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herself in certain ways, presenting herself as a helpless, desirable female,
trying to provoke the interest of attractive men."
The girl looked at him with horror, but I saw, in her eyes, that what he had
said was true. Even unbranded, she was already becoming a slave.
"Please, Master. Please, Master," begged the girl at my feet.
"What sort of brand would you like, my dear?"
asked the man of the girl at the wall. "Have no fear. I am now permitting you
to express a preference. I shall then, as it pleases me, accept your
preference, or reject it."
Her lip, now swollen, trembled.
"Would you like a lovely and feminine brand," he asked, "or a rude and brutal
brand, one fit for a pot girl or a tendress of kaiila?"
"I am a woman, Master," she said. "I am feminine."
I was pleased to hear this simple confession from the girl, this
straightforward, uncompromising admission of the reality of her sex. How few
of the women of my old world, I thought, could bring themselves, even to their
lovers, to make this same, simple admission. What a world of difference it
might make to their relationships, I speculated.
Yet this admission, nonverbally, was surely made, and even poignantly and
desperately, by many women of my old world, despite the injunctions and
conditionings against honesty in such matters
enjoined by an antibiological, politicized society. I hoped that upon
occasion, at least, these admissions, these declarations, these cries for
recognition and fulfillment, whether verbal or nonverbal, might in his
kindness, be heeded by a male.
It is an interesting question, the relation between natural values and
conditioned values. To be sure, the human infant, in many respects, seems to
be little more than a tabula rasa, a blank tablet, on which a society, whether
sensible or perverted, may inscribe its values. Yet the infant is also an
animal, with its nature and genetic codings, with its heritage of eons of life
and evolution, tracing itself back to the combinations of molecules and the
births of stars. Thus can be erected conflicts between nature and artifice,
whether the artifices be devised or blind. These conflicts, in turn, produce
their grotesque syndromes of anxiety, guilt and frustration, with their
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attendant deleterious consequences for happiness and life. A man may be taught
to prize his own castration but somewhere, sometime, in the individual or in
the maddened collectivity, nature must strike back. The answer of the fool is
the answer he has been taught to give, the answer he must continue to defend
and beyond which he cannot see, an answer historically deriving from an ethos
founded on the macabre superstitions and frustrated perversions of lunatics,
an answer now co-opted to serve the interests of new, grotesque minorities
who, repudiating the only rationale that gave it plausibility, pervert it
to their own ends. The sludge of Puritanism, with its latent social power,
bequeathed from one generation to the next, can serve unaccustomed masters.
The only practical answer to these dilemmas is not continued suppression and
censorship, but a society, a world, in which nature is freed to thrive. It is
not a healthy world in which civilization is nature's prison. Nature and
civilization are not incompatible. A choice need not be made between them. For
a rational animal each can be the complement and enhancement of the other. For
too long has the world been under the domination of the grotesque and
insidious. One fears mostly they may
begin to believe their own lies. They think they herd sheep. It is possible,
unbeknownst to themselves, they walk with wolves and lions.
The merchant regarded the girl at the wall. Under his gaze she straightened
herself. "Yes," he said.
"I see that you are feminine. Accordingly, you will be appropriately branded."
"Thank you, Master," she said.
"It will be the common Kajira mark," he said, "indicating that you are
beautiful, but only another slave girl."
"Thank you, Master," she said. I thought the cursive Kef, sometimes referred
to as the staff and fronds, beauty subject to discipline, would look well upon
her thigh.
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