty, like smuggling a barbecued pork sandwich into a vegetarian potluck. (But aren’t you supposed to feel that way when you’re reading erotic materials? It’s delicious, that guilty feeling of doing what you want to do and really enjoy, rather than doing what you ought and should.)

Yes, the work is unrelievedly heterosexual. Gor contains no male or female homosexuality; men bond with one another by passing around their lovely Kajira. Norman posits a world in which biology is supposedly allowed to dictate the social and sexual roles which men and women will play—dominant and warlike, submissive and servile, respectively, in case you’ve been on some other planet yourself for the last three decades. I have been tempted more than once to staple together the pages of the Gor novels which lapse into diatribe. It’s almost as bad as reading the Marquis de Sade. It’s not that I mind a spot of philosophy now and then; but when it repeatedly interrupts the flow of the bondage and discipline—I mean, the flow of the narrative—a girl gets annoyed. But tops who write S/M literature have a tendency to top the reader—it just comes with the territory.