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.
Gaiman’s response, is, of course, that everything was ‘consensual’, all these various forms of weird, humiliating, porn-driven sex between a man in his sixties and attractive young women. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. If I was the prosecuting counsel, I’d simply point at Gaiman and say ‘Consensual? With that? Would you, Your Honour?’In a blog post responding to the allegations, Gaiman bleated that there were ‘moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t’. (Drunk again!) He denies engaging in any non-consensual sexual activity but said he could have ‘done so much better’ and was ‘trying to do the work needed’. I’d say he’s done quite enough ‘work’ on himself, the dirty item.
I never blame men’s wives for their – alleged – crimes, but I’m interested in toxic couples, specifically in folie à deux, a ‘shared delusional disorder’ in which symptoms of an irrational belief are transmitted from one individual to another. In popular culture, we generally mean a pair of lovers who act in such a way that anyone outside their set-up sees them as insane (‘madness shared by two’) and who provide a great deal of entertainment for those who have chosen a tamer path.
So a word here about the lucky Mrs Gaiman – soon to be ex – the bumptious performer Amanda Palmer, who before she married a very wealthy man kickstarted her career partially by stripping off and inviting the paying public to draw on her. Their 2011 union was of course to be an ‘open’ one; one can’t help thinking that Palmer was from the start hoping that her unappetising hubby wouldn’t be ‘bothering’ her overmuch. They moved to New Zealand with their son in 2020; weeks later their marriage ended, and Gaiman travelled all the way back to his holiday home on the Isle of Skye. They are currently in the fifth year of wrangling their divorce, which would imply to me that Mrs Palmer doesn’t fancy going back to being drawn on by Kickstarter mouth-breathers in order to earn a crust. Still, she must have a good amount of nasty stuff to chuck at her erstwhile fantasy-loving ex by now – let alone if the allegations are proved true.
Kayleigh Hearn, in an essay about the Calliope ‘book’ wrote in 2019:
‘There are moments in the comic that are still jolting. Madoc’s cigar-chomping movie producer, Harvey. (Harvey!) The cocktail party where a woman praises Madoc: “There aren’t enough strong women in fiction” and Madoc replies “Actually, I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer.” The words drip with slimy irony, but what’s chilling is their real-world echo.’
Hearn is referring to another comic ‘book’ sex-pest but it may as well be Gaiman, flashing in plain sight.
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.
Once again, I wonder ‘What is a feminist?’ Increasingly it seems another part of the ‘wokescreen’ kit which men with icky browser histories hide behind. Listen to Gaiman at the height of #MeToo: ‘I believe survivors. Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world’. Now here he is ‘answering’ the allegations this week:
‘I could have and should have done so much better… I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could have or should have been. I was obviously careless with people’s hearts and feelings.’
Get you, Romeo!
In fact, he’s pretty much the perfect example of the ‘bad man who identifies as good’ woke-bro type I’ve written of before. Even now I bet he’s genuinely wondering what all the fuss is about as the network cancellations continue, sitting in his fine claw-footed bath and weeping at the injustice of a world that could so cruelly traduce its most sensitive fabulist. One lesson we can surely take from this sordid affair; never trust a man who fancies Tweetie Pie.
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