The Four Color Media Monitor

The UK Guardian interviewed singer Tori Amos, who knew the disgraced comics and screenwriter Neil Gaiman 3 decades ago, long before the accusations of sexual abuse against him became public. Some of her commentary is, unsurprisingly but still disappointingly, leftist:

In July, she was in the US, where she heard conversations that left her unsurprised by November’s election result. When she arrived back in the UK, her manager, John Witherspoon, told her about allegations that had been made against the writer Neil Gaiman, her close friend ever since Little Earthquakes. (She mentioned him in the song Tear in Your Hand – “If you need me, me and Neil’ll be hangin’ out with the dream king” – and they have collaborated on all sorts of projects since.)

The Gaiman allegations were made on Master, a podcast by Tortoise, the first episodes of which were released on 3 July this year. Rachel Johnson and fellow journalist Paul Caruana Galizia spoke first to two women, and eventually to five in total, who allege sexual misconduct by Gaiman. The podcast begins with a young woman called Scarlett, who had been sent to Gaiman’s house to babysit. His child turned out to be on a playdate, so Scarlett, who was 22 at the time, was alone with Gaiman. He ran her a bath and then, she alleges, sexually assaulted her within hours of first meeting him. He says he had established consent for their physical contact in the bath (in his account it was only cuddling and making out) and denies all allegations of sexual misconduct by all five women.

I ask Amos how she felt when she first heard the allegations. “Shocked,” she says. A long pause. “And if the allegations are true, that’s not the Neil that I knew, that’s not the friend that I knew, nor a friend that I ever want to know. So in some ways it’s a heartbreaking grief. I never saw that side of Neil. Neither did my crew. And my crew has seen a lot.”

She says it’s devastating for the women involved, and I ask if she has listened to the podcasts. “No,” she says. “But I’ve read …” She looks as if she’s about to cry. “He’s godfather to Tash.” Her eyes well up. She struggles to contain herself. “My manager was the one who told me, because the girls” – Tash and her cousin, Kelsey – “found out about it from a paper. Tash said, ‘Kels, we’re not telling Mom’ – they call me ‘T-Bird’, but she might have said ‘Mom’ here. But she said, ‘We’re not telling Mom right now, we’re going straight to John [Witherspoon], because we don’t know, first of all, the legality. We have to work through this, and it’s the holiday weekend [4 July is Independence Day in the US], and Mom has to work through this.’

“And so John said, ‘I will speak to her as soon as she gets off the plane,’ and that’s what happened.

“I haven’t publicly said anything because: what do I say? I didn’t hire the nannies. I wasn’t there. I’ve never met these people. And I’ve never received a letter – of the thousands of letters I’ve gotten in 33 years – I’ve never received anything that was about Neil, except praise for his work and how much his work meant to people. That’s all I ever knew.”

She looks crestfallen and hollowed out, as anyone would, but especially someone who has spent so much of their career advocating for survivors. One of the women who has made allegations against Gaiman says he mentioned Amos to her, and said he could get her full-time work on the singer’s rape helpline – a reference to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest anti-sexual violence organisation in the US.

Amos was the first spokesperson for the organisation (not a co-founder, as she is often described), which was set up after a show she did in the US midwest in 1994. During her performance of Me and a Gun, “a young woman – a girl, in her teens, I believe – collapsed and was taken, of course, backstage, and I went to see her afterwards. She said to me something like: can I get a job, anything, so I don’t have to go home, because my stepfather raped me last night, and he’ll rape me tonight when I get in? And I said, naively, ‘Of course. Of course.’ And my tour manager called management back in California and said, ‘T’s made up her mind to do this. To take this girl.’ And they called back and said ‘she’ll be arrested for kidnapping’.

“And I watched that girl walk out the door. And I’ve never seen her again. Or heard from her. Nothing. Or any reference to her. And I was able to work with the women at the record label at the time – they were feminists and good women at Atlantic records – and they paired us with Scott Berkowitz, who had started the Rape Crisis idea of connecting a hotline across the country. It was a joining of forces to get that off the ground.”

Does she feel the world has improved, generally, for women in the 30 years since RAINN began? “No,” she says bluntly, before adding that there are “places for women to reach out to that were harder to find back then”. On that night in 1994, there was nowhere “to direct that young girl to, and that was the motivating factor, being so frustrated … So I think when we ask if things have improved, I think there are services that have improved, but the fact we’re looking at an administration whereby there seems to be almost a gender apartheid happening, and where misogyny is common practice … I just didn’t think, after the last four years of the Trump administration, that women would have to face this again.”

It's a real shame Donald Trump has to be dragged into these discussions ad nauseum, because it only dampens the impact when one considers say, Joe Biden's record, which is far more disturbing. Has it ever occurred to folks like Amos that failure to consider whether a leftist's capable of awful offenses is exactly why the world hasn't changed for the better? It can also be argued that failure to ask whether "male feminists" are wolves in sheep's clothing looking for perfect shields behind which to commit their crimes is another reason why nothing's improved. And hasn't Amos noticed that Trump's hired Susan Wiles as the first female White House chief of staff? This is sad. I guess we should at least be glad Amos is parting ways with Gaiman. But if she and her staff never noticed what he was doing, that's got to be because some predators do choose their targets carefully, and somebody in a position as prominent as Amos' is somebody Gaiman would surely want to steer clear of letting know he's a bad lot, because women who are in more influential positions are not easy to fool. The worst thing about some deranged people is that they can still be very cunning.

Since we're on the topic, when I'd last done research on Gaiman's past resume, while there was plenty I'd looked over that was telling of his "moral" hypocrisies, there were a few items I'd missed, (the 27th issue of Hellblazer, which also featured allusions to Gaiman's leftist politics, and maybe even some Guardians of the Galaxy issues he'd supervised because a character named Angela he'd originally developed at Image was going to appear in it, and at least a few from indie publishers), but at this point, my intellect is so insulted by his portfolio I'm not sure I want to continue looking at more, so here, I'll highlight what another blogger once said about one of his other works 5 years ago. I found another item about one of Gaiman's GNs published at Dark Horse in 2016, "How to Talk to Girls at Parties", reviewed by a New Zealand blogger, who, while she appears to be just as leftist as him and Amos, does have some interesting things to tell about its premise, which draws from a short story Gaiman wrote a decade prior to the GN's publication:

The story is set in East Croydon, told by Enn, and framed as a narrative from 30 years ago. He is a fifteen-year-old boy with all the normal concerns of a heterosexual teenager: namely how to make girls notice him when everyone seems to be attracted to his best mate, Vic. The language is either deliberately teenaged and ignorant or woefully blokey and sexist as he talks of girls as objects. Vic tells Enn, “You just have to talk to them. They’re just girls. They don’t come from another planet”, which is not bad advice, although it may also turn out not to be true.

At a party, Vic abandons him to go upstairs with the best-looking girl present (presumably for intimate encounters). Enn is despondent but forces himself to talk to three girls: Wain’s Wain, who explains that she is a second – she has six fingers on one hand – and thus not allowed to breed; a second nameless girl who claims, “I love being a tourist” and regales him with stories of “swimming in sunfire pools with whales” and learning to breathe; and Triolet, who claims to be a poem.

The story plays upon the need to belong and the fear of being an outsider, with strong implications of other-worldliness. Women are clearly from another planet – Mars and Venus anyone? When Triolet kisses him, it blows his mind. He sees “towers of glass and diamond and people with eyes of the palest green and unstoppable beneath every syllable I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.” The drawing is of a fantasy land with bridges and turrets; minarets and spires in green and gold – a bit like The Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

Vic interrupts his reverie as he runs terrified from the house and Stella stands looking down at him in fury. There are suggestions that he tried to sexually assault her, although it is all rather ambiguous (The short story includes the line, “Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eyes”, which makes it less so). When Enn looks back he finds he remembers impressions of the evening rather than facts, and perhaps it is all a metaphor for the mind-altering universe of teenage hormones.

Neil Gaiman is hailed as a hero by many of my fantasy-loving friends, but I can’t help but feel there is something distasteful about this story. The pictures are beautiful but the sentiments are not. In trying to blur the lines of sexual experimentation and assault, I think this is unhelpful – especially when considering the teenage market at which it is aimed.

After what was discovered about Gaiman earlier this year, the story now stands as much more distasteful than previously thought. It won't be surprising if it goes out of print soon, assuming it's still in publication. Some of Gaiman's writings for DC/Marvel practically ran the gauntlet of minimizing the issue of sexual misconduct, and that's one of the worst things about his writings. It might even explain why in the stories I looked over, there was hardly anything that could be considered romantic, and anything that might've looked like love on the surface was soulless and empty. As a result, his stories are certainly not suitable for teens searching for positive examples of heterosexual romance in fiction. GNs like these can explain pretty much how it got to the point where the whole romance genre is in such a shambles now.

So if we've learned anything about Gaiman, it's that he has such a problem of preaching and lecturing ambiguously, and coupled with the accusations of sexual assault made by at least 5 women so far, one can say his real life antics are but one of the reasons why his work does not hold up well in hindsight.

Labels: dc comics, Europe and Asia, history, indie publishers, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, politics, violence