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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.
What dilemma is there in this gossip rag? The man is innocent. A crying woman is not a story. People's disgust is not an argument.
It’s not ‘it’ that creates headaches for them, it’s people who try to get them cancelled or prosecuted. Assume your role of censor and hangman.
I'm not sure being married to
palmer(edit: pavlovich) would have helped: the rag would have printed the lurid details of what they did behind closed doors, people would have felt 'iffy', they would have moved the blurry boundaries of consent to marital rape, and the tabloid life goes on.At least one of the allegations (Stout saying she didn't want penetrative sex due to a UTI, Gaiman sticking it in anyway) is an absolutely clear case of rape if true. It can't be adjudicated to the criminal standard, but given the pattern of behaviour revealed by the publicly-available information I think it is more likely than not.
The allegations by Pavlovich (again, if true) clearly include criminal sexual assaults. I suppose you can take a maximally pro-Gaiman view and say that all the penetrative sex was consensual on a "silence equals assent" basis, hence no rape strictu sensu, but I don't see why someone who is screwing the babysitter deserves that level of charity.
Even in libertine culture, "don't screw the babysitter" and "if you want to pick up MOTAS for casual BDSM, do it in a BDSM community so you know that they have the necessary skills to protect their own safety" are about as hard as customary rules can get when the mos maiorum isn't written down by the Censors. And Gaiman sailed over those lines on multiple occasions. I am well up for laughing at feminists calling mainstream Western culture a "rape culture" because it isn't one, but the culture that thinks that the behaviour Gaiman is accused of counts as "innocent" is a rape culture. This is a pre-Christ Roosh/Andrew Tate level of behaviour.
I don't have much sympathy for the groupies who chased down Gaiman for sex and ended up having sex they didn't want, and I don't think that adjudicating the difference between "the groupie was miserable the next morning because the popstar performed the consented-to sex act badly" and "the groupie was miserable the next morning because the popstar performed a different sex act to the one consented to" is a good use of police and court time. But "Caroline" and Pavlovich were not groupies - they were brought into Gaiman's orbit as employees, and both were living in de facto tied housing at the time that most of the sex happened. A woman who puts up with a skeevy boss because the alternative is homelessness and finds herself in a situation where homelessness would, with hindsight, have been the better choice is not the same thing as a groupie who gets a dicking other than the one she was cruising for, to use Jim Donald's crass but apt metaphor. If the difference between "I let the skeevy boss kiss me because I really needed the job and eventually we escalated to consensual sex under the same unfortunate terms" and "I let the skeevy boss kiss me because I really needed the job and then he raped me" is too hard to adjudicate, then I would support drawing the bright line rule on the side of "don't fuck employees".
The law agrees with me on this point - even if mostly-consensual, Gaiman's behaviour towards "Caroline" and Pavlovich is illegal (usually a tort rather than a crime, admittedly) as workplace sexual harassment, and not of the bullshit "hostile environment" variety that a lot of people want to legalise. There is a good reason for this - a world where being bait-and-switched into sex work is a normal incident of accepting a job as a nanny is a very bad place for a lot of people, including me as a non-skeevy man who has nannies in the house while I am working from home.
Without the employees' stories, there wouldn't have been enough material for the article.
This may well be a good idea (or maybe not), but I find the article's (and this comment's, implicitly) assertion that "the BDSM community" is some sort of authority to which BDSM practitioners must submit pretty weird -- the BDSM community's approval of various sexual activities does not feature in any legal codes that I'm aware of, and I see no reason why anybody should be expected to pay any more heed to the BDSM community's opinions about their sex life than (say) the BDSM community would pay to those of the Christian community.
In short, who died and made the BDSMC the sex cops? (although clearly they would the goto if one were looking for sex cop uniforms)
I've already written a bit about the totalizing nature of progressive sex norms (all fucking within the party, no fucking outside the party, no fucking against the party). But this is an especially good example of how it's done in practice.
Encourage deviant behavior to the point of basically making it mandatory (you don't have an open relationship? You're not a square are you?), then make it socially and legally risky to engage in outside of party-aligned social institutions.
And most notably that support isn't just contingent on following the ever-changing rules about sex; it can be withdrawn for insufficient zeal in other matters. Remember all the stories threatening naming and shaming valley sex party enjoyers when the media was pressuring them over insufficient anti-fascist censorship?
The rich, high status libertine techbros thought they had a deal that enabled them to have casual sex within the emerging leftist monoculture. Then the deal changed. I suspect that incident quietly did more to turn them against leftism than the rocks thrown at their employees.
The actual life path followed by Blue Tribe elites is to fool around a bit in your twenties, then to get married (to someone of your own social class, naturally) and stay married. The idea that polyamory and swinging are standard for married couples in prog circles is absurd if you have spent time with them - this is the whole point behind Charles Murrays "the elite should preach what they practice" thesis in Coming Apart. Even though the official prog position is that there is nothing wrong with swinging if everyone is consenting, it has always been the case that a male public figure who did this kind of thing and got caught was liable to be hauled over the coals by feminists for bullying his wife into it.
Blue Tribe opinion-formers promote sexual deviance because promoting deviance of all kinds feels like rebellion against oppressive authority. But the actual rules enforced by Blue Tribe morality police have included things like "don't engage in drug-addled casual sex" since the feminist backlash against 60's libertinism. And banging women of a significantly lower social class than your own (including whores) has always been mildly low-status behaviour for elite men, even though it is common. If the libertine techbros had thought that drug-fueled orgies were normal for Blue Tribe elites then they were making the classic mistake of believing what the NYT says and not watching what the sort of person who gets published in the NYT does.
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