Another round of #MeTootery was unleashed on the unsuspecting public regarding a writer called Neil Gaiman.
The writer who is being #MeTooted sounds like a right bastard. The women accusing him go straight from “It was consensual (and wonderful)!” (a direct quote) to “It was rape!” All of the ingredients of the story are as they always are. A sleazy rich and famous man, overheated groupies eager to pleasure him in most disgusting ways, the accuser who pursues the male star aggressively for years but then is “pressured — from very diverse, mostly older women in her community — to take action that she wasn’t sure she felt comfortable taking.”
These are all icky people, and the story published about the in New York Magazine is badly written, rambling, and filled with very disgusting details of the affairs between Gaiman and the groupies. The reason why I’m even mentioning this is as follows. Gaiman is into BDSM. Liberals have spent years trying to convince us that it’s not a paraphilia but a variation on the norm. And it’s not. BDSM entails getting off on the pain and humiliation of others. The idea that this process has some sort of ironclad rules established by an utterly imaginary entity called “the BDSM community” is ridiculous. Here’s the author of the article, continuing in this vein to make BDSM sound tame and unobjectionable:
BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms, the most important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it. This, as many practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture, have stressed over decades, is the defining line that separates BDSM from abuse.
Yes, the defining texts, totally. Sexual sadists are totally abiding by the “texts” written by sex educators. Marquis de Sade himself never veered from the rules set down by “practitioner Dossie.” It’s a mystery why the practice is even called after him instead of being named Dossieism.
“Consent” can’t guide our entire idea of sexual morality. And of you don’t like the word “morality”, take your objections to the New York Magazine, which is arguing sophomorically that there is good and bad BDSM, with the “good” variety being very arbitrarily defined by the article’s author.
What Gaiman did to the eager young groupie is disgusting and dehumanizing in spite of the fact that she enthusiastically consented, including in writing, many times. That she participated is also disgusting (read the article before you argue with my use of the word ‘disgusting.’ Or don’t because it really is.) She knew it and it weighed heavily with her because this pervy behavior wasn’t natural to her. She only engaged in it because she wanted a rich boyfriend.
First, liberals turned “consent” into a sacred cow, as if people didn’t consent all the time to things that are horrible for them. Now we have to witness their agonies of trying to untangle how this worship of consent leaves many people feeling abused, degraded, and broken.
Clarissa's Blog 
I really enjoyed reading Good Omens by Terry Patchett and Neil Gaiman. He seems to have an interesting and original voice on paper mixing magic realism and fantasy with wit and humor on occasion. It is a big let down to learn that he is such a pervert, but I’m glad for the lost young women who maybe saved from such dangerous and abusive engagements in the name of hero worship with this information out.
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This is one of these things where I don’t know what to think, Gaiman is a creep and the girl pursued, claimed it was consensual and now claims it’s rape. As someone who is asexual and aromantic, I have no opinion on BDSM or its practitioners as long as I don’t have to see it.
Problem is that there’s a lot of young women groupies so desperate to get with their idols that they’ll “consent” to anything. I’ve read books on rock bands from the 70s and 80s and the groupies “consented” to all sorts of crazy shot to get close to their idols. I think the bigger issue is that these creepy famous guys know that their fans will do crazy shit to get close to them, and take advantage of desperate fans. It doesn’t help that BDSM is glamorized in junk like 50 Shades of Grey and it’s ripoffs, it would be great if dysfunctional relationships weren’t glamorized
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I’m not going to read the article because I find these kind of narratives enervating, but I am very curious to know about the outcome. Is this fellow Neil Gaiman going to be tried for rape? How can someone – or should I say a woman? would the same apply if it were a man? – go from enthusiastic participant to rape victim?
And please comment on the unconscionable element of resentment among certain older women who – once they have become apprised of a younger, generally attractive, sexually active woman – stoke up all sources of doubt, shame, disgust and hatred of the man with whom they had so willingly committed the act to the point that they are now led to denounce him. What pathological condition is that? Does it have a name?
There is in the criminal codes of France and Quebec a crime called détournement d’affection [it’s in the section called droit des délits familiaux]: alienation of affection in English? something like that at any rate, which refers to people seducing someone away from his/her rightful spouse. It only applies to legally married couples, but I’m always reminded of this when I read of older women – generally single, in general sexually unhappy, typically existentially challenged – who counsel younger women in order to convince them that all the sex such women had was really, really abuse in disguise, even though they were not aware of it at the time…
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“#MeTootery … Neil Gaiman”
I _really_ don’t want to read that… what is it precisely that the women involved want to happen?
I’m fine with public humiliation of Gaiman if they’re willing to own up to their part in what happened, but I somehow don’t think that’s the case….
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There’s an ex-wife who engineered the whole situation. First, she sent the babysitter to pleasure the husband and now it looks like she’s trying to go for some sort of a custody re-arrangement for the unfortunate little boy who’s the son of the nutso couple. The wife is supposedly also famous. Amanda something. I don’t know these people but it looks like two rich exes are bashing each other over the head with that babysitter for purposes of their own. And we are all sitting here watching because we no longer know how to say, “These people are immoral, dissipated, and disgusting.”
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Now this makes everything sound more crazy and depraved, both of them sound disgusting. His ex-wife is Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, a band that has a weird Weimar Republic/ Cabaret vibe. It sounds like she gets off seeing her husband with a younger subordinate and using a younger, less powerful person as a cudgel to punish her husband. I feel bad for their son with these horrible, selfish parents, it sounds as though the babysitter went through with it to avoid losing her job
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Yes, these are all very disgusting people. And it’s really funny how the author of the article struggles with naming what is disgusting about them. Sexual incontinence and eager self-abandonment to kinks is supposed to be good. Then why does this story of sexual self-realization sound so tawdry and pathetic? There are no words in the arsenal of a liberal to explain why that is. All that remains is to repeat “consent” as if any amount of consent would make this story less contemptible.
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It’s been noted repeatedly, probably including on this blog, that “consent” has been given such a monopoly on how people frame sexual behavior that some younger people almost lack the language to grapple with the fact that a sexual encounter can be perfectly consensual for everyone involved and also be horrible/traumatic for any number of reasons.
It leads to this backward logic of “This left me feeling disgusted, therefore it must not have been consensual.”
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This is the perfect encapsulation of the problem. The young woman in this particular story begged for the continuation of the relationship with the writer on writing, on numerous occasions. Yet she felt degraded and horrible. Because he had degraded her and treated her horribly. Nobody ever bothered to tell her, “Child, being a human toilet for a married older dude won’t bring you joy. Don’t do it.” And now she has no idea what happened to her and how to explain it to herself. I’m very sad for her. This is terrible. And it will continue happening because we have created an unhealthy environment around sex.
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How do people reach adulthood and not have *any* sexual boundaries? Do people no longer talk to their kids about anything other than consent as a legal concept? Like, what about mutual respect? Getting to know someone first? Having standards? Some things being objectively bad, like getting involved in any way with married people? Things that make you feel degraded? That you can, and should, say NO to such things, even if you happen to like the person?
Is this not a thing?
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Yeah, everything I’ve seen on this one sounds like… yep, everybody involved are depraved. I wouldn’t want to be social with any of them. But also… the only reason it’s going public is because somebody wants something now.
None of it sounds like a legit legal case– just gross people doing gross things. If somebody “rapes” you, and then you voluntarily continue your social relationship with them (outside of really messed-up family situations)…. I don’t know how you get around the credibility problem there. That’s weird and I don’t understand it. At all.
The thing I find most interesting about the whole package is simply that… I’ve read a few short things by Gaiman. He’s a competent writer. But even though he was writing in the SF/Fantasy market, which was very much my stomping grounds when I was young, I just… couldn’t ever get into his books, the ones everybody raved about like Neverwhere and Sandman. Couple of pages, and just…. put it down and never picked it up again. This has happened more than a couple of times now– some author who is just right there in the middle of everything I like to read, and somehow I just… don’t read them. Keep picking up the book, maybe checked it out from the library a few times, and somehow never got more than a chapter in, because something’s just so *off*. It’s not clear what– it’s not anything obvious. There’s a repellant invisible forcefield on the dang book. And then later something like this comes out: oh, that author is a really gross horrible person IRL. I didn’t know that when I picked up the book, but… did I grok that unconsciously somehow? Was it hiding between a verb and an object?
I mean, I actually did finish reading exactly *one* Marion Zimmer Bradley book, mostly by sheer force of will, but then was thoroughly squicked out and never read another: left me with an icky feeling. Contact contamination or something. Then, later, same deal. Her kid came out with an expose.
I’d love to know the mechanics of that one.
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“liberals turned “consent” into a sacred cow”
More recently feminists (of the snakesville ilk) were actively trying to destroy ‘consent’ by making it impossible to discern. The official line (once you removed the incrustations) was that nothing a woman said or did actually signified consent (including repeatedly saying/writing ‘I consent’) that what seems like consent at one point might retroactively turn out to not be consent at all (and round and round in ever more stupid incantations).
Consent is important but so is judgement (including moral judgement) and discretion. I really miss discretion when people didn’t feel the need to splash their junk all over the media….
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What do you think about this commonly-accepted idea that women might not realize they’ve been sexually assaulted until much later, due to trauma, etc. (which can explain why they can give consent during the act, but withdraw it later)?
If someone punches me in the face, I’ll know what they did and react accordingly. But rape is different? I’m genuinely confused and need a woman’s perspective on this. Clearly I’m missing something.
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The confidence with which this person is saying “it is actually very normal to want to hang out with the person who raped you” is killing me. It’s one thing to say that such things have been known to occur. It’s quite another to declare that it’s very normal, actually.
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Unpleasant, disappointing sex is definitely not rape. But the question is, why are so many women having the kind of sex that disturbs them so much they keep trying to figure out what it even was for months or years afterwards? The only framework they have to answer this question is that somebody must have abused them. This is what creates all the problems.
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Does not apply here, but many victims of child molestation don’t think of it as rape or assault until later. Because at that age you don’t even really understand what happened.
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Doesn’t it? Is it a case of dreadfully prolonged immaturity?
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Having now read the article, I think it could apply, in the sense that someone who was abused as a child has a very skewed idea of what’s acceptable. That said, I don’t know one reconciles her text messages with a lack of consent, though Gaiman remains a predatory scumbag regardless.
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Yeah, that was pretty much where I pegged it.
Creeps gonna creep. Boundary-less people gonna keep hanging out with creeps.
It’s a shame they weren’t all raised better than that?
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The why? Hmmm, well, reasons range all the way from too much alcohol, or awkwardness, and inexperience, all the way down to deliberate lying because of feelings of shame. Both minds and bodies differ, it takes time and skill to read the physical cues of each other.
“…somebody must have abused them.” Nonsense, that mindset is how feminism developed. It takes two to tangle ;-D
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On a related note, anyone calling himself a male feminist should just preregister themselves as a sex offender.
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Remember that dude, what was his name, a male feminist who taught gender studies in California. He had this very popular blog. And then it was discovered that he was sleeping with his students the whole time while loudly condemning male professors who slept with students.
Does anybody remember what his name was? It was a huge thing in the feminist circles. I felt bad for the guy because the feminists who denounced him were even ickier than he was.
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Do you mean Hugo Schwyzer?
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Oh, thank you, thank you so
much. I hate it when I can’t remember something and it keeps itching my brain. Yes, him!
Those were the golden times of blogging. So fun.
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The founder of the “Good Man Project” lmao.
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I just came across his substack. Man, he’s fallen on hard times. I feel bad for him.
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Ah! I didn’t know he had one. Thank you, I’m interested to find out how things turned out for him.
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https://hugoschwyzer.substack.com/p/middle-aged-men-living-in-cars
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This is terrible. I don’t understand how the mother of his children is allowing this. I’d never allow this to happen to the father of mine.
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Didn’t that guy once also try to burn down his place while his girlfriend was there asleep?
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Hmmm, actually the correct scientific nomenclature is “sneaky f.cker”, a greasy critter first identified by evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith describing a sleazy subordinate male hoping to sufficiently butt kiss females to mate ;-D
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Gaiman is rich and famous. He doesn’t need to make additional efforts to attract young, eager groupies willing to accept any degree of degradation to find themselves in the proximity of money and fame. It’s like buying a lottery ticket – “what if he falls in love with me and marries me?” – and their bodies are the payment.
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In spite of herself, the writer conveys an insightful point regarding fetishism:
“As soon as they began to hook up, the feeling that had drawn her to him — the magical spell of his interest in her individuality — vanished. “He seemed to have a script,” she tells me. “He wanted me to call him ‘master’ immediately.” He demanded that she promise him her soul. “It was like he’d gone into this ritual that had nothing to do with me.”
This stuff is so depersonalized, both you and the other person are just interchangeable cogs in a roleplay.
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The mix of extreme naivety with an extraordinary lack of self-awareness is quite shocking. “I thought this very successful and accomplished person would be interested in me as an individual and not a piece of meat. Because everybody is an equally interesting individual, right?”
Well, wrong. And the sooner we all accept it, the happier we’ll be.
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Even between peers, BDSM functions this way. I suppose it’s ideal for people who fear emotional intimacy, or who are so unsure of their identity that they need to be told who to be during sex.
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As you’ve mentioned, it’s so funny how the writer, unable to invoke basic morality (because that’s been sacrificed at the altar of “consent”), has to reach for BDSM rules to indict him.
“He violated the most sacred moral law of the universe, the BDSM code of ethics” 😂😂😂
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What would you say are the foremost moral principle(s) that were broken here?
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Hugo wrote:
Turns out he is a son of a Jewish war refugee (from his another post).
Since the names he mentioned are unfamiliar to me, wouldn’t have noticed the Jewish part myself.
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I’d reckon it’s simply that Jewish people are overrepresented among the rich, and the rich are more likely targets for #metootery. No reason to #metoot somebody you’ve got no chance of a cash settlement from, though I reckon there are at least as many arseholes among the less-affluent as among the rich.
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Exactly. And also, ultra-liberal means sexual license. The more partners, the higher is the likelihood that somebody will end up unhappy. A man living monogamously with his wife has zero likelihood for these accusations as opposed to a man who goes through girlfriends like Kleenex.
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Yeah, but the schmo welder who trawls stripper bars every payday can have a lot of partners and *never* get #metooted. Not worth it for anybody involved, and everybody understands the transactional nature of the thing.
Smart rich people, oddly, seem much more likely to be confused about it.
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“Smart rich people”
Kind of an oxymoron…. lots of rich people are monomaniacal about one thing that gets them money and pig ignorant about lots of other things (see Musk). And those born into money are…. mostly….. not bright in any meaning of the word.
And rich people tend to be very vulnerable to scams (topic of another post).
They’re used to people going away when not needed so the hysterics who metoo them come as a complete surprise to them.
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This post I linked to also describes Hugo’s current situation.
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They end up overrepresented as targets because they are overrepresented among the cultural elites and have no religious / moral constraints because these are never practicing people and always extremely liberal.
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There was an article in a Jewish online magazine I follow that wondered whether where was something about the overrepresentation of Jewish men among so-called se*ual predators.
Here is the link: https://www.movingtraditions.org/jewish-men-pigs/
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The problem is, the only predators we hear about are rich and famous. About 100% of Muslim men in Western societies are total creeps but nobody cares. This semester, for instance, we have to practically stand on our heads to make sure that the Arabic instructor doesn’t coincide with any female lab workers. He has creeped them all out with his behavior. He’s married and has a small child but that isn’t making a difference.
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As I keep saying, downtown Montreal is unlivable because of this problem. There are masses of these men, and they are all sleazy, creepy and really really despise women. But we are only told about one Prof who slept with a student who persecuted him like a hound on scent, and the prof will be Jewish but nobody says anything about 500 rapey Muslim blokes who make it impossible for that student to go out like a normal person, so she has to throw herself at the professor.
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Clarissa
Don’t worry about it, the professional butt kissing Liberals want to bring in another 5,000 more, and from Gaza no less…no doubt they wisely noticed how well that had worked out for Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon ;-D
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\ we have to practically stand on our heads to make sure that the Arabic instructor doesn’t coincide with any female lab workers. He has creeped them all out with his behavior.
Has no one given him a warning, including a threat of job dismissal or not continuing his contract for the future, because he’s Arabic?
I doubt a WASP or Jewish instructor would’ve gotten away with it in the age of MeToo.
Will his contract be continued despite this?
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This is a Fulbrighter. If I get rid of him, there’s nobody to finish out the course. Remember, we don’t hire. We make do with whomever we have. He’s gone after this semester
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\ the accuser who pursues the male star aggressively for years but then is “pressured — from very diverse, mostly older women in her community — to take action that she wasn’t sure she felt comfortable taking.”
From reading comments I thought his former wife opened this can of worms and publicly dragged the babysitter into it.
What I don’t understand is how the babysitter isn’t afraid to destroy her life with this story. Gaiman and his wife, two extremely rich people, will be fine, but she?
Would you employ her to look after your children after reading this article? Every potential future employer will easily google this info, and she can hardly expect the money from lawsuit (if it comes at all) to last her entire life or, at least, around a decade.
What about being able to find a good life partner? Every normal man will google this and go away. Is Gaiman worth staying single forever?
Does she want her future children to read sordid details? Their classmates and teachers?
Her neighbors and acquaintances?
Or is her name not public somehow? The article is paywalled, so I wasn’t able to read the details.
Those same questions apply to numerous additional cases, like the mattress girl and others. Don’t those women understand what they’re about to lose?
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\ This is terrible. I don’t understand how the mother of his children is allowing this.
My first thought was about Hugo’s mother. He wrote himself in one post that his relatives only let him fall this far because of his previous behaviour, and that he had the knowledge they won’t let him being fully destroyed anyway.
\ I’d never allow this to happen to the father of mine.
Imagine an alcoholic or an abuser who’ll continue in his ways till you stop enabling him to live off you.
I felt sorry for Hugo myself, but lets not forget he’s an adult healthy man, who should be able to support himself w/o his former wife supporting herself, their two children and him too, for some reason. Why should a single mother of two do that, while the male ex is the suffering party somehow? Reminds of FSU where many women supported their husbands after 1992.
You cannot heal somebody’s mental health problems.
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She’s not a single mother. She’s a divorced mother. Which she amply chose to be, marrying a very promiscuous man with lifelong addiction problems and then deciding to have his children. She was not a very young girl, duped and misled. She was a mature woman who knew what she was doing. Hugo was always excessively open about who he was.
Once you marry somebody and have his children, he’s in your life forever. You can’t discard him when he becomes inconvenient. It’s simply not how it works.
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\ You can’t discard him when he becomes inconvenient.
I view not discarding as being supportive of his relationship with kids and not talking to kids badly about their father.
Giving money to a drug user, bailing an ex from jail after he committed a crime or supporting an adult healthy man for no good reason are not included in the contract at all.
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You’ll enjoy reading “Neoliberal Love” which I’m now more motivated than ever to finish.
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\ You’ll enjoy reading “Neoliberal Love” which I’m now more motivated than ever to finish.
Glad our conversation about Hugo contributed to this. 🙂
Hope you’ll update on your blog when it is finished. The subject is very interesting.
Still, the former wife doesn’t sound as unsupportive here:
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“I felt sorry for Hugo myself”
I never did…. it was less the offenses themselves but the hypocrisy and hubris. I feel bad for his family (that is, children) but him? no….
“an adult healthy man”
Hasn’t been mentally healthy….. ever?
By the third divorce a person needs to recognize that marriage is not for them, but he’s in the downfall of marriage number five.
I think he’s the type that a religious conversion would help a lot. He obviously has very poor judgement and he would benefit from a supernatural or all-powerful figure over his shoulder saying ‘NO! DON’T DO THAT!!!!’ to almost everything he decides.
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“Hugo Schwyzer”
I just thought of the ultimate train wreck….. if there were a way to use time travel to engineer a romantic meeting between Schwyzer and Joyce Maynard….. can you imagine how awful that would be? It would be a black hole of cluelessness and self-absorption….
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