Read-Along-A-Gor: Fighting Slave of Gor, chapter Five

 

Chapter Five: I am taught to pour wine; I am punished; I hear of the Market of Tima

 

(In which we read, Fighting Slave of Gor)

 

 

Sometime has gone by and Jason is well into his training now. His hair has grown longer and he is being groomed to be ‘pretty’ as far as women are concerned:

 

"You look nice this evening, Jason," said the Lady Gina. 

 

"Thank you, Mistress," I said. I now wore a short, silk tunic, white, trimmed with red. My hair, longer now, though I had worn it long before, was combed back and tied behind my head with a white ribbon.

 

Notice how Jason is being essentially feminised. The soft silk of his tunic, the pretty red trimming and the white ribbon in his hair are all very feminine touches. We can assume the aversion therapy, punishing him every time he has sexual thoughts, is working, and he is now being trained to serve a free woman as a kajira might. The classes take the form of one of the two slave girls playing the role of a free woman and judging Jason’s performance throughout, while the other slave girl supervises with a whip. 

 

"Again, Jason," said the Lady Gina, "more softly, more deferentially." 

 

"Wine, Mistress?" I again asked. 

 

"Yes, Slave," said Lola. 

 

"Good," said the Lady Gina. "Now, pour." 

 

Carefully I poured the wine into the cup before Lola. 

 

"You are pouring it too swiftly, Slave," said Lola. I looked to the Lady Gina. Surely I was not pouring it too swiftly. 

 

"The whim of the Mistress is everything," said the Lady Gina.

 

The service is feminine too, with an emphasis on slow, gentle, deferential movements. In this Jason is being taught not to appear threatening to a woman. Free women fear men, for they know that men are stronger than them, and so they seek the reassurance that their silk slave is essentially emasculated. Lola of course is beginning to be an absolute bitch to Jason, finding fault with everything he does. Lady Gina on the other hand continues to be fair and supportive of Jason. She appears to be essentially a good person, as far as slavers can be, and Jason is lucky to have her as a senior trainer.

 

Jason is not alone in the class. There are other silk slaves, all Gorean males, and they too seem cowed and emasculated by their training. There is a sense of some rivalry between these silk clad men. 

It’s worth noting that Lola is a bitch to all the male silk slaves, but particularly Jason, and of course he responds by trying desperately to relate to her in some positive manner, to please her, and to blame himself for her unreasonable behaviour.

 

I did not know why Lola so hated me. She seemed to hold me in an incredible contempt. She lost no opportunity to belittle or strike me. I had tried not to look upon her. I had tried, constantly, to respect her, and I had reminded myself, a thousand times a day, that she was, as I, a person. Yet, to be honest, I was not the only slave to whom she was petty and vicious. She was not popular in the pens, either with the slaves or keepers. I knew she was a person. Yet it was hard not to see her as a girl, and a slave. At times I suspected even the Lady Gina might be growing impatient with her.

 

Lady Gina continues to go up in my estimation, as she too realises what Lola is like, and yet she knows it is detrimental to her training programme if she intervenes too readily. Despite this, she does forbid Lola’s crueller passions during the training, and we are reminded that Lola fears her mistress.

 

"Twenty strokes!" cried Lola to Tela. Tela looked at the Lady Gina. 

 

"One will do," said the Lady Gina. Lola suddenly turned white. "Do not forget, Lola," said the Lady Gina, "that you are not really free. Do not grow pretentious." 

 

"Yes, Mistress," said Lola, frightened. It pleased me to see the fear in the female slave.

 

Jason can withstand the punishments from the girls reasonably well. A common Gorean trope that we see here is that a woman is incapable of doing serious damage to a man, with her whip. 

 

Tela, being a woman, could not strike me overly hard with the whip. She had only a woman's strength. A woman cannot punish a man too efficiently with a whip. A man, on the other hand, with his strength, may punish a woman terribly with it, should he choose to do so.

 

But later on, when Lola contrives to make it appear that Jason has spilled the wine during his serve (she knocked it over with sleight of hand) she has the excuse to demand that Jason is whipped by a man. The difference is pronounced:

 

I lay on the stones of the cell, naked, in blood, my wrists and ankles chained. I could scarcely move my body. I had received five strokes of the snake, wielded by a man.

 

Lady Gina had seen Lola knock the wine over and blame Jason in the process, but again she didn’t want to countermand Lola’s authority, except to reduce the whip punishment down to five strokes of the snake. Lola’s original choice of twenty strokes of the snake might well have killed Jason. She visits the injured kajirus in his cell and there seems to be some affection and concern on Lady Gina’s part. When she discovers that Jason is oblivious to why Lola is treating him like this, she tries to make him understand.

 

"Why does Lola so hate me?" I asked. 

 

"You are different from the other men she has known," said the Lady Gina. "She finds you despicable. You do not master the slave in her." 

 

"She is a person," I said. "She has feelings." 

 

"Of course she has feelings," said the Lady Gina. "She has the deep, exciting, profound feelings of a woman who knows herself a slave.”

 

We get a sense that Lady Gina is mystified that Jason can be so credulous. A sense probably shared by many of the readers at this point. Does he not understand the motivation behind Lola’s hatred? Obviously not. He is still thinking as an overly conditioned Earth male. He is fighting the truth that is laid out before him. Lady Gina puts it in black and white for him. 

 

"Women are slaves," said the Lady Gina. "They long for their masters. That is far deeper than your myths and political inventions, regardless of their expediency in your form of society." 

 

"How can you speak in such a fashion?" I demanded. "You yourself are a woman!"

 

Jason’s remark is a cutting one, for Lady Gina has an inferiority complex when it comes to herself. She feels she is not sufficiently feminine for men to take a sexual interest in her, and this has probably driven her to the lifestyle she currently has. 

 

"Look upon me, Jason," she said. "See my size and strength, my severity. I am not as other women. I am for all practical purposes a man, but one trapped by some cruel trick of nature in a woman's body. It is painful, Jason. That is perhaps why I hate both men and women so."

 

There is an honesty here that again suggests a connection of some kind between slaver and slave. Lady Gina is capable of opening up her innermost feelings to Jason. She wants him to survive on Gor, and she understand he is crippled by the way he has been brought up. When she initially assumes Jason wants to take revenge on Lola she is delighted, but that changes to disappointment when she finds it isn't case. 

 

"Why did you not point out that Lola had spilled the wine?" she asked. 

 

"You know that she did it?" I asked. 

 

“Of course," she said. "Her small hand, though quick, was not so quick as my eye. Too, your hands, as they were placed on the vessel of wine, could not have struck the cup." 

 

"I did not want you to punish her," I said. 

 

"Good!" she said. "I see you are learning. You wished to reserve her for yourself, that you yourself might later, if the opportunity presented itself, mete out her punishment. Good! You are learning something of being a man." 

 

"I would not have punished her," I said. "I am a man of Earth. A woman is not to be punished no matter what she does." 

 

"How then do you control your women?" she asked. 

 

I shrugged. "We don't," I said.

 

How frustrating this must be for the Lady Gina. We can see she finds Jason ‘pretty’ and no doubt wishes he could be more dominant, because she, like all Gorean women, secretly desires strong dominant men. Jason’s weakness in this regards undermines his attractiveness to her.  

 

She is also growing very tired of Lola’s attitude in the pens. Not only is it unfair (and she appears to be a fair woman in most regards) but it probably undermines the effectiveness of the training programme. We sense that Lola may be in for a rude shock if she continues in this way.

 

"Lola should not have attempted to embroil you in difficulties with me," she said. "The slave oversteps herself. I am growing rather dissatisfied with her performances. She is treading a thin line. I think she is growing too bold, too pretentious. The next time she displeases us in the pens, even in the least way, I think that I will have her disciplined."

 

Finally, we are teased with the casual mention that women slavers seem quite commonplace on Gor. It is easy to assume that the caste is almost exclusively male, because the business model primarily revolves around enslaving and training women, but it seems that women can play a big part within the caste itself, having no qualms when it comes to enslaving their own sex: 

 

"Rest now, Jason," she said. "Tomorrow you are to be appraised by woman slavers from the market of Tima."

 

We shall meet one of these women in the next chapter, and learn more about the hierarchy within the slave markets of Vonda.