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Games of Favors
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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, in 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. It is one of those cases in which a thing she has long striven to hide from herself is suddenly, perhaps to her consternations and dismay, made incontrovertibly clear to her. In support of the interpretation are such considerations as the fact that theses favors, in these games, are bestowed by females on males, that, generally, at lest, strong, handsome males seem to be the preferred recipients of such favors, that there is competition among the females in the distribution of these favors, and that she who first has her "favors" accepted therein accounts herself as somewhat superior to her less successful sisters, at least in this respect, and that the whole game, for these free women, is charged with an exciting, permissive aura of delicious naughtiness, this being indexed undoubtedly to the sexual stimulations involved, stimulations which, generally, are thought to be beneath the dignity of lofty free woman.
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. there is not full satisfaction of female sexuality, of course, outside of the context of male dominance........
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