I Swear to Gor

"Gor": the only series of fantasy novels bold enough to put women where they belong: tied to the front of a Viking boat in space.

There are certain groups of people on the Internet who are alive simply because they're too stupid to die. These subhuman clumps of fleshy waste product survive in a orbital meltdown that is their twisted view of reality, convinced that the bizarre neurological spasms occurring in their brain every two seconds dictate how reality "should" be, despite all diametrically opposite indications from the world around them. The most infamous group of such mental minefields are the furries, a close-knit association of people who would truly and honestly enjoy engaging in anal intercourse with a six-foot tall humanoid skunk that has an eyepatch and probably pilots a spaceship. I'm aware that roughly three or four of you fortunate souls out there may not be familiar with "the furry culture," so allow me to ruin every good impression you had of the human race in general by describing these exciting and dynamic creatures: they're insane. That's about all there is to it folks, and if I started going into depth about the furry "lifestyle" which involves jacking off to images of 300-foot tall female barnyard animals with penises the size of metropolitan city buses, I wouldn't have enough room to make fun of a fresh, new, and exciting group of Internet shitclowns that we here at Something Awful have been woefully neglecting over the past three years: the followers of Gor.

As a smart, witty, handsome, and incredibly charming individual, you may be asking yourself, "but Rich 'Lowtax' Kyanka, what is this 'Gor' thing anyway? And if I'm supposed to be asking myself a question, why am I directing it towards you?" Well I guess you're just not as smart, witty, handsome, and incredibly charming as you thought you were. Also you're gay and afraid to come out of the closet and tell your parents. The whole "World of Gor" thing began in 1967 when John Norman, a distinguished filthy old man who purchased a mail-order Ph. D. in the respectable field of Philosophy from Columbia University on Mars, wrote the groundbreaking novel "The Tarnsman of Gor," which was groundbreaking in the fact that it contained 1,452 pages and weighed nearly 700 pounds, buckling concrete and requiring a government permit to legally own. "The Tarnsman of Gor" was a revolutionary book at the time, encouraging men to break free from the shackles of society and its rigid "rules" that suggested males should not use women as large paperweights and jacks to hoist up their monster truck when changing tires. The universe of Gor is a place where men are men, boys are smaller men, and women serve the same function as Christmas tree decorations except the neighbors won't give you weird looks when you fuck them repeatedly. To learn a little bit about the mysterious land of Gor, let's examine a quote from author John Norman, master of philosophy and Gor-related history:

Gor is a continent in science fiction. Many may wish it did not exist, but it is there. It is not hard to find, really. Just look for a world that lies a thousand degrees north of monothink, a thousand degrees east of orthodoxy, a thousand degrees west of ideological conformity, a continent far from the placid waters of predictable mediocrity, a different world, one real, one like no other, one beyond the familiar world’s horizon, one emergent from far, tumultuous, untamed seas, a world alert to deep currents, which listens to secret whispers, which wears stars in her hair.

We can figure out a lot by examining this excerpt. For example, we can instantly assume that John Norman has severe mental issues and apparently wants to have sex with an entire planet, which may be okay for somebody like Galacticus but probably isn't the best thing for a 200-year old man who writes books about giant birds and semi-naked men for a living. The majority of the Gor series, which is composed of several billion novels and has been translated to at least one language, revolves around a mild mannered character named "Tarl Cabot," a liberal arts teacher who was abducted by UFOs during a camping trip; you know, just like Dr. Professor John Z. Norman Esq.'s life only with significantly less anal probes. The flying saucer transported Professor Cabot to an enchanting and magical world named "Gor," and the series details the epic struggle between the Goreans (like the Koreans, only not Korean) and the Kurii (evil furries with spaceships). As an interesting side note, Norman claims that many famous Earth creatures such as the Yeti, the Sasquatch, Grendel, and Otis Nixon are all Kuriis who got stranded here when their intergalactic love boat ran into New Jersey or whatever. Watching over (and presumably betting on) this exciting conflict lays the Priest-Kings, a group of magical beings who make sure the Gorean-Kurriian war abides by certain governmental standards which include such obvious rules as "metal armor is not allowed except for helmets and small shields (bucklers)" and "mechanized transport of any kind is forbidden." If you break any of their strict rules, then the Priest-Kings will light you on fire and then send an exploding anthrax-filled Pick-Me-Up Bouquet to your family members.

One of the many Gor slave positions. You must be white trash in order to do this correctly.

This is all highly wonderful and simply the epitome of science fiction writing, but I'm truly excited to inform you that the best is still to come. You see, the fantabulous world of Gor revolves around a very very very very long and very very very very detailed set of rules explaining that 99.9% of all women should be slaves. Dr. John "Bates" Norman NYPD may claim that the planet of Gor revolves around the sun, but in reality the planet revolves around a highly complex and technologically advanced hierarchy of male dominance. Many of the primitive Gorean machines are not powered by gasoline but instead by the vaginal fluid of submissive women who are trapped underneath a quilt and chained to a large boulder while a strong, burly, manly man hits them with an outrageously large Spiked Log of Eroticism. Need some proof? Well feast on this colorful essay about the world of Gor, written by somebody who has entirely too much time and pent up sexual frustration:

Slave females are expected to use all of their abilities to please their masters. Since one of the most pleasurable things a man and woman can do together is have sex, slaves are used often for sexual purposes. On Gor, a woman subjected to sexual use as a slave is not permitted to hold back or inhibit herself in any way. Surprisingly to the Terran, but not to the Gorean, the slave female finds that she cannot help but respond deeply and powerfully to the use of a master: her biological tendency to submission, when allowed to manifest itself, rewards her with extraordinary pleasure in sexual use and sexual drives far beyond what the free woman can experience. Gorean slave girls have been known to break their own bones on the bars of their cages trying to touch a man when they have been secured for a long time.

This exotic world of misogyny and male dominance is every science fiction nerd's wet dream; in the world of Gor, women throw themselves all over the nearest 20-sided die rolling scrawny outcast nerd with a broadsword! Gor is so much better than Earth because on Gor you get to fight for virtues and stab evil creatures with glowing magic poles while buying slave women who cater to your every whim and don't turn you down like Betsy Hilman did in the high school junior dance when everybody laughed at you and then you spilled punch on your pants and ran home crying and your mom laughed at you because she was drunk out of her mind and they'll all pay oh yes they will pay. To further push the boundaries of this already leaky, pus-filled envelope which should be marked "return to sender" at the most convenient chance, each Gor book cover features an embarrassingly goofy man swinging some large object on the top of a mountain while various scantily-clad slave women lay at his feet hoping that he'll drop a pound of two of salami from his pants and into their awaiting mouths. No sane creature who squirted out of some broad's egg sac would ever take such a retarded, inconsequential, misogynistic bunch of crap book seriously, would they? Well if you thought "no" then you've obviously never been on the Internet before and should probably ingest some mind-altering drugs to prepare you for the shocking fake world of bizzaro-reality here online.

AARGH! NO! I HATE YOU, GOR!!!

To some particularly fragile nutjobs on the Internet, once again the line between fantasy and reality becomes as fuzzy as their last memory of lifting up their 600-pound pale Slim Jim gut and actually viewing their own penis without the aid of a hydraulic lift and a series of NASA cameras. Thousands of dedicated online fuckbags have spent the last decade ironing out the kinks of the kinky "Gor D/s" scene (which either stands for "Gor Dominant / submissive" or "Gor Dumb Shits"), which is some kind of retarded bondage / dominance thing that combines the beauty of 1960's science fiction novels, sex, and Internet chat rooms. I honestly can't think of any mixture more disturbing and worthless than this, except possibly tons of napalm and the local Lee's Summit grade school.

As in Scientology, what was once a series of books penned by a hack writer bent on gaining fame and fortune has now been converted into a fake religion of sorts, bringing thousands of mentally disturbed individuals across the globe together and onto IRC channels where they can use a whole bunch of bracket keys when describing their sexual relationship to another bloated lard Twinkie on the same channel. If you don't believe me yet, perhaps this helpful basic guide to Gor-ing on the Internet will help you out:

The visible manifestation of slavery on Gor could be something as subtle as how a woman wore her hair, or something as overt as a black iron collar hammered onto her throat. Online, it is the lower-case reference. (And to some extent the use of third-person speech. See above.) Some slaves online will also "collar," or put into brackets, the capitallized initial of her master’s name (or the name he uses). Curly braces {} or squared [ ] are of no real difference, although some slaves have suggested that {D} signifies a "virtual" relationship and [D] signifies a real-time (rt) one.

Wasn't that helpful? Now you know how to address your friends and family online when you've become a slave to "-={[pSyK0_666]}=-" in the chatroom "#hotgoraction"! If you're some stupid, weak, senseless woman who really wants to hook up with an overweight, bearded Internet Gor geek douche bag who lives in a room that consists of four plasterboard walls and an anime wallscroll, then you'll be happy to know there are plenty of submissive Gor resources to teach you dippy dames how to act around your man! Take this helpful hint for example:

Ownership is total. You cannot kinda own someone, any more than you can be kinda pregnant. Leasing a slave is not the same thing as owning a slave. (Example: if you lease a house, you can act as an owner of it, but there is a higher authority that actually does *own* the house. It can be removed at any time by the bank or homeowner, and thus, you have no power over them in that respect). By the same token, a slave who has limits, such as being married, that would inhibit the Master from having full and complete power over her, is being leased. The marriage is the actual owner, and the Master is borrowing her, working within the confines of her owner's (husband's) restrictions, knowing someone else has ultimate authority. But it isn't ownership, unless he has the consent and power over her spouse as well. Even if the Master chooses not to *utilize* the power he has... the fact that he is limited and is restricted diminishes the claim to possession.

Hey! You're kinda dumb! I mean granted, I don't expect too much intellectual discussion from a group of people who want to be slave women and abide by a set of rules written in a series of fantasy books from the 1960s and then adapted to fit the Internet 's AOL chatrooms, but it nonetheless is disturbing to witness a whole community of people dedicated to wearing domination collars and submitting to people with bellies the size of mature bulls. The important point here is that we, the citizens of the Internet, must be aware that the D/s fans of Gor are alive and well, hiding in the various nooks and crannies of the Internet, and if we don't prepare ourselves for them then we might run the risk of allowing them to step out into the limelight and falsely believe that their fucked up behavior is just as "acceptable" as being a furry and spending weeks airbrushing a griffon fucking a moose. If you encounter anybody attempting to push a Gor book upon your person, please choke them to death with their own submission collar and run to the nearest exit, which will probably be blocked by furries attempting to jack off to promotional posters of "Finding Nemo."

HOLLA BACK YOUNGIN

Ryan "OMGWTFBBQ" Adams kinda sorta paying attention. You see, I'm reading the new Harry Potter book to find out who really did die in the end. Zack has been telling me it's Dumbledore, but dammit, I hope not. Dumbledore kicks all kindsa ass, like he was a machine that was made just for kicking all the asses out there. So please excuse me if I'm a bit distracted.

To continue on with my distracted state, I decided to make a double upped version of the goldmine today. The subjects: "create slogans that aren't very effective" and "spoofing Microsoft's new ad campaign."

Oh wow, Harry didn't get expelled! That was a close one, eh? Screw you sideways Fudge.

Click here to find out who really dies!.

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)