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My memory is that Neil Gaiman's name occasionally pops up around here (edit: here). New York Magazine pulled no punches today. Headline?
The headline is false, though maybe not for the reasons you would immediately guess. As far as I can tell the story itself is not a scoop so much as a rigorous summary of things already known. It's difficult to know where to begin, commentary-wise; probably this belongs in the long tail of 2017's "#metoo" movement? But maybe we should begin with Sandman.
If you don't know who Neil Gaiman is, he's... a writer! A talented writer--not so talented a comic writer as Alan Moore, not so talented a novelist as Neal Stephenson, not so talented a screenwriter as Joss Whedon, but what makes him remarkable is that he is almost as good as every one of those writers within their respective mediums of mastery. He became Alan Moore's protégé; he collaborated with Terry Pratchett (Discworld) on Good Omens (1990). But it was his new take on an old DC character, Sandman, that became his own personal magnum opus. Running from 1989 to 1996, the book briefly outsold even Superman and Batman as DC's top title.
If you read it today, you'll see a lot of English punk, a gothic flair, deep cut literary references, edgy takes on stuff that 21st century Westerners now take culturally for granted... and a whole, whole lot of not-even-repressed sexual deviance, both of varieties that have since become more culturally acceptable, and varieties that have not. Hence my suggestion that the headline is false; as near as I can tell, Neil Gaiman never hid the darkest parts of himself from anyone, ever.
In fact, owing to decades of involvement in fringe geek fandoms, I have had a handful of glancing personal encounters with Neil Gaiman. The first thing to know is that he basically sweats charisma. Where Alan Moore is a spectacle, where Joss Whedon is a douche, Neil Gaiman is patently avuncular. He is warm and articulate, a storyteller every second, and when you meet him you know immediately within you, down to the marrow of your very bones: this man fucks.
And as far as I could tell, he made absolutely no secret of it. By no later than 2010 I had heard multiple totally separate stories from women claiming to have accompanied Gaiman to his home for playtime, hippie-style (or rationalist style, if some of the things I hear about San Francisco group homes are true). It is entirely possible that some or all of them were lying! Certainly they were all boasting. One was very clearly imagining that this would be her big break into the literary world, which seems like a strange hope to express if you are lying about the sex.
This is not the sort of behavior I want to encourage from anyone, for a variety of reasons, but it's probably worth noting, very clearly, that this did not seem at all surprising to me. I remember Bill Clinton, I remember Bill Gates, I know what a groupie is. Famous, powerful, wealthy, men have for all of history been inclined toward promiscuity, and women have been inclined to indulge them that.
The article seems to confirm my own, limited historical experiences:
Inevitably, it seems, in such contexts there is never any shortage of... misunderstanding. The article gets into pretty explicit detail concerning accusations of outright rape--often, however, with women who had been involved with Gaiman for some time, and continued to be involved with him for some time afterward. His second marriage (to a C-list celebrity in her own right) was "open"--
Indeed!
That sort of thing only lasted a few years. Eventually, Palmer was pregnant and decided to try to close the marriage. This seems to have been the beginning of the end of that, and the New York Magazine story could be viewed through the lens of "hit piece intended to influence the drawn-out divorce proceedings." I do not (and cannot) know the truth of these events for myself, but it probably doesn't matter; his career has been drying up for a while now, and once studios milk the requisite profits from their current investments in his IP, those contracts seem likely to be among his last. Well, he's in his 60s and he has plenty of money (even if Palmer absconds with half of it), I don't feel too badly for him.
But the whole charade does remind me once more of the peculiar way in which Western culture has come to insist that there is nothing problematic about sexual promiscuity. Marriage is just one choice among many! Homosexuality, polyamory, open marriages, monogamish couples, as long as it is consensual then it's fine, right? Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries. Gaiman's putative victims do not say that they unequivocally rejected his advances; some, indeed, texted him after the fact with reassurances that their encounters were in fact consensual.
That's the kind of evidence that keeps Gaiman out of jail, regardless of what social media mob justice decides on the matter. Even assuming she was being completely honest when she later said, in effect, "I texted him lies because I was scared," there's no evidence of what she was thinking at the time, except what she actually wrote. A world with clear relationship-grounded boundaries around sexual activity alleviates such ambiguities!
I am sort of peripherally aware of some of the "sex pest" stories that occasionally circulate in rationalist circles, and certainly I am aware of the polyamory (and e.g. Scott's occasional defense of it). Apparently it can work, for some people, at least for a time. But more often it seems to end up like this: if you want an open marriage, probably you don't really want a marriage in any robust sense of the term. And wealthy, powerful men who do not commit themselves to monogamy wholly and from the outset, Pence style, will be promiscuous, and it will eventually create headaches for them, of one kind or another.
Hm. Maybe someone should write a comic book about that.
I continue thinking that to look at the life of rich celebrities and seek to derive any conclusions about what rules the rest of us ought to live by is foolish. Even if the data actually suggests that it was a mistake for people like him to not live by the Pence rule (and this hasn't been established - for every blob of drama like this, do we know how many happy celebrities have left happy groupies with A+-would-bang-again experiences that they will treasure for a lifetime?), the data says nothing at all about whether an open marriage can work for any of the instances that don't fit this pattern, where the man is not an idol seen as holding the keys to a magic world of glamour or de facto bottomless affluence, the women are not secretly competing for exclusive access to this resource and there is no hovering media machine that would involve the whole world in the conflict for the promise of eyeballs.
Considering we already know the ones who regret it have massive incentive to say something now that they have a worldwide platform to get sympathy, and considering how many gay now-celebrities give glowing reviews of getting
rapedlaid in their early teens (to say nothing of Milo Y.), I expect the rate of satisfaction from these encounters to be in excess of the base rate of satisfaction per encounter for normal sexual relationships, which for reference averages around 69%.I think this but for people who make unconventional choices more generally.
Just because it works [or is within the bounds of acceptable risk] for them (for reasons you might not know, and maybe it isn't working) doesn't mean it will work for you (because you just want to stick it in the new hotness rather than your wife- she's not as hot any more, you see), and if you can't understand why it's working for them (because it's not done with the implicit or explicit intention of taking more than they put into the relationship/they're capable of dealing with the pitfalls) then it will hurt you if you do it (because that is why you are doing it).
(Which is the positive justification for censorship of infohazards like open marriages are; too bad the principal-agent problem is a thing, so you make the choice between ensuring the high-performance unconventional people have everything they need or blinding them so the less-able are less distracted by bad options they don't have the mental or social capacity to avoid. It's almost like the people in these relationships owe it to the less-able not to broadcast it to the ends of the Earth, and the less-able owe it to the more-able not to interfere; perhaps this comprises some sort of social contract?)
Now THIS is the sort of argument that keeps me coming back to The Motte.
Seriously. Asking about the base rate of 'satisfaction' with celebrity sex encounters is a 'fun' and relevant question.
I can't actually disagree with your estimate, either. I'd guess that the glow of having someone you idolize giving you the most intimate of attention and (one hopes) pleasure is a particular kind of ecstasy for the monkey brain. Like, imagine a teen boy who was fantasizing about, I dunno, young Christie Brinkley for his entire adolescence, then after he turns 18 he has a chance encounter with her where she gives him the thing he'd dreamt about and he has an incredible story to tell for the rest of his life. Hard to imagine the guy having any regrets.
But I also expect that the same idolization leads to expectations that necessarily exceed the reality of human capabilities, so there's likely to be some amount of disappointment upon realizing that well-maintained celeb is but a man and thus has finite stamina, makes awkward sounds and smells during sex, and may not administer amazing pillow talk. So the delta between expectations and reality is probably where some of the 'regret' can be found.
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