In my article on the Buck Rogers TV series Planet of the Slavegirls I pointed out that slavegirls on the aforementioned planet dressed like servers at Applebee's (or any other large chain restaurant) and had much the same duties as waitresses.

I pointed out the dramatic inappropriateness of this and suggested that the reason we called waitresses "waitresses" is because they are not, in fact, slavegirls.

John Norman understood this distinction well. Take a look at how waitresses are treated in Gorean taverns, where the waitresses are, in fact, slavegirls. The taverns are called "paga" taverns, with "paga" being more or less beer.

In a paga tavern, an hours' worth of sexual services from your waitress can be had for the price of a mug of paga, and paga is pretty durned cheap, like beer. If a customer wants to whip, fuck or otherwise treat his waitress like a sex slave, he just tells her, "Go have them chain you in an alcove" and the paga slave must stop serving food and drink and scurry off to the alcove, which is provided with a full selection of chains, ropes, whips, gags, hoods, etc., as well as some comfy furs to snuggle in during and after the paga slaves' use, as well as a torch or two to provide soft, romantic (albeit smoky) lighting.

Now before you get on your high horse about the financial impracticalities of offering free sex in order to sell beer, allow me to point out that bars already offer freebies of various kinds to entice customers.

The infamous slavegirl-waitress from the Buck Rogers "Planet of the Slavegirls" episode that rocked the restaurant industry to its very core. (Well, it would have if anyone had ever watched Buck Rogers.) Surely the cold, distant, alien eyes of Earth corporate CEOs of restaurant chains have seen this episode and noted its potential in their beady little brains.

For example, in my city, many bars and grills (and a few pizza joints that sell beer with the pizza) offer free trivia games for the customers. The games are hosted by professional DJs with their own sound system and trivia questions provided by a research staff.

The bar pays for all this, as well as providing house cash prices (of typically $50, $30 and $20). The bar, I believe (I don't know) makes its money from the customers who come to play the trivia and who stay for two hours to do so, eating and drinking.

Bars also often have teams of pretty girls representing various brands of alcohol (especially beers) who visit the bars and promote the beer and give away freebies like the lighted beer bottle cap I scored the other day.

Now imagine a bar in modern America that by some miracle manages to work like a Gorean paga tavern, offering food and drink and the sexual services of your waitress for the prices of the food and drinks. (Some such taverns might be staffed by waiters, but this is not the focus of MY article. I'm sure it would work about the same, in any event.)

Naked waitress al fresco. Yeah, there's a waitress-as-slave girl meme out there, alrighty. Image courtesy of nude-in-public.com.

The place would of course be swamped by horny guys in no time (especially if it was the only one offering such a deal.) They wouldn't be able to sell booze and food fast enough. Things would almost certainly get a little jammed up in the alcoves and service in the dining area might be a little slow at times, but I don't think anybody would be complaining.

Some might ask, "Where would you find women willing to work under such conditions for tips, however generous?"

Asia and Eastern Europe mostly. Hell, if we elect another Republican Presidential administration in 2008, in most of the U.S.

Norman thought this all out years ago. In order to come up with his vision of the paga tavern, he had to have picked up on the whole "waitress as slavegirl" meme and worked it out, demonstrating its absurdity much more powerfully by taking the "pro" side of the meme to its full conclusion, than anyone ever could by an reasoned or logical argument on the "anti" side.¹

I.e., in the Gor novels, paga slaves serve as an argument: "If waitresses were in fact slavegirls THIS is how a bar/restaurant owner would use them."

If this were a slaveholding culture, I could TOTALLY see large chains like Applebee's, Chili's and ... dare I say it? ... McDonald's forcing members of the service staff to service customer's members. Let's face it, the corporate attitude toward personnel at the bottom end of the economic chain is very similar to that of a plantation owner with a lot of slaves in the fields. It wouldn't be a matter of changing how they think about people. It would be a matter of having more options.

So, are waitresses slavegirls? No. Could they be, in the future? Yes, definitely, if the US eventually redefines workers' rights to something like slavery, which is definitely the slope we are on. Would this be a good thing? No, definitely, because for every single sexy waitress slavegirl there'll be about a thousand garden-variety work slaves who'll be used as thoroughly as the waitress slavegirls, but limited to hard physical labor. That'd be most everybody in the middle class and lower classes. Bad deal.

A naked slavegirl waitress wearing a Photoshop gag and matching green dot to hide her genitals. Is this the future of waitresses? Except for the Photoshop stuff?

Is it all right to have fantasies about waitresses as slavegirls? That, like having fantasies about women in general as slavegirls, depends. If you can fantasize about waitresses as slavegirls and recognize that while your fantasy waitresses are slaves, real-life waitresses are just people doing a job, you'll do fine. If you let your slavegirl fantasies leach over into real life and you start treating waitresses as slavegirls, even in little ways, you risk turning into an asshole in pretty short order.

There's another little problem as well. If you start having sex fantasies about persons who bring you food in restaurants, you may have some difficulty with the fact that a significant portion of the people who do so are guys.

That said, Norman's paga slave makes for a great fantasy. If you've got someone who plays it with you just because they enjoy playing it with you, well, enjoy it!

FOOTNOTES

1. (I'm not sure whether or not this was Norman's intent in creating beer slaves, er, paga slaves, as I am not privy to his thoughts in that regard. I am sure that the feminists who snarl and spit at the mention of Norman's name would say the paga slaves are mere masculine power fantasies, and they may be right -- I sure would like a paga slave to play with in every bar I go to. But I think paga slaves are a demonstration of the silliness of the "waitress=slavegirl" meme, whether or not it was intended as such.)

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