Neil Gaiman is probably not a monster
He’s probably just an ordinary predator and abuser
As a society, we are strongly opposed to violence against women, under the following conditions:
- If a strange man leaps out of the shadows and attacks a woman outside
- If the woman is ‘allowed’ to be there, i.e. it’s daytime, a public place, maybe not a park, but a shopping centre would be okay
- If the woman is dressed in clothes that cover her body and has not made eye contact with the man prior to the attack
- If the woman has never had sex with a man
- If the attacker is clearly a bit gross or insane, and definitely not a well-loved celebrity
If all these conditions hold, then we as a society find violence against women to be utterly wrong and evil.
It’s why Alice Sebold titled her memoir about her horrifying rape ‘Lucky’. Lucky that she was considered an innocent victim. Lucky that it happened in the street. Lucky that people believed her.
Because most women who have been predated upon, abused, assaulted, and raped were not that lucky.
They knew the man who hurt them. They may even have loved the man who hurt them. They had sex with him consensually, sometimes. Sent him messages and photos of themselves in their underwear, or not. So when they say, he preyed upon me, he manipulated me, he hurt me, we as a society will say, you’re lying.
You consented once, and that consent is valid for the duration of the relationship and beyond, and can be applied retrospectively, too.
That’s not what the law says. And it’s not what moral sense says, either. But it’s what we, as a society, keep saying to women and girls. We can’t seem to get past the idea that only monsters prey on women.
In the case of Neil Gaiman, it’s alleged that he preyed upon young and vulnerable women. Within hours of meeting one such woman, his new employee, he had got into the bath with her, uninvited, and proceeded to touch her, uninvited. The woman says she was just… she just didn’t… it was so fucked up she couldn’t… She didn’t have any mental model for how to respond to this.
She was so young. She had never had sex. She was a lesbian. She wasn’t attracted to Neil Gaiman.
What she was, was frozen in shock. Completely intimidated by the fact that this famous, rich, creative man was acting like what he was doing was completely normal.
He kept telling her it was normal; all normal, all fine. At one point, she passed out from the pain of a sexual event, and when she came around, he was on his computer, doing some work.
He dehumanised her, in other words.
He even claimed that she was suffering from a condition associated with false memories — something that is not corroborated by any of her medical records.
But it’s messy. Because she told him she consented. With the exclusion of the first time, in the bath, she tells him she consented to all of it. When she’s crying to her friends, and when she’s attempting suicide, she tells him it was all consensual, please forgive me Neil, I never said you did anything wrong.
And so how was he to know that she wasn’t consenting?
He’s not a monster, right? He didn’t leap out of the shadows and attack her. She was already naked in the bath when he came in. If she didn’t want to have sex with him, why would she be naked? Why would she get in the bath in the first place if that wasn’t an invitation for him to join her? (Why wouldn’t she do what modest, non-rapeable women do, and don’t have baths and also keep their clothes on in the bath?)
He couldn’t possibly know that, when she passed out from the violence that he told her was a normal part of sex, she might feel weirdly diminished by coming around to find him occupied with his phone and not with her wellbeing.
He couldn’t know that, in the case of the other woman who has made (strikingly similar) allegations against him, that penetrating a woman who has clearly said, “do not penetrate me,” could be seen as doing something wrong. How could he know that?
He’s not a monster, after all.
Anyway, these women are probably lying. We don’t know why they would lie about this, but there must be some reason. Revenge. Sexual obsession. Yeah, it’s quite likely that a 20 year old lesbian is sexually obsessed with her 60 year old male employer and when he rejects her, she’s going to take him down. Or is it for the money? Some women do lie for money. But… Two women make up the exact same story about a man, even though they’ve never heard of each other’s existence, because they’re both money-grabbing bitches?
Make it make sense.
The truth is, what we know to be true, is: violence against women is usually messy. It’s usually perpetrated by men against women who are entangled in complex relationships with them. It’s less often the ‘lucky’ kind of violence, where it’s all clean cut. It happens in complicated relationships, where there’s history and emotions and obligations and dependencies.
And often, the women in these relationships do not understand that they are being abused.
If you don’t believe me, check out any relationship advice board or column. You’ll find many, many examples of women asking for advice about how they can do better in their relationship, so that their partner will stop raping, assaulting, controlling, hitting, shouting, stealing, driving too fast with them in the car, threatening, cheating, destroying their things. And when they are given the advice, “hey, you’re not the problem here — he is,” these women respond, “But he’s lovely to me sometimes! I must be doing something to provoke him.”
These men are not monsters. They’re lovely, funny, kind, sweet, generous, intelligent people — sometimes. It’s just that other times, they’re violent and manipulative and they might rape you. But how can you complain about that, when the rest of the time, they’re so nice?
We’re never going to stop violence against women until we, as a society, begin to engage with the actual reality of what that violence looks like most of the time. It’s messy and complex, but anyone who claims to understand human psychology — anyone, say, like a writer — should be able to see it quite clearly.
Neil Gaiman is probably not a monster. He’s probably just an ordinary predator and abuser. And that’s the most terrifying thing of all.
