Life & Wisdom Quote by John Norman

Norman’s line isn’t coy; it’s a sales pitch for domination dressed up as discernment. The split between “own a woman” and having her “within the bonds of an excellent mastery” performs a rhetorical upgrade: mere possession is framed as crude, while “mastery” is elevated into a craft, even an ethical standard. That move matters because it tries to convert a naked power claim into something like competence. If ownership sounds archaic, mastery sounds like expertise. The sentence launders coercion through vocabulary that implies care, skill, and superiority.

The subtext is that a woman’s autonomy is not just negotiable but irrelevant. She’s positioned as an object that can be mismanaged by amateurs and properly handled by the “excellent” master. “Bonds” does double duty: it hints at literal restraint while also evoking social contract language, as if bondage were simply a relationship framework with rules and quality control. The adjective “excellent” is the tell. It implies a hierarchy among dominators, shifting the moral question from “Should anyone be owned?” to “Who does it well?”

Context sharpens the intent. John Norman is best known for the Gor novels, a long-running erotic-fantasy universe built around formalized female submission and male authority. Read in that frame, the quote functions as internal propaganda: it normalizes the premise (women as property) and offers a refinement for readers to aspire to, turning domination into an identity with standards. It’s not just erotics; it’s ideology with a gloss of etiquette.