True Selves and Neil Gaiman

I remember years ago talking to someone about the signs of the Zodiac and I said, "If Scorpios are all promiscuous, that would mean Neil Gaiman is promiscuous, so it's obviously bunk." Maybe Zodiac signs are as reliable as anything else in the media these days.

The conversation about Gaiman has become surprisingly existential in the past few days following the publication of a piece at Vulture and Gaiman himself finally posting a blog entry addressing the allegations, breaking the public silence he's maintained on this and other matters for months. Chiefly, the issue now is over the concept of consent, even enthusiastic consent, being retracted several years after the fact. Counterintuitively, the prevailing opinion seems to be that yes. it can be, particularly in matters in which the individual engaged in activities generally considered to be repulsive in the culture. This is nothing new in Britain where BDSM has long been illegal due to the belief that it's impossible for a person to willingly engage in an activity that will inflict pain or injury upon themselves, a perspective that has long weathered the obvious hypocrisy in simultaneously permitting people to engage in physically intense sports, cosmetic surgery, and body piercing.

The original article on the Gaiman allegations was on a right wing site called Tortoise. Now that a left wing platform, Vulture, has published a piece, voices on the right find themselves compulsively arguing with it. They kind of have to since the right has had to rhetorically push back against cancel culture so they've accrued an armoury of logical arguments that can't be tamped down.

There's an article on the predominantly right wing British site UnHerd called "The Perils of BDSM". Author Kathleen Stock uses the Gaiman situation primarily to take aim at BDSM and concludes with the telling statement;

More often than not, it is very bad for the submissive in the scenario — not just because it leads her to physically dangerous situations, but also because it tends to put her in a state of mind in which agency is undermined and subsequent choices aren’t those of her true self, however confidently things started out.

Her choices aren't those of her "true self"? It's impressive Stock has the chutzpah to unabashedly make such a statement, to presume knowledge of a woman's "true self" without even having met her.

Regular UnHerd writer Kat Rosenfeld did not publish her piece on Gaiman on UnHerd but on her Substack perhaps because, despite beginning the article by saying she believes Gaiman to be "a pretty bad guy," she does not support the narrative that Gaiman's alleged victims lacked agency. People on Twitter who didn't read or understand her article have been attacking her for being sympathetic to Gaiman.

I spend all this time reading long, thought out articles that I forget about masses of people who see headlines and base everything they believe on them. I saw one guy posting on Reddit, replying to someone distraught because she only had very good memories of her encounters with Gaiman, by saying that back then maybe "he still had some good in him." So this guy apparently thinks of Neil Gaiman as Darth Vader now, sorting him into that fantasy narrative because the articles he didn't read were just too complicated. The way people confidently go out into the world with some opinions is like people going out without pants on. I just marvel at the history of intellectual complacency that brought them to that point.

I finally read the Vulture article, which was, like the Tortoise article, behind a paywall. At least the name of the publication is more fitting. The article is called "There is No Safe Word", which is not a quote from Gaiman or anyone else involved but it's one a few people have taken to be. The article was written by Lila Shapiro who garnered accolades for her piece on Joss Whedon. You know, more and more I think the pool of brilliant writers on the cancelled bench should get together and make a fantastic streaming series or something.

As with everything else I've been hearing, I can't help but notice that all tangible evidence, all the texts and videos, points to these being consensual relationships; all the things suggesting they're not are from third or fourth party hearsay or from the alleged victims who have changed their opinions on their own past decisions. It's all starting to seem like alien abduction stories, which Carl Sagan spent some time debunking and wrote about in his book Demon Haunted World, a book in which he also decries a psychiatric industry that profits by coercing clients into constructing false memories of assault not unlike those of alien abduction. And one of Gaiman's alleged victims is said to have changed her "perspective" after spending time with "women who were experienced in dealing with sexual assault and abuse."

That alleged victim, Scarlett Pavlovich, spent time with Kris Taylor, "a doctor of psychology who had lectured at the University of Auckland on coercion, consent, and rape" and his partner, Misma Anaru. "Although Pavlovivh had never used the words rape or sexual assault to describe what had happened to her," the Vulture article states, "both Anaru and Taylor believed Gaiman had raped her repeatedly."

It's strange how few people find it suspicious that these articles which confer on Gaiman nearly supernatural powers of coercion, manipulation, and subterfuge, are unwilling to consider anyone else involved capable of deception.