Why Be a Sex Slave?

This July, we’re heating things up with Sex-Rated: The VICE Guide to Sex in India. Come with us as we dive deep into Indian sexuality, as well as cherry-pick some of the best videos and stories about sex from VICE around the world. Read more here.

My brother made me a Yahoo chat ID when I was 16 or 17 years old. I used to go to the Science chatrooms because I was preparing for medical entrance tests at the time. And the chatrooms introduced me to a lot of new things.

After I discovered porn, BDSM to be specific, I had tons of questions. But I had no one to confide in. So I asked people in the chatrooms and discovered an entire world of role-play and fantasy fan-fiction.

I discovered Gor sex months after I found about about BDSM, when I stumbled upon channels on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) devoted to John Norman’s Chronicles of Gor, a series of approximately 30 fantasy novels in which men enslave women. In the discussions around Norman’s philosophy, they talked of a parallel world (Counter Earth) where slavery is a given. In his books [female slave or slave-girls] are called Kajiri. There are only male masters and female slaves.

Gor [and its philosophy] hugely shaped my initial years in the BDSM lifestyle. The role-plays were only textual, and all my role-plays used hardcore poetry.

I understood myself, and my sexuality, better after indulging in Gorean role-plays. I am a submissive. I enjoy pleasing my master, an authoritative figure. The digital copies of the books were gifted to me by an American in one of the role-playing channels online. He was almost 60 years old and wanted me to read the text so that I could differentiate between the sexual fantasy and the underlying philosophy.

There is something very appealing and raw about being treated as a slave. It is sensual and liberating for me. When you surrender control, in a way you’re saying, “I am no longer responsible about adhering to social norms of sexuality”. I am not shirking from my responsibility, but I am temporarily surrendering it to someone I trust. Some might say that this potentially pressurises the dominant partner to take extra responsibility and exercise extra caution. However, it also demonstrates my trust in my master. The amount of trust that goes into this kind of surrender is what ultimately leads to the feeling of liberation.

I was born in a really small town in India. And I believed and internalised, “Achi ladkiyan sex nahi karti [good girls don’t have sex]”. Role-play gave me a way to express myself in a safe environment. My first sexual encounter was with a teacher, when I was 17. We ended up mutually masturbating. I believe whatever lies between your legs doesn’t matter. It’s what happens between your ears.

Porn didn’t make much sense to me. Role-play, on the other hand, did. Some members of the BDSM lifestyle community judged me for my involvement in Gor role-plays. They thought I must have self-esteem issues and told me that Gor was wrong. But [at that time], I enjoyed it.

There is a lot of ritual around Gor. For example, there are dance competitions. And we celebrate Christmas etc. I began to infuse bits of Indian cultural context during my role-plays, either as a sexual concubine, or as a domestic slave. I noticed there weren’t too many Indians [in the community]. And in the past 10 years, I have come to be known for this, in the [BDSM] community.

For the role-plays, I had no context in how western dance moves work. So when I wrote my role-play dances, the only moves I could think of either came from classical Indian dance or at best a very shallow imitation of Bollywood dance. My challenge [as an Indian-origin Kajiri], was also different, because I was expected to make the descriptions sensually provocative—of which I had no experience, like most Indians. So the dances I wrote were very different from those written by my western counterparts. This is not self-professed, but was an insight shared by a lot of western counterparts [on IRC] which comprised of both Masters and Mistresses, as well as competitors, judges and audience.

After being a Kajiri for many years in the online role-playing world, I started looking for partners in the real world who would understand the philosophy of Gor. I found people who lived their lives according to Gorean philosophy, but all [living] outside India. There are very few people in India who have heard of, read about, or actively pursued Gor. Most of those who claim to have done so are usually interested more in the sexual fantasy than in the underlying philosophy.

In hindsight, I think Gor philosophy is a patriarchal answer to radical feminism. I don’t identify as any of the ‘ists’. However, I strongly believe in the concepts of freedom of choice, speech, sexual expression and equality for both genders. I am in control of my finances, my reproductive health, my career, my social life, and all the other things that feminism has fought for. That said, I do not want to identify myself as a feminist, because that will be misconstrued, as if all that feminists want is sexual freedom. Feminism has far more important issues to battle. I would not take it upon myself to dilute that effort or the perception. So, in other words, you might say I’m fighting for only one cause out of the many that my feminist sisters are fighting for—the right to express my sexuality the way I want to.