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1.0 out of 5 stars
Repellant wish fulfillment, Nov 15 2000
By A Customer
In "Dancer of Gor", a shy librarian, who studies bellydancing between the stacks after hours, is kidnapped by slavers from the wild planet of Gor. Somehow frozen in a state resembling the Hyborian Age of Robert E. Howard's "Conan" books (and every sword and sandal tale ever told), Gor forces its men to become warriors while the women become "living jewels of desire". On that "wild counter-earth", Doreen not only becomes a slave, but her dancing makes her the local star, even though (as with all slaves) her individual situation approximates a souvenir brought back from a long trip. Whereas modern bellydancers have stressed how liberating and empowering the dance is, that images of slave girls in gauzy skirts is just a Hollywood myth, Gor creator John Norman buys into the myth completely, and Doreen's dancing is only one of the services she is forced to offer as a slave. Driven into exile by an un-wanted competitor, Doreen finds herself in the forefront of war between competing city-states on Gor. For reasons not made quite clear, Doreen's dancing makes her a crucial factor in a massive Gorean civil war - but she remains too much of a slave to extract any power from that position.I'm ashamed to admit I read "Dancer" - ashamed less from the book's purportedly hot subject matter, but because of how cold and unarousing a book it really is. The brutal treatment typical of slaves in the Gor books, and especially in "Dancer" is little better than that given to animals, and given the pleasure they offer Gor's men, doesn't say anything about that world's male population either. (This is supposed to be a wild and adventurous version of our world, but Gorean men manage to go to extremes for a pitifully shorter and less erotic coupling than paler and weaker Earthmen would aspire to) Not even the author's emphasis on bellydancing - which he assures us really is about female submission - seems to bring out the dance's sexier attributes. But the worst conceit is Doreen herself. Enamored with the idea of those days of yore (when women were women), Norman crafts a tale of a modern woman's descent into submission. Doreen though, is no spice-girl, and begins the story waiting for her chains. Pondering, if not longing for those days of yore, from the very first page, Doreen is already a slave at the outset. When an advanced party of Gorean scouts first meets her, their leader rhetorically asks Doreen if she's a "modern woman". You've got to wonder how a guy who can cross the gulf of worlds and culture can mistake the timid Doreen for one of those modern women who "destroy men". Unfortunately, Norman robs Doreen of the pretension of being the sort of modern women that Gor-slavers and our own misogynists were meant to break. As a lone and friendless (even among her fellow student-dancers) librarian with time to kill, Doreen is far from the man-destroying modern woman so despised (and prized) by the slavers. Norman's error is in confusing intelligence with strength, which says more about him than bellydancing heroine. Doreen is smart - her slave visions are out of library books and not movies - but submits to the slave collar with little problem. Her smarts however dampen the fun, as she calmly describes the ordeals of being a slave almost as if they were occurring to someone else, and that "other" person doesn't seem worth Doreen's efforts. I've heard all of the canned diatribes about white male wish fullfillment, but never believed there might be something to it until I read this book.
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by John Norman
by John Norman
by John Norman
by John Norman
by John Norman
