Imaginative Sex is a nonfiction book by John Norman that catalogs male-dominant / female-submissive heterosexual BDSM-style fantasy scenarios and offers guidelines for couples who want to act them out to heat up their sex lives. First published as a 1974 paperback by DAW Books—then also Norman’s publisher for the Gor science-fantasy series, and distributed through the same science-fiction and fantasy channels—it was reissued in 1997 by Rhinoceros Books (a Masquerade Books adult imprint) with a new foreword by BDSM author Patrick Califia.
Califia called the 1974 edition “one of the first above-ground nonfiction books to offer a rationalization for dominant/submissive role-playing and some instructions about how to do it.” The book does not use later standard BDSM jargon “for the very simple reason that the jargon and conventions we take for granted had not been created when he wrote the book.” That timing is why historians of kink literature still file it as a bridge text: Gor-adjacent male-dom fantasy packaged as practical couple advice before SSC vocabulary, munch culture, or internet scene education existed.
Who It Was Written For—And Who Can Still Use It
Norman focuses exclusively on male-dominant heterosexual couples. Califia noted, however, that “Imaginative Sex could… be used by readers of any sexual orientation or gender,” because Norman is strong at naming “archetypal situations that are ideal for building the tension and polarization crucial to a good scene,” and “It’s fairly easy to adapt these scenarios to any S/M or D/S relationship.” In other words, the scripts are gendered in the text but modular in practice: capture, ownership language, ritual service, mock punishment, and rescue/possession frames travel.
Imagination as Sexual Liberation
Norman argues that one of his goals as a writer is to let people’s imaginations become “sexually liberated.” He urges married couples to deploy fantasy and role-play to enliven sex and to explore mental and spiritual dimensions of intercourse—not only genital mechanics. While he defends the same male-dominant / female-submissive psychosexual theories that underwrite the Gor novels, he notably does not tell readers to import Gorean customs and institutions into real life in any literal or simplistic way. Compared with the novels, Imaginative Sex puts more weight on pair-bonding and stable heterosexual relationship. When fantasy-scenario whippings appear, Norman recommends theatrical technique—for example, the man sharply clapping his hands while the “slave” reacts as if whipped—rather than untrained real striking as default.
That combination—explicit D/s fantasy menus, early popular rationalization of role-play, caution against LARPing an entire fictional planet, and stagey rather than injurious defaults—makes the book a period piece and a usable idea bank. Readers who dislike Norman’s gender politics can still mine the scenario architecture; readers who came to kink through Gor will recognize the through-line. Either way, Imaginative Sex remains a landmark of 1970s above-ground SM how-to: DAW mass distribution, later Masquerade/Rhinoceros reissue, Califia’s historicizing foreword, and a shelf life that outlasted the paperback racks it first rode on.
