Draw near, allies, for these are dark days for “kink-shaming”. At best, this is one of the whiniest, most pathetic and least helpful phrases to have entered the parlance of modern times – and at worst, it’s just another guy’s excuse for sexual abuse. It’s confusing. You try to be modern and post-conventional, and you end up enabling the most old-fashioned and conventional nastinesses of all.
Still, thank heavens for the parade of embattled famous men fighting kink-shaming’s corner. I have just one thing to say to all the lady authors, lady pop stars and lady actors out there. And that is: if you haven’t had an eye-wateringly expensive lawyer draft a statement about how consensual your sex with a tormented junior was, then are you really properly creative at all?
Fighting out of a Brooklyn detention centre, we have the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is on remand facing sex trafficking charges and about 120 lawsuits alleging drugging and sexual abuse, including of teenagers and minors. He denies the charges, some of which relate to his so-called freak-off parties. This week, Diddy’s lawyer’s take on the multiple federal charges was that the US government was trying “to police non-conforming sexual activity”. “The prosecution of Mr Combs is both sexist,” this lawyer hazarded, “and puritanical.” Righto.
Elsewhere, we have actor and oil scion Armie Hammer, #MeTooed back in the day over a number of sexual abuse and coercion allegations, plus a little light cannibalism talk – which he says was like being “left standing there naked in front of the world with all of your proclivities or kinks being judged by the world”. Despite police reports, no charges were brought, and Armie now observes of his downfall that “people were my bags of dope with skin on it”. Ah, ye olde sex addict, hoovering up his chosen substance – women – that just happens to have “skin on it”.
Meanwhile, Channel 4 is currently showing a documentary on the rock star Marilyn Manson, who has successfully ridden out years of grim abuse allegations, including by his much younger former partner, Evan Rachel Wood. The documentary contains some previously unaired interview footage, in which Manson declares: “I’m not into rape whatsoever … I prefer to break a woman down to the point where they have no choice but to submit to me. Rape is for cowards, for lazy people.” Certainly for other people.
But arguably the newsiest one this week concerns the author Neil Gaiman, subject of what might have been last summer’s dam-breaking Tortoise podcast, Master. Except, there are some dams that people – and fandoms – are hugely invested in keeping intact. It has taken till now for the follow-up, courtesy of New York Magazine, in the form of an investigation entitled There Is No Safe Word, which features eight young women alleging sexual assault, coercion and misconduct by Gaiman, six of them on the record.
Gaiman denies anything was non-consensual, and says that the claims contain “descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen”. He has remained largely hidden behind lawyers since the allegations surfaced last year, with one of these legal eagles telling Tortoise that “sexual degradation, bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism may not be to everyone’s taste, but between consenting adults, BDSM is lawful”. Was boundaried BDSM what was going on? The alleged victims say no, and they say it at complex length in the New York investigation.
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.
As for Neil himself, I see Gaiman still can’t let go of the allyship argot, which frequently feels performative and knackered, but in the circumstances of this case comes off as actively ludicrous. Finally breaking the silence on Thursday, Gaiman said that he hadn’t commented thus far on the multiple, months-long stream of allegations, some of which he had allegedly sought to silence via NDAs, “out of respect for the people that were sharing their stories”.
Sharing their stories, if you please! Neil: some of them have “shared their stories” with Auckland and Devon and Cornwall police. Are you attempting to be an “ally” to your own alleged victims? Either way, great to find you holding space/checking your privilege for them. You’ll note that people like Neil even react to sexual abuse allegations in a superior way. Honestly, I’m feeling somewhat lesser, here. I’ve literally never given $60,000 or $275,000 to people I haven’t sexually assaulted so that I can – hang on, let me get my reading glasses on – help them get therapy/“make up some of the damage”. Having said that, I have always paid my nanny via PAYE, and have never attempted to have sex with her. I recommend it.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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