Game of Favors
   A free woman, in swirling robes of concealment, veiled, appeared before me.  "Accept my favor, please!" she laughed.  She held forth the scarf, teasingly, coquettishly.  "Please, handsome fellow!" she wheedled.  "Please, please!" she said.  "Please!" 
   "Very well", I smiled. 
   She came quite close to me. 
   "Herewith," she said, "I, though a free woman, gladly and willingly, and of my own free will, dare to grant you my favor!" 
   She then thrust the light scarf through an eyelet on the collar of my robes and drew it halfway through.  In this fashion it would not be likely to be dislodged. 
   "Thank you, kind sir, handsome sir!" she laughed.  She then sped away, laughing. 

   She had had only two favors left at her belt, I had noted.  Normally in this game the woman begins with ten.  The first to dispense her ten favors and return to the starting point wins.  I looked after her, grinning.  It would have been churlish, I thought, to have refused the favor.  Too, she had begged so prettily.  This type of boldness, of course, is one that a woman would be likely to resort to only in the time of carnival.  The granting of such favors probably has a complex history.  Its origin may even trace back to Earth.  This is suggested by the fact that, traditionally, the favor, or the symbolic token of the favor, is a handkerchief or scarf.  Sometimes a lady's champion, as I understand it, might have borne such a favor, fastened perhaps to a helmet or thrust in a gauntlet. 
   It is not difficult, however, aside from such possible historical antecedents, and the popular, superficial interpretations of such a custom, in one time or another, to speculate on the depth meaning of such favors.  One must understand, first, that  they are given by free women and of their own free will.  Secondly, one must think of favors in the sense that one might speak of a free woman granting, or selling, her favors to a male.  To be sure, this understanding, as obvious and straightforward as it is, if brought to the clear light of consciousness, is likely to come as a revelatory and somewhat scandalous shock to the female......Players of Gor pgs 44-45 

   (continued from page 45) 
   In short, the game of favors permits free women, in a socially acceptable context, by symbolic transformation, to assuage their sexual needs to at least some small extent, and, in some cases, if they wish, to make advances to interesting males.  ...
   "I see that you wear the favor of a free woman," observed the officer.  He referred to the rich, light, colorful scarf thrust through the eyelet of my robes. 
   "Yes," I said.  I recalled the richly robed, veiled, wheedling free woman whom I had permitted to place it there.  What a churl I would have been, considering how prettily she had begged, and she a free woman, not to have accepted it. 
  "I see that you, too, have accepted the favor of a free woman," I said. 
   "Yes," he said, grinning.  The favor he wore was different from mine, both in border and color.  In the game of Favors, of course, the favors are supposedly unique to the given woman, in pattern, material, texture, color, shape, decoration, and so forth.  If they were not unique in this fashion they could not act as practical counters in the game.  Similarly, of course, they would be less efficient in manifesting the results of the deeper competitions involved, those competitions in which women desperately strive against one another, each to prove themselves more desireable to men than the others.  Each woman desires to be more pleasing to men than the others.  This is significant.  It is in their nature. 
   "It is interesting to me that free women play the game of Favors," I said. 
   "It gives them a way of flirting," he said.  Too it gives them an opportunity to put themselves, in a way, at the mercy of the male, to engage in petitioning behavior, suing for his indulgence.  In this it is not difficult to see a form of symbolic submission, a making of themselves dependent on his will.  Too, of course, it gives them a way of testing their desirability and publicly proclaiming, or advertising, it."  Players of Gor, pgs 61-62 
 
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