"John Norman - Gor 22 - Dancer of Gor " - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

was a different woman than the world knew of me, one they had
never seen, one they had never suspected. What was that thing she
wore? What sort of garment could that be, so delicious and brief, so
excruciatingly and uncompromisingly feminine? Surely no real
woman, hostile, unloving, demanding, shrill and frustrated, zealous
in her conformance to stereotypes, attempting desperately to find
satisfaction in such things, would wear such a garment. It was too
female, too feminine. How could she be identical to a male in such a
garment? It would show her simply that she was not. How could she
keep her dignity and respect in such a garment? It would show her
simply that she was beautifully, and utterly different from a man. It
was the sort of garment a man might throw to a woman to wear,
amused to see her in it. What sort of woman, of her own free will,
would put on such a garment? Surely no real woman. It was too
feminine. Surely



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only a terrible woman, a low woman, a shameful, wicked, worthless
woman, a reproach to her entire sex, one with depths and needs
antedating her century, one with needs, not indexed to political
orthodoxies, one with needs older and deeper, and more real and
profound, more ancient and marvelous than those dictated to her by
intellectual aberrations antithetical to biology, truth, history and
time. I put my hand before my mouth, frightened. I stood there,
regarding myself, then, shamed, and humbled and thrilled. I knew
then it was I in the mirror, and none other. Perhaps what I saw was
not a real woman in some invented, artificial, contemptible,
grotesque modern sense, but I thought she was a woman nonetheless
and one in some even suddenly significant force, that that there were
two sexes, and that they were quite different. I regarded myself in
the mirror, and trembled, wondering what this might mean, fully. I
feared to consider the matter. What did it mean, that we were not the
same as men, that we were so different? Was this really totally
meaningless, a unique accident in the history of a world, a random
paragraph written in the oceans, in the records of steaming swamps,
in the journals of primeval forests, in the annals of the grasslands
and deserts, of vacillating glaciers and damp, flowering valleys, of
the basins of broad rivers and of the treks of nomads, wagons and
armies, or were there biological proprieties, destinies and natures to
be fulfilled? I did not know. But I knew how I felt. I lowered my
hand and turned, slowly, before the mirror. I considered myself, and
was, truly, not displeased. I was not a man, and did not want to be
one. I was a female. I choked back a sob. I wondered what it might
mean, that men, until we had managed to turn them against
themselves, until we had managed to tie and cripple them, were so
much stronger, so much more powerful, than we. There was no
nether closure, by intent, in the tiny garment I had fashioned. It was
open at the