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.
The main take-away for me was that (far too many) women chase status and then twist themselves into a knot to evade accountability when things go awry. Neil Gaiman is abhorrent. So was/is Harvey Weinstein.
You might object that the common denominator is these 'powerful men's abhorrence.' Yet, you would only be partially correct, as you would have to add that these women, endowed with their own agency, chose to 'eat shit' in service of their own ambition.
Why doesn't anybody want to talk about why males claim themselves to be logical, rational protector-providers and then when they get a chance they immediately become abusive, crazy freaks who treat women like shit?
Does anybody want to talk about this? Why is it immediately shifted to women, which is the same fucking conversation for the past oh I don't know, fifty years?
Wtf is wrong with men? Why does everybody deflect?
After all this time, and all you moids have is IT'S NOT ALL THO.
Thanks for proving me correct.
My point is that when anything happens, nobody wants to have an honest conversation about male violence and male behavior.
That is true in Afghanistan and in China and in the US (I'm not saying the cultures are the same everywhere, but the innate irrational self-defense is the same).
We criticize and talk about women all the time and have for thousands of years.
This is the problem--and you proved it. Constant deflection, derailing, shifting to women. Since Adam and Eve.
Nobody wants to speak honestly about males and their severe innate problems.
Perhaps Chuck replied saying that "most men don't do what you described" because your comment is phrased in such a way as to imply you're talking about men in general?
You're still talking about "males and their severe innate problems", literally in the same comment as you scathingly rebuke someone for pointing out those problems are not ubiquitous, or even particularly common, in males.
Your comment states that “every time a male gets a chance he turns from rational protector provider into abuser” but there is absolutely no reason to believe this is true. Most men that COULD abuse a woman, don’t. Your worldview is a result of media sensationalism and advertisement driven media, not reason and evidence.
I'm not convinced this is that common, or that men do it more than women. Perhaps the reason people don't talk about this supposed phenomenon is that it does not exist, or they aren't convinced it exists.
Women are more likely to be the sole aggressors in domestic disputes (28% females to males vs 13% males to females and the rest bidirectional).
Yes women are more likely to be killed by their male counterparts, but to pretend that women are some pacifist cohort of the population isn’t borne out in the data. Warren Farrell’s work is pointing out the inconsistencies between public perception of intimate partner violence and the realities. The point of this article, I think, is that pretending that women as a category are agency-less “smols” is untrue, reductive and unhelpful.
“Believe all women” is good precisely for the shitty women and not good for the not so shitty women, just as “believe all men” empowers the psychopaths and punishes the gentleman. If you say perjury doesn’t exist you have enshrined rule by lie.
I have seen men do terrible things and I have seen (more) women do terrible things, and none of that behavior is OK, but it doesn’t need to degenerate to yelling about Adam and Eve. The story of Adam and Eve isn’t about Eve’s evil and Adam’s innocence, it is about the line of evil residing in every human heart.
Women are not evil, men are not evil, but individual humans who are male or female have the opportunity to commit terrible horrible things on one another, and this life is about trying not to inflict suffering on others while you alleviate your own. May we all reach to a higher, rather than lower, purpose.
It is great someone finally is talking about how awful some, probably most, men are. Give some, probably most, men some
Money or power and they’d all be making every woman in their sordid pathetic tiny penis lives eat their own poop. Because deep inside every man wants that.
FINALLY! Someone is saying something bad about men. You are breaking new ground here, Kat.
Because a minority of men sleep with very many women and do this type of thing. It's up to you to select better. The same way it's up to me not to pick borderline women. Take accountability for your choices and stop pretending to be a victim.
A general note to Substack readers: if you get this far be sure to follow the conversation thread beside this one between Kat Highsmith (NOT Kat Rosenfeld - ed.), Chuck and Jack. Jack provides a master class in “how to disagree online” - pure DH6 material (refuting the main point) to use Paul Graham’s brilliant formulation of the disagreement hierarchy. You don’t see this a lot.
If you were a yr or two younger, it'd be considered statutory rape in some states. If a man twice the age of your preteen great granddaughter grooms her into having sex or even child marriage (legal in some states), would you say, "I don't think it would be right to call him a rapist for not reading her mind"? Would it be better for her mental health to tell her she made bad choices? Why would it be better than admitting facts about assymetries in cognitive maturity, experience, theories of minds, and evolutionary psychology of rape? How do you know the older man couldn't predict a teen mind better than teen-you could?
Who are more mind-blind: Gaiman, who specialized in writing with such realistic theories of abusers' & victims' minds that it made him famous, or the people acting like he was mind-blind? People who never had to defend their rapists can't empathize with victims like in Shiny, Happy People or other religious or family sex abuse scandals.
You cannot determine the rightness or wrongness of an action by likening it to a completely different situation. We are not talking about preteens being groomed; we are talking about adult women.
If you're going to suggest that women who are 18 and 22 are the same as preteen girls, then you're bolstering Kat's argument. When do we stop being impressionable children who can't meaningfully consent? If the line is not at 18, or 20, or 22, then where is it (I've seen the "he groomed her" explanation applied to women in their /late/ 20s; in their 30s; and in one case, in her 40s)? And are you sure you want to argue for your particular line, given its implications for us?
I'm here for updating predictive theories for reducing future risks, not for 'determining wrongness' of the past. It's not our job to be judge, jury, or lawyers on Substack, though some foolishly act like lawyers defending Gaiman pro bono based lies by omission or their egos self-IDing as dom. Not one such fool has had the integrity to admit that at the very least, Gaiman serially committed sexual harrassment as an employer.
The thought experiment involving possible future statutory rape/enslavement was specifically for a commenter to practice modeling assymetries & evo psy that underlie crimes in general. If people don't learn to predict and mitigate risks, then being above age 17 will not only NOT protect them, they and their (future) dependents will be at higher risk of being targeted by mind-hackers with impunity.
The fact that books like Why Does He Do That or How He Gets into Her Head are read by adults who react as if such info is mind-blowing or "must-read" shows that many don't learn until having read the book, often after having struggled to predict cases of domestic abuse that they personally suffered or found out someone they know suffered. Ask them if they'd agree that 'living with an abuser = consent to being physically assaulted if over age 17, so police & courts should ignore all those cases, or else [insert whatever your chicken-little theory is]'. Bet the same chicken-little theory was used to argue against law recognizing marital rape.
I have no problem with a justice system attempting to respect the WHOLE TRUTH, instead of complying with serial criminals' "deny, deny, deny" strategy. Can't fearmonger me into idiocracy, rule of ideology that ignores or can't predict reality. Regressive societies are idiocratic. If the US further regresses to idiocratically denying that crimes can happen to people above age 17, then I'd move to a smarter nation, while the US is overtaken by serial perps like Trump, Gaiman, or those featured on American Greed. If instead of stopping serial con artists, you'd rather have fraud victims over age 17 ruminate over bad choices, then good luck to you when you're elderly and targeted by mind-hackers in the AI Age. There's only so much I can do to get people to develop theories & skills so they won't have to rely on luck.
Um, when do men start taking responsibility for their actions and stop proclaiming themselves to be super logical, rational protector providers who should be given power in society? If this is how they behave whenever they can, what does it say about the male character?
Why is the topic always changed to women and what women should do?
Is this how males are expected to behave whenever and wherever they can? Why? Who made that decision?
Nearly all crimes (e.g. sexual harrassment by employers, theft, fraud, non-sexual assault, homicide, white collar crime, slavery) are considered crimes NOT due to violation of age of consent but due to one party taking advantage of assymetries to the detriment of another party, which if not disincentivized by a justice system would result in even less freedom or perfection of information processing (i.e. more biased or poorly informed choices; more corruption, destruction, & brutality; lower trust; more inefficient games or economy; more suffering & low productivity; etc.).
Pointing at an arbitrary age cutoff in order to ignore all factors other than age ONLY for one type of crime, sexual assault, is a thought/speech-termination/control tactic or willfull obstruction of justice, designed by rape cultures to give impunity to ingrouped rapists. If Gaiman & his ex were Pakistani immigrants in the UK, they'd be lumped with 'grooming gangs' for targeting a homeless, familyless, naive woman and making her feel responsible for protecting a child and other potential victims. But the US is a nation where rich, White male serial criminals are ingrouped to such an extent that one can be relected President by people who deny, deny, deny that he committed any crime.
Given that there are pro-rape/antichoice subcultures of the US which keep child marriage/slavery legal, I don't buy that they care about 'age of consent'. Rather, they wield it as a cudgel to beat down adults who attempt to stop rapists. Meanwhile, their police mistreat even child victims, e.g. the way Melissa Turnage coerced Taylor Cadle to apologize to her rapist uncle. British rape/antichoice culture (since at least 1861 abortion ban) allowed White male grooming gangs and prosecuted victims, incl. children, as "prostitutes" if they attempted to file reports, paving the road for grooming gangs of immigrants from former British colonies (still neocolonies). If you're surprised by anything in the examples I've pointed at, your theories are less predictive than mine.
Yes, it is functionally, morally, and medically superior to tell someone they made bad decisions when they made bad decisions. The question isn't whether or not to tell them that; it's a rhetorical exercise in how to manipulate a damaged person's perceptions and emotions to criticize without tripping one of the mines in their mental minefield.
This is not something that can be measured in abstract or discussed as a vague "game plan" with interchangeable variables - IT MUST BE TAILOR-MADE TO INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE.
That you believe otherwise, I hold as a demonstration of the fact you have little understanding of guilt, fault, responsibility, the difference between the three, and why that's important.
That lack of understanding is probably not your fault - the entire legal community, much of the psychiatric community, and a great number of otherwise-not-related people have been peddling filthy nonsense such as "at fault equals all guilt" for a while.
Fault is a measurement of who created the problem.
Guilt is a measurement of who contributed to the problem. Responsibility is a measurement of who's obligated to fix the problem.
Assuming purely for the sake of argument that all parties are being honest here...
Gaiman is at fault for creating the problem by asking for creepy and medically unhealthy sex. The lady who gave it to him is guilty of not standing up for herself and saying no, then lying about it and giving him ammunition to use kater. Both are responsible for fixing the problem - Gaiman needs to stop asking for creepy and medically unhealthy sex, the lady needs to say what she means even if she's afraid, and both need to stop seeing each other.
I don't recall the details of the experiences of all the accusers, but I think that the young woman who was their nanny did say "no" during their first encounter; I think the woman he pressured into sex after she said she had a UTI did too. I don't know how much a technical, hair's difference matters; at a minimum, apparently, not only did he sexually harass an employee (the nanny), he didn't pay her. So this doesn't just sound like shitty sex but abuse and possibly criminal acts.
It's also true that her seeming willingness to continue the affair casts doubt on her side of the story, and people might compromise themselves at times because they want something from someone who's in a position of power. That doesn't mean that they deserve to be harassed or raped, one of which happened in this situation.
I think it's important to talk about these things in a nuanced way, though, as you're doing, because situations and relationships can be messy and murky, and we risk missing deeper insights into ourselves and society. It reminds me of the debate about whether young women who go walking around in skimpy clothes are putting themselves at risk; even if they are, are you allowed to say it? What does it mean that so much value is placed on young women's sex appeal, not just by men or society, but by themselves?
I'm also of the belief that people shouldn't have to be banished forever because they've done something wrong, or even many things wrong. People can learn and be rehabilitated, and it's more likely if they see a way back for themselves. If they think that they're going to be pilloried or professionally ostracized, they're usually unwilling to accept any accountability at all.
I can do yet another about-turn and say professional repercussions are the only consequences some of these men face, partly for the very reason that rape or assault is usually committed by partners or acquaintances or co-workers and can be hard to prove.
I can probably piss a lot of people off by even considering any of these perspectives publicly, but we should be able to discuss these types of issues without shouting each other down or making monsters or incompetents or villains out of each other. I can acknowledge the points you've raised.
It's all made me feel sick to my stomach, though, as usual, and I also somehow feel like an idiot for yet again failing to sense a predator. And I know that this is an unpopular and possibly weird stance, but I feel sad for Neil Gaiman, as I do for many offenders, because there are other parts of them that aren't terrible, I guess. I never even read or watched many things he was involved in, and the stuff I did read or see struck me as a little twisted and overly violent. I still didn't see it, and I'm still sad for the artist in him.
I don't agree that it's fair to blame "BDSM" for this. It's not bad or gross. Every time you take control of a woman's body consensually, tie her up or hold her hands down, or give her orders, you are practicing BDSM.
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.
Absolutely. It's having so many downstream effects to normalise kinky, fringe or extreme sexual behaviour.
There's so many stories I've seen on Reddit of Gen Z young adults describing bizarre, creepy, disgusting, unsafe or aggressive sexual experiences and they just seem to accept that it's all part of some process of calibration as they figure out their "identity" (Am I a sub? A dom? A switch? A top? A bottom? A side? Vers? Bi? Pan? Poly? Demi-romantic? Queer? Non-binary? Transmasc? Transfemme? Into humiliation? Into punishment? Into group sex? Into cuckolding? CNC? The pornification of online subcultures has led to an obsession with identity labels which would be fine if only theoretical but people are then going on apps and ticking a bunch of boxes, basically advertising to the world that they are sufficiently indoctrinated into the sex-positive kink-is-cool mindset. It is a fucking field day for predators or just anyone with zero scruples.)
We are robbing a generation of the experiences most of us had growing up in the 80s, 90s and 2000s -- the opportunity to explore sex in an organic fashion, with someone you meet IRL and hit it off with, and to come into it without the baggage of a childhood spent on Tumblr, Reddit, Discord, Pornhub...
My assumption is generally that the more focused on such labels an individual is the less likely they are to have actually had sex. Sex is not an abstraction.
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.
If you are “queer,” which I take to mean that you like gay sex, fine. If you like being whipped or whipping people who consent, fine. If you just love the taste of pee, enjoy. It might be better for you than Mountain Dew.
But it’s not unreasonable for us “vanilla” types to point out that the per drinking can quickly devolve into something degrading and unhealthy and ultimately unsatisfying.
By all means, enjoy sex. But lots of people manage to enjoy sex without being flogged.
Or maybe some of us have seen certain "scenes" up close or explored alternative relationship models, and we eventually came to reconsider the moral framework we were operating under.
I have no problem with what people do in private -- it's about the normalisation of these things, the demand for validation and the push for making them ubiquitous in society and easily accessible to minors.
Right there, right there in your response is the entire problem in a nutshell. Someone talks of the inherent issues of a certain vibe/practice and the response--"you hate queer people and hate sex."
Kinks are not the definition of sex or sexually enjoyment. You can adore sex and never do anything vaguely kinky. You can feel deep shame about it and that is what drives your kink. Secondly, kinks do not make you "Queer". I know people are trying to make it the same but to me there is something just wrong about a rich, straight, white guy into dominating and harming a straight female (maybe even with a racial angle) calling themselves "queer". That person may even be homophobic otherwise. They certainly won't have any serious oppression geared toward them.
It also implies that gay people have weirder sex than non-gay people and that feels very problematic.
I guess the point is that when what used to be correctly recognized as sexual deviance is mainstreamed who is going to tell youngsters this is probably not a good idea?
I had a conversation about this just recently. In a healthy society, taboo and shame are supposed to fill the role of “checks and balances.” Many things that people assume were oppressive to women (some legitimately were, no argument there) actually served a function to make sure society didn’t end up in chaos. When you have literally disgusting kink being normalized - is it good for society? Is it good to live in a society in which people have no inhibitions and that’s supposed to be normal? Does this serve us in raising a healthy upcoming generation? What happens to us when whimsical desires are placed at the center of what we are supposed to want?
These are things we have to ask ourselves in an era where it’s easier than ever to be a porn star a la Lily Phillips (I think that’s her name). We live in an era where the kids are not alright. BDSM is mainstream and people scream at us on the street for not being inclusive enough.
I’m sorry, maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think shame serves a high purpose within culture and that perhaps we should remember that.
I think you have to be measured in any shaming or making things taboo. Because often than just leads people to wanting to know what the fuss is about and making it even more attractive. I think the mistake in the past was the shame/taboo coming from a religious standpoint where people were shamed to talk about sex *at all* and people started questioning all boundaries because so many boundaries really didn’t make sense. I think you can let people know that those behaviors are far outside the norm, and “buyer beware” as someone else said. Then empower them to assert their agency in sexual matters, instead of treating them like children. And for very young people whose brains might still be developing, just be straight with them that they should wait because right now their judgment not be what they think it is. Don’t try to scare the shit out of them or shame them for even asking or being curious, but be straight about the vulnerability of sex and what it’s ok to just wait until you’re older and have a different perspective. Just being direct and respectful and telling people they have control of their bodies, and to just take care and be proud of that agency—that’s a lot better than just blind shaming or tabooing without any context.
Do you only want to talk about how terrible it is that wimminz walk around in short skirts nowadays, or do you honestly want to talk about male behavior as well?
Of course we should talk about male behavior and we do - all the time. I just think it’s awfully easy to do just that and not get into the messy place where adults have agency to make choices for themselves. I think we can talk about a societal failure to speak loudly about the things we find inappropriate. It seems the loudest ones are the ones promoting the same kind of behavior that makes people think eating shit is fine and just another preference and how dare we judge anyone’s preferences.
We have a society that promotes appalling male AND female behavior in the name of personal liberation. Honestly, this sort of feels like it was the point. So much of feminism has been about women having the right to act just like men and I’d say we’ve arrived there. This is no longer the world of systematic female oppression, though I’d say femininity itself is under an attack of its own.
I say this from a place of personal experience. I wasted much time in my younger years “experimenting” and “trying to figure myself out” and it didn’t contribute in any meaningful way to the process of healthy maturation. It is the type of behavior designed to keep one in a state of constant personal drama and turmoil- much like the apparent lives of Nail Gaiman’s sex partners turned victims - wasting much life energy on self-sabotage. My point is that we ought to let young women know that, while, yes, they are free to be who they want in this world and with whomever, many of the old values would still prove useful: discernment, sobriety, restraint, and delayed gratification. Young women are entering into a world that is essential a sex-positive thunderdome and I hope more people deign to tell them what a farce that is.
To answer your questions:
I believe it is not only men who are trying to normalize this culture of anything goes sexual expression. I see women vehemently defend men in their private personal spaces while in the same breath claiming men are inherently predatory. I see women claiming that sex work is empowering. I see women claiming that dressing in a maximally sexual way is for themselves only. Sexuality is a double edged sword and if one is going to wield that in the world like a weapon, perhaps they should not be surprised when blood is drawn.
Again, I think both men and women are paying for this sort of shit. Go talk to any stripper and ask them about the general level of aggression of most of their female patrons. Women also fuel this fire of transactional sexuality. You can ask who’s paying, but you can also ask who is exploiting this. As though women aren’t out there setting up their own OnlyFans to try to cash in on what they think men want only to break their damn souls and then try to blame the men? You’re really telling me this is a one way exploitation? The customer base is clearly men, but somehow women are only innocent collateral here?
I have been in dire straits and had the internal argument of whether or not I should go strip. I have friends that do so and are able to pay all their bills and then some. Their children have what they need.
It’s a tempting proposition but it’s a CHOICE. Women have just as much agency to choose a different avenue as anyone else. Not saying it’s easy, but it is a choice. As most things in life are. And choices have consequences.
The general term youre looking for is “perversion.” It’s perverted, just like anything else that isnt normal sex, and all perversions are bad. None of them are rape, if they are consensual, and some of them fit in other bad categories as well, but they are all nonetheless bad. Idk what exactly Gaiman was up to apart from what was referenced in this post, but from the way it was described here, it wasnt rape, rather it was an especially messed up perversion.
A lot of much better writers and thinkers have expounded this than I, but basically the farther you get away from the proper and natural purpose of something, the more negative side effects there are.
Essentially, the proper and natural purpose of something is its highest order, and the further you get away from it the more it is disordered as opposed to ordered. That’s where we get the term “mental disorder” or “disorderly conduct”, etc.
Not seen much nowadays, but you could also have disorder in the other direction if you wanted to narrow the proper and natural purpose of something beyond its proper and natural purpose. An example of this would be the Shakers or an extreme example would be the Skoptsy, who were extremely disordered.
> basically the farther you get away from the proper and natural purpose of something, the more negative side effects there are.
Do you have any evidence or anything else to support this proposition? Does this mean gay sex is bad? How about condoms? How about the appendix? What is the "proper and natural purpose" of anything, when nature is random and purposeless? The eyes, for example, are the product of random mutations that happened to be beneficial. Do they really have a "natural purpose"- let alone a "proper" one?
I'm really not sure it's a defensible or even coherent position, but I'd be very interesting in hearing your defence.
Gay sex, condoms, yes. See almost every society ever. There are plenty of other people whove gone on and on about it in different ways. Appendix was thought to do nothing for a long time but helps deal with poisons and such. If nature is random and purposeless and nothing has a proper use then there is no defense possible and no defense needed of anything or any behavior and Neil’s only fault or anyone else’s for that matter is getting caught doing something other people dont like for whatever pointless reason. The idea that the purpose of a thing is what it does goes back a long time, and has been defended ad nauseam through the ages. If you want to go full nihilism then we dont have much to discuss, go make other people eat shit and call it a good thing I guess?
But that requires that you know what the proper purpose of sex is and nature isn't going to agree with folks like you. Yours comes from a religious understanding not true observance.
It isn't though. Animals use sex for lots of purposes. Procreation is only one part. Bonobos, which like chimps, are are closest living primate relative use it for LOTS of things, including diplomacy and smoothing group dynamics. This is the problem with this statement, people think they understand nature, what they understand is what institutions saiid about what is natural.
Why is it that everywhere I go that merely advocates for a nuanced viewpoint gets overrun with the most vile "conservatives" who are the actual ultra-perverts?
Or maybe the "stories that come out of this world" are the ones that reinforce the kinkshaming viewpoint? Kind of like how cops think everyone's a criminal and therapists think everyone's neurotic? There's a self-selecting process at work that shouldn't be ignored.
That's a fair question, and answering it depends on how much awareness one has beyond stuff that makes ripples in the broader news environment. I was speaking from the position of someone who spent the last 12 years interacting with people who are very kink-positive.
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.)
My perspective on all this, is that many movements of cult like sexual grooming will often take in the emotionally vulnerable & lonely, along with the psychological types that are very much less so & take pleasure from manipulation of said vulnerable, - a broad church so to speak. And therein, the, oh there's that word again, almost cult like worshipping of whatever is the in fetish of the season, toasted toenails on whipped lettuce anyone? etc etc, can become really boring for people who may find talking about the weather a tad more interesting than discussing the respective freedoms of assorted squelching membranes and who is doing what to who, why, how often & were they up for it, etc.
People have private hobbies.
But if my neighbours screech too loudly I'll call the cops.
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.
Perhaps I’m misreading Penny M, but adults taking a girl in her “mid-teens” to a BDSM party is definitely inappropriate, possibly criminal, and definitely wrong.
But even if the adults weren’t having sex in front of the underage person, even if it was just about how wonderful it all was and all of us have space for this kind of sexual behavior within us and everyone should just look deep inside, face facts, and get their freak on … still possibly criminal and definitely wrong.
For me as a feminist, I can't help but side eye this whole thing because I keep reading, oh there is nothing patriarchal about it, it is just the moment/scene whatever is the correct word but IRL everyone is equal. Indeed, I've read people say the sub has the "real power". And yet, there seem to be a strong sex ratio imbalance so that it is men doing the dominating and sadism and women (young ones at that) being bound, submissive etc.
All I can think is ok, and if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you. My suspicion is that this story is about her discovering that indeed if it walks like patriarchy and quacks like patriarchy, it is patriarchy. Even if both parties claim otherwise. But we have no other language than rape to describe that these days.
What biological sex people are who are paid to do miight be different than shall we say voluntary (or as this case quasi-voluntary) configurations. There also tends to be more actual sex involved in the voluntary group.
Yeah, there is no reason to think that women are submissive by biology. That's the kind of myth that evo-pysche quacks like to push only they know nothing about females in nature. Females in nature tend too be submissive to violence as we all are, but they aren't naturally so. They are taught though that this is who they are and who they should be.
"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.
i think a consequence of fame is that everything automatically has a power imbalance that sometimes can’t be identified until later if either person doesn’t have the awareness/vocabulary for its recognition.
"Rape" is the term needed for at least two of Gaiman's actions.
His first night with Pavlovich, he put his fingers in her anus without asking. While vacationing with Stout, he penetrated her vagina with his penis after she told him not to.
Admittedly he also did many other objectionable things that were at least ostensibly consented to, and "taken advantage of," etc would be useful for describing them.
My issue with the original article is that some of the acts as described were rape, but some were not. And the way they were written about made no distinction between the two.
Fingering without permission is a species of sexual assault. For myself, I am inclined to believe they did not consent, but also that it will be very difficult to prove that beyond a
I lost one of your other comments somehow. Not sure why Substack keeps dropping comments. It was the one about "if you are queer" and "if you like whipping someone."
Is tacit or implicit consent not a thing? Or do you demand explicit ask-and-answer at every stage of sex? "Can I put my tongue in your mouth now?" "Can I put my mouth on your breast now?
Legally, in New Zealand, it’s “unlawful sexual connection,” but doesn’t fall under the strict definition of rape. It is legally rape in many US states, though.
Surely there’s a vast chasm between sexual assault and “trying something” that you stop as soon as you’re told or (better) you’re aware it isn’t having the intended effect. But if I’m Gaiman, maybe I *want* my partner to feel pain and discomfort. If that’s who I am maybe I’m not hoping she’ll like it, but that she won’t and that it will turn her on to be *forced* to do something she doesn’t want to do.
I guess I’m lucky not to have that particular fetish. I like to think that if I did have that kind of fetish, and there was a cure for it, I would take the cure for it.
Depends where you live. In Australia, inserting your fingers or toes (digits) into 'private parts' of another person without consent is Digital Rape that can result in jail time.
If someone put their fingers up your asshole when you told them not to, would you really not consider that rape or at the very least non consensual and very hurtful?
We're talking about vaginal fingering here, not that it really matters.
The common meaning of rape as used in normal speech is forced sexual intercourse, even if some organizations expand the meaning of the word for political purposes.
This is why Trump could sue and get millions of dollars for a news organization saying he was found liable for rape.
Fingering without consent would be molestation or sexual assault.
Saying that someone was taken advantage of means that said person is not fully autonomous, and some outside person or institution should intercede on their behalf. It's a fundamental contradiction of liberalism, where no one will accept the consequences of declaring that people are fully autonomous.
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.
> 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.
How about going back to the older system of "sex within marriage is licit, sex outside marriage isn't".
There has to be some sort of implied consent in marriage. Is it assault if my husband pats my behind in the kitchen? What if we have sex when we're both drunk? In the middle of the night and we're asleep? Feminism has backed itself into a corner with Andrea Dworkin.
Hmm. In actual real life, almost, since modern “dating” edges into what used to be called common law marriage. But all that I described shouldn’t be part of any implied first date contract. I’ve been thinking about this post and comments all day. There have to be situations where a man and a woman can sit together on a sofa, get to know one another, but sex is off the table; yet if a man can no longer grab a women he knows a little bit and try to kiss her, good grief - Andrea Dworkin has moved into the bedroom. Please get her out.
So if you were married, and your wife hit you, held a gun to your head, or threatened to hurt you, unless you did something sexual you really didn't want to do and found painful, you'd think that was ok?
No! Of course not. However, even without the sexual threat, it’s already a criminal act to hit him and threaten him with a gun. Without the violence and threat of violence, it’s just somebody nagging you to do something you don’t want to.
"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.
Don't worry, it wasn't a matter of arousal: she claims to have been instructed to lick the shit off his dick AFTER sex. A classic post-nut aftercare shitlick (no clarity or shame for demon-incarnate Gaiman, duh!).
This is also very possible. One of my best friends is going through the “discard phase” with their BPD gf, and holy hell it ain’t pretty. I do think that the “How true is this version of events?” convo is a different one from the “BDSM- good or bad?” convo, but both are important and interesting in their own right.
If you’re dealing with someone without BPD, they associate their emotions with events. For example, “I have to go to work today. That makes me sad.” With BPD, that relationship is reversed. They feel sad and then look for a “reason” why they’re experiencing this emotion. And the reason doesn’t have to make sense! So if they decide it’s *you* that is at fault, they will then also decide that you’re evil, have always been evil, have always been the reason they feel sad, ect. They blowup and then punish you however they can. In other words, they “discard” you like garbage.
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.
I don’t really care what other people think, I care what other people can logically argue for. This argument is akin to me asking “Who should I vote for you?” and you replying “Well, some people think you should vote for Kamala, others think you should vote for Trump, so it’s impossible to say.” Some people think the moon is made of cheese- considering there’s no good argument for that actually being the case, I pay them no mind.
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.
Moreover, it would be very poor optics (and fresh meat for the misandrists) for his team to release texts that indicate either her consent or her nefarious intent.
It’s the opposite: there won’t be a criminal trial (or possibly even a civil one) but there is a media trial going on now and the stakes for Gaiman are enormous.
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.
If she can say something different now than she said in the text message, then she could also say something different in the text message than she had when he first initiated.
I realized my last comment was inelegantly put, especially since the totality of the accusations against Gaiman suggest a pattern of egregious and clearly abusive behavior, particularly against women over whom he had some power.
However, the point remains. One can think of other, less-well known people in the arts. There was a comic-book creator who was loudly accused of "grooming" due to the sexual relationship he had shared with a female artist. When I hear that someone was groomed, I'm thinking we are speaking of a child. But this was a young woman of about 23.
Again, no force involved or alleged. Simply a case where someone wanted to boink another person, perhaps told said person some things they wanted to hear, and goal was achieved. But to say someone "groomed" a 23 year old woman completely relieves her of any agency, and, again, essentially views the woman/victim as an infant, with no responsibility for making a stupid/shitty choice.
One would think feminists of principle (I know, "principled feminists," ha ha) would reject such a framing of a Proud Independent Woman. But to do so would deny feminists the opportunity to blame men, and especially deny them the pleasure of canceling said man.
I guess I’m just old-fashioned in my belief that a married, wealthy, incredibly successful celebrity should be able to keep his fucking hands off THE NANNY.
A sign that true gender enlightenment has been achieved: The number of complaints about men "grooming" a 23-year-old woman, and the number of complaints about men "infantilizing" a 23-year-old woman, are equal. (I.e. there's no "gender equality" gain from moving the "infantilization" dial in either direction)
I actually think we are pretty close to this as a society, and that's why feminists have so many contradictory complaints. We'll never satisfy everyone, but in a certain sense, in certain ways, we might be close to as good as it gets.
The logical conclusion is just that they want men to exist in a quantum state: available if sex is wanted and criminal if they want us locked up. And they want the freedom to flip between the two for any reason, including no reason
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.
That is a deeply disingenuous take, but I suspect this is a reportage problem rather than a you problem.
Amanda's offer for Scarlett to become a live-in nanny was made the weekend AFTER the bathtub incident. She could have declined; somehow, she'd been surviving on her own up to that point.
In the other case, the woman's HUSBAND was the primary factotum, and she divorced him (she was an artist with a studio on premises in addition to the guest house):
>Around the time Wallner’s marriage ended in 2017, which she said devastated her emotionally, Gaiman told her ex-husband that there was no more work for him on the property, which had provided the family’s main income. Wallner and her daughters were now dependent on Gaiman for work and housing...
That last sentence is strange, given that work and housing had ALWAYS been provided by Gaiman (the bastard!); the difference is that Caroline was not really feeling up to doing any odd jobs. Blowjobs, on the other hand...
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.
In Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes, he describes his mom as taking on a hobosexual relationship with her cousin in order to keep a roof overhead for herself and her children.
In this case it wasn't him who was befriending such women, it was Amanda Palmer who then sent them to work for her in places where she knew they would encounter Gaiman and that he had a history of doing this to such women.
Palmer doesn't much deserve the benefit of the doubt given just how often she helped enable him. She made most of the money of her life off marrying him, and repeatedly sent him new women long after she not only knew he was bad news, but could no longer stand him for herself. Naïvité is too charitable an assumption for such dupery. Why even hire a hot young female to be a babysitter when you know a man like Neil will be involved?
It's obviously true. Neil Gaiman being a perv is hardly a big stretch given his Scientology background, disastrous marriages, unlimited money, and all the sadism and pervy sex shit in his writings.
And of course she's hot. To him, which is what matters. She's a thin fairfaced babysitter a third his age, and he's a writer. Not a model or actor or even an athlete. Seeing as how Amanda knew he wasn't to be trusted sexually, Scarlett was the last kind of person who should've been hired as a babysitter. The fact that she did anyway shows a level of foolishness so great as to be indistinguishable from that of collaboration.
Most people don't grow up in a horribly abusive cult that teaches children have exactly the same brains as adults. $cieno is a vipers nest of abuse and dysfunction.
No he doesn't. He's a writer, not a movie star, and an old and a not-particularly-good-looking one at that. Unless he just outright hires an escort to live with him full time, women like Scarlett, who is herself by no means unattractive, are by far the hottest looking women he has any hope of sleeping with.
Whether this case is strong enough to land a conviction, I can't say. But the notion that Neil Gaiman couldn't possibly be a rapist and is being framed up is preposterous. Great artists are frequently rapists. Chuck Berry, for instance. Or Kanye, who you just know doesn't have long before he's arrested for some horrific sex crime or another. My money's on one of his daughters outing him for being hip-hop's John Phillips.
If those young vulnerable women aren't able to fully consent to sex, what else can't they consent to? Should they be able to vote, or are they too vulnerable for that?
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.
To be fair, though the intent of the podcasters might have been to infantilize the accuser, "small and waiflike" really was his known type back when the only open secret about him in the sci-fi/fantasy lit community during his first marriage was that he was a cheating horndog who enjoyed everyone else's fair share of groupies as well as his own.
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.
Yeah man, you convinced me. I’m just nuts for thinking that might have some kind of deeper psychological source and reveal something fundamentally unpleasant about him.
The allegations about vomit, urine and feces were all in the Tortoise Media podcast and Gaiman denied none of them. His position was simply that she had agreed.
If I were on a jury and I read those text messages it would be a clear Not Guilty for me. Is he disgusting? Sure. But so is she. Do you go to prison for ten years for being disgusting? No. Fifty years ago, yes. Also, if you say women aren’t capable of giving consent then they shouldn’t be mayors, governors, or President. They literally can’t be in charge.
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 appreciate your essay and the points you are spending time in these comments to clarify. Gaiman clearly was raised in a cult where coercive control was the norm. He seems to have learned to perpetuate that behavior as well. However it also seems a lot of people in his life were attracted to this controlling behavior.
Outside of the cult dynamic, assuming people can communicate at all, adult relationships are always or often messy. If we regret doing messy things, and retroactively categorize them as bad, or that adult females can never consent to violent sexual encounters, then we are back to the Victorian times of upper class women being treated as children.
There has been a recent resurgence of people reading Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton’s writing on topping and bottoming.Janet ‘s memoir is a fascinating account of all the risky situations she got herself into because of her intense desire to be physically punished.
Yes. It makes complete sense. Particularly in light of our contemporary tendency to either be over-responsible (take on every body else’s wants / needs / feelings), or utterly negligent, particularly (seemingly), when it comes to our own care or agency. Thank you for this thoroughly clarifying piece. 🙏🏽 (PS have been reading you in The Free Press and finally got around to following you here. So glad.)
The accusers allege they told Gaiman "no" several times and he ignored them. From the article:
“I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘I’m not confident with my body,’” Pavlovich recalls...[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."
In this instance she didn't say "no", but it come across like she was indicating she didn't want to have sex and there was little way to stop him.
"The boy sat against the wall by the picture window overlooking the city, facing the bed. Pavlovich perched on the edge of the mattress; Gaiman got onto the bed and pulled her so she was on her back. He lifted the covers up over them. She tried to signal to him with her eyes that he should stop. She mouthed, “What the fuck are you doing?” She didn’t want the child to overhear what she was saying. Gaiman ignored her. He rolled her onto her side, took off his pants, pulled off her skirt, and began to have sex with her from behind while continuing to speak with his son."
"Pavlovich was in the kitchen, tidying up, when he approached her from behind and pulled her to the sofa...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...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."
Another woman's account:
"When she said it hurt too much, he’d tell her the problem was she wasn’t submissive enough...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."
You don't think 'what the fuck are you doing', and 'signalling with your eyes' is enough? She *could* have told him to stop, but did you miss the part where the article says "she didn't want the child to overhear what she was saying"?
I strongly disagree that that isn't rape, and frankly think it's pretty troubling that you don't. Would you have sex with someone who was saying 'what the fuck are you doing' and 'signalling with her eyes for you to stop'?
Well, first of all, I don't believe that any of this really happened.
But assuming it did - she could have gotten out from under the covers, right?
She didn't say that, she "mouthed" it - so he may not have even been aware, and that phrase is pretty ambiguous.
And "signaling with her eyes for him to stop" is self-evidently absurd - what on earth is that supposed to look like? If we accept that kind of "signal" as communication, doesn't the fact that she stayed under the covers and didn't roll over or anything "signal" for him to continue?
> Well, first of all, I don't believe that any of this really happened.
That's odd, I think, and epistemically irrational. I absolutely don't believe that we should immediately convict in the court of public opinion, and have myself stuck my neck out socially to argue for the presumption of innocence in many controversial cases. But it's equally, if not more irrational to immediately decide to *disbelieve* it, when we have so little to go on.
> She didn't say that, she "mouthed" it - so he may not have even been aware, and that phrase is pretty ambiguous.
This is a huge stretch- most people can easily lipread at least approximately when someone is trying to mouth something legibly- but I suppose it's theoretically plausible that he could have failed to catch it. If someone mouthed something like 'what the fuck are you doing' at me, though, it would at least give me pause about whether they were consenting, even if I couldn't make out exactly what they said. I certainly wouldn't plough on, if someone was mouthing something at me that I couldn't work out what it was, and signalling with their eyes that they didn't like it. Which brings me to this bizarre bit of your argument:
> And "signaling with her eyes for him to stop" is self-evidently absurd - what on earth is that supposed to look like?
I'm not trying to be rude, but are you on the autism spectrum by any chance? Most people can absolutely imagine what that sort of eye signal would look like, and could very easily understand at least the general tenor of it if they encountered it. The eyes are a pretty fundamental part of human communication, and the idea that it's "self-evidently absurd" that you could communicate anything with them would itself be self-evidently absurd to anyone with normal interpersonal and communicative abilities.
Again, I don't want to immediately leap to assuming guilty whenever a public figure is 'me too'd', so to speak, but you're sprinting in the other direction here. It screams motivated reasoning.
Any fair and open-minded person reading this, with no particular knowledge of the parties involved or their credibility, should give at least some credence to the possibility that Gaiman raped this woman. It's at least as consistent with the meagre evidence we have as any other possibility.
I think I have enough to go on to make the assessment that it does not seem credible to me.
It doesn't seem like she clearly communicated anything there, given that she "mouthed" something when he was rolling her over and may not even have been looking at her lips. I'm not convinced most people can lipread well.
> it would at least give me pause about whether they were consenting
Maybe, but that's not enough for it to be rape.
> self-evidently absurd to anyone with normal interpersonal and communicative abilities
Ok, that was very harsh and uncalled for. No, I'm not autistic, and obviously the eyes do play a big role in nonverbal communication, chiefly by communicating emotions. No one is denying that.
But nonverbal communication is extremely ambiguous, which can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. There's no eye signal that could have unambiguously communicated that, even if he'd been looking at her eyes.
And the rest of her nonverbal communication did seem to indicate consent - she didn't get up, roll over, push him away, etc.
And keep in mind we're talking about rape here - so it should be a very high bar, not someone missing a very odd way to communicate.
Her conduct here is very bizarre - she (presumably) claims she is getting raped, but doesn't want to move or communicate because there's a kid there? Does that make any sense to you? If she didn't care enough to disrupt things a little or communicate clearly, there's no way it's rape.
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.
Indeed, Amanda wouldn't propose the live-in nanny arrangement until the weekend AFTER the bathtub incident. And of course the "rape victim" (who had been a 22-year-old virgin) accepted the offer, because women have no agency and can't help but act against their own interests when a man is involved (except he wasn't, of course: Amanda made the offer, not Neil).
Christ in a cardigan sweater. Any psychiatrist worth their salt will tell you about freeze and fawn, and that all sexual assault victims do it, not just women. Men as well. I’m so curious about people who write this kind of shit. The statistical lack of culpability re: sexual assault is mind blowing, but you felt moved to write about how textbook psychological reactions (that men and children also have when sexually abused) make women look flaky. You sat down, typed this, and hit publish. This is a dark ass timeline for anyone who isn’t a land-owning white man, and this is where you put your effort. This is what moved you. Incredible.
You're proving her point. If women are this unreliable as narrators of their experience then the way society thought of them 150 years ago is more correct than the modern feminist position.
"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.
People can consent to things that are harmful to their own body or soul for a multitude of reasons — mental illness, low self-esteem, misinformation, immaturity, low intelligence, desperation — and I would call taking the opportunity to harm them in such situations “abusive.”
So if your ex says the relationship was harmful, that means you were abusive? Doesn't make sense.
Yes, people sometimes consent to things, and then it turns out those things harmed them. But the other person didn't know that would happen. All they knew was that the other person wanted it at the time.
"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 definitely hate-fuck. A friend told me she had this coworker she found really annoying and couldn't stand and hated him, and it was mutual, but there was chemistry between them and one day they just hate-fucked after work. She described it as the anger and hatred turning into sexual energy.
Let me spell this out. We're talking about three different things here.
1. Sex with someone to get one up on them.
2. Sex with someone you're attracted to but think you shouldn't be.
3. Sex with someone you really dislike but are attracted to.
You said men do (1) and women do (2).
What I'm trying to explain is that hate-fucking is (3). It just means when you really dislike someone for whatever reason but also are attracted to them and have sex with them.
If a woman does (3) she might think she "shouldn't" be attracted to the guy, or she might not. It's irrelevant.
What we are talking about here is the combination of sexual attraction and disliking someone.
Let’s break it down to physical arousal. Attraction is a philosophical term that involves romantic as well as physiological aspects. There’s a lot of scientific studies done on people in labs hooked up to devices that measure arousal levels to media. There are some surprising results for males and females! I tried to find the link to one of these studies, but couldn’t in the time I have right now. Also, women and men can experience arousal during non consensual sex. It’s doesn’t mean anything except maybe it’s evolutionary biology as a survival mechanism.
"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.
The main take-away for me was that (far too many) women chase status and then twist themselves into a knot to evade accountability when things go awry. Neil Gaiman is abhorrent. So was/is Harvey Weinstein.
You might object that the common denominator is these 'powerful men's abhorrence.' Yet, you would only be partially correct, as you would have to add that these women, endowed with their own agency, chose to 'eat shit' in service of their own ambition.
Why doesn't anybody want to talk about why males claim themselves to be logical, rational protector-providers and then when they get a chance they immediately become abusive, crazy freaks who treat women like shit?
Does anybody want to talk about this? Why is it immediately shifted to women, which is the same fucking conversation for the past oh I don't know, fifty years?
Wtf is wrong with men? Why does everybody deflect?
Most men don’t do what you described.
After all this time, and all you moids have is IT'S NOT ALL THO.
Thanks for proving me correct.
My point is that when anything happens, nobody wants to have an honest conversation about male violence and male behavior.
That is true in Afghanistan and in China and in the US (I'm not saying the cultures are the same everywhere, but the innate irrational self-defense is the same).
We criticize and talk about women all the time and have for thousands of years.
This is the problem--and you proved it. Constant deflection, derailing, shifting to women. Since Adam and Eve.
Nobody wants to speak honestly about males and their severe innate problems.
Keep it up with "NOT ALL," see how that works.
Perhaps Chuck replied saying that "most men don't do what you described" because your comment is phrased in such a way as to imply you're talking about men in general?
You're still talking about "males and their severe innate problems", literally in the same comment as you scathingly rebuke someone for pointing out those problems are not ubiquitous, or even particularly common, in males.
Come on... this shouldn't be too hard.
Your comment states that “every time a male gets a chance he turns from rational protector provider into abuser” but there is absolutely no reason to believe this is true. Most men that COULD abuse a woman, don’t. Your worldview is a result of media sensationalism and advertisement driven media, not reason and evidence.
I'm not convinced this is that common, or that men do it more than women. Perhaps the reason people don't talk about this supposed phenomenon is that it does not exist, or they aren't convinced it exists.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_against_men
Women are more likely to be the sole aggressors in domestic disputes (28% females to males vs 13% males to females and the rest bidirectional).
Yes women are more likely to be killed by their male counterparts, but to pretend that women are some pacifist cohort of the population isn’t borne out in the data. Warren Farrell’s work is pointing out the inconsistencies between public perception of intimate partner violence and the realities. The point of this article, I think, is that pretending that women as a category are agency-less “smols” is untrue, reductive and unhelpful.
“Believe all women” is good precisely for the shitty women and not good for the not so shitty women, just as “believe all men” empowers the psychopaths and punishes the gentleman. If you say perjury doesn’t exist you have enshrined rule by lie.
I have seen men do terrible things and I have seen (more) women do terrible things, and none of that behavior is OK, but it doesn’t need to degenerate to yelling about Adam and Eve. The story of Adam and Eve isn’t about Eve’s evil and Adam’s innocence, it is about the line of evil residing in every human heart.
Women are not evil, men are not evil, but individual humans who are male or female have the opportunity to commit terrible horrible things on one another, and this life is about trying not to inflict suffering on others while you alleviate your own. May we all reach to a higher, rather than lower, purpose.
It is great someone finally is talking about how awful some, probably most, men are. Give some, probably most, men some
Money or power and they’d all be making every woman in their sordid pathetic tiny penis lives eat their own poop. Because deep inside every man wants that.
FINALLY! Someone is saying something bad about men. You are breaking new ground here, Kat.
Because a minority of men sleep with very many women and do this type of thing. It's up to you to select better. The same way it's up to me not to pick borderline women. Take accountability for your choices and stop pretending to be a victim.
When women raise their standards, men in general end up alone and women are told to lower their standards.
None of what you say is logical. It's whatever shifts blame away from men at the moment and blames women, so nothing you say is serious.
Go tell the Taliban about your amazing ideas.
Btw males are nearly 80% of Tinder. You're not picking anything.
"bla bla bla blames women shifts away from men" It's about individual responsibility. Again, stop pretending to be a victim.
A general note to Substack readers: if you get this far be sure to follow the conversation thread beside this one between Kat Highsmith (NOT Kat Rosenfeld - ed.), Chuck and Jack. Jack provides a master class in “how to disagree online” - pure DH6 material (refuting the main point) to use Paul Graham’s brilliant formulation of the disagreement hierarchy. You don’t see this a lot.
That's right, change the subject to females, that should work. It's worked for thousands of years.
The subject IS females Kat. Try to keep up with the coal miners, dear.
T
None of that is true, so Gaiman is not abhorrent.
If you were a yr or two younger, it'd be considered statutory rape in some states. If a man twice the age of your preteen great granddaughter grooms her into having sex or even child marriage (legal in some states), would you say, "I don't think it would be right to call him a rapist for not reading her mind"? Would it be better for her mental health to tell her she made bad choices? Why would it be better than admitting facts about assymetries in cognitive maturity, experience, theories of minds, and evolutionary psychology of rape? How do you know the older man couldn't predict a teen mind better than teen-you could?
Who are more mind-blind: Gaiman, who specialized in writing with such realistic theories of abusers' & victims' minds that it made him famous, or the people acting like he was mind-blind? People who never had to defend their rapists can't empathize with victims like in Shiny, Happy People or other religious or family sex abuse scandals.
You cannot determine the rightness or wrongness of an action by likening it to a completely different situation. We are not talking about preteens being groomed; we are talking about adult women.
If you're going to suggest that women who are 18 and 22 are the same as preteen girls, then you're bolstering Kat's argument. When do we stop being impressionable children who can't meaningfully consent? If the line is not at 18, or 20, or 22, then where is it (I've seen the "he groomed her" explanation applied to women in their /late/ 20s; in their 30s; and in one case, in her 40s)? And are you sure you want to argue for your particular line, given its implications for us?
I'm here for updating predictive theories for reducing future risks, not for 'determining wrongness' of the past. It's not our job to be judge, jury, or lawyers on Substack, though some foolishly act like lawyers defending Gaiman pro bono based lies by omission or their egos self-IDing as dom. Not one such fool has had the integrity to admit that at the very least, Gaiman serially committed sexual harrassment as an employer.
The thought experiment involving possible future statutory rape/enslavement was specifically for a commenter to practice modeling assymetries & evo psy that underlie crimes in general. If people don't learn to predict and mitigate risks, then being above age 17 will not only NOT protect them, they and their (future) dependents will be at higher risk of being targeted by mind-hackers with impunity.
The fact that books like Why Does He Do That or How He Gets into Her Head are read by adults who react as if such info is mind-blowing or "must-read" shows that many don't learn until having read the book, often after having struggled to predict cases of domestic abuse that they personally suffered or found out someone they know suffered. Ask them if they'd agree that 'living with an abuser = consent to being physically assaulted if over age 17, so police & courts should ignore all those cases, or else [insert whatever your chicken-little theory is]'. Bet the same chicken-little theory was used to argue against law recognizing marital rape.
I have no problem with a justice system attempting to respect the WHOLE TRUTH, instead of complying with serial criminals' "deny, deny, deny" strategy. Can't fearmonger me into idiocracy, rule of ideology that ignores or can't predict reality. Regressive societies are idiocratic. If the US further regresses to idiocratically denying that crimes can happen to people above age 17, then I'd move to a smarter nation, while the US is overtaken by serial perps like Trump, Gaiman, or those featured on American Greed. If instead of stopping serial con artists, you'd rather have fraud victims over age 17 ruminate over bad choices, then good luck to you when you're elderly and targeted by mind-hackers in the AI Age. There's only so much I can do to get people to develop theories & skills so they won't have to rely on luck.
cnn.com/interactive/2024/10/politics/political-fundraising-elderly-election-invs-dg/
Um, when do men start taking responsibility for their actions and stop proclaiming themselves to be super logical, rational protector providers who should be given power in society? If this is how they behave whenever they can, what does it say about the male character?
Why is the topic always changed to women and what women should do?
Is this how males are expected to behave whenever and wherever they can? Why? Who made that decision?
What do you mean, implications for us?
That women need to be wards of men until they're safely disposed of in marriage.
I don't see how that follows
If we say the age of consent is 18, it’s 18.
Nearly all crimes (e.g. sexual harrassment by employers, theft, fraud, non-sexual assault, homicide, white collar crime, slavery) are considered crimes NOT due to violation of age of consent but due to one party taking advantage of assymetries to the detriment of another party, which if not disincentivized by a justice system would result in even less freedom or perfection of information processing (i.e. more biased or poorly informed choices; more corruption, destruction, & brutality; lower trust; more inefficient games or economy; more suffering & low productivity; etc.).
Pointing at an arbitrary age cutoff in order to ignore all factors other than age ONLY for one type of crime, sexual assault, is a thought/speech-termination/control tactic or willfull obstruction of justice, designed by rape cultures to give impunity to ingrouped rapists. If Gaiman & his ex were Pakistani immigrants in the UK, they'd be lumped with 'grooming gangs' for targeting a homeless, familyless, naive woman and making her feel responsible for protecting a child and other potential victims. But the US is a nation where rich, White male serial criminals are ingrouped to such an extent that one can be relected President by people who deny, deny, deny that he committed any crime.
Given that there are pro-rape/antichoice subcultures of the US which keep child marriage/slavery legal, I don't buy that they care about 'age of consent'. Rather, they wield it as a cudgel to beat down adults who attempt to stop rapists. Meanwhile, their police mistreat even child victims, e.g. the way Melissa Turnage coerced Taylor Cadle to apologize to her rapist uncle. British rape/antichoice culture (since at least 1861 abortion ban) allowed White male grooming gangs and prosecuted victims, incl. children, as "prostitutes" if they attempted to file reports, paving the road for grooming gangs of immigrants from former British colonies (still neocolonies). If you're surprised by anything in the examples I've pointed at, your theories are less predictive than mine.
Yes, it is functionally, morally, and medically superior to tell someone they made bad decisions when they made bad decisions. The question isn't whether or not to tell them that; it's a rhetorical exercise in how to manipulate a damaged person's perceptions and emotions to criticize without tripping one of the mines in their mental minefield.
This is not something that can be measured in abstract or discussed as a vague "game plan" with interchangeable variables - IT MUST BE TAILOR-MADE TO INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE.
That you believe otherwise, I hold as a demonstration of the fact you have little understanding of guilt, fault, responsibility, the difference between the three, and why that's important.
That lack of understanding is probably not your fault - the entire legal community, much of the psychiatric community, and a great number of otherwise-not-related people have been peddling filthy nonsense such as "at fault equals all guilt" for a while.
Fault is a measurement of who created the problem.
Guilt is a measurement of who contributed to the problem. Responsibility is a measurement of who's obligated to fix the problem.
Assuming purely for the sake of argument that all parties are being honest here...
Gaiman is at fault for creating the problem by asking for creepy and medically unhealthy sex. The lady who gave it to him is guilty of not standing up for herself and saying no, then lying about it and giving him ammunition to use kater. Both are responsible for fixing the problem - Gaiman needs to stop asking for creepy and medically unhealthy sex, the lady needs to say what she means even if she's afraid, and both need to stop seeing each other.
Why should anyone care what sex you think is "creepy"? I'm sure some of the stuff you like in bed is something someone else might call creepy.
Oh stop it, norms exist for a reason.
I see you posted a comment just now, something like "some of us have seen certain scenes," but I can't view it.
Well said. I like your fault vs guilt elucidation.
I don't recall the details of the experiences of all the accusers, but I think that the young woman who was their nanny did say "no" during their first encounter; I think the woman he pressured into sex after she said she had a UTI did too. I don't know how much a technical, hair's difference matters; at a minimum, apparently, not only did he sexually harass an employee (the nanny), he didn't pay her. So this doesn't just sound like shitty sex but abuse and possibly criminal acts.
It's also true that her seeming willingness to continue the affair casts doubt on her side of the story, and people might compromise themselves at times because they want something from someone who's in a position of power. That doesn't mean that they deserve to be harassed or raped, one of which happened in this situation.
I think it's important to talk about these things in a nuanced way, though, as you're doing, because situations and relationships can be messy and murky, and we risk missing deeper insights into ourselves and society. It reminds me of the debate about whether young women who go walking around in skimpy clothes are putting themselves at risk; even if they are, are you allowed to say it? What does it mean that so much value is placed on young women's sex appeal, not just by men or society, but by themselves?
I'm also of the belief that people shouldn't have to be banished forever because they've done something wrong, or even many things wrong. People can learn and be rehabilitated, and it's more likely if they see a way back for themselves. If they think that they're going to be pilloried or professionally ostracized, they're usually unwilling to accept any accountability at all.
I can do yet another about-turn and say professional repercussions are the only consequences some of these men face, partly for the very reason that rape or assault is usually committed by partners or acquaintances or co-workers and can be hard to prove.
I can probably piss a lot of people off by even considering any of these perspectives publicly, but we should be able to discuss these types of issues without shouting each other down or making monsters or incompetents or villains out of each other. I can acknowledge the points you've raised.
It's all made me feel sick to my stomach, though, as usual, and I also somehow feel like an idiot for yet again failing to sense a predator. And I know that this is an unpopular and possibly weird stance, but I feel sad for Neil Gaiman, as I do for many offenders, because there are other parts of them that aren't terrible, I guess. I never even read or watched many things he was involved in, and the stuff I did read or see struck me as a little twisted and overly violent. I still didn't see it, and I'm still sad for the artist in him.
She wasn't offered the nanny job until the weekend after the bathtub incident!
Exactly. This was not rape.
I don't agree that it's fair to blame "BDSM" for this. It's not bad or gross. Every time you take control of a woman's body consensually, tie her up or hold her hands down, or give her orders, you are practicing BDSM.
Whoa it sounds like you really have sex 😎
Yeah I'm a dom
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.
Absolutely. It's having so many downstream effects to normalise kinky, fringe or extreme sexual behaviour.
There's so many stories I've seen on Reddit of Gen Z young adults describing bizarre, creepy, disgusting, unsafe or aggressive sexual experiences and they just seem to accept that it's all part of some process of calibration as they figure out their "identity" (Am I a sub? A dom? A switch? A top? A bottom? A side? Vers? Bi? Pan? Poly? Demi-romantic? Queer? Non-binary? Transmasc? Transfemme? Into humiliation? Into punishment? Into group sex? Into cuckolding? CNC? The pornification of online subcultures has led to an obsession with identity labels which would be fine if only theoretical but people are then going on apps and ticking a bunch of boxes, basically advertising to the world that they are sufficiently indoctrinated into the sex-positive kink-is-cool mindset. It is a fucking field day for predators or just anyone with zero scruples.)
We are robbing a generation of the experiences most of us had growing up in the 80s, 90s and 2000s -- the opportunity to explore sex in an organic fashion, with someone you meet IRL and hit it off with, and to come into it without the baggage of a childhood spent on Tumblr, Reddit, Discord, Pornhub...
My assumption is generally that the more focused on such labels an individual is the less likely they are to have actually had sex. Sex is not an abstraction.
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.
If you are “queer,” which I take to mean that you like gay sex, fine. If you like being whipped or whipping people who consent, fine. If you just love the taste of pee, enjoy. It might be better for you than Mountain Dew.
But it’s not unreasonable for us “vanilla” types to point out that the per drinking can quickly devolve into something degrading and unhealthy and ultimately unsatisfying.
By all means, enjoy sex. But lots of people manage to enjoy sex without being flogged.
Or maybe some of us have seen certain "scenes" up close or explored alternative relationship models, and we eventually came to reconsider the moral framework we were operating under.
I have no problem with what people do in private -- it's about the normalisation of these things, the demand for validation and the push for making them ubiquitous in society and easily accessible to minors.
😂😂😂
You clearly don't know who you're talking to. Thanks for proving my point.
The absolute worst retort.
Right there, right there in your response is the entire problem in a nutshell. Someone talks of the inherent issues of a certain vibe/practice and the response--"you hate queer people and hate sex."
Kinks are not the definition of sex or sexually enjoyment. You can adore sex and never do anything vaguely kinky. You can feel deep shame about it and that is what drives your kink. Secondly, kinks do not make you "Queer". I know people are trying to make it the same but to me there is something just wrong about a rich, straight, white guy into dominating and harming a straight female (maybe even with a racial angle) calling themselves "queer". That person may even be homophobic otherwise. They certainly won't have any serious oppression geared toward them.
It also implies that gay people have weirder sex than non-gay people and that feels very problematic.
I guess the point is that when what used to be correctly recognized as sexual deviance is mainstreamed who is going to tell youngsters this is probably not a good idea?
I had a conversation about this just recently. In a healthy society, taboo and shame are supposed to fill the role of “checks and balances.” Many things that people assume were oppressive to women (some legitimately were, no argument there) actually served a function to make sure society didn’t end up in chaos. When you have literally disgusting kink being normalized - is it good for society? Is it good to live in a society in which people have no inhibitions and that’s supposed to be normal? Does this serve us in raising a healthy upcoming generation? What happens to us when whimsical desires are placed at the center of what we are supposed to want?
These are things we have to ask ourselves in an era where it’s easier than ever to be a porn star a la Lily Phillips (I think that’s her name). We live in an era where the kids are not alright. BDSM is mainstream and people scream at us on the street for not being inclusive enough.
I’m sorry, maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think shame serves a high purpose within culture and that perhaps we should remember that.
I think you have to be measured in any shaming or making things taboo. Because often than just leads people to wanting to know what the fuss is about and making it even more attractive. I think the mistake in the past was the shame/taboo coming from a religious standpoint where people were shamed to talk about sex *at all* and people started questioning all boundaries because so many boundaries really didn’t make sense. I think you can let people know that those behaviors are far outside the norm, and “buyer beware” as someone else said. Then empower them to assert their agency in sexual matters, instead of treating them like children. And for very young people whose brains might still be developing, just be straight with them that they should wait because right now their judgment not be what they think it is. Don’t try to scare the shit out of them or shame them for even asking or being curious, but be straight about the vulnerability of sex and what it’s ok to just wait until you’re older and have a different perspective. Just being direct and respectful and telling people they have control of their bodies, and to just take care and be proud of that agency—that’s a lot better than just blind shaming or tabooing without any context.
Who is normalizing this?
Who is paying for it?
Who is the customer base of OF?
Do you only want to talk about how terrible it is that wimminz walk around in short skirts nowadays, or do you honestly want to talk about male behavior as well?
Of course we should talk about male behavior and we do - all the time. I just think it’s awfully easy to do just that and not get into the messy place where adults have agency to make choices for themselves. I think we can talk about a societal failure to speak loudly about the things we find inappropriate. It seems the loudest ones are the ones promoting the same kind of behavior that makes people think eating shit is fine and just another preference and how dare we judge anyone’s preferences.
We have a society that promotes appalling male AND female behavior in the name of personal liberation. Honestly, this sort of feels like it was the point. So much of feminism has been about women having the right to act just like men and I’d say we’ve arrived there. This is no longer the world of systematic female oppression, though I’d say femininity itself is under an attack of its own.
I say this from a place of personal experience. I wasted much time in my younger years “experimenting” and “trying to figure myself out” and it didn’t contribute in any meaningful way to the process of healthy maturation. It is the type of behavior designed to keep one in a state of constant personal drama and turmoil- much like the apparent lives of Nail Gaiman’s sex partners turned victims - wasting much life energy on self-sabotage. My point is that we ought to let young women know that, while, yes, they are free to be who they want in this world and with whomever, many of the old values would still prove useful: discernment, sobriety, restraint, and delayed gratification. Young women are entering into a world that is essential a sex-positive thunderdome and I hope more people deign to tell them what a farce that is.
To answer your questions:
I believe it is not only men who are trying to normalize this culture of anything goes sexual expression. I see women vehemently defend men in their private personal spaces while in the same breath claiming men are inherently predatory. I see women claiming that sex work is empowering. I see women claiming that dressing in a maximally sexual way is for themselves only. Sexuality is a double edged sword and if one is going to wield that in the world like a weapon, perhaps they should not be surprised when blood is drawn.
Again, I think both men and women are paying for this sort of shit. Go talk to any stripper and ask them about the general level of aggression of most of their female patrons. Women also fuel this fire of transactional sexuality. You can ask who’s paying, but you can also ask who is exploiting this. As though women aren’t out there setting up their own OnlyFans to try to cash in on what they think men want only to break their damn souls and then try to blame the men? You’re really telling me this is a one way exploitation? The customer base is clearly men, but somehow women are only innocent collateral here?
I have been in dire straits and had the internal argument of whether or not I should go strip. I have friends that do so and are able to pay all their bills and then some. Their children have what they need.
It’s a tempting proposition but it’s a CHOICE. Women have just as much agency to choose a different avenue as anyone else. Not saying it’s easy, but it is a choice. As most things in life are. And choices have consequences.
Sensible.
The general term youre looking for is “perversion.” It’s perverted, just like anything else that isnt normal sex, and all perversions are bad. None of them are rape, if they are consensual, and some of them fit in other bad categories as well, but they are all nonetheless bad. Idk what exactly Gaiman was up to apart from what was referenced in this post, but from the way it was described here, it wasnt rape, rather it was an especially messed up perversion.
> all perversions are bad
Why?
A lot of much better writers and thinkers have expounded this than I, but basically the farther you get away from the proper and natural purpose of something, the more negative side effects there are.
Essentially, the proper and natural purpose of something is its highest order, and the further you get away from it the more it is disordered as opposed to ordered. That’s where we get the term “mental disorder” or “disorderly conduct”, etc.
Not seen much nowadays, but you could also have disorder in the other direction if you wanted to narrow the proper and natural purpose of something beyond its proper and natural purpose. An example of this would be the Shakers or an extreme example would be the Skoptsy, who were extremely disordered.
> basically the farther you get away from the proper and natural purpose of something, the more negative side effects there are.
Do you have any evidence or anything else to support this proposition? Does this mean gay sex is bad? How about condoms? How about the appendix? What is the "proper and natural purpose" of anything, when nature is random and purposeless? The eyes, for example, are the product of random mutations that happened to be beneficial. Do they really have a "natural purpose"- let alone a "proper" one?
I'm really not sure it's a defensible or even coherent position, but I'd be very interesting in hearing your defence.
Gay sex, condoms, yes. See almost every society ever. There are plenty of other people whove gone on and on about it in different ways. Appendix was thought to do nothing for a long time but helps deal with poisons and such. If nature is random and purposeless and nothing has a proper use then there is no defense possible and no defense needed of anything or any behavior and Neil’s only fault or anyone else’s for that matter is getting caught doing something other people dont like for whatever pointless reason. The idea that the purpose of a thing is what it does goes back a long time, and has been defended ad nauseam through the ages. If you want to go full nihilism then we dont have much to discuss, go make other people eat shit and call it a good thing I guess?
But that requires that you know what the proper purpose of sex is and nature isn't going to agree with folks like you. Yours comes from a religious understanding not true observance.
I meant to add to the first sentence, “particularly the former”
It isn't though. Animals use sex for lots of purposes. Procreation is only one part. Bonobos, which like chimps, are are closest living primate relative use it for LOTS of things, including diplomacy and smoothing group dynamics. This is the problem with this statement, people think they understand nature, what they understand is what institutions saiid about what is natural.
Why is it that everywhere I go that merely advocates for a nuanced viewpoint gets overrun with the most vile "conservatives" who are the actual ultra-perverts?
Or maybe the "stories that come out of this world" are the ones that reinforce the kinkshaming viewpoint? Kind of like how cops think everyone's a criminal and therapists think everyone's neurotic? There's a self-selecting process at work that shouldn't be ignored.
That's a fair question, and answering it depends on how much awareness one has beyond stuff that makes ripples in the broader news environment. I was speaking from the position of someone who spent the last 12 years interacting with people who are very kink-positive.
FWIW, this discussion inspired a follow up article https://substack.com/home/post/p-155550860
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.
Midteens???
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.)
My perspective on all this, is that many movements of cult like sexual grooming will often take in the emotionally vulnerable & lonely, along with the psychological types that are very much less so & take pleasure from manipulation of said vulnerable, - a broad church so to speak. And therein, the, oh there's that word again, almost cult like worshipping of whatever is the in fetish of the season, toasted toenails on whipped lettuce anyone? etc etc, can become really boring for people who may find talking about the weather a tad more interesting than discussing the respective freedoms of assorted squelching membranes and who is doing what to who, why, how often & were they up for it, etc.
People have private hobbies.
But if my neighbours screech too loudly I'll call the cops.
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.
Perhaps I’m misreading Penny M, but adults taking a girl in her “mid-teens” to a BDSM party is definitely inappropriate, possibly criminal, and definitely wrong.
But even if the adults weren’t having sex in front of the underage person, even if it was just about how wonderful it all was and all of us have space for this kind of sexual behavior within us and everyone should just look deep inside, face facts, and get their freak on … still possibly criminal and definitely wrong.
>In my experience in the kink community, the organizers and the ones putting together community spaces are the only bad ones
Is this said as a defense of kink per se, or of the kink community?
All the people I know into BDSM are not healthy people. In many ways.
I don't see how THAT is possible.
Why not?
I'm saying to all the people who criticize kinksters because some kinksters have abusive relationships, that the same is true for non-kinksters.
For me as a feminist, I can't help but side eye this whole thing because I keep reading, oh there is nothing patriarchal about it, it is just the moment/scene whatever is the correct word but IRL everyone is equal. Indeed, I've read people say the sub has the "real power". And yet, there seem to be a strong sex ratio imbalance so that it is men doing the dominating and sadism and women (young ones at that) being bound, submissive etc.
All I can think is ok, and if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you. My suspicion is that this story is about her discovering that indeed if it walks like patriarchy and quacks like patriarchy, it is patriarchy. Even if both parties claim otherwise. But we have no other language than rape to describe that these days.
Aren’t most Doms women?
What biological sex people are who are paid to do miight be different than shall we say voluntary (or as this case quasi-voluntary) configurations. There also tends to be more actual sex involved in the voluntary group.
So no I don't think so.
Well some of that is biology.
And some of that is people being discouraged by stereotyping - there are a lot of dominant women who don't think they fit the mold.
Yeah, there is no reason to think that women are submissive by biology. That's the kind of myth that evo-pysche quacks like to push only they know nothing about females in nature. Females in nature tend too be submissive to violence as we all are, but they aren't naturally so. They are taught though that this is who they are and who they should be.
As is also true for non-kinky relationships - they don't meet the platonic ideal of relationships, and they attract unkind people with serious issues.
🍵
What is that?
Tea
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."
Here's Penny M's reply:
"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."
Thanks! Where did it go? Why can't I see it?
I don't know.
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.
i think a consequence of fame is that everything automatically has a power imbalance that sometimes can’t be identified until later if either person doesn’t have the awareness/vocabulary for its recognition.
Not hard at all to argue it was given freely - why do you say that?
"Rape" is the term needed for at least two of Gaiman's actions.
His first night with Pavlovich, he put his fingers in her anus without asking. While vacationing with Stout, he penetrated her vagina with his penis after she told him not to.
Admittedly he also did many other objectionable things that were at least ostensibly consented to, and "taken advantage of," etc would be useful for describing them.
My issue with the original article is that some of the acts as described were rape, but some were not. And the way they were written about made no distinction between the two.
Fingering is not rape.
Also we don't know whether these things really happened, and we don't know whether they consented.
Gaiman says they did consent, and I don't see any reason to doubt him, as much as I think he's a crappy writer.
Fingering without permission is a species of sexual assault. For myself, I am inclined to believe they did not consent, but also that it will be very difficult to prove that beyond a
reasonable doubt.
Why do you think they didn't consent?
Fingering someone is almost always done with clothes off. Which implies consent. Hard to finger someone with a pair of jeans on.
I lost one of your other comments somehow. Not sure why Substack keeps dropping comments. It was the one about "if you are queer" and "if you like whipping someone."
What did it say? Where did it go?
I don’t recall and don’t know where it went. I was probably being slightly snarky but I’m not sure I remember what I was being snarky about.
Weird I don't know how it disappeared.
I just like vaginas, regardless of gender identity, so I would count as queer. I'm a dom but not really that into whipping people then.
What's your threshold? Bigger than a broomstick, smaller than a fist? Does it exempt certain classes of people from any culpability?
Is tacit or implicit consent not a thing? Or do you demand explicit ask-and-answer at every stage of sex? "Can I put my tongue in your mouth now?" "Can I put my mouth on your breast now?
Was that in response to geoduck about broomsticks?
I think he's asking about nonconsensually inserting a foreign object into someone, and whether that would count as rape or just sexual assault?
Sorry, what are you talking about? Sexual assault is culpable.
I'm talking about your statement: "Fingering is not rape."
Legally, in New Zealand, it’s “unlawful sexual connection,” but doesn’t fall under the strict definition of rape. It is legally rape in many US states, though.
It's not. Rape is forced or nonconsensual sexual intercourse.
Nonconsensual fingering is molestation and sexual assault. Not rape.
Surely there’s a vast chasm between sexual assault and “trying something” that you stop as soon as you’re told or (better) you’re aware it isn’t having the intended effect. But if I’m Gaiman, maybe I *want* my partner to feel pain and discomfort. If that’s who I am maybe I’m not hoping she’ll like it, but that she won’t and that it will turn her on to be *forced* to do something she doesn’t want to do.
I guess I’m lucky not to have that particular fetish. I like to think that if I did have that kind of fetish, and there was a cure for it, I would take the cure for it.
Well, I think his partners did like it.
What turn-ons/kinks would you add to yourself, or take away from yourself, if you could?
Depends where you live. In Australia, inserting your fingers or toes (digits) into 'private parts' of another person without consent is Digital Rape that can result in jail time.
If someone put their fingers up your asshole when you told them not to, would you really not consider that rape or at the very least non consensual and very hurtful?
I think I was pretty clear that it would be molestation and sexual assault.
Yes it is.
Huh? You're saying fingering is rape?
According to the FBI it is. Why would you think forced anal fingering is not?
We're talking about vaginal fingering here, not that it really matters.
The common meaning of rape as used in normal speech is forced sexual intercourse, even if some organizations expand the meaning of the word for political purposes.
This is why Trump could sue and get millions of dollars for a news organization saying he was found liable for rape.
Fingering without consent would be molestation or sexual assault.
Precise language unfortunately doesn’t sell stories these days.
You understand how "taken advantage of" denies one party agency and awareness, right?
So is your contention that you should never say that someone was taken advantage of?
Taking advantage of someone is what denies them agency. Describing the event doesn't do anything but describe the event.
Saying that someone was taken advantage of means that said person is not fully autonomous, and some outside person or institution should intercede on their behalf. It's a fundamental contradiction of liberalism, where no one will accept the consequences of declaring that people are fully autonomous.
What agency did this person lack?
What does this question mean? Can you rephrase it for clarity?
Yes? Not consensual, but not necessarily criminal. Denying one party agency is not a crime, just a shitty thing to do.
You misunderstood. If you say someone was taken advantage of then you are the one denying them agency.
That is a great point.
“Sexual misconduct”
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.
A smol bean whined.
My theory is that smol beans lack requisite carriage to be churls.
"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.
No US draft "within living memory" of Millenials.
What limitations on autonomy are within living memory for millennial women?
Yes! It's amazing how people don't seem to care about what happens to men!
What sorts of limitations?
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.
> 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.
How about going back to the older system of "sex within marriage is licit, sex outside marriage isn't".
Licit? Or legal? Do you want to criminalize premarital sex?
Also that doesn't address nonconsensual marital sex.
> Do you want to criminalize premarital sex?
At least make it looked down upon again.
> Also that doesn't address nonconsensual marital sex.
Marriage is already consent.
There has to be some sort of implied consent in marriage. Is it assault if my husband pats my behind in the kitchen? What if we have sex when we're both drunk? In the middle of the night and we're asleep? Feminism has backed itself into a corner with Andrea Dworkin.
There's implied consent in any relationship, not just marriage. All those things described are consensual between people who are dating.
Hmm. In actual real life, almost, since modern “dating” edges into what used to be called common law marriage. But all that I described shouldn’t be part of any implied first date contract. I’ve been thinking about this post and comments all day. There have to be situations where a man and a woman can sit together on a sofa, get to know one another, but sex is off the table; yet if a man can no longer grab a women he knows a little bit and try to kiss her, good grief - Andrea Dworkin has moved into the bedroom. Please get her out.
So if you were married, and your wife hit you, held a gun to your head, or threatened to hurt you, unless you did something sexual you really didn't want to do and found painful, you'd think that was ok?
No! Of course not. However, even without the sexual threat, it’s already a criminal act to hit him and threaten him with a gun. Without the violence and threat of violence, it’s just somebody nagging you to do something you don’t want to.
Isn't that also true outside of marriage?
How exactly would you criminalize "nonconsensual marital sex," not involving physical assault? Please be specific.
Marital rape is already illegal in every state, so I'm not sure what you're asking.
Another one of those recently passed bad laws.
So do you think physical assault or threats should be legal in marriage?
So do you think physical assault or threats should be legal in marriage?
I'm confused - why would you be unhappy Gaiman is innocent?
Why do you think he was a manipulator or that he "manufactured consent? How would one do that?
The NDAs were to try to stop the lies from spreading further.
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.
Don't worry, it wasn't a matter of arousal: she claims to have been instructed to lick the shit off his dick AFTER sex. A classic post-nut aftercare shitlick (no clarity or shame for demon-incarnate Gaiman, duh!).
NPD needs to figure out who does BPD's PR....
This is also very possible. One of my best friends is going through the “discard phase” with their BPD gf, and holy hell it ain’t pretty. I do think that the “How true is this version of events?” convo is a different one from the “BDSM- good or bad?” convo, but both are important and interesting in their own right.
BPD = borderline or bipolar?
Borderline Personality Disorder.
What is the discard phase?
If you’re dealing with someone without BPD, they associate their emotions with events. For example, “I have to go to work today. That makes me sad.” With BPD, that relationship is reversed. They feel sad and then look for a “reason” why they’re experiencing this emotion. And the reason doesn’t have to make sense! So if they decide it’s *you* that is at fault, they will then also decide that you’re evil, have always been evil, have always been the reason they feel sad, ect. They blowup and then punish you however they can. In other words, they “discard” you like garbage.
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.
Because many people find male homosexuality gross, almost as gross as eating feces.
I don’t really care what other people think, I care what other people can logically argue for. This argument is akin to me asking “Who should I vote for you?” and you replying “Well, some people think you should vote for Kamala, others think you should vote for Trump, so it’s impossible to say.” Some people think the moon is made of cheese- considering there’s no good argument for that actually being the case, I pay them no mind.
Anal sex is unhealthy for both parties (mostly for the receiver though) regardless of the sex of the participants.
Exactly.
💩🍽️🤌👎💀
But you can do those with another person who consents.
Can you elaborate on this? Intentional how?
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.
There should be or you end up with mobs and lynching.
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.
Moreover, it would be very poor optics (and fresh meat for the misandrists) for his team to release texts that indicate either her consent or her nefarious intent.
Why would that be poor optics?
The trial, if there will be such a thing, won’t be in the media, so showing all of your cards ahead of time would be a terrible legal move.
It’s the opposite: there won’t be a criminal trial (or possibly even a civil one) but there is a media trial going on now and the stakes for Gaiman are enormous.
"it only presents a few texts; one has to wonder what else is in those messages"
Listen to the Tortoise Media podcast, it spends a lot of time on the messages.
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.
If she can say something different now than she said in the text message, then she could also say something different in the text message than she had when he first initiated.
Are you the TGGP who used to post on LessWrong?!
Yes, and I still blog at https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/ approaching two decades after I started it.
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?
I realized my last comment was inelegantly put, especially since the totality of the accusations against Gaiman suggest a pattern of egregious and clearly abusive behavior, particularly against women over whom he had some power.
However, the point remains. One can think of other, less-well known people in the arts. There was a comic-book creator who was loudly accused of "grooming" due to the sexual relationship he had shared with a female artist. When I hear that someone was groomed, I'm thinking we are speaking of a child. But this was a young woman of about 23.
Again, no force involved or alleged. Simply a case where someone wanted to boink another person, perhaps told said person some things they wanted to hear, and goal was achieved. But to say someone "groomed" a 23 year old woman completely relieves her of any agency, and, again, essentially views the woman/victim as an infant, with no responsibility for making a stupid/shitty choice.
One would think feminists of principle (I know, "principled feminists," ha ha) would reject such a framing of a Proud Independent Woman. But to do so would deny feminists the opportunity to blame men, and especially deny them the pleasure of canceling said man.
I guess I’m just old-fashioned in my belief that a married, wealthy, incredibly successful celebrity should be able to keep his fucking hands off THE NANNY.
Maybe so, but if they then have consensual sex, it's wrong to call it rape.
Homie, feel free to point to anyone in this discussion who disagrees with that point.
I do! I think it's hot when guys bang the nanny
A sign that true gender enlightenment has been achieved: The number of complaints about men "grooming" a 23-year-old woman, and the number of complaints about men "infantilizing" a 23-year-old woman, are equal. (I.e. there's no "gender equality" gain from moving the "infantilization" dial in either direction)
I actually think we are pretty close to this as a society, and that's why feminists have so many contradictory complaints. We'll never satisfy everyone, but in a certain sense, in certain ways, we might be close to as good as it gets.
The logical conclusion is just that they want men to exist in a quantum state: available if sex is wanted and criminal if they want us locked up. And they want the freedom to flip between the two for any reason, including no reason
"And they want the freedom to flip between the two for any reason, including no reason "
And at any time, including long after the fact.
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.
And the women in them have the option to get a real job like the rest of us.
Case in point, according to the article, when the factotum refused Gaiman, he canceled their arrangement.
False.
Explain?
That is a deeply disingenuous take, but I suspect this is a reportage problem rather than a you problem.
Amanda's offer for Scarlett to become a live-in nanny was made the weekend AFTER the bathtub incident. She could have declined; somehow, she'd been surviving on her own up to that point.
In the other case, the woman's HUSBAND was the primary factotum, and she divorced him (she was an artist with a studio on premises in addition to the guest house):
>Around the time Wallner’s marriage ended in 2017, which she said devastated her emotionally, Gaiman told her ex-husband that there was no more work for him on the property, which had provided the family’s main income. Wallner and her daughters were now dependent on Gaiman for work and housing...
That last sentence is strange, given that work and housing had ALWAYS been provided by Gaiman (the bastard!); the difference is that Caroline was not really feeling up to doing any odd jobs. Blowjobs, on the other hand...
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
In Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes, he describes his mom as taking on a hobosexual relationship with her cousin in order to keep a roof overhead for herself and her children.
The “awesome man” is said sarcastically. Nobody actually respects him.
Of course they do. It's not sarcastic at all.
So, this is not a gender issue. It is a class issue.
I don’t have much agency rn :/
Yes. Young women have no agency at all, and certainly aren’t attracted to wealth and fame and power. 🙄
Don't forget the free room and board...
In this case it wasn't him who was befriending such women, it was Amanda Palmer who then sent them to work for her in places where she knew they would encounter Gaiman and that he had a history of doing this to such women.
Palmer doesn't much deserve the benefit of the doubt given just how often she helped enable him. She made most of the money of her life off marrying him, and repeatedly sent him new women long after she not only knew he was bad news, but could no longer stand him for herself. Naïvité is too charitable an assumption for such dupery. Why even hire a hot young female to be a babysitter when you know a man like Neil will be involved?
Assuming any of this is true.
And she's hardly "hot" lol.
It's obviously true. Neil Gaiman being a perv is hardly a big stretch given his Scientology background, disastrous marriages, unlimited money, and all the sadism and pervy sex shit in his writings.
And of course she's hot. To him, which is what matters. She's a thin fairfaced babysitter a third his age, and he's a writer. Not a model or actor or even an athlete. Seeing as how Amanda knew he wasn't to be trusted sexually, Scarlett was the last kind of person who should've been hired as a babysitter. The fact that she did anyway shows a level of foolishness so great as to be indistinguishable from that of collaboration.
It isn't a great stretch for anyone to be a perv. The allegations are a bit weightier than that!
Most people don't grow up in a horribly abusive cult that teaches children have exactly the same brains as adults. $cieno is a vipers nest of abuse and dysfunction.
I would say it's obviously false.
And he has a bevy of adoring attractive fans to choose from.
No he doesn't. He's a writer, not a movie star, and an old and a not-particularly-good-looking one at that. Unless he just outright hires an escort to live with him full time, women like Scarlett, who is herself by no means unattractive, are by far the hottest looking women he has any hope of sleeping with.
Whether this case is strong enough to land a conviction, I can't say. But the notion that Neil Gaiman couldn't possibly be a rapist and is being framed up is preposterous. Great artists are frequently rapists. Chuck Berry, for instance. Or Kanye, who you just know doesn't have long before he's arrested for some horrific sex crime or another. My money's on one of his daughters outing him for being hip-hop's John Phillips.
The “mood: raped yesterday” photos she included as evidence were next-level manipulative.
Assuming any of this is true
If those young vulnerable women aren't able to fully consent to sex, what else can't they consent to? Should they be able to vote, or are they too vulnerable for that?
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.
To be fair, though the intent of the podcasters might have been to infantilize the accuser, "small and waiflike" really was his known type back when the only open secret about him in the sci-fi/fantasy lit community during his first marriage was that he was a cheating horndog who enjoyed everyone else's fair share of groupies as well as his own.
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.
So says the borderliner who ruined his marriage and life. Well, actually, she says he made her lick the shit off his dick AFTER sex, not during...
Assuming any of that is true, ok.
So what? Everyone has their kinks.
Yeah man, you convinced me. I’m just nuts for thinking that might have some kind of deeper psychological source and reveal something fundamentally unpleasant about him.
I don't see how.
What does it say about me that I like sleep sex? Or period sex? Or trans men? Or someone doing what I tell them?
Sleep sex and people doing what you tell them: that you have issues around control
Trans men and period sex: I don’t know I’d want to know about your relationship with your parents.
"Assuming any of that is true, ok."
The allegations about vomit, urine and feces were all in the Tortoise Media podcast and Gaiman denied none of them. His position was simply that she had agreed.
His statement was that he recognized some details and others weren't true at all. He never said it all happened.
That statement was in response to the NYM article, which brought in the allegations that he'd had sex in front of his 4-year-old boy.
Before those particular claims surfaced, he maintained only that the women agreed to what he did.
Also, I didn't say he admitted to everything, just that he found only one thing to deny -- that his activities had been nonconsensual.
It would really be best if you listened to the podcast and read the article.
If I were on a jury and I read those text messages it would be a clear Not Guilty for me. Is he disgusting? Sure. But so is she. Do you go to prison for ten years for being disgusting? No. Fifty years ago, yes. Also, if you say women aren’t capable of giving consent then they shouldn’t be mayors, governors, or President. They literally can’t be in charge.
“(#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 appreciate your essay and the points you are spending time in these comments to clarify. Gaiman clearly was raised in a cult where coercive control was the norm. He seems to have learned to perpetuate that behavior as well. However it also seems a lot of people in his life were attracted to this controlling behavior.
Outside of the cult dynamic, assuming people can communicate at all, adult relationships are always or often messy. If we regret doing messy things, and retroactively categorize them as bad, or that adult females can never consent to violent sexual encounters, then we are back to the Victorian times of upper class women being treated as children.
There has been a recent resurgence of people reading Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton’s writing on topping and bottoming.Janet ‘s memoir is a fascinating account of all the risky situations she got herself into because of her intense desire to be physically punished.
What are the books called? What's her memoir called?
Google Janet Hardy books. I don’t remember the title, but it’s a fun read! What a different time in the bad old days of the late 80’s and early ‘90’s.
Yes. It makes complete sense. Particularly in light of our contemporary tendency to either be over-responsible (take on every body else’s wants / needs / feelings), or utterly negligent, particularly (seemingly), when it comes to our own care or agency. Thank you for this thoroughly clarifying piece. 🙏🏽 (PS have been reading you in The Free Press and finally got around to following you here. So glad.)
Did she aggressively pursue it and brag to friends? Where is that?
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?
The accusers allege they told Gaiman "no" several times and he ignored them. From the article:
“I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘I’m not confident with my body,’” Pavlovich recalls...[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."
In this instance she didn't say "no", but it come across like she was indicating she didn't want to have sex and there was little way to stop him.
"The boy sat against the wall by the picture window overlooking the city, facing the bed. Pavlovich perched on the edge of the mattress; Gaiman got onto the bed and pulled her so she was on her back. He lifted the covers up over them. She tried to signal to him with her eyes that he should stop. She mouthed, “What the fuck are you doing?” She didn’t want the child to overhear what she was saying. Gaiman ignored her. He rolled her onto her side, took off his pants, pulled off her skirt, and began to have sex with her from behind while continuing to speak with his son."
"Pavlovich was in the kitchen, tidying up, when he approached her from behind and pulled her to the sofa...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...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."
Another woman's account:
"When she said it hurt too much, he’d tell her the problem was she wasn’t submissive enough...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."
That second example is not rape. She could easily have told him to stop.
You don't think 'what the fuck are you doing', and 'signalling with your eyes' is enough? She *could* have told him to stop, but did you miss the part where the article says "she didn't want the child to overhear what she was saying"?
I strongly disagree that that isn't rape, and frankly think it's pretty troubling that you don't. Would you have sex with someone who was saying 'what the fuck are you doing' and 'signalling with her eyes for you to stop'?
Well, first of all, I don't believe that any of this really happened.
But assuming it did - she could have gotten out from under the covers, right?
She didn't say that, she "mouthed" it - so he may not have even been aware, and that phrase is pretty ambiguous.
And "signaling with her eyes for him to stop" is self-evidently absurd - what on earth is that supposed to look like? If we accept that kind of "signal" as communication, doesn't the fact that she stayed under the covers and didn't roll over or anything "signal" for him to continue?
> Well, first of all, I don't believe that any of this really happened.
That's odd, I think, and epistemically irrational. I absolutely don't believe that we should immediately convict in the court of public opinion, and have myself stuck my neck out socially to argue for the presumption of innocence in many controversial cases. But it's equally, if not more irrational to immediately decide to *disbelieve* it, when we have so little to go on.
> She didn't say that, she "mouthed" it - so he may not have even been aware, and that phrase is pretty ambiguous.
This is a huge stretch- most people can easily lipread at least approximately when someone is trying to mouth something legibly- but I suppose it's theoretically plausible that he could have failed to catch it. If someone mouthed something like 'what the fuck are you doing' at me, though, it would at least give me pause about whether they were consenting, even if I couldn't make out exactly what they said. I certainly wouldn't plough on, if someone was mouthing something at me that I couldn't work out what it was, and signalling with their eyes that they didn't like it. Which brings me to this bizarre bit of your argument:
> And "signaling with her eyes for him to stop" is self-evidently absurd - what on earth is that supposed to look like?
I'm not trying to be rude, but are you on the autism spectrum by any chance? Most people can absolutely imagine what that sort of eye signal would look like, and could very easily understand at least the general tenor of it if they encountered it. The eyes are a pretty fundamental part of human communication, and the idea that it's "self-evidently absurd" that you could communicate anything with them would itself be self-evidently absurd to anyone with normal interpersonal and communicative abilities.
Again, I don't want to immediately leap to assuming guilty whenever a public figure is 'me too'd', so to speak, but you're sprinting in the other direction here. It screams motivated reasoning.
Any fair and open-minded person reading this, with no particular knowledge of the parties involved or their credibility, should give at least some credence to the possibility that Gaiman raped this woman. It's at least as consistent with the meagre evidence we have as any other possibility.
I think I have enough to go on to make the assessment that it does not seem credible to me.
It doesn't seem like she clearly communicated anything there, given that she "mouthed" something when he was rolling her over and may not even have been looking at her lips. I'm not convinced most people can lipread well.
> it would at least give me pause about whether they were consenting
Maybe, but that's not enough for it to be rape.
> self-evidently absurd to anyone with normal interpersonal and communicative abilities
Ok, that was very harsh and uncalled for. No, I'm not autistic, and obviously the eyes do play a big role in nonverbal communication, chiefly by communicating emotions. No one is denying that.
But nonverbal communication is extremely ambiguous, which can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. There's no eye signal that could have unambiguously communicated that, even if he'd been looking at her eyes.
And the rest of her nonverbal communication did seem to indicate consent - she didn't get up, roll over, push him away, etc.
And keep in mind we're talking about rape here - so it should be a very high bar, not someone missing a very odd way to communicate.
Her conduct here is very bizarre - she (presumably) claims she is getting raped, but doesn't want to move or communicate because there's a kid there? Does that make any sense to you? If she didn't care enough to disrupt things a little or communicate clearly, there's no way it's rape.
What about the other examples ?
The others, if true, seem like they could be rape.
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.
Indeed, Amanda wouldn't propose the live-in nanny arrangement until the weekend AFTER the bathtub incident. And of course the "rape victim" (who had been a 22-year-old virgin) accepted the offer, because women have no agency and can't help but act against their own interests when a man is involved (except he wasn't, of course: Amanda made the offer, not Neil).
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.
Yes
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
Christ in a cardigan sweater. Any psychiatrist worth their salt will tell you about freeze and fawn, and that all sexual assault victims do it, not just women. Men as well. I’m so curious about people who write this kind of shit. The statistical lack of culpability re: sexual assault is mind blowing, but you felt moved to write about how textbook psychological reactions (that men and children also have when sexually abused) make women look flaky. You sat down, typed this, and hit publish. This is a dark ass timeline for anyone who isn’t a land-owning white man, and this is where you put your effort. This is what moved you. Incredible.
No, all sexual assault victims do not write thank-you notes asking for more.
Yes, thank you!
You're proving her point. If women are this unreliable as narrators of their experience then the way society thought of them 150 years ago is more correct than the modern feminist position.
"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?
People can consent to things that are harmful to their own body or soul for a multitude of reasons — mental illness, low self-esteem, misinformation, immaturity, low intelligence, desperation — and I would call taking the opportunity to harm them in such situations “abusive.”
So if your ex says the relationship was harmful, that means you were abusive? Doesn't make sense.
Yes, people sometimes consent to things, and then it turns out those things harmed them. But the other person didn't know that would happen. All they knew was that the other person wanted it at the time.
"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.
Men hate fuck women to get one up on them.
Women don't hate fuck. They fuck men they are genuinely attracted to but know that they "shouldn't" be.
Women definitely hate-fuck. A friend told me she had this coworker she found really annoying and couldn't stand and hated him, and it was mutual, but there was chemistry between them and one day they just hate-fucked after work. She described it as the anger and hatred turning into sexual energy.
No, she was attracted to a man who didn't fit the profile of a man she was supposed to be attracted to.
Lol no. That's completely different.
Let me spell this out. We're talking about three different things here.
1. Sex with someone to get one up on them.
2. Sex with someone you're attracted to but think you shouldn't be.
3. Sex with someone you really dislike but are attracted to.
You said men do (1) and women do (2).
What I'm trying to explain is that hate-fucking is (3). It just means when you really dislike someone for whatever reason but also are attracted to them and have sex with them.
If a woman does (3) she might think she "shouldn't" be attracted to the guy, or she might not. It's irrelevant.
What we are talking about here is the combination of sexual attraction and disliking someone.
Let’s break it down to physical arousal. Attraction is a philosophical term that involves romantic as well as physiological aspects. There’s a lot of scientific studies done on people in labs hooked up to devices that measure arousal levels to media. There are some surprising results for males and females! I tried to find the link to one of these studies, but couldn’t in the time I have right now. Also, women and men can experience arousal during non consensual sex. It’s doesn’t mean anything except maybe it’s evolutionary biology as a survival mechanism.