Life & Wisdom Quote by John Norman

A “slave ring” is doing a lot of work here: it’s not a plot detail so much as a worldview compressed into a piece of jewelry. Norman frames coercion as “occasionally beneficial,” a sly rhetorical move that launders domination through the language of therapy and self-improvement. The phrase “taste of” is equally calculated. It suggests experimentation, a dabble, a controlled encounter with subordination rather than a violent system. That softens the brutality while keeping its charge, making the idea easier to entertain as fantasy and harder to challenge as politics.

The “Gorean way” is the key bit of stagecraft. By attributing the claim to an invented culture, Norman borrows the authority of anthropology: don’t blame the author, blame the natives. It’s a familiar tactic in speculative fiction, but here it functions as plausible deniability for a very specific sexual ideology. The line doesn’t argue; it presumes. “Is thought to be” removes an agent, turning a patriarchal decree into ambient common sense.

“Even the exalted free woman” completes the mechanism. The hierarchy is acknowledged only to be overridden: no amount of status exempts women from the purported corrective of being marked as property. That’s the subtextual project of the Gor books in miniature: reasserting gender essentialism by presenting submission as women’s hidden baseline and male dominance as a natural, even healthful, reset button. In the context of 1960s-70s backlash currents around feminism and sexual liberation, it reads less like world-building and more like counter-programming dressed as adventure.