site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

My memory is that Neil Gaiman's name occasionally pops up around here (edit: here). New York Magazine pulled no punches today. Headline?

There Is No Safe Word How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.

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:

It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. But in my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual.

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"--

During the early years of their marriage, they lived apart for months at a time and encouraged each other to have affairs. According to conversations with five of Palmer’s closest friends, the most important rule governing their open relationship was honesty. They found that sharing the details of their extramarital dalliances — and sometimes sharing the same partners — brought them closer together.

Indeed!

In 2012, Palmer met a 20-year-old fan, who has asked to be referred to as Rachel, at a Dresden Dolls concert. After one of Palmer’s next shows, the women had sex. The morning after, Palmer snapped a few semi-naked pictures of Rachel and asked if she could send one to Gaiman. She and Palmer slept together a few more times, but then Palmer seemed to lose interest in sex with her. Some six months after they met, Palmer introduced Rachel to Gaiman online, telling Rachel, “He’ll love you.” The two struck up a correspondence that quickly turned sexual, and Gaiman invited her to his house in Wisconsin. As she packed for the trip, she asked Palmer over email if she had any advice for pleasing Gaiman in bed. Palmer joked in response, “i think the fun is finding out on your own.” With Gaiman, Rachel says there was never a “blatant rupture of consent” but that he was always pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her. Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him “like a toy.”

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.

Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him. “It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she wrote.

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.

Gaiman, it seems clear, didn’t commit rape- he committed seduction. It can be scummy to have sex with a woman who wants it, which is what he did. These women were it seems led to believe that their sex would be repaid, either through commitment or through benefits within the community, and this didn’t happen.

To say nothing of pressure tactics that he’s alleged to have applied. Again, not rape- seduction.

Some of the stories fit into rape and or sexual assault and not just seduction. Pavlovich was also working for him as a babysitter and so there is that factor also in play.

Gaiman asked her to sit on his lap. Pavlovich stammered out a few sentences: She was gay, she’d never had sex, she had been sexually abused by a 45-year-old man when she was 15. Gaiman continued to press. “The next part is really amorphous,” Pavlovich tells me. “But I can tell you that he put his fingers straight into my ass and tried to put his penis in my ass. And I said, ‘No, no.’ Then he tried to rub his penis between my breasts, and I said ‘no’ as well. Then he asked if he could come on my face, and I said ‘no’ but he did anyway. He said, ‘Call me ‘master,’ and I’ll come.’ He said, ‘Be a good girl. You’re a good little girl.’”

In 2007, Gaiman and Stout took a trip to the Cornish countryside. On their last night there, Stout developed a UTI that had gotten so bad she couldn’t sit down. She told Gaiman they could fool around but that any penetration would be too painful to bear. “It was a big hard ‘no,’” she says. “I told him, ‘You cannot put anything in my vagina or I will die.’” Gaiman flipped her over on the bed, she says, and attempted to penetrate her with his fingers. She told him “no.” He stopped for a moment and then he penetrated her with his penis. At that point, she tells me, “I just shut down.” She lay on the bed until he was finished. (This past October, she filed a police report alleging he raped her.)

One evening, Palmer dropped Pavlovich and the child off with Gaiman and retreated back to her own place. Pavlovich was in the kitchen, tidying up, when he approached her from behind and pulled her to the sofa. “It all happened again so quickly,” Pavlovich says. Gaiman pushed down her pants and began to beat her with his belt. He then attempted to initiate anal sex without lubrication. “I screamed ‘no,’” Pavlovich says. Had Gaiman and Pavlovich been engaging in BDSM, this could conceivably have been part of a rape scene, a scenario sometimes described as consensual nonconsent. But that would have required careful negotiation in advance, which she says they had not done. After she said “no,” Gaiman backed off briefly and went into the kitchen. When he returned, he brought butter to use as lubricant. She continued to scream until Gaiman was finished. When it was over, he called her “slave” and ordered her to “clean him up.” She protested that it wasn’t hygienic. “He said, ‘Are you defying your master?’” she recalls. “I had to lick my own shit.”

I guess I'm going to be that guy, but: what the hell was Pavlovich doing going back there after the first time? Losing your babysitting gig hardly seems like a powerful coercion to being possibly raped a second time.

Or, what was she doing getting naked and into a bath outside at some guy's house? And then just chilling there when he jumps in unexpectedly?

That's obviously not an excuse to get raped but it really makes me wonder if this is a faithful accounting of what happened. I can't really imagine just going along with all of this.

I think a lot of this stuff is difficult to parse in terms of masculine notions of consent and sexuality. It's a lot more binary and individual agency driven.

I've dated a lot, I've got a bunch of close girl friends who date a lot and a lot of women just have this desire to be 'swept along' in the tide of relationships plus intense binary bipolar takes on previous relationships. Guys don't 'ick' like women do, for the most part, negative information discovered will be more filed under 'she is a 7 with an asterisks due to XYZ' whilst most heterosexual women are very 100-0 in how they see men.

Also add weird cultural norms on top of that. I've had girlfriends who simply refuse to discuss/initiate sex in any sort of an agency-driven way. The closest they'll come is acting in a way that 'makes them exposed to being acted upon'. This is due to a combination of weird shame-driven consciousness around it, plus ego. Women don't deal well with outright rejection as a rule of thumb, since their conception of sex is 'I am the gatekeeper and at any time the rapacious male presence will go through there'. If they open the proverbial gate and the rapacious hordes shrug and defer from entering, egodeath ensues.

Women don't deal well with outright rejection as a rule of thumb, since their conception of sex is 'I am the gatekeeper and at any time the rapacious male presence will go through there'. If they open the proverbial gate and the rapacious hordes shrug and defer from entering, egodeath ensues.

You might think this would give women more empathy for how rejection feels for men, but of course it doesn't, in most cases. Though IME women who have dealt with romantic rejection are more likely to be sympathetic towards lonely men. So this is perhaps a case of the necessary experiences not being experienced.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats