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Branding

January 17th, 2006

"Masters, incidentally, seldom brand their own slaves….. The girls are usually branded impersonally, perfunctorily, as cattle….. The mark is an impersonal designation. This is understood by the girl. When she is marked she understands herself not to be marked by a given man for a given man, to be uniquely his, but rather, so to speak, that she is marked for all men. To all men she is a slave girl. Usually, of course, only one among them, at a given time, will be her master. The brand is impersonal. The collar is intensely personal. The brand marks her property. The collar proclaims whose property she is, who it is who has either taken, or paid for, her. That the brand is an impersonal designation of an absence of status in the social structure is perhaps another reason why masters do not often brand their own girls. The brand relationship to the free man is institutional. The collar relationship, on the other hand, is an intensely personal one." Tribesmen of Gor

"Aww, come on, rayne. Again with the book quotes?" Yep. Again with the book quotes.

Quite
a few people, both online and in real life, who claim themselves Gorean
personally brand their slaves. They make it into this huge special
event as if the slave is giving something bigger than even her
submission (which, by the way, is NOT a gift… more on that later).
They make it into something that marks the slave as theirs – as if the
collar isn't enough – first begging the slave's permission, and then
doing it the way she wants it done. Often, the Master has a mark he
considers his own and he uses that to brand the slave. This is not the
Gorean way, friends.

In the books, as you can see
from this quote, a brand wasn't personal. Generally speaking, a man
gave his slave to another man, sometimes a stranger to him (rayne will
remind you that in the Gorean language, stranger and enemy are the same
word), and at times, didn't even witness the branding. The collar was
what told of who owned the slave. The brand was meant to engrave the
meaning of her slavery to her. To show that she is owned. The collar, however, is to denote who owns her.

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