Free Kajira of Gor by John Norman Page A

down, cross-legged, on the cushion before the table.
    I picked up a piece of the yellow bread.
    “Oh, no, Mistress,” said the girl, putting out her hand.
    “That is how men sit. We are women. We kneel.”
    “I will sit,” I told her.
    “Mistress understands, surely,” said the girl, in misery, “that I must make
    reports to Ligurious, my master.”
    “I will kneel,” I said.
    “That is much more lovely,” said the girl, approvingly.
    I then began to eat, kneeling. This posture, to be sure, though I do not think I
    would have admitted it to the girl, did strike me as being much more feminine
    than that which I had earlier adopted. Certainly, at least, it made me feel much
    more feminine. I wondered if there was a certain rightness to women kneeling.
    Certainly we look beautiful, kneeling. ‘Me posture, too, at least if we are
    permitted to keep our knees closed, permits us a certain modest reserve with
    respect to our intimacies. Too, it is a position which one may assume easily and
    beautifully, and from which it is possible to rise with both beauty and grace.
    To be sure, the position does suggest not only beauty and grace but also
    submissiveness.
    This thought troubled me. But then I thought that if women should be submissive,
    then, whatever might be the truth in these matters, such postures would be
    appropriate and natural for them. In any event, the posture did make me feel
    delicately and exquisitely feminine. I was somewhat embarrassed, to be sure, by
    these feelings. Then it suddenly seemed absurd to me that I should be
    embarrassed, or should feel guilty or ashamed, about these feelings. I think I
    then realized, perhaps for the first time, fully, the power of the conditioning
    devices to which I had been subjected. How strange, and pernicious, I thought,
    that a woman should be made to feel guilty about being feminine, truly feminine,
    radically feminine! What a tribute this was to the effectiveness of contemporary
    conditioning techniques! In the world from which I came sexuality was not an
    ingredient but an accessory. Here, on the other hand, I suspected, men and women
    were not the same.
    Indeed, it seemed that here I would be expected to assume certain postures and
    attitudes, and genuinely feminine ones, perhaps merely because I was a woman. In
    this world it seemed that sexuality, and perhaps a deeply natural sexuality, was
    an ingredient, and not a mere accessory. It might lie at the very core of this
    world. An essential and ineradicable ele-red to be sexuality, with its basic
    distinctions between human beings, dividing them clearly into different sorts,
    into males and females. In a world such as this I realized that I might not only
    be permitted to express my natural, fundamental nature, but that I might be
    encouraged to do so. This was a world in which my femininity, whatever it was,
    and wherever it might lead, was not to be denied to me. I glanced at the whip on
    the wall. On this world, I suspected, I might even be given no choice but to be
    true to my sex, and fully. For a moment this made me angry.
    Surely I had a right to frustrate and deny my sex if I wished. If I was afraid
    to be a woman, truly and fundamentally, with all that it might entail, surely I
    should not be forced to become one! Yet I knew that in my heart I felt a sudden,
    marvelous surge of hope, a sense of possible liberation, that I might here, on
    this world, be freed, even if I were placed in a steel collar, to be what I
    truly was, not merely a human being, but the kind of human being I actually was,
    a human female, a woman.
    “Mistress’ drink is cold,” said the girl. “Let me have it reheated or fetch you
    a fresh one.”
    “No,” I said. “It is fine.” I lifted the small, handleless bowl
    he had used the word in two hands. I was excited that she had said “fetch.” She
    was the sort of girl who might carry or fetch for a Master or a Mistress.
    “Mistress,” said the girl. “You are a woman.