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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.
There can be no "clarity of consent" because "consent" doesn't actually exist- it suggests that women are just as dominant as men are just as submissive as women (1), but then as we see a bit later...
...that's pretty obviously false. That's the inherent tension with having a gender whose average participant gets off on the submission- and if they start to resent that for whatever reason, and have the political power to get their top/dom jailed, then arises the incentive to abuse that power. But the fact that this woman isn't availing herself of that power that she knows (or can be reasonably expected to know, especially since she demonstrates an understanding of what the word "consent" is implying) is at her beck and call is actually quite significant, so I'd take the claim of "yeah, it sure was a time, I have made my peace that this is just how [my] sexuality works, this isn't a big enough deal so fuck off" at face value in this instance. (Actually, it kind of reminds me of this.)
Fundamentally, it comes down to whether you think sex (and by extension, whether or not you've made peace with the fact consent doesn't exist) is a big deal or not. The people who think sex is a big deal are unwilling or unable to deal with the fact sex no longer leads to pregnancy or disease (2); and the people who think sex has no consequences are unwilling or unable to deal with the fact that implies it's child-safe (3). And the world turns.
(1) Which makes sense, considering "consent" was manufactured by non-gender-conforming men and women in the late '80s as a reaction to the free '70s, so it's only natural those [in a purely descriptive sense] trans-gender individuals would come up with a system that doesn't match how normal human beings actually function, then get all defensive when it doesn't work.
(2) If you don't allow needle-shaped objects to penetrate your ass, you're relatively safe from the only STD of actual consequence (and even then, it's "take these pills for the rest of your life or you'll die 2 weeks after someone coughs on you", but diabetics and epileptics manage that just fine, so...). You're still going to get herpes but the cold sores are just the cost of doing
your mombusiness.(3) "But what if the 5 year old girl consents" is specifically meant to call out the fact that "consent" doesn't actually mean "accedes to"; the concept is, quite literally, used as a condom. It's so thin at times ("my 5 year old is trans") it feels like it's not even there, which is exactly how Trojan claims it should be.
The easy solution for men worried about this is simply not to engage in degenerate, promiscuous behavior. Oh, you got burned by a BPD whore? Shouldn’t have fucked her. The same, by the way, applies to getting in the outdoor baths of strange old men after being invited to.
I agree that it would be great if we had a society that called guys like that degenerate whoremongers. But what we actually have is one that celebrates "BPD whore behavior," and actively encourages young women to follow that script in relationships (see literally all advice column and lit fic for women from the '10s).
And we don't even condemn the whoremongering. We celebrate men for it until he ages into the Weinstein zone where imagining him holding their leash makes fangirls ick instead of tingle, then retroactively mob him for it.
It's not a coincidence that Gaiman was one of the last metoo targets, and it wasn't his fame protecting him; far more famous men got hit, and his sphere of leftist YA fantasy lit nerddom was ground zero for it. It's just that he only recently aged out of the schlick zone and became a target
I am genuinely curious, since advice columns aren't my thing and I'm fairly sure I wouldn't even be looking for the right ones. Could you please provide what you would consider three archetypical examples from the era?
"when having an affair is an act of self care," (it's a way for women to take back her patriarchal restrictions that have been put on us), "cheating on my husband made me a better mother," "cheating on the sisterhood: infidelity and feminism" (a third wave feminist take focuses on the individual woman and her rights to sexual pleasure), "what open marriage taught one man about feminism" (that it should be women who choose, not men, even the men they're married to)
That's four I remember off the top of my head focusing entirely on the "whore" part, but there's lots more content for the BPD bit.
I remember that at least two, possibly three, of those were specifically articles of the same Guardian writer.
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