|
 Free Women - DanceThese are relevant references from the Books where Dance is mentioned as it pertains to Free Women. I make no pronouncements on these matters, but report them as I find them. Arrive at your own conclusions. I wish you well, Fogaban Shoutout to Lady Sho Do Free Women dance? The short answer is, yes, they do. The dance of the free woman states her dignity and worth;However, the long answer seems to be when, where and how the Free Woman dances as to whether or not it is appropriate that she do so. Yes, Free Women do indeed dance. But there is the distinct possibility she might end up in a collar. I have included here most of the relevant quotes speaking of Free Women dancing. . . . even girls who will be free companions, and never slaves, learn the preparation and serving of exotic dishes, the arts of walking, and standing and being beautiful, the care of a man's equipment, the love dances of their city, . . . The free woman is lovely; the slave is lovely and patently needful. The free woman, in her freedom, must hold back, for she is free; the slave, in her slavery, need not do so and may not do so. The dance of the free woman states her dignity and worth; the dance of a slave is quite different; it exhibits an incredibly desirable domestic animal, one which may be bought and sold. The dance in the circle, as one might have gathered, was not the stately dance of free maidens, even in which, of course, the maidens, though scarcely admitting this even to themselves, experience something of the stimulatory voluptuousness of movement, but slave dance, that form of dance, in its thousands of variations, in which a female may excitingly and beautifully, marvelously and fulfillingly, express the depths and profoundities of her nature. The principle he had alluded to pertains to conduct in a free woman which is taken as sufficient to warrant her reduction to slavery. The most common application of this principle occurs in areas such as fraud and theft. Other applications may occur, for example, in cases of indigency and vagrancy. Prostitution, rare on Gor because of female slaves, is another case. The women are taken, enslaved, cleaned up and controlled. Indulgence in sensuous dance is another case. Sensuous dance is almost always performed by slaves on Gor. A free woman who performs such dancing publicly is almost begging for the collar. In some cities the sentence of bondage is mandatory for such a woman. Many women are free, legally, whether it is in their best interest or not. Such dances, then, "slave dances," at least on Gor, are not for such women. If a "free woman," that is, one legally free, were to publicly perform such a dance on Gor she would probably find herself in a master's chains by morning. Then suddenly she said to us, scornfully, "What is wrong? You are dancing tonight like free women. You must improve that. You must dance like slaves." Few free women, I suspect, would dare to dance the dances of Gor before strong men. If they did so, how long could they expect to remain free? Any woman who dares to appear so before men, and dance, it is said, is in her heart a slave. Let her then be collared! Whatever may be the truth in these matters it is a fact that almost all of the dancers on Gor are slaves. To the music of the musicians, near the iron door, they performed a most decorous dance, slowly and gracefully lifting their arms and turning, facing first one side and then the other. In their hands they held baskets of flower petals. The dance was the sort that free maidens of a city might perform to honor and welcome visiting dignitaries, or the ambassador and his entourage, of a foreign city. There are many stories of Gorean free women, sometimes of high caste, who, as a lark or in a spirit of bold play, dared to dance in a paga tavern. Often, perhaps to their horror, they found themselves that very night hooded and gagged, locked in close chains, lying on their back, their legs drawn up, fastened in a wagon, chained by the neck and ankles, their small bodies bruised on its rough boards as they, helpless beneath a rough tarn blanket, are carried through the gates of their city. Tuza then, apparently muchly satisfied with herself, stood up stirred the fire, and threw upon it much of the fuel we had gathered earlier in the preceding evening. Soon a hardy blaze was illuminating the clearing, brightly. It was bright enough for a man's paga feast, the sort at which stripped free women must dance as slaves and, to their shame, though they are still legally free, will be put to use as sluts before their collaring and branding. "Can you dance?" I asked the girl. "The flower dance of the free maiden," she said, frightened, her head held back, by the hair. She was not, however, altogether ignorant of slave dance, or its general nature; indeed, how could anyone on Gor, unless it be a free woman, be totally ignorant of it? "Do not make me do these things," she begged. "Do not make me dance and writhe so. I am a free woman!" "Dance," he said. "Master?" I asked, disbelievingly. "Need a command be repeated, slave girl?" he asked. "No, Master!" I cried. I wound the chain a bit about my wrists, taking up its slack. I could use it, in its different lengths, later, in the dance. I lifted my hands above my head, the backs of my hands facing one another. I flexed my knees. Sometimes a woman is permitted, even a free woman, among the fires of a burning city, the glare of the flames red upon her flesh, to dance before masters as a naked slave. She must hope to be found pleasing, and that her fate will be only the brand, chains and the collar. She dances helplessly, desperately. She hopes to be found pleasing. She dances for her life. How startled I had been when she had said that. I had turned away. She had looked into my eyes, in that instant, not as a slave into the eyes of a free woman, but as one woman into the eyes of another. I had felt then, in that instant, that we were both, ultimately, only women, that we were identical in our femaleness, that we were united in the bonds of a common sisterhood and what, in relationship to men, it entailed. We were both, ultimately, only women; we were both, ultimately, though I was free and she was a slave, representatives of the slave sex. I smiled. The Sa-eela, of course, is not the sort of dance which could be performed by a free woman. A familiar bit of advice given by bold Gorean physicians to free women who consult them about their frigidity is, to their scandal, "Learn slave dance." "Mistress," cried Melpomene, suddenly, in misery, "I do not know how to dance!" "What!" cried the Lady Florence, as though in astonishment. "I was a free woman," wept Melpomene. "I have been locked in a collar but this night. I know nothing of the lovely and sensuous dances of the female slave." |       
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
