The Four Color Media Monitor

Here's some more op-eds about the Neil Gaiman sexual assault scandal. For example, from the UK Observer/Guardian:

Perhaps uniquely in the history of #MeToo, the women now alleging sexual misconduct on the part of the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman would appear to have their alleged perpetrator’s full support. Back when this movement seemed full of potential, in 2018, Gaiman urged the public to believe women like Christine Blasey Ford, whose allegations of sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh were then being trashed. [...]

“We must fight,” Gaiman’s 2018 pro-survivor declaration continued, “alongside them, for them to be believed, at the ballot box & with art & by listening, and change this world for the better.”

Sounds like this was more a political statement for elections than an actual protest against misogyny. And as far as I know, the accusations against Kavanaugh were trumped up, yet Joe Biden by contrast was ignored, and Gaiman clearly wasn't interested either. Nor does the Observer seem particularly interested in making a point about all that.

As with art, so with a despised celebrity’s tweets: the content is sometimes separable from the man. The languid response to the opening Tortoise Media investigation, Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman, last July, confirms how hard it remains for low-profile, non-glamorous accusers to be believed, regardless of successive, cautionary reports involving, for instance, Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew and Gaiman’s fellow New Statesman guest editor, the disgraced Russell Brand.

The first accusations about Gaiman, detailed by Tortoise, were stolidly, even reluctantly received. Gaiman “strongly denied” allegations by two women of non-consensual sex. Some film adaptations were suspended. A new dramatisation of his children’s book, Coraline, due to open this year, was not. He kept his publishers and five honorary degrees. Even last week, when the US journalist Lila Shapiro detailed a spectrum of alleged behaviour featuring what reads, at best, like BDSM gone hideously wrong, more grimly, like concerning behaviour in the presence of a child, headlines focused repeatedly on Gaiman’s denials. If that sounds like appropriate caution, compare with the old Weinstein reports, or domestically, with the consternation when, for instance, the highly regarded writer Daisy Goodwin alleged that a Tory, Daniel Korski, once touched her breast. After horrified reports focused on her experience, as opposed to Korski’s denial, he withdrew his candidacy for mayor of London.

If, for headline writers, Korski could hardly match Gaiman for ostentatious virtue, well, nor did his claimed offence come close to what is alleged about the writer. From reports in which Gaiman’s denials loom as large as multiple women’s detailed accusations, it’s confirmed that rule number one, for a powerful married man interested in exploitative recreational sex with manipulable young women is: recruit from the isolated and obscure. Snag a babysitter, a fan, someone vulnerable. Learn, from, say, John le Carré, Cormac McCarthy: both appear widely forgiven, even sneakingly admired, for getting away with it. Gaiman’s rebuttal has been respectfully quoted, as if his denial of “non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever”, does not leave much else unaccounted for. While, with BDSM in the picture, there is room for confusion about consent, this leaves open many other allegations, including a child’s possible awareness of aspects of this hobby. A nanny says she was ordered by Gaiman’s son to “call him ‘Master’”.

For Gaiman’s superfans, unwilling to think badly of a writer they love, over and above his creative talent, for returning their interest, for his care for the marginalised, for being an LGBTQ+ ally, for being progressive on practically everything, difficulty in adjusting to a creepy, cruel-sounding Gaiman is more understandable. For some fans it should not have counted by way of mitigation, but evidently did, that one of the Tortoise journalists is Rachel Johnson, the former prime minister’s sister and his ardent supporter.

Gaiman’s claim to the opposite standing, as a trusted progressive authority, actually does make his alleged misconduct more reprehensible than a standard big shot’s. Harvey Weinstein never posed as a feminist; you didn’t hear Mohamed Al Fayed say things like (Gaiman’s) “why can’t we all be nice to each other”, or not in public. Neil “call me Master” Gaiman is not just any wealthy man who has won extraordinary access to extremely young women; the women were likely to be dazzled precisely because, with his former wife, Amanda Palmer, he represented – as an Observer piece once said – “geek royalty”.

Which less easily explains the pause while Gaiman’s older associates, collaborators and friends silently reconcile the dashing feminist with the disgusting person eight women describe. Two eminent friends are reportedly “processing” the reports. Is it that complicated? As the writer Jeff VanderMeer commented on Bluesky: “‘Neil Gaiman’s my friend. I have to process my feelings.’ Barf.”

Well this suggests that, when the offender is a liberal like Gaiman happens to be, the left still sees it as far less of a concern, even selectively, seeing how Weinstein went down, but Gaiman so far has all but gotten away with his offenses. Something the ostensibly worried would do well to process to boot - is there anything wrong with liberal ideologies? Speaking of which:

Few professionals, these days, are more careful than UK and US publishers not to hurt feelings or to cause offence, even if it leads to accusations of censorship: last week The Bookseller was unable to elicit any response from Gaiman’s. Maybe Bloomsbury will continue to publish his children’s book What You Need to be Warm, written as a goodwill ambassador for the UNHCR: “It is about our right to feel safe, whoever we are and wherever we are from.”

Oh, so that book was written for the sake of a movement as awful as the UN and its agencies happen to be. Which only compounds quite a bit of what's wrong with Gaiman. He made things so much less safe, like quite a few of his colleagues at the UN agency he worked for. One can only wonder at this point if any refugees were victimized by Gaiman during his time in their employment.

Here's another from the UK Guardian, which says:

Take the story told by Scarlett Pavlovich. Even unconventional people end up needing conventional things such as childcare, which Gaiman and his ex-wife Amanda Palmer seem to have decided was best obtained by asking women who were also fans. Aged 24, Pavlovich has arrived for her first day of work at Gaiman’s – he is 61 – to discover the child is in fact on a playdate. She has only known the author for a couple of hours when he suggests she takes a bath in his outdoor tub while he’s on a work call. Minutes after, he appears naked, and joins her, swiftly beginning to stroke her feet. According to the New York Magazine report, she tells him “she was gay, she’d never had sex, she had been sexually abused by a 45-year-old man when she was 15. Gaiman continued to press.” Indeed, he does so to the point of anal penetration. “Then he asked if he could come on my face, and I said ‘no’ but he did anyway. He said, ‘Call me “master”, and I’ll come.’ He said, ‘Be a good girl. You’re a good little girl.’” She goes home to Google #MeToo and Neil Gaiman. Yet in time, she also goes back to Gaiman and Palmer’s houses. And months later, a vulnerable young adult without a home and estranged from her own family, she is still stuck in this toxic cycle. And has still never been paid for all the childcare.

In our era, people have righteously debunked the myth of the perfect victim – but less so the myth of the perfect perpetrator. The perfect perpetrator is an evil stranger – yet sexual abuse is overwhelmingly likely to be carried out by someone you know, who you may be related to or in a relationship with, and who is pretty nice to you some of the time. These are complex and inconvenient truths, but they are truths.

Furthermore, there are perfect perpetrators in the public imagination. Harvey Weinstein, once he was exposed, was the perfect perpetrator. Physically repulsive – hey, it is what it is – and not actually famous in the world outside his professional community, he was the kind of 2D scumbag no civilian could possibly be invested in. People in the normal world will always be incalculably more relaxed about the exposure of a movie producer, a job they instinctively regard as commoditised, than they will be about losing any kind of artist, a job whose works have affected them over the course of many years. Perhaps this is why many fans of the master storyteller Neil Gaiman are refusing to listen to the less appealing, less magical accounts of those women who allege he took advantage of them.

Something eyebrow raising about what Gaiman did is that he abused a lesbian. Which could explain why he wrote one as nothing more than a plot device in issue 6 of the Sandman series, one of the most excruciatingly gruesome moments in the book. Or, as a character who amounted to nothing more than tissue paper, to be used for wiping the nose, then submitted to the wastebasket. And what kind of audience did he acquire that would be so easy with such atrocities? The people who watched Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street?

Here's another op-ed from Mid-Day:

What is the right response to the revelations that a powerful man is a perv like unimportant ones, and uses his wealth to silence his victims and others too? You’d have to be depraved to ask. We are pained, horrified, sickened. And of course, betrayed.

Public shaming brings its share of trauma no matter who you are. But, there is no substantive loss of power for Gaiman. We will move on to a new icon. Same rapture, different guy.

Accounts of celebrity sexual predators follow a format. Methodically detailed crimes whose tone of forensic detachment gives them political significance, setting them apart from tabloid salaciousness. They are made to sound exceptional, because the person they are about is exceptional and because they may be in a respectable magazine, not Manohar Kahaniyan. Someone will always be quoted as saying “I knew he cheated but never imagined it could be non-consensual.” That’s right—because we have no proof from the last decades that powerful, charismatic men are routinely non-consensual. Because who wouldn’t want to be with that iconic man na?

It is not their artistry that makes these artists exceptional but the act of conversion where success anoints them as celebrities. The essay on Gaiman talks about how comic book conventions he featured in have a particularly vulnerable fandom, subsuming itself to a Papa icon. But is this process limited to those fandoms?

The relationship with these figures is continuously mediated by a fawning media culture —social media is an extension of it. A whole cultural complex of “quotes”, as if passages from the Bible, exists to convert the celebrity into a cult figure, gleaming with moral certitude. We share those quotes to establish our membership in this moral cult. Most ecstatically self-declared bell hooks fans, a particular internet species, have mostly read her quotes or perhaps the one book—All About Love.

Of course it's not just comicdom that can be vulnerable. Even movie and music fandoms can fall prey to these dangerous facades. Wasn't Bill Cosby once unwisely revered as a supposedly great role model until it turned out he wasn't? What's needed is vigilance even when it comes to celebrities, and writers who can say they hope various celebrities will retain some moral integrity and keep their flaws to a minimum so we can appreciate their resumes for years to come, and their writings and performances will hold up far better for a long time. The time's come to call for more responsibility on the part of performers.

Now here's one from Unherd's editor, Kathleen Stock, about why BDSM is dangerous, and at the end:

To be clear: this couldn’t work as a legal argument, and nor is it an attempt to adjudicate Gaiman’s guilt or innocence. But it is certainly an argument against getting involved in sadomasochism in general. 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. Meanwhile, for the sadist — and especially the famous one, as Gaiman has discovered — it leaves your good reputation a hostage to fortune, hoping that those with whom you had degrading sex in the past never properly get to know their own minds.

Whatever "good" reputation Gaiman had was undeserved, and this whole scandal should serve as a lesson why BDSM only gives sex a bad name. No sane person should practice it.

We could also take a look at what Polygon is telling about the reaction on Reddit to the scandal, as the news sends the posters into feelings of devastation:

Overwhelmed by the influx of comments, the r/NeilGaiman mods initially shut down conversations about the allegations. Another subreddit, r/NeilGaimanUncovered, formed to “raise awareness of the allegations against Neil Gaiman and promote accountability processes for him and others like him.” The r/NeilGaiman facilitators quickly changed their policy. “I think we collectively realized that we can’t bury our heads in the sand,” says nineteendoors. “The allegations are what they are, and we can’t quell discussion of them. It’s something we have to actively engage with.”

The community had settled into a new norm, with more mods facilitating the increased engagement, when New York Magazine published its in-depth investigation. “[Monday] was an extremely bad day to be on Reddit,” says nineteendoors. “The last couple of days have just been this endless flood of people grieving, and then of people coming in and saying, ‘But they’re just allegations.’” One comment she removed claimed the “public outcries are because most of [Gaiman’s] fans are women, and this is what you get when you have women for fans.”

Of course it was never just women who were fans of this overrated creep. Plenty of men were too. What is incomprehensible is how nobody could see the writing on the wall, or noticed how as time went by, his stories became increasingly contrived and forced, like the 1602 miniseries and the Eternals miniseries. And there were questionable allusions to racial topics in some of his tales too. As I realize, his audience was regrettably one that couldn't care less about the wider DCU/MCU and its casts, which could explain why no complaints about the maltreatment of Lyta Hall. Perhaps now, after all these years, somebody might want to make the case it's time to right a wrong when it comes to Roy Thomas' creations as much as any other decent veterans' from decades past?

Splice Today says we can't save Gaiman's reputation and career, nor does he deserve it, but they take a questionable turn when they say:

The scandal has a lot of implications for Gaiman’s future life and career. Some of are trivial, unless you are Gaiman; others are works in progress, their outcomes uncertain. One thing, however, is clear. Gaiman will not be serving jail time, paying fines, or suffering other legal repercussions for his indiscretions. That’s good, because most of the allegations describe him acting in ways that are unseemly, even shocking, but not explicitly against the law.

While he may sadly never go to prison, that doesn't mean he shouldn't. What's offensive about his behavior is that, in at least a few cases, he lured women into seemingly consensual relations, then afterwards, he began to cross red lines. And his endangerment of child welfare, to use a legal term for such a monstrosity, is something that demands he be kept away from children as much as women of any age. And then, wouldn't you know it, the article turns into a pathetic excuse for a Trump-bashing moment:

The sordid history of Gaiman’s love affairs is a story that could only center around a rich, famous, creatively-gifted man. It would be different for a woman, obviously. But it would be different, as well, for someone who couldn’t pay a suborned housekeeper to sign a nondisclosure agreement, or couldn’t send angry ex-lovers hush money “to be used for therapy.” It would be different for someone without the power to awe and intimidate everyone around them with magical texts they alone know how to summon from the void. Reducing Gaiman to a symbol of male privilege, male aggression, feckless wealth—or even duplicitous feminism—is a mistake. There are predators, like Donald Trump, who we (collectively) treat as if they’re too big to fail, no matter what they’ve done wrong. There are also cruel, self-deluded men of no importance who abuse women. Naturally, their lovers have stories and scars, but those traumas will never come to light because outing anonymous bastards doesn’t pay.

Ahem. Trump may have talked dirty, but did he do anything physically dirty? If not, then this is pathetically cheap, considering Gaiman reportedly did commit physical crimes by sharp contrast. At least they make an interesting point with the following:

We’re not witnessing, by watching Gaiman tumble, the ouster of a duplicitous feminist from a chastened industry that has grown wise at last. I say this because feminism doesn’t live on social media sites where you can impress people with chatty, one-sentence posts about the “fact” of the patriarchy. Feminism isn’t built around pandering stories about women with exceptional abilities and sassy wits. Feminism ought to be, for someone like Gaiman, the internal struggle to live up to the values of a powerful, persistent movement that elevates all of us. But we gave him another option, a tempting one: we let him stand there while we projected all our feminist hopes onto his inoffensive mug shots. We pretended that books like Coraline were feminist books because they had brave female protagonists. They also had hysterical, oppressive “mother” characters, but we didn’t worry too much about that. After all, he was clearly doing the right thing. His heart was in the right place. Or was it?

Nope. When somebody belittles motherhood to the point of making it look like they're bad for a daughter, that's a contradiction of feminism right there, along with respect for womanhood. I know stepmothers have gotten a bad image in some fiction stories (and even the Parent Trap/Lisa and Lottie by Erich Kastner was similar in this sense), but if Gaiman was making even biological moms look bad, that's taking the stereotype to a whole new level. Ugh.

Then, the UK Spectator's Julie Birchill, who once met Gaiman in the late 80s at a club, gave her view of the disturbing revelations:

One of the worst ways to form a good first impression of someone is when they’re chasing the same woman as you, so in the interests of total clarity I’ll divulge that the first – and only – time I met Neil Gaiman was way back in the twentieth century, at the Groucho Club, when we were both after the late Kathy Acker. (I wanted to hurl when he called her ‘Tweetie Pie’.)

I’ll tell my Acker story first because it’s a funny one. That Christmas she was a guest at a lunch at my bohemian in-laws. My second husband’s mother had failed to turn the stove on, thanks to an even greater cannabis fog than usual, and so lunch wasn’t served until dusk. As the afternoon wore on, and the brandy and Babycham ran out, I began to feel…warmly, shall we say, towards Miss Acker. To cut a long story short, my second husband was not best pleased when he found us playing tonsil-tennis upstairs in the marital bedroom. My putative paramour was cast out into the night; she was the lucky one, I reflected as I took a second helping of thoroughly nuked turkey as penance.

Anyway, Gaiman. For ages I thought of him as ‘that creepy bloke who fancies Tweetie Pie’ but then suddenly he was everywhere with his daft ‘fantasy’ stories. I’m damned if I’m going to write about his ‘work’, specifically as I haven’t read it in principle, but my husband Mr Raven, something of a ‘graphic novel’ fan informs me that:

‘If you’re looking for early perve signs you could hardly do better than his story ‘Calliope’ from issue 17 of The Sandman. It’s about a successful writer (books, screenplays etc., just like Neil!) with a dark secret: he owes all his success to the fact that he’s keeping the muse Calliope prisoner in his basement, and raping her every time he needs inspiration.’

The level of Gaiman’s success can be painlessly understood by the amount of awards he’s won during his career; I counted 80, and I’m not sure that this is even the full list.

And now he’s a shoo-in for the Bad Feminist Award, inaugurated by no less than Harvey Weinstein. Last year, this life-long ‘ally’ of women was alleged by five young women interviewed on the Tortoise Media podcast ‘Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman’ as a sexual abuser, sexual assaulter and rapist. Though these are as yet purely allegations, all of them shared a similar insight; that this weedy little intellectual geek was in fact a sadist, taking delight in subjecting girls to painful sex they neither ‘wanted nor enjoyed’ as one of them put it. I won’t go into the gory details here, but forcing one of them to eat their own vomit is one of the tamer tales.

So he took a creepy approach to a woman she knew way back when. And, most unfortunately, went on to rake up a whole shipload of awards for some of the most overrated tripe on the market. I do have to wonder about the following though:

The problem here is bigger and more interesting than Gaiman himself. (What isn’t?) Women involved in the gamer/geek sub-culture have reported many times how, thinking that their own ‘nerdiness’ will make them welcome in these offbeat, online communities, immediately get hit on and subsequently insulted quicker than by a pub-full of Millwall fans when they do not respond sexually. It’s that men who were ‘geeky’ at school believe that they can never become bullies – or indeed become bad.

There is an element of bitterness about the memory of all those girls at school who preferred the tough, attractive boys – also a massive driver of incels generally. If geeks manage to make it in the real world, the bodies of women become their ‘reward’, their somewhat sickening ‘treat’ to themselves. We’re taught that traditionally masculine men are the enemies of feminism, but – as the kind of men who have supported real women and the kind who have supported transvestites in the Toilet Wars shows – I’d bet on a geek being more misogynistic than a jock any day.

Well, I'm sure there are, most unfortunately, "geeks" whose understanding of how to interact with the fairer sex is very poor. But it would be wrong to say all are like that (and the use of the slang "incel" is something leftists may have concocted, so I wouldn't recommend somebody I assume is conservative use it). Gaiman, on the other hand, certainly gives geeks a bad name, along with counterculture, which I'm sure he was pandering to as well, for all the wrong reasons. All that aside, at least she acknowledges traditionally masculine men may have defended women's dignity in case of the transsexual invasion of women's private spaces. And that's counting for something. As for lady nerds, is Birchill implying they expect to be treated as men, and don't want to date men, nerdy or otherwise, at all? Well that'd have to be the weirdest news I've heard all day.

One more item of interest from the UK Times is the news that a professor who once bestowed an award to Gaiman is now calling for revoking all awards given to him in the past:

Neil Gaiman must be stripped of his academic titles if the “horrifying” allegations made against him are substantiated, the professor who presented him with a honorary doctorate has said.

[...] Gaiman, who has won awards for his scripts for Doctor Who and appeared as himself in The Simpsons, was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters at St Andrews in 2016.

Dr Chris Jones, now professor of English at the University of Utah, who presented the honour, believes it should be rescinded if the claims are found to have substance.

“I am shocked and horrified at the allegations that have been emerging in the news recently,” he said. “I presume these allegations will be rigorously investigated.

“If they are substantiated, and I have no reason to doubt the testimony of the women who have been brave enough to come forward, then I do think it appropriate that any institution which has given Gaiman an honour in the past, including the University of St Andrews, rescind that honour.”

Stressing he was speaking in a personal capacity he added: “My thoughts are with the victims of abuse and sexual assault everywhere.”

Nine years earlier Jones delivered a speech where he praised Gaiman for championing “strong female characters”, adding: “He knows that young readers have fears that they need to confront and that transitioning into the imaginative world of adulthood requires the kind of intellectual nourishment that is found in the often terrifying realm of the original, unsanitised fairy tales.”

I just don't understand how, if we refer to the Sandman series, nobody could see the contempt Gaiman had for Lyta. Why, even Calliope wasn't particularly written well as a guest character. Come to think of it, nobody came off very well there under Gaiman's overrated scripting. And there were the leftist political allusions present there as well, which I've guessed had something to do with the positive reception he originally got. If a right-wing writer was passed over for the sake of men like Gaiman, that's a problem that needs repairing. Maybe the recinded awards should go to deserving conservatives instead.

Labels: history, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, violence