On what women want

Neil Gaiman appears to be a pretty bad guy. That's not actually what this essay is about, but I know people are going to ask — what about the man, are you defending the bad man — so let's just get it out of the way, the bad man is so extremely bad. He’s so bad that I don't even care if he broke the law, at this point; if the best defense for your behavior is "But she consented to eating her own shit and vomit!," if you find yourself saying anything even in the ballpark of that statement, you need either therapy or Jesus or both. Neil Gaiman gets a big thumbs down from me, he gets zero stars. I would certainly not have sex with him and I don't think you should, either.

I mean, unless you really want to, but ah, there it is: even if you say so, how can we know you're telling the truth?

There's a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he's doing. Gaiman says he's struggling: he's heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. "I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed," he writes.

"It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.

Except: she doesn't mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:

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.

But also, we know this because she didn't mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that's what I want to talk about.

By this point in the article we've been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can't assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. "Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do," Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn't matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him "master" or eat their own feces because "BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms" to which Gaiman didn't strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it's only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)

Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich's behavior (including the "it was wonderful" text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that's just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I'm more interested in what happens to women when they're cast in this role of society's unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world's adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can't have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn't mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

Some of this (most?), I think, is an unfortunate side effect of all our traditional sexual mores having been discarded in favor of vapid, anything-goes sex positivity with a monomaniacal focus on consent. We barely even have the vocabulary anymore to describe bad or cruel or execrable behavior that is wrong without being rape. Instead, we're left with two categories of sex, consensual and criminal, the unspoken understanding being that you're only allowed to complain about the latter, because heaven forfend you yuck the yum of the guy who gets off on making women crawl around on all fours and drink urine. It should surprise no one that women in this milieu are performing intellectual acrobatics to redefine their terrible-but-consensual sexual experiences as actually rapes; it's the only way anyone will acknowledge that something bad happened to you.

But just because this isn't surprising, that doesn't make it good.

It's become very unpopular in the post-MeToo era to take a critical view of stories like the Gaiman exposé, or of the behavior of the characters in them; when I suggested on Twitter that there might be some unsavory second-order consequences to portraying women as fundamentally unreliable narrators on the subject of their own desires, people got very mad, and sent me a lot of outraged replies accusing me of being a victim-blaming bad feminist, of "dunking on a rape survivor." I suspect this is a function of that binary worldview in which sex can be either consensual (good) or criminal (bad); if you believe this, then the idea of a woman deserving sympathy for a terrible experience in which she was not just a consenting party but an active player is probably completely alien to you.

But I don't believe that. I believe Pavlovich went through something awful that was not her fault; I also believe she made some choices that left her vulnerable to what happened, and some choices that made it worse. As is the case with most awful experiences. And yes: if someone has sex with you that you didn't desire and didn't enjoy, I think it is better, all things considered, not to repeatedly tell him afterwards that it was wanted and wonderful you can't wait to do it again. Not just because it's important for people (and women are people, I must insist) to say what they mean, but because you should save those words to describe sex that is actually wonderful, and what you actually want. You deserve nothing less.