Submissives

Ranting time...and what are blogs if nothing else than a way to rant in public and hope no one reads it although secretly hope that the right people actually do read it?

I don't understand "submissives." I don't WANT to understand submissives. Most women in SL Gor self-identify as submissives. I can understand and appreciate that. I have my own understanding of what being an overall submissive is (and I've shared it on this blog a few times), but it's clearly not the definition of choice of most submissives in SL Gor. As far as I can tell, "submissive" in SL means to be intellectual lazy, helpless and wanting to obviate all responsibility for themselves and their life choices. They'd rather pawn that off on someone else. Essentially, being a submissive in SL means to be an overgrown baby. Apparently, that's a good thing.

And even if that's the definition (or even if I'm wrong), I have no problem with that. Everyone has their emotional and psychological problems. I've got plenty myself that probably make me appear childish and selfish, so I really can't be throwing rocks at that type of behavior. Where my problem occurs is when women confuse roleplay with reality and assume that because my male characters portray dominant personalities and react well to submissives...they assume that I personally am a dominant individual and am actively looking for submissives to dominate in my normal life. Ergo, them.

This can't be farther from the truth. First of all, my characters are fake. They exist in an imaginary roleplay world that are subject to the rules of John Norman's very stupid writing and the rule sets contained within them. My characters have to be callous and "dominant" because Norman says they must be. That's not reflective of my actual personality simply because...shocker...I don't live in Gor. I am a product of my environment and my environment says I must respect all people and treat them as equals. So I do, and more importantly, I want to treat all people as equals.

Second, I'm not looking for a relationship in SL Gor outside of someone who can entertain me in roleplay. I find it monumentally stupid to try and find love in a game where people present false depictions of themselves. I understand that this is no different than trying to find a date at a club where a woman is all dolled up and not acting "naturally" because she, too, wants to instantly attract a mate. The only reason I tolerate clubs is, well, it's real so even if the woman is faking it...I might get something tangible out of it like sex or a companion to do fun things on a date with. For an online relationship, I'm simply deluding myself: as long as I can convince myself this person is what I want, I'll stay. Seems rather hollow and superficial to me. I'm not saying I can't do it- it just seems a waste of my time.

And even if I were looking for an actual relationship based on my roleplay interactions, I sure as hell wouldn't want a submissive women. I find the idea of having a "genuine submissive" as a potential mate utterly repulsive. I can interact with them, no problem. But get serious with them? No thanks, not my cup of tea. I'd rather have a woman with a brain who asserts herself. Someone might argue that a submissive can be all those things and assertive...but really, she can't. It's listed within the definition of submissive that she can be assertive, but can't be an assertive person. If she can be all that, then she's not submissive- she's just pretending she is. And I hate people that can't try to be honest with themselves so I wouldn't want to have a relationship with them anyway. On the intimacy front, "submissives" and "me" do not mix- just a fact of life. And those that want to convince me otherwise are largely wasting their breath.

Finally, I think "dominance" and "submission" as state-of-beings is a crock of shit. I consider it something akin to homosexuality. There are certainly a group of people in this world that are inherently and genetically homosexual. No matter what can be said or done, these people will always be attracted to the same sex. Same can be said for bisexuals as well. But there are a group of people who experience the psychological condition of "mimicry." If you put these people around lots of gay people for a long period of time, they will self-identify themselves as gay...and if you took them out of the gay population and put them back in heterosexual communities, they'd self-identify as heteros. You find this exceedingly common in prison populations: inmates have homosexual sex inside the clink to mimic the rules, customs and behavior within prison...but revert to a hetero lifestyle when living in a mixed population. Same thing with SL: when confronted with a paradigm where everyone must be split up into "dominants" and "submissives," women see that submissive box, self-identify with some of those characteristics and then unilaterally decide that they must be all of those characteristics...when they're not.

I don't doubt there are a few genuine submissives in SL Gor. As in people who have an innate tendency to follow and please people. It's just written into their DNA. But I suspect that 99% of the "submissives" out there are actually just sexual submissives who mistake their timidness in the bedroom and sexual relationships to be representative of the rest of their personality. And if you take them out of a sexual relationship, they are confrontational, abrasive and controlling...just like normal human beings. Which is cool. I like normal human beings. I just don't like people who pretend they are something they're not.

The other truth I've learned out there is that most people who roleplay in Gor either do not understand the IC/OOC split...or don't care. They are here for boyfriends and damnit, they're going to get them. Somehow, I end up on their wish list because I can type a complete sentence and can show an original thought from time to time. I have no idea how to disabuse them or get them to ignore me. So...I rant. And this is one of them.

Alright, it's all over now. I will now put myself into that state where I debate whether I should have posted this and whether I should delete it.

Choice

As an aside to the now THREE daily regular readers- I promised posting my story of the Sa-Ta-Tor. That will unfortunately be postponed indefinitely until I figure out what to do with it. Either the roleplay is dead and I need to reconcile my ideal vision of the story with what I have...or I wait until (if ever) it starts up again. Luckily, such projects need no deadlines. They get done when it is time to finish them. Eventually, I'll make a decision but not now. So it will wait in storage as a series of blog drafts, waiting to be published.

I probably did a blog post about this earlier. If I did, who cares? Here it goes again.

Compare these two videos:





In the first talk, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates why choice is a good thing: the more choices you have, the better chance you have at getting something you genuinely want. In the second video, Barry Schwartz demonstrates that infinite choice creates an information crisis: while you get exactly what you want, the cost it took to make the decision actually exceeds the benefit so you're overall WORSE off than you were before.

So why this topic?

Choice creates two sets of problems that interact with one another: why you roleplay and how you achieve that goal.

To create a Gorean community, much attention needs to be placed on the environment. SL, as a program, gives the creator a lot of choice in terms of creating the most authentic environment: build a Mediterranean city, Victorian style, inland city empire, coastal island, whatever. If someone can conceive of it, it can be built. The same goes with clothes, characters and everything else needed to build a Gorean community: SL provides infinite choice so it's absolutely possible to build the "perfect" Gorean community that a person wants.

The problem is that richly detailed environment makes it prohibitively expensive to play that environment. If you want to create an authentic Torvsland sim, you need to have people that fundamentally understand the nuances of a Torvie culture. People have to promote stories and characters that fit within that niche, instead of the generic Gorean man. And this isn't just one person. EVERY person that plays in that environment has to meet some threshold of immersion or else...the detail, nuance and sophistication is lost. Just walk into a scene where someone says, "Hi lulz. I iz Gorean. U r slave?" The mood is instantly broken. So, to keep that level of immersion, the sim has to create a whole rule set and create a system that approves people into the sim ("You must be THIS Gorean to roleplay here"). The more rules a sim has, the more time is needed to learn and understand those rules. More moderators are needed to keep the sim faithful to those rule sets. The more authentic the picture, the more people and time are needed. To actually extract the benefit of getting what you want, you have to pour in a lot of effort that you didn't think was needed. As Barry Schwartz points out, to get to the level of choice that makes you happy, you're worse off in a situation where there was no choice.

And that's a fundamental unsolvable problem for any online roleplay community: roleplay is supposed to be a diversion, not a job. But to get that deeply immersive and rich element, it's prohibitively expensive. Lots of lots of time and effort must be spent. Is it worth spending all that time and effort on what's supposed to be a game? Some people answer this question by making it personal: they use the game to find themselves a suitable real life mate. By raising the stakes, the effort is worth it (people will do a lot for love vs. just fun). Some people compromise their standards so that the benefit exceeds the effort. Most people, though, answer this question by simply just walking away.