On Men Who Pretend To Love Women
Neil Gaiman’s literary acclaim was bolstered by an earnest public commitment to feminism. Does that make the allegations against him worse?
Neil Gaiman by Backstage Rider
The author Neil Gaiman was recently at the centre of a 11,000-word New York Magazine exposé, in which writer Lila Shapiro interviewed eight women who accused the 64-year-old of sexual assault, and rough and degrading sex that caused physical injury. Gaiman had first encountered a firestorm of sexual misconduct allegations last summer, when Tortoise Media published a six-part podcast series called ‘Master’. That podcast failed to get serious mainstream traction, and it was only after the publication of New York’s piece that Gaiman, the acclaimed writer of comics, novels, screenplays and children’s books such as ‘American Gods’, ‘Coraline’, ‘Good Omens’, and ‘The Sandman’, began to face repercussions for his alleged misdeeds: multiple planned adaptations of his work have been shelved, and yesterday his publisher, Dark Horse Comics, stated that they will no longer publish his works.
Post Me-Too, we have become accustomed to long-form reporting on the bad behaviour of powerful men. But even by that standard, the Gaiman story makes for grim reading. The allegations paint a portrait of a man with a sadistic appetite for inflicting sexual pain and an almost sociopathic detachment for the feelings of young, vulnerable women. Particularly harrowing is the story of Scarlett Pavlovich, Gaiman’s former nanny, who is the central testimony of both ‘Master’ and Shapiro’s reporting. But the story also acts as a broader meditation on the pitfalls of performative male feminism. We see in Gaiman a man who weaponised his own inability to fit into the tight constraints of traditional masculinity and adopted an unthreatening, pseudo-feminist persona to the public while hurting and abusing women in private. It’s a timely conversation given the recent lawsuit filed by Blake Lively against Justin Baldoni, the actor and filmmaker who brands himself as a feminist ally. Lively has accused Baldoni of sexually harassing her on the set of the film It Ends With Us, then orchestrating a calculated smear campaign to destroy her reputation in the media as punishment (Baldoni denies these claims and has counter-sued both Lively and The New York Times).
Gaiman had, per the New York piece, a “reputation as an outspoken champion of women”. He married the so-called feminist performance artist, Amanda Palmer. He was outspoken on Twitter about the Me Too movement. “On a day like today it’s worth saying I believe survivors,” he wrote on the day Christine Blasey-Ford testified against Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. “Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world.” He adopted an “oh shucks” literary persona, foppish, handsome, with a studied nervousness and a kind of eroticised docility. Per the New York Magazine piece, this helped Gaiman develop a cult following among young female fans who flocked to his readings to slip him their number or request that he sign their breasts. In some instances, women actually fainted upon seeing him. His outward-facing response to this circus was predictably endearing. Per Shapiro’s reporting: “Once [during an on-stage Q&A] a fan asked if she could be his “sex slave”. “He read it aloud and said, ‘Well, no.’ He was very demure”
How to make this square then, with the man accused of coercing women decades younger than him—teenage fans, vulnerable women in their early 20s who worked for him and relied on him for food and board—into BDSM relationships where, among other things, they participated in sex so painful they “blacked out” “passed out” and “screamed” from the pain? The man who told one such partner that the sex only hurt so much “because she wasn’t submissive enough” and proceeded to “beat her with a belt”? The man who initiated rough anal sex with his 22-year-old nanny within hours of meeting her, despite her having vocally objected multiple times beforehand because, among other things, she had been sexually abused as a child? The man who paid multiple women large sums of money in return for NDAs that swore silence, who threatened his housekeeper with the eviction of herself and her three daughters if she didn’t continue giving him sexual favours when requested, who forced oral sex so violently on one partner that she threw up on him?