January 17, 2025
Unpleasant Distinctions Between Vile and Illegal
So as I write this, Neil Gaiman is being accused of....
I shall not elaborate upon the specifics of said unpleasantness because I do not hate you.
I could have lived a long, happy, and fulfilling life never knowing any of the details of what is alleged to have gone on between Sir Neil and various of his female fans. That path is now closed to me forever. I do not wish to inflict that fate upon you, gentle reader.
It's appalling. I have always liked the fellow's work, and while I can separate the work from the artist that's a heavy lift in this case. He also struck me as a fairly good dude. On the one hand, the idea that a darling of the left is behaving badly towards women is no surprise. On the other hand, what Sir Neil has allegedly done (and not denied) is WAY beyond the pale of what we would expect from even the mouthiest male feminist. And on the gripping hand, there is the little issue of consent.
There are things that are so objectively "ICK!" So completely wrong, that are red flags along the path to the moral event horizon.
Now. I am a conservative. So I am reported to be neurologically more inclined to disgust than a leftist or a libertarian. However, I do not think that most of my Left/Lib acquaintances would not be squicked out by the allegations. The allegations are THAT vile.
However....
Wait. HOW can there be a However...or a but?
What is alleged is unspeakably AWFUL and so beyond the pale that anyone, who has the faintest grasp of hygiene, propriety, and basic human decency is going to say..."Nope!"
And yet, as much as it nauseates me to say this, there is, a "But..."
"So that's how Brickmuppet died, the villagers all burned him"
Kat Rosenfield is an author that I am not familiar with, but she has looked at this sordid affair sufficiently closely that....that I'm giving her the side-eye.
However, she's looked at the statements from both sides of this little slice of Weimar and notes something.
There's a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he's doing. Gaiman says he's struggling: he's heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. "I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed," he writes.
"It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.
Except: she doesn't mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:
Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. "I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.
This is a major issue with our society right now for several reasons, but I'll focus on two.
Sir Neil's behavior and appetites are apparently grotesque. I get nauseous just typing about this and will not revisit this...EVER.
HOWever, it seems that Sir Neil believed that the ...trysts... were consensual. AND at least one of the victims seems to be in agreement on this point in as far as Gaiman's point of view. She actually says in the quoted text that she lied to him, allegedly because she was, what, afraid? disgusted?
Why was there not a "HARD NO!" ?
As a dude who has just thrown in the towel on the minefield of dating post Me-To, this affects me not at all. But IF this is true, and the women never said "No!" How is this an assault on anything but the concept of decency?
How can ANY man date now?
This is a question that's been pending for years as the bar for what's considered rape and sexual harassment has been lowered steadily for 30 years, but it is especially germane here, where the woman actually says she consented, kept up a brave face and then ....
Yes. This behavior by Sir Neil that is alleged is loathsome, and so foetid that it would curl Caligula's nose hairs, but there is a LOT of stuff that is very disgusting, especially to folks like me. Do we really want "yes" to mean nothing.
Now if this (or any sexual impropriety) had happened to a child, then this would not be an issue, because a child cannot give consent, no matter how often they say yes. In THAT sort of situation, I would be perfectly fine with Sir Neil (or anyone) being skinned alive rolled in salt , bathed in iodine and injected with stimulants to prevent him from passing out before his death rattle if that was the case*.
However, This appears to be an adult woman. And that has FURTHER implications, which Kat Rosenfield touches on here...
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world's adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. 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. [quote/]
This infantilization of women is likely to have some pretty vile consequences for the fairer sex going forward if nothing is done about it.
There are a vast number of men I met in college, who, unlike me have NEVER had a positive interaction with a woman. That may sound silly and irrelevant but look at the most strident misandrist feminists. They did not spring forth fully formed from the head of Zeus or anything, most of them had real trauma that made them the people they are now, and what they are is generally a bitter enemy to all men. They are human beings who react to trauma as people do...as are men
What we have is a growing cadre of men who see women as deceitful tormenters, an education system that stresses that any form of oppression justifies ANY response, and, increasingly, a legal system that says women can't be expected to have any agency.
This is not a good combination.
I'm an American Conservative. I'm old fashioned. I believe that grown women actually are fully formed adults with agency and an ability to make decisions, and because of their slightly different neurology they look at things from a slightly different perspective and so having them around provides valuable crosschecking to problem solving and enriches our world in myriad ways beyond mere procreation.
We'll see if my somewhat romantic and archaic views can be reconciled with current year attitudes toward women's decision making ability.
Also: Sir Neil seems to be vile.
*I know, I know 8th amendment, but we can still dream when it comes to pedos.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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The Retroactive Withdrawal of Consent is something every male college student fears these days, and yes, it seems to infantileize women, but fourth wave Feminists are okay with this because it gives them victim power.
I've seen all kinds of shades of the consent discussion in my life, from the Antioch College style of "May I kiss you? May I kiss you again?" to the BDSM community, which makes a fetish over negotiating consent, to the worst and darkest corner of Furry Fandom, where the bestialists tout "Well, the dog didn't bite me when I did that, therefore it consented."
I can almost see where the "Red Pilled, Manosphere" followers of Vox Day get their inspiration to claim "There's no such thing as Marital Rape", which would make things simpler for them, if only they could find a woman stupid enough to marry them.
Where Neil fails is he didn't even bother to marry them first.
I've seen all kinds of shades of the consent discussion in my life, from the Antioch College style of "May I kiss you? May I kiss you again?" to the BDSM community, which makes a fetish over negotiating consent, to the worst and darkest corner of Furry Fandom, where the bestialists tout "Well, the dog didn't bite me when I did that, therefore it consented."
I can almost see where the "Red Pilled, Manosphere" followers of Vox Day get their inspiration to claim "There's no such thing as Marital Rape", which would make things simpler for them, if only they could find a woman stupid enough to marry them.
Where Neil fails is he didn't even bother to marry them first.
Posted by: Mauser at Fri Jan 17 18:04:19 2025 (QE7eq)
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