Neil Gaiman's Normalized Sadism

If we're going to be this culture, we're going to court this outcome

Current discourse around rape is riddled with legalism and technicality. Is implied consent as good as verbal consent? What constitutes implied consent (or lack thereof)? Can you consent retroactively? Can you revoke consent retroactively? What if consent was given, but reluctantly?

What if consent was given under duress? And what counts as duress? The threat of losing a home? A friendship? The attention of an influential person? Is vulnerability a barrier to providing true consent? What kind of vulnerability? Youth? Poverty? The state of being female?

The correct answers aren’t carved on flaming tablets delivered from on high. They’re a matter of consensus, and they change over time. They are questions of law and policy, not questions of wellbeing.

The brutal reality Scarlet Pavlovich suffered at the hands of literary darling Neil Gaiman was not sex-gone-wrong. It was torture. Such cannot be redressed with policy hair-splitting; it demands an investigation into deeper questions:

• Is it in a woman’s best interest to eat feces and vomit for the sexual gratification of a man?

• Is a man who asks this of a woman a decent human being?

• Is a society in which such occurs a healthy one?

Neil Gaiman is a sadist. That’s not just a guy who participates in a particular kink scene, as a certain modern liberal type would have it—but a man who so enjoys inflicting pain upon people (in this case, women) that it heightens his sexual arousal and release. Another sadist (and literary figure) was Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism was named. That author’s sexual fantasies, detailed in 120 Days of Sodom, include scatological themes, murder, and the evisceration and swapping of a boy’s and a girl’s genitals. His actual deeds include torturing a homeless woman and abusing a harem of girls. Other sadists include Jeffrey Dahmer, who serially murdered his lovers, and Armin Meiwes, who dismembered, cooked and dined on his date.

The podcast Master by Tortoise Media tells the stories of several women who’ve come forward to accuse Gaiman of sexual assault. Some are textbook cases of rape (if true). Take the story of Caroline Wallner, who had lived with her family on the author’s property for some time when her husband up and left. Gaiman threatened to put her and her three children on the street unless she supplied him with blow jobs on demand.

Other stories are more complicated. That of Scarlett Pavlovich, for example, whose response to Gaiman’s overtures throws a wrench in her quest for justice. There’s a legal conversation to be had about her case. But there’s another conversation to be had, too. What brought us to this place, to witness this horror, to debate this horror?

According to the podcast, It was February 2022 when Scarlett—a virgin and avowed lesbian—met Gaiman. The year prior, she’d become friends with his wife, Amanda Palmer, a world-renowned punk rock star she idolized. The popular take is that Scarlett was young, broke, unemployed, and homeless when she accepted Amanda’s offer to work as a live-in nanny for the couple, rendering her vulnerable to the abuse that followed.

In fact, Scarlett was 22—young by some measures, but not a child. And she may well have been insolvent—who wasn’t at that age? But she’d not so long ago scraped up the means to knock around Europe by herself, and she’d gained some employment experience at a perfumery. She wasn’t homeless, either, but facing the end of an apartment lease.

Nor was she a live-in nanny when the abuse began; she’d been offered a babysitting gig for the day. Gaiman sexually assaulted her that very day, within three hours of meeting her. No childcare had occurred (the kid wasn’t home), no money had changed hands, and no contract had been signed.

To make a long story short, Gaiman talked his prospective employee into having a bath in his luxurious outdoor garden tub, climbed in to join her when she thought she’d be bathing alone, and penetrated her anus with his fingers despite her protests. He also jerked off over her, spoke to her in a way she calls “filthy” and asked her to call him “Master.”

The next day, Scarlett texted him to say: “Thank you for a lovely, lovely night. Wow.”

Scarlett’s employment continued, as did this cycle of sexual assaults and approving texts. Within weeks Gaiman escalated to forcing Scarlett to lick up her own vomit and feces after violent oral and anal sex.

Scarlett’s texts include this early one to Gaiman: "I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry. What a terrible creature you've turned me into." And this later one: “It was consensual (and wonderful)!”

Despite composing these and similar messages, Scarlett now understands the relationship as abusive.

There’s something to be said at this juncture about agency. Was this woman—whose housing, financial and employment status was frankly not atypical for a young adult—incapable not only of fleeing but of stopping herself from repeatedly texting her abuser effusive praise?

I think not, even if her reasons for doing what she did are complex.

First-world Western societies have removed nearly every legal restraint that once trapped women in the literal sense; we now enjoy financial autonomy, reproductive choice¹, and a wide variety of educational and career opportunities. What’s left are the cultural factors that bind women—the mores and narratives and socialization that keep us figuratively enslaved.

Rape is reasonably characterized as something you can’t control. If what happened to Scarlett was rape, then Scarlett had no control over it. She couldn’t have stepped out of the bath nor declined a second visit nor stopped herself from texting lusty messages between visits. It follows that she is doomed to repeat these sorts of actions and reap these sorts of results. I reject that: I urge Scarlett to refrain from texting her gratitude to any (god forbid) future perpetrators. For starters.

Because I care about women, I’d like to live in a world that sees fewer of us (preferably zero) debased and injured in the name of male pleasure. That means examining what happened, even if it also means forfeiting a performative but politically compelled disavowal of “victim blaming.”

To Scarlett, I say: You can say no. The first time. Or the third time. Or anytime. You can make do without that job. You can work as a waitress or cashier or landscaper. You can sleep in your car in a truck stop parking lot. You can lay down a single twenty dollar bill and couch surf, anywhere in the world, for an entire year.

Hell, you can even get a different crappy boyfriend.

It’s hard to imagine, in fact, any option before you, however scary or uncertain, that’s inferior to literally eating shit.

Kat Rosenfield notes that we can hardly argue for women’s rights—financial, medical, political, and so on—while painting women as “hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy.” To discard apparent expressions of consent like Scarlett’s for political expedience, she argues, is to undermine “the entire feminist project.”

I share her concern, too, that our culture’s “monomaniacal focus on consent”—which focus I characterize above as “legalism” and “technicality“—leaves us ill-equipped to condemn Gaiman’s behavior in the face of Scarlett’s confusing response. And that the same sees women like Scarlett rebranding “terrible-but-consensual” sex as rape, so their trauma can be taken seriously.

But to suggest that rape is the wrong word for Scarlett’s situation is to accept that framework to some degree. I’m tempted to argue for something much more radical: that women can, and often do, consent to rape. I don’t mean consent by technicality, but genuine consent.

And I don’t mean that rape becomes not-rape in such a situation. It’s still deplorable and should be criminal—however that may upend current notions on the topic. After all, those notions are constructed and culturally bound. We can change them.

Consent is, after all, fuzzy sometimes. Seldom does sex involve an explicit verbal agreement. Scarlett admits she was starstruck by both celebrities and disparately wanted to remain “in their orbit.” Some have argued that constitutes duress. I say that’s a rabbit hole that never ends. If women can’t trust themselves around famous men, what about good-looking men? Well-read men? Men with impressively stocked root cellars?

Women agree to sex for all kinds of reasons I call sketchy: for attention, for money (including via dating and marriage), to “get rid of” a dude, to please a different dude, and so on. I personally think if women had sex only for pleasure we’d see fewer regrets, but I’ve beat that drum many times. As it is, women can and should make sexual choices on their own terms, not mine.

But back to how we got here. And by “here,” I don’t mean a place in which men sexually torture women. That happens all over the world, in the name of revenge and punishment and war, and certainly not more in the Western world than elsewhere. I mean: how did we get to a place where women who are tortured are confused by their torture, mistake it for friendship or intimacy, sign up for more of it?

I believe the first culprit is the current discourse around rape itself. That discourse fails women and it provides cover for atrocities. We tell women: You are first and foremost a victim. Of course you couldn’t walk out, at the time. Of course you couldn’t walk out later, either. And fine, you couldn’t even hold your praise between visits. Acting in your best interests is too hard. And anyway, all actions are equal and none have any effect. Like hurricanes and tornados, there’s no escaping the ambient natural phenomenon that is rape. Cross your fingers, I guess.

And to be fair, that last part is true, for some. But it wasn’t true for Scarlett.

I’m not interested in prioritizing the project of protecting victims from feeling shame over that of minimizing their further abuse. And one need not preclude the other, anyway.

Many other cultural factors brought us here, old and new, starting with the liberal morality crisis I’ve so often written about.

A culture committed to defending porn, kink and the sex trade at all costs is a culture that’s lost its empathy for the victims of these practices. Once you’ve swallowed the pill that minimizing the trafficking of children is of lesser importance than minimizing “kink shaming,” it hardly makes sense to overthink your own abuse.

This whole mess grew out of a reasonable concern for minority rights. It made sense to extend those to gays and lesbians, who need housing, health insurance and so on for their families. It made less sense when the demand for rights morphed into the demand for celebration. And it made less sense still when every kind of sexual deviance was brought under the minority umbrella, as if we owe citizens not just their basic needs and safety, but sympathy for their darkest and most private desires. As author Douglas Murray writes, some activists will always “mistake exhibitionism for activism.” I struggled with same-sex attraction growing up, so I’m not wholly indifferent to others’ shame. But it isn’t my problem. Everyone must face their own shame, warranted or otherwise, as a part of maturation.

And all kinks aren’t created equal. Masochism is common, even in women. But a masochist (ironically) shouldn’t trust a sadist, who is—by definition—violent. The transgression of norms isn’t always edgy and cool, even if they’re sexual norms. It can be psychotic, criminal or cruel. We have no trouble, as a society, condemning hate speech and misgendering. But what of the hate inherent in smearing a partner with vomit? Is currying the favor of the supposed “ethical kinkster” important enough to set the Gaimans and the Meiwes loose on whomever falls for their lines?

Scarlett may or may not have been a masochist, but she was no doubt a product of a culture swimming in casual anal rape on television, music videos evoking snuff, and brutal porn defended by self-avowed feminists. Gaiman seemed cool, and too few were calling his preferences uncool.

That’s part of the personality versus character problem, as articulated by Chris Rojek in his book Presumed Intimacy. As a society, we once valued character. Now, we value personality. Though it started prior to social media, that shift is only accelerated by our our screen-mediated world and liberals’ fear of judging, shaming or interfering with anything bearing the sheen of sex.

Jessa Crispin talks about its effect on the publishing industry, where Gaiman was packaged and sold as a superstar with “very public stances on political issues” and a too-online, fan-centered persona that helped him “source broken teenage girls for his sex life.” It’s against this backdrop that Scarlett found herself bedazzled by the man’s fame instead of repelled by his principles—which included valuing excrement-fueled orgasm over kindness toward a fellow human.

In Feminism and Linguistic Theory, linguist Deb Cameron talks about the influence of ancient Roman sexual mores upon those of today. Sex was defined as a man penetrating someone. Boinking women, men, teenage boys and children counted, but pleasuring a woman with your hands or mouth did not. The themes of mainstream porn, the behavior of Gaiman, and the compliance of Scarlett suggest that for many, female pleasure remains irrelevant to the project of sex.

But the blame doesn’t fall on crazy liberals alone. The conservative crowd throws a different set of obstacles between women and our sexual wellbeing: the defeat of Roe versus Wade, concern for incels, and alarmism around womens’ “fertility window,” to begin with. Any young woman who faces childbearing decisions with intentionality is now blamed for the declining “birth replacement rate” or cast as an “anti-natalist.”

It’s now trendy to critique the sexual revolution. A spate of post-menopausal former liberals with 2.5 kids have suddenly turned “birth control for me but not for thee,” re-infusing sex with anxiety for the younger generation of women.

The more insidious aspects of female socialization, too, are a conservative project. We raise boys to be self sufficient, and girls to depend upon men. We raise boys to get a skill, and girls to marry. We raise boys to express themselves, and girls to defer. It is in this context of women serving men that women learn to serve men sexually.

Cameron writes about this, too, noting that every aspect of “femininity” is designed to turn girls into heterosexual partners for men. The focus on makeup and clothing, the domestic training, the de-emphasis on financial autonomy.

Notions of courtship, as portrayed in books and media, also carry blame. There’s an all-too-common trope, from before Star Wars and beyond, that I call the “grudgefuck romance.” Watch for it: if a woman rejects a man’s overtures at the beginning of a book or film, vehemently and perhaps angrily, she’ll be his girlfriend by the end. The societal view of “romance” in general is infused with men overpowering women, literally and figuratively.

Let’s imagine a twenty-something heterosexual² man, who’s between jobs and homes, is offered a roadie gig by a famous musician. The musician sexually assaults him at the meet-and-greet before the tour. Is he vulnerable? Is he trapped? Are we surprised if he climbs onto the bus and commits to the job?

I say we are. And not because young men on their own are in less danger than women on their own. Either is safer on their own than in the hands of a known abuser. The difference is socialization.

Men do not grapple with learned helplessness as women do. Men assume they can work in other jobs, find other friends, live in other cities. Women are raised to fear these options.

The common thread is misogyny, overt or by omission of respect and concern for female people. I want to see us raise our girls with self-respect and confidence, and to confer the same, however belatedly, to adult women like Scarlett.

1. Largely; abortion rights have recently been challenged in the U.S. But both abortion and birth control remain fairly accessible in the Anglosphere, and all parties lived in New Zealand at the time.

2. Scarlett identified as a lesbian, so the comparison is parallel.