..The girls are usually branded impersonally, perfunctorily, as cattle. Though they feel the mark in
..The girls are usually branded impersonally, perfunctorily, as cattle. Though they feel the mark intensely physically, it is felt, interestingly, even more intensely, more profoundly, psychologically; not unoften it, in itself, radically transforms their self images, their personalities; they are only slaves, not permitted their own wills, rightless, at the bidding of masters; the mark is an impersonal designation; this is understood by the girls; 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 brand marks her property; 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 actually taken, or paid for, her; that the brand is an impersonal designation of 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, 2:42 -- source link