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Fourteen years later he has three slaves, all of whom have some college education. "Everything that I have experienced in the intervening years has led me to believe that what [Norman] said is true of a great many women. I have seen, again and again, intelligent, strong-willed women grow happier, more beautiful, less stressed and more contented when made the slaves of men."

There is little question that BDSM scenarios have enormous erotic appeal for many men and women, heterosexual and homosexual alike, so it is not surprising that a fantasy series like Gor would have an enthusiastic following. Goreans take the very popularity of these fantasies, and the power the narrative has to make a willing lifestyle captive of women like sura, as proof of one of their central beliefs: that men and women have been programmed by evolutionary history to be, respectively, naturally dominant and naturally submissive and that people can be truly happy only when they live in accordance with their biological instincts to be either a Master or a slave.

The Gorean Argument, something of a definitive statement by "Marcus of Ar," a major contributor to the Silk and Steel site, says that "the process of evolution has naturally selected for strong, competitive males, and females who were both desirable to such men, and who were in turn attracted to such men." This is a familiar simplification of some currently popular theories in evolutionary psychology, and it has a ring of truth to it, although those most disposed to salivate at that bell are the ones most flattered by it -- namely, strong, competitive men. Even science has its seductive narratives.

Marcus goes on to elaborate his understanding of human evolution: "Weak males would not survive the competitive selection process to reproduce. Females who were not attractive and responsive to strong men would not be selected to reproduce. Therefore, nature being what it is, the non-competitive and unattractive geneaological [sic] lines would fade away and the strong and attractive lines would continue to survive."

There's only one little problem with this idea: Weak males and unattractive females obviously did survive to reproduce; otherwise most of the men in the world today would be George Clooney and most of the women would be Jennifer Lopez (with better clothes). The reason that "mediocre," "ugly" and "wimpy" genes are still around and being expressed in the human population -- and in quantities far greater than Clooney and Lopez genes -- is not, as Marcus later goes on to charge, because the moral constraints of civilization interrupted the marvelous process of winnowing the race toward perfection. It is because human sexual activity and reproductive strategies have always been amazingly elastic and complicated. Even at the dawn of time, it probably wasn't just a matter of bigger and stronger cave men whacking lesser men and dragging their women home by the hair. Female choice and female resistance to sexual control (even if it had to be by means of subterfuge and secrecy) have always played a huge role.

"Males who were unsuited to combat would not live long," Marcus says. "Females who refused to breed with the combative males would not do so, and would not propagate the species."

The scientific and logical errors in this statement are manifold: It assumes that combat was a constant and crucial fact of early human evolution, that if women refused one kind of man they would not mate with others, that the only way for a man to live a long life was to fight with other men, that combat was the sole means of reproductive competition and that submission to her mate's physical dominance was the female's only means of reproductive success. All these ideas are just plain wrong.

Brian Ferguson, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, says the popular idea that our distant past was a sanguinary "war of all against all" is a "fable." Archaeological evidence tells us that deaths by interpersonal violence, especially violent deaths from organized intentional mayhem -- war -- seem to have been far more rare in prehistory than they became later. He cites the case of Japan in particular: "Evidence of violent death goes from .002 percent of approximately 5,000 skeletons from hunter-gatherer times to 10 percent of all deaths in the subsequent agricultural period."

Aggressive domination of man over man, or man over woman, was also not the sole basis of reproductive competition or any guarantee of reproductive success. In fact, being too combative and aggressive could reduce reproductive success, because combat and killing are inherently risky propositions. Not only would warriors get killed themselves, their violent ways made it more likely that they and their women and children would be targeted for retaliation later on. Meanwhile, back at the hearth, chances are the wimps would be having it on with all the widows. Bearing out this scenario are some recent studies of the primitive Yanomamo tribe in South America, showing that war leaders are likely to leave behind fewer surviving children than other men.

Next page | A would-be Master contemplates real-life kidnapping