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.
"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" made me laugh bleakly, as it's a lot of this in a nutshell. I know far too many people in the scene for someone not into it at all, and the number of Gaiman-lite people in the scene ain't small (Gaiman was a friend of several friends, for what it's worth). I wish more people could acknowledge the messiness there vs. going No True Scotsman about it. (And, frankly, admit that a lot of the community, such as it is, are using it as a maladaptive coping mechanism for their various mental health issues. Am I kinkshaming? Yep.)
Honestly my main takeaway from the article is that BDSM is bad and gross and attracts unstable and cruel people and creates murky consent.
Gaiman certainly seems cruel and sadistic (like many in the BDSM scene), but I just don't buy that strongly into the power dynamic or mental health thing.
I had a weird relationship with a older man when I was barely 18, severely manic, and hadn't realized I was a lesbian yet. I regretted it deeply when I came down from that episode, but during it I was enthusiastically consenting, even if I felt a twist in my stomach every time I saw the male body in a sexual way. I don't think it would be right to call him a rapist for not reading my mind. And, I didn't think it would be helpful for my own mental health to perceive myself as having been a victim of sexual violence.
Certainly he was taking advantage of the situation, but if she's coming back for more and putting it in writing that it's consentual, I can't bring myself to call it rape. It certainly seems like a very different thing than a forced encounter that she gets a rape kit for the next morning.
It's funny I had a similar reaction, having crossed paths with a number of people in the scene local to me and maybe gone an adventure or two myself. The idea that there is this platonic ideal of BDSM that's just fine really! As long as it checks all of the therapeutic boxes about boundaries, respect, and self actualization someone posted on Tumblr!
Which doesn't mean I spend a lot of time concerned about what adults do behind closed doors. But I don't think anyone who has been anywhere near it can honestly say it doesn't attract a lot of lost souls and people with some serious issues, many of whom are not particularly nice.
There's this post that's been going around Tumblr for years about how, actually, people in the kink scene are totally the absolute best people to teach the youth about sex, seeing as everything's all about consent, etc. And every single time I see it, I just want to chime in with, "Err, how about no?"
I don't think it ultimately harmed me all that much (though there was that brief period of time where I felt like I was broken because BDSM, in practice, bored and annoyed me), but being the person who learned most of what she learned about sex beyond sex ed from people in the scene sure didn't help me. It gave me a messy perspective of the whole shebang and a skewed concept of boundaries. And, in hindsight, those people in their 20s and 30s really should not have been talking to a girl in her mid-teens about any of that, or bringing her to parties, or the rest of it.
I didn't say my experiences were bad. In fact, I said I wasn't ultimately harmed all that much by it, warping of my perspectives on what was typical for human sexuality and what boundaries I should have in place aside; I'm pretty resilient, but I also count myself lucky.
The people I was around weren't just on the fringes of everything or exceptions to the rule: they were the people organizing community events, putting together community spaces, etc. They were the true believers with the maximum amount of social credit.
For the most part, I don't think they were trying to groom me or anything malicious or sinister. They were just in so deep that it seemed peachy keen to evangelize their lifestyle to anyone over the age of 14. If the people at the core are that clueless about what's appropriate, maybe, just maybe, something needs some serious fixing. If I wasn't still seeing the same patterns to this day, I'd be happy to say, wow, the scene has really managed to get its shit together. However, I am, and it hasn't, and it won't unless people take a step back from the defensiveness.
(PS, before anyone asks where my parents were during all this, I'm Gen X. We were the masters of keeping our parents from knowing anything about what we got up to and having our friends cover for us if we claimed we were sleeping over at their place.)
In my experience in the kink community, the organizers and the ones putting together community spaces are the only bad ones - the 90% of kinksters who aren't like that are fine. You're better off with those of us more on the fringe.
I don't agree they did anything inappropriate. Kinky people need an outlet and a community.
I don't think conceptualizing kink(y) as something a person 'is' as opposed to something someone 'does' is useful, at least not for a conversation about personal conduct. I'm not prudish. Couples can spice up their sex lives, have a little fun, and it can be ok, maybe even good for them. People can also have casual sexual encounters and come out the other side no worse for wear. Other times people think they're up for something only for it to be a disaster that they deeply regret.
Bottom line is there is no magic formula that removes risks. No subculture has it all figured out, and the more boundaries pushed the greater the chance something goes wrong, even if that something falls well short of criminal. Doesn't mean we need to be policing bedrooms or sex lives. However people need to be honest with themselves about their choices and the potential for bad results, as well as the intent of those they have sexual relationships with, which may not align with their own, ground rules or not.
I keep thinking about this article and @Penny M's comment. When stacked up against more and more examples of the "kink is fun" --> "I'm just fresh meat for these sadists" pipeline, all the good talk about enthusiastic consent and aftercare seems to be disingenuous propaganda. The kink-positive people talk about "geek social fallacies" and "missing stairs" as if they need mild correction, but the more stories that come out of this world, the more it looks like collapsed stairwells and "theater kids took over the culture."
Maybe it's time to bring back kinkshaming and referring to a certain type of person as sex pests. DARE to stop mentally unwell people from boasting about their dysfunctions.
I don't know that shaming is quite right, but more like a caveat emptor. No one is going to stop you from exploring this stuff but the odds of regret and/or putting yourself in vulnerable positions with people with little regard for your emotional well-being are significant. Buyer beware.
At least that, for sure. But that warning isn't going to come from the evangelists of the outré. The hype machine for things like kink and polyamory is loud and obnoxious in more and more sectors of online discourse. It's like the sort of vegans who have to make sure everyone knows they're vegan. Except this time it's intimate aspects of one's sexual life, sold as superior to all those boring repressed normies with our vanilla relationships and monogamy prisons. Maybe this is the wrong venue to gripe, but I'm getting pretty sick of it.
You guys are the dominant voices, and we're getting so sick of you for shaming our sexuality. We get it - you don't like queer people, you don't like people enjoying sex, you don't like anything you think seems different or weird.
I have been around people in my local kink scene since I was 15 (the geek/goth/tech crossover with it is huge), and I am in my 50s now. I'm also not straight and think sexual pleasure is an excellent thing. A+++, would recommend and all.
I also have three decades of seeing people, sometimes very close friends and ex-partners, tie themselves in knots (no pun intended) to justify some of the crap that happens, even when it's messing them up, because to do otherwise would violate community norms. Do I know some people who are living the safe, sane, consensual dream? Yeah. A few, sure, but they've been the minority. It's possible that other cities have much healthier scenes. Maybe mine's an outlier and shouldn't be counted, as that meme goes, but people being people, I doubt it.
I like using the phrase “taken advantage of” to illustrate a situation that falls somewhere between criminal and consensual. But people are generally uninterested in being precise with language.
It's interesting that I don't recall a conversation about second order consequences for men after, say, Baby Reindeer - in which the protagonist describes being raped by a powerful, successful man and then going back repeatedly to be further raped, while enthusiastically continuing a text relationship with the abuser. Consent is a difficult, deficient concept in sexual ethics: it also happens to be the concept on which the law of sexual violence is largely built, and perhaps the only plausible foundation for that.
One of the things that the Tortoise podcast on Gaiman (I don't know if you've listened) is exceptionally good at is exploring the issues with the women's own documentation and explaining why they are in a legally weak situation. I came away from that unhappily convinced that a fair trial would not find Gaiman guilty. But I can hold that understanding simultaneously with the belief that Gaiman was a practiced manipulator in his selection of victims and post-assault behaviours designed to manufacture consent. Otherwise, what were the NDAs for?
That isn't a piece about potential second order consequences regarding men's ability to consent to medical treatment or sign contracts; it's a piece about Gadd's willingness to turn his experience into content. A good topic, but not the same argument you're making here.
Perhaps that’s because men have never been subject to those sorts of limitations on their autonomy, whereas women have, within living memory? I mean, maybe it would be nice if the stakes were identical here but I’ve gotta write about the world we live in
I think I would frame your point there similarly but with an opposite emphasis: men's rights and subjectivity are presumed to be settled and secure even when they talk about being a "bad victim"; women's are conditional, so the cost of being a "bad victim" is the threat that other rights will be withdrawn. That is by definition a sexist, misogynist framework, and there's no reason to accept it.
Now I'm just confused, because nobody has accused anyone of being a "bad victim" and that is not the framework of this essay (if anything it's one I explicitly reject). And I certainly haven't threatened anyone!
"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... 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." Implicitly, this says Pavlovich is not a sympathetic victim without the scale-thumbing; explicitly, it groups her with "unreliable narrators". I think that "bad victim" is a reasonable shorthand for someone seen as unsympathetic and unreliable. And I certainly didn't say you threatened anyone, but the concept of "second order consequences" to women's rights is a threat that those rights will be void -- so there is a threat, which you are describing here.
"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."
Considering that feminism has been largely taken over by radical lesbians, a not-small-number of whom have endorsed the claim that all sex with men is rape, that trap seems quite intentional.
To be honest, I am much more worried about the brand of feminism that tells us that it’s “kink shaming” to react negatively to stories about men being sexually aroused by women eating his feces. We should be able to call some stuff gross and concerning, even if everyone involved is consenting.
Why? We are allowed to talk about people having bad taste in movies, books, arts, ect. We recognize, for example, that not all books are equally well written or contain the same level of artistic merit. Why would sex be any different? Why should that be the one area of life where it’s “cruel and wrong” to make aesthetic judgements? It seems weird to say that I’m allowed to say that I find something gross, but it’s immoral for me to explain *why* I find that thing gross.
I never said it was cruel or wrong to make aesthetic judgments, just to shame people. Like I think Neil Gaiman is a crappy writer, but I'm not going to shame anyone for liking his books.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to compare a book or painting, which is a single work of art that stands on its own and is intended for the public to enjoy aesthetically, to a kink, which is a type of activity that many different people can do in many different ways, and done for personal and relational purposes.
What's your aesthetic judgment about sleep sex? Period sex? What kinks do you think are more or less aesthetically pleasing?
I don't think it's immoral for you to explain why you find something gross, though I would personally find it nearly impossible to explain why something turns me on or doesn't - it just does. I'm just wired that way.
I would never shame anyone to their face- that just seems mean and unhelpful and well, rude. But I don’t think it’s out of bounds for feminists to criticize kinks- after all, it seems very reasonable to question why people find certain acts pleasurable. Like, you said that you don’t know why certain things turn you on- I feel like that’s a very common opinion. So doesn’t that make this a great topic for writers and thinkers to explore? I feel like one of the main reasons why we read is to learn more about ourselves. And, to come back to the criticism angle, that includes both the good and the bad aspects of ourselves.
Here's where I'm stuck. She said no, repeatedly. She said no in the bath. She said no to anal sex.
Stout also said no, repeatedly.
Isn't everything else sort of beside the point? (And isn't the fawning by Pavlovich completely documented as a common response in the sexual assault literature?)
Things get murky because at the time she was clearly saying "yes" in the text messages, which are the hardest evidence the article presents (and it only presents a few texts; one has to wonder what else is in those messages).
As she recounted the story to the author some four years later, she said that she repeatedly said "no" in person back in 2020.
According to the article, she didn't conceive of what happened as sexual assault even after a couple friends of hers said they believed it was.
As the article reads, it seems like she only decided she was sexually assaulted after Palmer decided it was best for her not to return as a babysitter.
No, as a matter of ethics and fairness, he should be considered innocent in the court of public opinion as well, until proven guilty. The presumption of innocence does not just apply in court.
He doesn’t have to do anything, nor should we draw any implications from any texts not being released. But the person I was responding to seemed to be drawing implications the other way.
It’s quite possible she said ‘No’ on some occasions and consented on other occasions and later put it was consensual because it’s all mixed up together. I have a male friend who was raped whilst under the influence of a drug and he later went back and had sex with his attacker because he couldn’t accept that he had been a victim. These things can be more complicated than you suppose. Additionally, it is possible that ‘no’ was said on every occasion. In some BDSM relationships to mean ‘no’ they use a different safe word to get the other person to stop because ‘no’ is part of it. (Personally I think that’s a messy situation). In that case it would be true she said no but, also that the text was true. Or it could be that she said ‘no’ on every occasion but, said it was consensual because she had a financial/romantic motivation to say it was consensual. You see what I mean? We don’t know that she said ‘no’ on the occasions she describes is a lie because we don’t know what really happened.
We could be talking about a real 'no' or we might not be. My point is that to conclusively say that she said no 'was a lie' is not something we are able to assert. You are of course entitled to your opinion and you may well be right. If you had said 'I believe she is lying' I would not argue with you.
Every relationship between humans includes other factors which affect the power dynamic. The rich and famous Gaimans seem to have specialized in befriending younger, vulnerable, poor women. How convenient.
Specifically, Gaiman's alleged victims include a woman retained largely unpaid as a nanny to his child who was reliant on him and Palmer for bed and board; and a women employed as a factotum who lived with her children on his property, under a grace and favour arrangement in which Gaiman expected sex. These are not vague definitions of "poorer" or "less powerful". These are relationships in which Gaiman had the direct ability to make these women homeless and/or unemployed.
I've heard men relying on a girlfriend for housing without paying rent described as "hobosexual" in a jokey way. I do get that the age, wealth dynamics, and the BDSM aspect make the Gaiman thing a bit different, but the reaction I've seen to men paying rent via sex is more of a "awesome man," but when women are in the same arrangement it's viewed as a rapey power dynamic. I've known hobosexual men rendered homeless (couch surfing) after a breakup and mostly the whole situation was joked about in the friend group.
It's not snarky, Tom; it's a joke, at the expense of nobody. And I disagree that there's anything to be gained from engaging with unsubstantiated allegations (in general, not just in this case) that are contradicted by more substantive contemporaneous evidence -- especially for this cultural analysis to which the question of Gaiman's guilt is totally irrelevant. Even if I had an opinion on whether he did it (I don't) it wouldn't change the thesis of this piece.
I didn't by "snarky" mean anything substantially different than "joke," so I'm happy with that terminology. I don't mean to tell you what you meant, but I think the joke is at least a little at the expense of people who have said "believe women" (with or without the hashtag) who are taking Pavlovich's side on this issue. You're joking about an apparent inconsistency, right? Otherwise, what's the joke about?
I disagree that there's nothing to be gained by mentioning Pavlovich's allegations, even skeptically. As it stands, one could read your piece without having any idea that Pavlovich is alleging forcible rape, and in fact some of your readers have done exactly that: I responded to someone today who said "If Pavlovich said no, then the author" (I think he meant you) "is either lying or misinformed, which I doubt." I don't think you're misinformed and certainly not lying, but I think you inadvertently gave a mistaken picture to your readers of what Pavlovich is alleging. And it's the same as the premise of the "#BelieveWomen" joke: that people are blaming Gaiman for taking her "yes" at face value. Whereas her allegation is the exact opposite.
I also disagree that the question of Gaiman's guilt is irrelevant. If in fact he raped Pavlovich, that casts a totally different light on both her texts and her current claims, and what we make of the whole situation. For instance, you write, "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"—that would be a total non-sequitur if in fact there was nothing to "mean it" about, no choice, just him raping her. (The choice to send him nice texts afterwards looks pretty slight in comparison once that rubicon is crossed, I think.)
For what it's worth, I agree with you that the author tells us what to think too much—I thought "thumbing the scale" was a perfect description.
Lol, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on the question of whether hashtags are people. (Personally I think the only community I'm having a bit of a go at here are the guys who get off on forced feces-eating, and if they get mad, so be it.)
As for the rest, let me try to explain this one more time: Gaiman's guilt is irrelevant because this essay isn't about what happened between Gaiman and Pavlovich. It's completely decoupled from that question. We have *no idea* right now what he did or didn't do. The only thing we know is that she said it was consensual, at the time, and not just after the affair was over; she aggressively pursued a sexual relationship, bragged to friends at the time it was happening, etc.
To be clear, I'm not judging her for this, I'm not saying it means he didn't rape her; I'm just saying, the available evidence only points in one direction. Which is why the journalist who wrote the piece is working so hard to persuade us that her consent didn't count, by explaining that actually, women are *always* struggling to distinguish consensual sex from rape, saying yes when they mean no, etc. And THAT is what my essay is about.
The way people are talking about women's agency in this situation, which is the way they always talk about women's agency when stories like this come up: this would be the same whether Gaiman did it or not, and my analysis of it will be the same even if a bombshell video of that bathtub interlude hits the internet tomorrow and resolves the question once and for all. Does that make sense?
I found this interesting as in this case the thing I found that made her consent less meaningful was mental illness. Depending on what Gaiman knew and when he knew it I *could* see that pushing this into outright criminal territory. Hard to prove, though.
But yeah, even without that, if this were a storyline from a book there would be zero doubts Gaiman is the villain.
One case where power imbalances have legal weight would be sexual harassment law related to employment. If a boss lays out a quid pro quo expectation for an employee (the exchange of sex for promotions, perks, or continued employment), my understanding is that would be illegal, regardless of consent.
We can assume that the degree to which a woman will lie about her consent to please somebody is a normally distributed trait, probably correlated with neuroticism and aggreableness. So a few women are unreliable narrators, most are okay, a few are highly reliable.
Since the unreliable ones are a small portion of women, there is no need to worry about the loss of choice for women as a group in areas like health, politics, etc.
I'd quibble with using "normally distributed" to refer generically to being distributed in a bell-shaped fashion, since there are a lot of bell-shaped distributions (Cauchy, Student-t, lognormal, etc.), but I think you're about right.
I also think it's fair to say that there are circumstances that are coercive enough as to make consent murky at best, and perhaps the best way to ensure that a "yes" really means "yes" is to keep away from those circumstances to the extent that one can.
> I also think it's fair to say that there are circumstances that are coercive enough as to make consent murky at best, and perhaps the best way to ensure that a "yes" really means "yes" is to keep away from those circumstances to the extent that one can.
I came here to say this as well. On top of whatever personality traits make someone likely to say yes when they don’t mean it, someone could also feel desperate enough to lie about it for the reasons you mention — if they depended on the person for employment or housing, for instance. (Which is in fact relevant here!)
And I would expect that to be the case no matter the gender of the person involved.
"Since the unreliable ones are a small portion of women, there is no need to worry about the loss of choice for women as a group in areas like health, politics, etc."
Depends on how society handles that assumed "small portion" and the events involved.
If half of society risks prison if a member of the other half withdraws consent after the fact, such events would have to be *VANISHINGLY* rare for it not to have serious and far-reaching effects on society.
(Spoiler: it is currently not "vanishingly rare".)
"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always as an end and never simply as a means." - Kant
"Mutual consent" does not morally justify abusing another, even if it may do so legally.
I agree that this is disgusting and the man involved deserves negative judgement. Women need to take responsibility for their actions too though. Screw all of them. I don’t care.
"Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience."
This is because we use the same term – "attraction" – to describe two polar opposite things. We say that "men are attracted to women", but this could mean that they like women and want to love and care for them. Or it could mean that men hate women and they want to hurt, dominate and humiliate women.
How does a women distinguish between these two things when the culture – like you outline – is built around this "sex positive" anything-goes, no "kink shaming"? This is coupled with still the dominant sentiment that sex is about servicing men's desires.
For women there's no concept like "hate-fucking". Yet this is embedded deep within male sexuality.
That said, it seems women in South Korea have understood this and decided that going anywhere near the human male is simply not in their interests.
I winced when I was listening to the original report in "Tortoise." I noticed first how hard the podcast worked to infantilize the first accuser (I hesitate to use the word victim): she was "small" and "waiflike." They really needed her to be a victim.
But mostly, I found myself asking "what responsibility does she have for what happened?" In her report of the first encounter with NG, there was no force, no threat...nothing. She made the decision to get naked in the hot tub of a person who was essentially a stranger to her. And she made the decision to stay in the hot tub when NG climbed in. What was stopping her from hopping out, getting dressed and walking the five minutes back to the ferry station?
It's part of a trend I've noticed, where it's as if Womyn are Queens and Goddesses...until they do something stupid, and then suddenly they're waiflike beings with no agency or responsibility for the outcome. And that is way more infantilizing of women than the things the Evul Patriarchy is supposedly trying to accomplish.
It's hard to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound like I'm pro-Gaiman, but did he rape her? I think not (and the follow up texts to her friends about "awesome sex" certainly don't support that). He was a guy who wanted to get laid, and like most people (male and female) who want to get laid, he was pretty insistent and boorish.
And this is only about experience reported on the first accuser's claim. Some of the stuff Gaiman allegedly did was worthy of a good horsewhipping.
Thank you for stating this so clearly. Perhaps it is time to bring back the Victorian concepts of "wickedness" and "seduction," because without those words, or something like them, it's so difficult to even talk about what happened to them.
"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" made me laugh bleakly, as it's a lot of this in a nutshell. I know far too many people in the scene for someone not into it at all, and the number of Gaiman-lite people in the scene ain't small (Gaiman was a friend of several friends, for what it's worth). I wish more people could acknowledge the messiness there vs. going No True Scotsman about it. (And, frankly, admit that a lot of the community, such as it is, are using it as a maladaptive coping mechanism for their various mental health issues. Am I kinkshaming? Yep.)
Honestly my main takeaway from the article is that BDSM is bad and gross and attracts unstable and cruel people and creates murky consent.
Gaiman certainly seems cruel and sadistic (like many in the BDSM scene), but I just don't buy that strongly into the power dynamic or mental health thing.
I had a weird relationship with a older man when I was barely 18, severely manic, and hadn't realized I was a lesbian yet. I regretted it deeply when I came down from that episode, but during it I was enthusiastically consenting, even if I felt a twist in my stomach every time I saw the male body in a sexual way. I don't think it would be right to call him a rapist for not reading my mind. And, I didn't think it would be helpful for my own mental health to perceive myself as having been a victim of sexual violence.
Certainly he was taking advantage of the situation, but if she's coming back for more and putting it in writing that it's consentual, I can't bring myself to call it rape. It certainly seems like a very different thing than a forced encounter that she gets a rape kit for the next morning.
It's funny I had a similar reaction, having crossed paths with a number of people in the scene local to me and maybe gone an adventure or two myself. The idea that there is this platonic ideal of BDSM that's just fine really! As long as it checks all of the therapeutic boxes about boundaries, respect, and self actualization someone posted on Tumblr!
Which doesn't mean I spend a lot of time concerned about what adults do behind closed doors. But I don't think anyone who has been anywhere near it can honestly say it doesn't attract a lot of lost souls and people with some serious issues, many of whom are not particularly nice.
There's this post that's been going around Tumblr for years about how, actually, people in the kink scene are totally the absolute best people to teach the youth about sex, seeing as everything's all about consent, etc. And every single time I see it, I just want to chime in with, "Err, how about no?"
I don't think it ultimately harmed me all that much (though there was that brief period of time where I felt like I was broken because BDSM, in practice, bored and annoyed me), but being the person who learned most of what she learned about sex beyond sex ed from people in the scene sure didn't help me. It gave me a messy perspective of the whole shebang and a skewed concept of boundaries. And, in hindsight, those people in their 20s and 30s really should not have been talking to a girl in her mid-teens about any of that, or bringing her to parties, or the rest of it.
Definitely disagree with almost all of that. I'm sorry you had bad experiences, but please don't overgeneralize from that.
Every criticism about kinksters applies with equal force to nonkinksters!
I didn't say my experiences were bad. In fact, I said I wasn't ultimately harmed all that much by it, warping of my perspectives on what was typical for human sexuality and what boundaries I should have in place aside; I'm pretty resilient, but I also count myself lucky.
The people I was around weren't just on the fringes of everything or exceptions to the rule: they were the people organizing community events, putting together community spaces, etc. They were the true believers with the maximum amount of social credit.
For the most part, I don't think they were trying to groom me or anything malicious or sinister. They were just in so deep that it seemed peachy keen to evangelize their lifestyle to anyone over the age of 14. If the people at the core are that clueless about what's appropriate, maybe, just maybe, something needs some serious fixing. If I wasn't still seeing the same patterns to this day, I'd be happy to say, wow, the scene has really managed to get its shit together. However, I am, and it hasn't, and it won't unless people take a step back from the defensiveness.
(PS, before anyone asks where my parents were during all this, I'm Gen X. We were the masters of keeping our parents from knowing anything about what we got up to and having our friends cover for us if we claimed we were sleeping over at their place.)
In my experience in the kink community, the organizers and the ones putting together community spaces are the only bad ones - the 90% of kinksters who aren't like that are fine. You're better off with those of us more on the fringe.
I don't agree they did anything inappropriate. Kinky people need an outlet and a community.
I don't think conceptualizing kink(y) as something a person 'is' as opposed to something someone 'does' is useful, at least not for a conversation about personal conduct. I'm not prudish. Couples can spice up their sex lives, have a little fun, and it can be ok, maybe even good for them. People can also have casual sexual encounters and come out the other side no worse for wear. Other times people think they're up for something only for it to be a disaster that they deeply regret.
Bottom line is there is no magic formula that removes risks. No subculture has it all figured out, and the more boundaries pushed the greater the chance something goes wrong, even if that something falls well short of criminal. Doesn't mean we need to be policing bedrooms or sex lives. However people need to be honest with themselves about their choices and the potential for bad results, as well as the intent of those they have sexual relationships with, which may not align with their own, ground rules or not.
I keep thinking about this article and @Penny M's comment. When stacked up against more and more examples of the "kink is fun" --> "I'm just fresh meat for these sadists" pipeline, all the good talk about enthusiastic consent and aftercare seems to be disingenuous propaganda. The kink-positive people talk about "geek social fallacies" and "missing stairs" as if they need mild correction, but the more stories that come out of this world, the more it looks like collapsed stairwells and "theater kids took over the culture."
Maybe it's time to bring back kinkshaming and referring to a certain type of person as sex pests. DARE to stop mentally unwell people from boasting about their dysfunctions.
I don't know that shaming is quite right, but more like a caveat emptor. No one is going to stop you from exploring this stuff but the odds of regret and/or putting yourself in vulnerable positions with people with little regard for your emotional well-being are significant. Buyer beware.
At least that, for sure. But that warning isn't going to come from the evangelists of the outré. The hype machine for things like kink and polyamory is loud and obnoxious in more and more sectors of online discourse. It's like the sort of vegans who have to make sure everyone knows they're vegan. Except this time it's intimate aspects of one's sexual life, sold as superior to all those boring repressed normies with our vanilla relationships and monogamy prisons. Maybe this is the wrong venue to gripe, but I'm getting pretty sick of it.
You guys are the dominant voices, and we're getting so sick of you for shaming our sexuality. We get it - you don't like queer people, you don't like people enjoying sex, you don't like anything you think seems different or weird.
I have been around people in my local kink scene since I was 15 (the geek/goth/tech crossover with it is huge), and I am in my 50s now. I'm also not straight and think sexual pleasure is an excellent thing. A+++, would recommend and all.
I also have three decades of seeing people, sometimes very close friends and ex-partners, tie themselves in knots (no pun intended) to justify some of the crap that happens, even when it's messing them up, because to do otherwise would violate community norms. Do I know some people who are living the safe, sane, consensual dream? Yeah. A few, sure, but they've been the minority. It's possible that other cities have much healthier scenes. Maybe mine's an outlier and shouldn't be counted, as that meme goes, but people being people, I doubt it.
😂😂😂
You clearly don't know who you're talking to. Thanks for proving my point.
🍵
I lost your reply to one of my comments somehow - it said something about being around kinksters since you were 15 but it's gone now.
I know another group at least as bad as kinksters in terms of maladaptive, abusive, or unhealthy people - it's called "non-kinsters."
I like using the phrase “taken advantage of” to illustrate a situation that falls somewhere between criminal and consensual. But people are generally uninterested in being precise with language.
Agreed: I think, in this case, the word “exploited” fills the bill rather neatly.
Consent may ostensibly have been given, but it would be hard to argue that it was given freely.
Exploited or maybe "in a psychologically and sexually abusive relationship.
Precise language unfortunately doesn’t sell stories these days.
It's interesting that I don't recall a conversation about second order consequences for men after, say, Baby Reindeer - in which the protagonist describes being raped by a powerful, successful man and then going back repeatedly to be further raped, while enthusiastically continuing a text relationship with the abuser. Consent is a difficult, deficient concept in sexual ethics: it also happens to be the concept on which the law of sexual violence is largely built, and perhaps the only plausible foundation for that.
One of the things that the Tortoise podcast on Gaiman (I don't know if you've listened) is exceptionally good at is exploring the issues with the women's own documentation and explaining why they are in a legally weak situation. I came away from that unhappily convinced that a fair trial would not find Gaiman guilty. But I can hold that understanding simultaneously with the belief that Gaiman was a practiced manipulator in his selection of victims and post-assault behaviours designed to manufacture consent. Otherwise, what were the NDAs for?
I mean, at least one person was talking about that: https://www.thefp.com/p/baby-reindeer-is-a-true-story-but-whose
That isn't a piece about potential second order consequences regarding men's ability to consent to medical treatment or sign contracts; it's a piece about Gadd's willingness to turn his experience into content. A good topic, but not the same argument you're making here.
Perhaps that’s because men have never been subject to those sorts of limitations on their autonomy, whereas women have, within living memory? I mean, maybe it would be nice if the stakes were identical here but I’ve gotta write about the world we live in
I think I would frame your point there similarly but with an opposite emphasis: men's rights and subjectivity are presumed to be settled and secure even when they talk about being a "bad victim"; women's are conditional, so the cost of being a "bad victim" is the threat that other rights will be withdrawn. That is by definition a sexist, misogynist framework, and there's no reason to accept it.
Now I'm just confused, because nobody has accused anyone of being a "bad victim" and that is not the framework of this essay (if anything it's one I explicitly reject). And I certainly haven't threatened anyone!
"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... 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." Implicitly, this says Pavlovich is not a sympathetic victim without the scale-thumbing; explicitly, it groups her with "unreliable narrators". I think that "bad victim" is a reasonable shorthand for someone seen as unsympathetic and unreliable. And I certainly didn't say you threatened anyone, but the concept of "second order consequences" to women's rights is a threat that those rights will be void -- so there is a threat, which you are describing here.
"Perhaps that’s because men have never been subject to those sorts of limitations on their autonomy, whereas women have, within living memory?"
The draft.
Yes! It's amazing how people don't seem to care about what happens to men!
It's worth noting that not all states use the "consent" legal framework for rape - some still use the older "force" one. I think that one is better.
This made me laugh.
"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."
Ya think?
Considering that feminism has been largely taken over by radical lesbians, a not-small-number of whom have endorsed the claim that all sex with men is rape, that trap seems quite intentional.
To be honest, I am much more worried about the brand of feminism that tells us that it’s “kink shaming” to react negatively to stories about men being sexually aroused by women eating his feces. We should be able to call some stuff gross and concerning, even if everyone involved is consenting.
You can certainly say you think something is gross. Shaming others for their sexual interests, however, is cruel and wrong.
Why? We are allowed to talk about people having bad taste in movies, books, arts, ect. We recognize, for example, that not all books are equally well written or contain the same level of artistic merit. Why would sex be any different? Why should that be the one area of life where it’s “cruel and wrong” to make aesthetic judgements? It seems weird to say that I’m allowed to say that I find something gross, but it’s immoral for me to explain *why* I find that thing gross.
I never said it was cruel or wrong to make aesthetic judgments, just to shame people. Like I think Neil Gaiman is a crappy writer, but I'm not going to shame anyone for liking his books.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to compare a book or painting, which is a single work of art that stands on its own and is intended for the public to enjoy aesthetically, to a kink, which is a type of activity that many different people can do in many different ways, and done for personal and relational purposes.
What's your aesthetic judgment about sleep sex? Period sex? What kinks do you think are more or less aesthetically pleasing?
I don't think it's immoral for you to explain why you find something gross, though I would personally find it nearly impossible to explain why something turns me on or doesn't - it just does. I'm just wired that way.
I would never shame anyone to their face- that just seems mean and unhelpful and well, rude. But I don’t think it’s out of bounds for feminists to criticize kinks- after all, it seems very reasonable to question why people find certain acts pleasurable. Like, you said that you don’t know why certain things turn you on- I feel like that’s a very common opinion. So doesn’t that make this a great topic for writers and thinkers to explore? I feel like one of the main reasons why we read is to learn more about ourselves. And, to come back to the criticism angle, that includes both the good and the bad aspects of ourselves.
Lol wut
Here's where I'm stuck. She said no, repeatedly. She said no in the bath. She said no to anal sex.
Stout also said no, repeatedly.
Isn't everything else sort of beside the point? (And isn't the fawning by Pavlovich completely documented as a common response in the sexual assault literature?)
Things get murky because at the time she was clearly saying "yes" in the text messages, which are the hardest evidence the article presents (and it only presents a few texts; one has to wonder what else is in those messages).
As she recounted the story to the author some four years later, she said that she repeatedly said "no" in person back in 2020.
According to the article, she didn't conceive of what happened as sexual assault even after a couple friends of hers said they believed it was.
As the article reads, it seems like she only decided she was sexually assaulted after Palmer decided it was best for her not to return as a babysitter.
Obviously Gaiman and his team are free to release any messages that he find exculpatory, so if we’re not seeing them, that seems to go both ways.
He's innocent until proven guilty. He doesn't have to release any messages.
Certainly a jury would be instructed to consider him innocent until proven guilty. I don’t think there’s any similar expectation for public opinion.
No, as a matter of ethics and fairness, he should be considered innocent in the court of public opinion as well, until proven guilty. The presumption of innocence does not just apply in court.
Then you run into the problem that you’re considering her guilty of defaming him before that’s been proved.
He doesn’t have to do anything, nor should we draw any implications from any texts not being released. But the person I was responding to seemed to be drawing implications the other way.
She didn't say no. That was a lie.
And no, fawning is not a common response to being assaulted.
We don’t know it’s a lie. We just don’t know it’s true.
I do think we can be fairly confident that it is a lie, given the clear consent expressed in the texts as discussed in Cinema's comment above.
It’s quite possible she said ‘No’ on some occasions and consented on other occasions and later put it was consensual because it’s all mixed up together. I have a male friend who was raped whilst under the influence of a drug and he later went back and had sex with his attacker because he couldn’t accept that he had been a victim. These things can be more complicated than you suppose. Additionally, it is possible that ‘no’ was said on every occasion. In some BDSM relationships to mean ‘no’ they use a different safe word to get the other person to stop because ‘no’ is part of it. (Personally I think that’s a messy situation). In that case it would be true she said no but, also that the text was true. Or it could be that she said ‘no’ on every occasion but, said it was consensual because she had a financial/romantic motivation to say it was consensual. You see what I mean? We don’t know that she said ‘no’ on the occasions she describes is a lie because we don’t know what really happened.
Lol, well we're talking about a real "no" here, obviously.
I don't believe there was any abuse here or any evidence of abuse.
We could be talking about a real 'no' or we might not be. My point is that to conclusively say that she said no 'was a lie' is not something we are able to assert. You are of course entitled to your opinion and you may well be right. If you had said 'I believe she is lying' I would not argue with you.
On what basis do you say it’s a lie?
See Cinema's comment above that you replied to - I think that explains it.
If you take the texts as infallible that certainly simplifies things.
Meaning they might have been forged or photoshopped? I'm not understanding your point.
Meaning that they didn’t reflect her true beliefs about what happened, as written in the article. You did read the article?
Every relationship between humans includes other factors which affect the power dynamic. The rich and famous Gaimans seem to have specialized in befriending younger, vulnerable, poor women. How convenient.
Younger, poorer women have no agency? What do you mean by vulnerable?
Specifically, Gaiman's alleged victims include a woman retained largely unpaid as a nanny to his child who was reliant on him and Palmer for bed and board; and a women employed as a factotum who lived with her children on his property, under a grace and favour arrangement in which Gaiman expected sex. These are not vague definitions of "poorer" or "less powerful". These are relationships in which Gaiman had the direct ability to make these women homeless and/or unemployed.
Case in point, according to the article, when the factotum refused Gaiman, he canceled their arrangement.
I presume you you believe this true for men. Young, poor and vulnerable being subjected to abhorrent conditions? Or is it only women?
I've heard men relying on a girlfriend for housing without paying rent described as "hobosexual" in a jokey way. I do get that the age, wealth dynamics, and the BDSM aspect make the Gaiman thing a bit different, but the reaction I've seen to men paying rent via sex is more of a "awesome man," but when women are in the same arrangement it's viewed as a rapey power dynamic. I've known hobosexual men rendered homeless (couch surfing) after a breakup and mostly the whole situation was joked about in the friend group.
This is the first time I’ve heard the word “hobosexual” and I’m DYING
So, this is not a gender issue. It is a class issue.
I don’t have much agency rn :/
“(#Believewomen, except when…”)
It seems like this snarky comment should at least engage with Pavlovich’s allegation that she told him “no” and he did it anyway.
It's not snarky, Tom; it's a joke, at the expense of nobody. And I disagree that there's anything to be gained from engaging with unsubstantiated allegations (in general, not just in this case) that are contradicted by more substantive contemporaneous evidence -- especially for this cultural analysis to which the question of Gaiman's guilt is totally irrelevant. Even if I had an opinion on whether he did it (I don't) it wouldn't change the thesis of this piece.
I didn't by "snarky" mean anything substantially different than "joke," so I'm happy with that terminology. I don't mean to tell you what you meant, but I think the joke is at least a little at the expense of people who have said "believe women" (with or without the hashtag) who are taking Pavlovich's side on this issue. You're joking about an apparent inconsistency, right? Otherwise, what's the joke about?
I disagree that there's nothing to be gained by mentioning Pavlovich's allegations, even skeptically. As it stands, one could read your piece without having any idea that Pavlovich is alleging forcible rape, and in fact some of your readers have done exactly that: I responded to someone today who said "If Pavlovich said no, then the author" (I think he meant you) "is either lying or misinformed, which I doubt." I don't think you're misinformed and certainly not lying, but I think you inadvertently gave a mistaken picture to your readers of what Pavlovich is alleging. And it's the same as the premise of the "#BelieveWomen" joke: that people are blaming Gaiman for taking her "yes" at face value. Whereas her allegation is the exact opposite.
I also disagree that the question of Gaiman's guilt is irrelevant. If in fact he raped Pavlovich, that casts a totally different light on both her texts and her current claims, and what we make of the whole situation. For instance, you write, "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"—that would be a total non-sequitur if in fact there was nothing to "mean it" about, no choice, just him raping her. (The choice to send him nice texts afterwards looks pretty slight in comparison once that rubicon is crossed, I think.)
For what it's worth, I agree with you that the author tells us what to think too much—I thought "thumbing the scale" was a perfect description.
Lol, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on the question of whether hashtags are people. (Personally I think the only community I'm having a bit of a go at here are the guys who get off on forced feces-eating, and if they get mad, so be it.)
As for the rest, let me try to explain this one more time: Gaiman's guilt is irrelevant because this essay isn't about what happened between Gaiman and Pavlovich. It's completely decoupled from that question. We have *no idea* right now what he did or didn't do. The only thing we know is that she said it was consensual, at the time, and not just after the affair was over; she aggressively pursued a sexual relationship, bragged to friends at the time it was happening, etc.
To be clear, I'm not judging her for this, I'm not saying it means he didn't rape her; I'm just saying, the available evidence only points in one direction. Which is why the journalist who wrote the piece is working so hard to persuade us that her consent didn't count, by explaining that actually, women are *always* struggling to distinguish consensual sex from rape, saying yes when they mean no, etc. And THAT is what my essay is about.
The way people are talking about women's agency in this situation, which is the way they always talk about women's agency when stories like this come up: this would be the same whether Gaiman did it or not, and my analysis of it will be the same even if a bombshell video of that bathtub interlude hits the internet tomorrow and resolves the question once and for all. Does that make sense?
I found this interesting as in this case the thing I found that made her consent less meaningful was mental illness. Depending on what Gaiman knew and when he knew it I *could* see that pushing this into outright criminal territory. Hard to prove, though.
But yeah, even without that, if this were a storyline from a book there would be zero doubts Gaiman is the villain.
Disagree. The texts make it pretty clear there are a lot of doubts and Gaiman is likely innocent
Legally that is the likely outcome, yes.
But he’s still a guy that ejaculates at the site of a woman eating her own vomit and feces.
Assuming any of that is true, ok.
So what? Everyone has their kinks.
Genuine question: given the murky details around the victim's consent, what criteria are being used to diagnose this situation as rape?
Is it that the sex was so clearly gross, it's presumed no one would consent?
I've heard talk of her "mental health"; was she diagnosed with something specifically?
I've heard talk of power imbalances, but I'm not aware of any that crossed the line into illegal?
One case where power imbalances have legal weight would be sexual harassment law related to employment. If a boss lays out a quid pro quo expectation for an employee (the exchange of sex for promotions, perks, or continued employment), my understanding is that would be illegal, regardless of consent.
It would be sexual harassment, and she could sue.
It would not be a crime. It would not count as rape.
He began the assault 3 hours after meeting her, before she had done any work or accepted any payment, though.
True of Pavlovich, not of Stout, the other woman discussed in the article (but not in the post here).
The criteria are that she allegedly told him “no” but he had sex with her anyway.
That is the usual criteria. But here we apparently have her texting "It was consensual (and wonderful)!”
Is her claim that she verbally said "no" at the time despite this later text? I am still listening to the Tortoise podcast.
Here’s an unpaywalled link to the article: https://archive.is/2025.01.13-120214/https://www.vulture.com/article/neil-gaiman-allegations-controversy-amanda-palmer-sandman-madoc.html
Yes
We can assume that the degree to which a woman will lie about her consent to please somebody is a normally distributed trait, probably correlated with neuroticism and aggreableness. So a few women are unreliable narrators, most are okay, a few are highly reliable.
Since the unreliable ones are a small portion of women, there is no need to worry about the loss of choice for women as a group in areas like health, politics, etc.
I'd quibble with using "normally distributed" to refer generically to being distributed in a bell-shaped fashion, since there are a lot of bell-shaped distributions (Cauchy, Student-t, lognormal, etc.), but I think you're about right.
I also think it's fair to say that there are circumstances that are coercive enough as to make consent murky at best, and perhaps the best way to ensure that a "yes" really means "yes" is to keep away from those circumstances to the extent that one can.
> I also think it's fair to say that there are circumstances that are coercive enough as to make consent murky at best, and perhaps the best way to ensure that a "yes" really means "yes" is to keep away from those circumstances to the extent that one can.
I came here to say this as well. On top of whatever personality traits make someone likely to say yes when they don’t mean it, someone could also feel desperate enough to lie about it for the reasons you mention — if they depended on the person for employment or housing, for instance. (Which is in fact relevant here!)
And I would expect that to be the case no matter the gender of the person involved.
"Since the unreliable ones are a small portion of women, there is no need to worry about the loss of choice for women as a group in areas like health, politics, etc."
Depends on how society handles that assumed "small portion" and the events involved.
If half of society risks prison if a member of the other half withdraws consent after the fact, such events would have to be *VANISHINGLY* rare for it not to have serious and far-reaching effects on society.
(Spoiler: it is currently not "vanishingly rare".)
"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always as an end and never simply as a means." - Kant
"Mutual consent" does not morally justify abusing another, even if it may do so legally.
This seems to be begging the question.
It's not abuse if it was consented to.
"It's not abuse if it was consented to."
I disagree that this logically follows.
Why is that?
Thank you Ms Rosenfeld, this is bravely written. You deliver a combination of erudite wit and joyful backbone - feels like a breath of fresh air.
I agree that this is disgusting and the man involved deserves negative judgement. Women need to take responsibility for their actions too though. Screw all of them. I don’t care.
"Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience."
This is because we use the same term – "attraction" – to describe two polar opposite things. We say that "men are attracted to women", but this could mean that they like women and want to love and care for them. Or it could mean that men hate women and they want to hurt, dominate and humiliate women.
How does a women distinguish between these two things when the culture – like you outline – is built around this "sex positive" anything-goes, no "kink shaming"? This is coupled with still the dominant sentiment that sex is about servicing men's desires.
For women there's no concept like "hate-fucking". Yet this is embedded deep within male sexuality.
That said, it seems women in South Korea have understood this and decided that going anywhere near the human male is simply not in their interests.
Women tend to be more into hate-fucking than men...
Somebody had to break it to him.
I winced when I was listening to the original report in "Tortoise." I noticed first how hard the podcast worked to infantilize the first accuser (I hesitate to use the word victim): she was "small" and "waiflike." They really needed her to be a victim.
But mostly, I found myself asking "what responsibility does she have for what happened?" In her report of the first encounter with NG, there was no force, no threat...nothing. She made the decision to get naked in the hot tub of a person who was essentially a stranger to her. And she made the decision to stay in the hot tub when NG climbed in. What was stopping her from hopping out, getting dressed and walking the five minutes back to the ferry station?
It's part of a trend I've noticed, where it's as if Womyn are Queens and Goddesses...until they do something stupid, and then suddenly they're waiflike beings with no agency or responsibility for the outcome. And that is way more infantilizing of women than the things the Evul Patriarchy is supposedly trying to accomplish.
It's hard to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound like I'm pro-Gaiman, but did he rape her? I think not (and the follow up texts to her friends about "awesome sex" certainly don't support that). He was a guy who wanted to get laid, and like most people (male and female) who want to get laid, he was pretty insistent and boorish.
And this is only about experience reported on the first accuser's claim. Some of the stuff Gaiman allegedly did was worthy of a good horsewhipping.
Thank you for stating this so clearly. Perhaps it is time to bring back the Victorian concepts of "wickedness" and "seduction," because without those words, or something like them, it's so difficult to even talk about what happened to them.