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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.
Stuff like this makes me think that "consent", as a binary yes/no, is not a good model of human relations. Like, we all agree that having sex with who's falling-down drunk is wrong, even if she enthusiastically says yes. And there's no clear line for "how much alcohol is too much." For age, there's a clear legal line, but most people still think it's creepy for a too-old man to have sex with a too-young woman. But everyone has different opinions on how much age gap is too much. A supervisor at work dating their employee is also not inherently illegal, but there's a lot of guidelines about it and situations where it can be considered into sexual harassment.
In this case, there's all sorts of things that create a power imbalance. The guy was rich, famous, and apparently charming. He had legions of fans reading his stuff when they were teenagers, so he was effectively "grooming" them without even having met them. He liked to play dom during sex, and had a lot of experience in it, while he was meeting young women with very little experience. It seems like he met a lot of women who were enthusiastically into it, to the point where he might be genuinely confused that someone wasn't consenting with him.
I wish there was a middle ground. Something in between "he's guilty of rape, send him to prison for 20 years" and "he did nothing wrong, so let him off scott-free." A fine seems meaningless when he's so rich. Maybe a good dose of social shaming is the right punishment. Even rich people still care a lot about their social reputation, and this can be a good lesson to everyone about some of the darker sides of human sexuality. Maybe sex-ed classes could include a lesson on the dangers of falling in love with a celebrity.
If you want to treat women as having agency, you have to assign blame for the consequences of their decisions to them. There was no power imbalance tantamount to force here; Gaiman was rich, famous, and (apparently) charming but he had no authority over them. Writing books read by the public is not "grooming"; calling it such casts doubt on the concept of grooming. A woman's later regret does not make a man's actions any sort of offense against her. If you don't think women have agency, you may as well join the "Fight for 25".
Certainly there are conservative-morality reasons that it's wrong for an old celebrity to have sex with starstruck young women. But either such moral systems treat women as being lacking in agency, or the offenses aren't against the woman (or both).
There are many forms of power besides just physical force, which is the entire reason we have laws against underage sex or sex with drunk people. Please don't tell me you think it's fine and dandy for a boss to tell his female employee that she must have sex with him to get a job because "she has agency and can say no."
Since this is the Motte, assume this is indeed someone's position.
Why is it wrong to ask for quid pro quo? The market will price in the value of it and you'll be able to pay a premium not to have sex with your boss. Nobody is technically forced to do anything here. Sex work is real work. Etc.
To account for these hazards, consent based moral systems have to make up tortuous definitions of power, as you do, that taken to their logical conclusion make any sort of arrangement involving sex (including marriage) into rape. Some feminists see this as a feature. I think this just demonstrates the absurdity of such a lens either way.
This is how we end up with zoomers persecuting 20 year olds for having 18 year old partners, or how having any sort of popularity somehow turns women that court you into children. These are absurd propositions.
I submit to you that the reason you think it is wrong has absolutely nothing to do with any conceit of logic but that you are intuiting, as many do, that sex is sacred and people who trade it it engage in sacrilege.
I don't think the market prices this well at all, outside of very broad "that whole sector (e.g. Hollywood) has a bad reputation" strokes.
When I think of typical workplace sexual quid pro quo, it's not an upfront "perform sexual favors to get this job", where the negotiation is open and transparent -- it's an eventual and unexpected "perform sexual favors to keep this job", often targeted specifically at an employee who the employer suspects lacks options at that time. And I'd guess it correlates positively, not negatively, with other unexpected and costly-to-the-employee behaviors like illegally withholding tips.
The market mechanism against this behavior is that employers who behave like this will have high turnover, but it's often ones in naturally high-turnover sectors who are doing it in the first place -- "guy who manages lots of young women who are working their first shitty service job" is like my central example of a workplace sexual harasser.
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It's wrong for the same reason all other forms of prostitution are wrong; because it creates a race-to-the-bottom effect in which the economy demands that women be sexually immoral. Now, I'd be basically fine with women sleeping with their bosses in a world where that meant marrying them, but that's not the world we live in, and in any case there ideally wouldn't be so many women in the workplace to begin with.
For similar but non-financial reasons, I remember finding a lot of the sexual norms in high school especially disgusting because they placed strong status incentives on girls being sexually active. Abstinence propaganda aimed at teens is impotent and doomed not simply because teens are horny, but because they're facing much stronger peer pressure from other horny teens.
This is true but it also doesn't matter if consent is all you care about axiomatically. And can't be reconciled with individualism unless you believe in and enact freedom of association.
I believe the rebuttal within this framework is usually termed thus: what business is it of yours what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms?
The answer to which is that what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms has indirect effects on me. If I am a woman and the other women around me freely sleep around in an effort to land a better mate then I am directly disadvantaged if I wish to keep my chastity and not gamble on getting my heart broken.
It's not like this is a new insight or anything, it's standard externalities which we've known how to reason about for centuries now. Your objection is like saying: what business is it of your what people do on their private property when on their property they're running 24/7 diesel generators modified to roll coal that then lead to extremely bad local air quality for everyone in the neighbourhood.
Nifty. Will you go one step further and say that all those pesky court rulings that were based on an obviously faulty premise the entire time should just be overturned?
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Under libertarian ethics, it isn't wrong to hire a sex worker on mutually agreeable terms, but it is wrong (because dishonest) to hire an employee for some other job and then after she has resigned from her previous job, relocated etc. pull a bait-and-switch and tell her she is now your sex worker, and the door is that way if she doesn't want her new job. You can't be a good person if you are going around saying "You fucked up - you trusted me. Learn the lesson and don't trust people like me next time."
It is noteworthy that a lot of right-on-right arguments about whether a woman who is sexually harassed in the workplace is a victim of obnoxious behaviour come down to an argument about whether some particular job counts as sex-work adjacent (such that the implicit employment contract does include putting up with this stuff) or not.
Doing this to your employees is a type of wrongdoing that the US has (unusually from a global perspective) decided is beneath the notice of the law in the case where sex isn't involved, but is tortious when sex is involved.
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Well, the short easy answer is that it's clearly illegal, and almost everyone would think that it's morally wrong. So this feels like you're asking a weird academic question like "can you logically justify from first principles why murder is wrong?" I'm not an ethical philosopher, I'm just some guy, going off of what feels right and wrong.
But sure, I'll play along. To start. this:
Absolutely not me lol. I'm a lifelong atheist, and a huge degenerate who has often paid for sex. I also have some friends who were former sex workers.
I think I can confidently speak on this topic because I have so much experience with it. When you're paying for sex, it's not just a simple business transaction. It's still an intimate act that triggers strong emotions. Scientifically, it causes a huge spike of oxytocin, which is a hormone linked to pair-bonding, especially in women. So it's actually really hard to just wham-bam-thank you maam with no emotions. The girls I met who could do that seemed incredibly damaged. Most still liked to talk a little and have some sort of emotional intimicy (and I liked that too).
They also usually have a pimp/manager who can handle the business side of things. Partly that's for pragmatic reason (they can bring in customers and chase down the deadbeats who don't pay up). But I think it's also an emotional need, to separate the business side away from the sexual side. Most working girls have strict rules that they do not have sex with their own manager, and the less-shady managers should also follow that rule. If they do, they usually end up horribly abused. In that sense, even asking for sex is wrong, because it turns what used to be a strictly business relationship into this weird mixed thing, and the woman will have to constantly think about that every time she's with her boss now. Sex work is work, but it's emotional work in a weird way that's very different from normal jobs, and part of that emotional work is just dealing with men constantly propositioning you for weird sex acts.
In my experience there's not much of a "market price," you have to haggle for everything like an old-school bazaar. So that's another area where it gets weird, and the girl can get taken advantage of if she doesn't know how much to ask for. (or the customer can get ripped off also). I guarantee this 20-yr-old Au Pair did not know how much to charge a famous rich guy for kinky BDSM sex.
Also that is totally not my position. I was trying to explain why I think what he did was morally wrong, even though it wasn't rape. There should be a middle ground of scumminess, where there's deception and coersion but not actually rape.
@FiveHourMarathon this is also my answer to you
You contradict yourself. Lest we be under the illusion that only the religious can be sacred.
The vocabulary you're grasping for, the "weirdness" is only here to justify a preexisting irrational bias against turning emotions into a moneyed exchange. It literally is wrong because it feels wrong.
You're operating under the same moral intuition as the religious people. This isn't even to say that's bad. I think it has merit for the same reason I think it has merit that buying an old piece of art to destroy it is evil.
But none of this has anything to do with consent and my objection is indeed that the moral philosophy you're espousing to justify all this is a rotten edifice that is much better served by expliciting this bias instead of trying to hide it behind consent.
Because doing so creates the insane applications that turn normal human behavior into some monstrous exploitation for no reason but the requirement to deny this bias in the name of Reason.
I don't think it's an "irrational bias" to say that hurting someone emotionally is wrong. What about hurting someone physically? Can you logically prove that it's wrong to hurt someone physically, or is that also just an irrational bias?
I think it's fine to turn emotions into a moneyed exchange. Normal people do it all the time with therapists, and maybe with all service jobs like bartenders, salesmen, etc. But those people know what they're getting in for, it doesn't get sprung on them by surprise from someone with power over them. It would also be wrong to trauma dump all of your psychological problems on some poor retail cashier.
Tragically, we can not, which caused the death or around 200 000 000 people in the previous century. Much of what is good and moral cannot be arrived at through reason.
I don't have anything against sentimentalism, or even against irrational biases. I'm only suspicious of people who hide such natural tendencies in the cloak of logic and reason so that they may not be checked by tradition.
It is all well and good that disgusting sexual practices remain obscure and shameful, actually. But any proper application of this principle is completely incompatible with society as it is, and the strategic application of this principle to some has only been a font of power.
The irony of course being that many of the people using this mechanism do so under the auspices of the very philosophers that tried to denounce it.
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I appreciate the in depth response, and confess that I have little to add to a conversation about bona fide prostitution, I have no experience with it, to the point where it's something I honestly have trouble grokking that it exists.
But I'm going to persist: if a woman lacks agency to say no to sex with her boss because saying no might cost her the job, how does she have agency to say no to being asked to walk his dog, or to taking a cut in pay, on threat of losing her job? They haven't had sex yet, oxytocin hasn't come into play. The intimacy of sex isn't implicated yet.
Now if you wanted to argue at a more granular level that such and such acts can't be done because of the oxytocin and the pressure, that would make sense.
Or if we're talking about high leverage deals and job opportunities, common in show business. That I can see the logic.
I don't really understand your point. Isn't it genuinely considered wrong for a boss to order their employee to do something that's wildly out of their job description? Or likewise to suddenly cut their pay for no reason? Usually there are rules against that sort of thing. Of course she has some agency, she can say no, but her life is going to get messed up when she gets fired, so she'd be justified in filing a lawsuit in that situation. Or at least cursing out her boss to anyone who'd listen. Making it about sex just makes it worse because it makes her think about gross things, so it's emotionally disturbing even if she can say no.
Are you an anarcho-capitalist who thinks that absolutely everything should be legal as long as there's no physical force used? I know there are some people who think that way, but that's a really fringe view that now many people share.
I feel like this is a very urban-corporate-PMC attitude towards employment, where many small business owners take more of an attitude of "I'm paying you for eight hours of your time, during that time you do what I tell you to do." If that means helping with putting up Christmas lights at the owner's house, that's your job description today. Obviously in a corporate setting a middle manager having personal tasks done by his underlings is bad, because he is embezzling. But there's no law against a restaurant owner asking some of his waiters to help him move his mother in law to a new apartment on the clock. But there's that word again, ask. This isn't ancient Rome, an employee can always exercise agency by saying no, and if his employer no longer wishes to employ him he can be fired, and if the employer operates his business in such a way that employees don't stick around then he'll have to close his business or reassess his ruleset.
Where I agree it would be genuinely bad would be a bait and switch, where the employee accepts the employment on the promise of the opportunity to do certain work and develop certain skills and is instead given low level work. The magazine intern who gets stuck getting coffee and is never given the opportunity to work on articles, etc.
In all these cases, I expect the employee to advocate for themselves. If they don't want to do something, it is incumbent on the employee to say no to it, and to threaten to quit if forced. If that makes me an AnCap then so be it.
I don't particularly think that fucking your employees is good, but I do think that trying to make it into a consent violation is confusing and dumb. It's not a consent violation, otherwise women are incapable of consent and agency which is obviously a repugnant conclusion to most people making the argument against Gaiman in the New Yorker, it's a different category of thing.
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Having celebrity may be a form of power in the broad sense, but not in the sense of curtailing agency.
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What deals with her employer is she allowed to consent to, in your view? Or, why is sex special? Why can she consent to any terms of employment at all?
A not entirely unreasonable point. Our economic system gives too much leverage to employers; if Alice hires Bob, Bob has a lot more to lose than Alice does; thus Alice can make unreasonable demands knowing that: 1. Bob will probably back down first, and 2. if he refuses, she won't have any difficulty finding someone more desperate. If we try to patch specific abuses with rules like 'don't make sex with one's boss a condition of employment', we end up playing Whack-a-Mole as Alice keeps finding more indignities to inflict on Bob, and campaigns against any intervention with the argument that Bob 'voluntarily' agreed to her terms, in the same way as the victim of a highway-man 'voluntarily' agreed to hand over his valuables.
Under full employment, however, if Alice demands that Bob offer her sexual favours, or forgo safety equipment in order to work faster, or stand up for his entire shift even though he could do his work just as well sitting down, or answer his phone at zero-dark-thirty for something could have waited until morning, or refrain from eating rice on Tuesdays, &c. &c., Bob is more likely to leave, and, having done so, is less likely to experience financial hardship as he can readily find a more reasonable employer, while Alice, less able to find anyone who will accept her onerous terms, will be incentivised to be more reasonable herself.
In such a system, the libertarian argument that Alice and Bob mutually agreed to whatever terms would be much more likely to hold water.
Does this apply to all aspects of employment contracts, or only to sexual favors? Is Bob bound by anything in his employment contract, or can he break it as he sees fit because he is being held hostage by reality?
It applies to unreasonable provisions, i. e. ones Bob only accepts because Alice can afford to hold out longer.
It doesn't apply to 'doing the task for which he was hired, to a reasonable standard'.
Why doesn't it apply to doing the task for which he was hired? Certainly, in a wage dispute, Alice's ability to hold out longer is equally if not moreso present.
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An that's why I always say the best anti-rape policy is to lower the minimum wage and fight the unions.
Doesn't the US have full employment already, therefore Bob was not raped?
But then you have the problem of people who work full-time who still can't afford the costs of an existence worthy of human dignity.
That goes in the wrong direction; unions are an attempt to solve the very problem I am alluding to, namely the gross imbalance of power between Alice and Bob!
Perhaps 'full employment' was not the exactly correct term; I am referring to the balance of power between management and labour, and economic circumstances in which the lack of an agreement has similar costs to both sides.
I don't think that's a real thing. What about a 15k$/year life is below human dignity? The only real indignity is starving, plus maybe not having a (small) roof over your head. And minimum wage workers are far from that. In most western countries, even those who refuse to work, who are supported by the rest of society, are far from that.
Only the imbalance between union members and the boss. The unemployed are screwed. It creates a new class of protected workers who cannot be fired, and so make hiring more risky and expensive, increasing unemployment.
So essentially, you admit there's full employment, yet there's still no way to get you to accept that workers have agency/they aren't raped when they have sex with their boss? Only if there's a new system, full communism or something.
I think achieving the lack of any real unemployment in a society (like the current 4% in the US) is of primary importance, and a great boost to the agency, bargaining power, and psychological health of workers. So I'm very sceptical of any attempts to help workers that could increase unemployment (raising minimum wage, anti-firing legislation, etc). What they gain in salary or security, they lose in bargaining power - that's not a good trade over the long term.
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