"whinge"
Meh. The analogy to The Turner Diaries works only halfway.
Yes, they are both Author Tract on the supremacy of one category of people, and thus quite similar. However, TTD is written by an actual nazi who consider white supremacy to be actual moral truth, while Gor is written by a guy who simply consider male supremacy to be a sexy fantasy. As far as I know, he have never argued against equal rights in real life. I have read one book he have written about Real Life... This book is about sexual roleplaying scenarios in Real Life.
A woman playing Damsel In Distress, "kidnapped" by a mighty pirate captain (played by her husband), well, such a scenario does not equal actual kidnapping.
Seriously: Here in Sweden we used to have a political campaign from buerocrats who honestly believed that everyone playing Tabletop RPG are involved in some kind of militant conspiracy against democracy. Don't make the same mistake. :-D
The Turner Diaries: Fiction based on politics. Gor: Fiction based on fantasies. Big difference.
"Sexually frustrated basement dwellers" and, as it turns out, a *hell* of a lot of women, as This Troper discovered somewhat to his surprise when he learned about the real-life Gor culture.
And don't whinge at me about how the male slaves are treated worse. Who cares if the lot of a man in slavery is usually nasty, brutish and short when about one woman in forty, canonically, ends up as a slave and liking it? :rolls eyes:
Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. That way, when you criticize him, you're a mile away and you've got his shoes.
So it is a convenient contrivance that the women slaves actually enjoy a life of sexual servitude. That Uncle Remus style argument doesn't make the the portrayals of women in these books any more acceptable. In this world, women who abstain from sex are perceived as frigid and needing to be taken down a peg. That sort of exploitive scenario is closer to a porn plot than a fantasy story.
Worst still is the gender inequality between slaves. I don't think that female slaves have it any easier then men; a choice between being raped or being forced into hard labour. My concern is that women are repeatedly shown as enjoying the idea of being raped, whereas the male slaves never seem to be all that keen on the hard labour. The enjoyment factor is not only convient for the male readers but it also disguises the core problem; rape is as attrocious as slave labour, but to indulge this series, you must accept it isn't. That is a pretty big ask.
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And here was I, thinking that The Turner Diaries was just going to be some terrible Pirates Of The Caribbean fanfiction. Blargh, I did not need to know of that thing's existence.
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Repulsive, Utterly Repulsive
The Gor novels are quite possibly the most vile thing inflicted upon the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres. Forget what its fans say about the plot or the characters. They're only reading for one thing, the slaves. This series is unique in that the vast majority of its female characters are legally property. If a female isn't a slave in these books, they are uppity straw feminists destined to be dominated and forced into servitude by the two dimensional manly men heroes. The only reason these books sell is because they cater to the sexually frustrated, woman hating basement dwellers that infest sites like Loveshy.com.
And don't whinge at me how "the male slaves are treated worse" That doesn't have any relevance to the fact that this series treats slavery, the act of taking a human being, stripping him or her of all dignity and freedom and lowering them to the level of a sex toy as something honorable. The fact the female slaves are depicted as enjoying such a degrading existance makes it even worse. And the writing itself isn't even that good. You can tell right away that John Norman doesn't have an editor, his prose is dry, redundant, and preachy. It's literature on the same level as The Turner Diaries.