Warning, this story is really horrific and will be heartbreaking for any fans of his, but Neil Gaiman is a sadistic [not in the BDSM sense] sexual predator with a predilection for very young women.
Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/dfXCj
Warning, this story is really horrific and will be heartbreaking for any fans of his, but Neil Gaiman is a sadistic [not in the BDSM sense] sexual predator with a predilection for very young women.
Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/dfXCj
We have to remember that Bill Cosby was praised for decades because he genuinely made the world a better place while being an utter sack of shit.
It sounds like (at best) some of Gaiman’s victims consented to some form of foreplay or sex and then rapidly found themselves on the receiving end of some brutal BDSM without consenting to it. If I were a woman reading this I would find it hard to ever trust any man, going into sex, even if I wanted to have sex with him. When the world’s most harmless-seeming man can suddenly become a punishing torturer in the sack, how can you ever know that a guy is safe until after the fact? Jesus.
This is why women choose the bear…
I’ve never heard it articulated quite like this before, but you phrase it well.
Men like this absolutely deserve to be condemned and shunned for what they have done, but that doesn’t also erase the good that they did before – nor does it preclude them from ever doing good again.
At the same time, any good they do does not erase or counterbalance the harm. Jimmy Savile, the UK’s worst celebrity paedophile who abused hundreds of children, conspicuously did a lot for charities throughout his career. He said that he knew God would look at all the good he had done and it would make up for the bad things. There was a calculus in which he only had to do more good each time he did bad, and it would cancel it out. It’s a twisted view. Harm is harm and is not changed by any independent “good” act a person does. But apparent goodness can change its significance in the light of the harm that accompanies it.
Savile’s apparent selfless good acts were actually a calculated attempt to win license to do harm, and a psychological coping mechanism to allow him to believe in his own basic goodness before God. Plus the reputation for selfless goodness served as a smokescreen to prevent people seeing clearly what was really going on, and to win the support and protection of powerful people. Seen this way, while the charitable works may have had some helpful effects, these were not genuinely good actions but in large part self-serving and an integral part of the dynamics of this man’s abuse.
I think the same applies to men like Cosby and Gaiman: the overt charity or the overt feminism changes its meaning when you see how it serves them psychologically and reputationally, amd how it may be a functional part of the whole abusive operation.
Matt Bernstein in a recent video (it’s long) discusses men who act as outspoken self-avowed feminists but then abuse their power to treat women terribly. The feminism may be genuine, but it may also be their smokescreen, or a mix of each, and when a man is very loud about being a feminist you have to look carefully to see which is the case. Some are genuine, but you have to ask. Maybe Gaiman was doing the feminist smokescreen, or maybe he’s just so messed up that these two sides of his life - the feminism and the abuse - just didn’t really encounter each other.
This explains so much. Read a book written by his very young wife. Now I get it and how fucked up he is.