It is clichéd-sounding but still accurate to say that the allegations of sexual assault and abuse against the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, as recounted in a New York magazine cover story by Lila Shapiro, read like a gothic tale invented by a writer like Gaiman himself.
Here you have the traditional stereotype of gothic masculinity: Black-clad, wealthy, long of face, creative, hanging out on the edges of civilization (New Zealand, the Isle of Skye, upstate New York), with a mysterious semi-estranged spouse (evoking the first Mrs. Rochester or de Winter, but much more in the picture), and some kind of buried secret trauma (related to Scientology, apparently) to torment him. Then the traditional gothic questions — Is he a good man underneath? Can the heroine trust him? Is she safe with him? — give way to answers out of horror, not romance: No, the allegations say; he’s monstrous, cruel, abusive and perverse.
But this paragraph from the story is a bit harder to imagine appearing in a Gothic novel:
According to the podcast, which quoted Gaiman through his representatives, his position was that “sexual degradation, bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism may not be to everyone’s taste, but between consenting adults, B.D.S.M. is lawful.” (Gaiman declined to speak with me despite multiple requests, but through a legal representative, he responded to some claims.) If you know nothing about B.D.S.M., Gaiman’s claim that he was engaging in it with these women may sound plausible, at least in some cases. The kind of domineering violence he inflicted on them is common among people who practice B.D.S.M., and all of the women, at some point, played along, calling him their master, texting him afterward that they needed him, even writing that they loved and missed him. But there is a crucial difference between B.D.S.M. and what Gaiman was doing. An acronym for “bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism,” B.D.S.M. is a culture with a set of longstanding norms, the most important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it. This, as many practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture, have stressed over decades, is the defining line that separates B.D.S.M. from abuse. And it was a line that Gaiman, according to the women, did not respect.
Last spring I wrote a column about the novel kind of sexual morality that social liberalism finds itself cultivating today. Recoiling from Hefnerian permissiveness, returning in certain ways to older critiques of (mostly male) predation, but still wary of traditional norms of chastity and monogamy and determined to retain its faith in sexual liberation, liberalism (or, at least, its would-be vanguard) has ended up with a peculiarly managerial attitude toward human sexuality. In this worldview, almost everything is permissible so long as it is adequately litigated and consented to in advance: adultery if the polycule’s rules are set to everybody’s satisfaction, sadism and masochism if the norms of express and enthusiastic consent are honored, fornication between consenting adults in all circumstances save when age gaps or power imbalances seem to make fair litigation suspect.
In that essay, I did a combined reading of several New York magazine cover stories to discern the outlines of this ethic, but the Gaiman piece gives you the same tangle in a single story. You have a set of allegations that includes accusations of sexual assault (which Gaiman denies; in a statement on Tuesday, he said “I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone”), but whose context also reveals the inadequacy of bare consent as the lone restraint in situations involving celebrity, power, dominance. But then you also have the need to shield and even rationalize not just libertinism but certain very specific forms of outré conduct from broader judgment. There can’t be any general problem with sadism and masochism as sexual appetites, any more than there can be a general problem with open marriages or promiscuity or any other liberated practice.
No, where the system breaks down, when bad things happen, it’s because of a failure to establish appropriate parameters, or a refusal to abide by the therapeutic rules — even when, as with the allegations against Gaiman, the entire surrounding story underscores just how hard it can be to constrain a predator’s behavior or litigate the murky landscape of power and desire.
To understand the ideal that all this litigation is trying to protect, it’s useful to watch the new Nicole Kidman vehicle “Babygirl” (though I don’t recommend it otherwise, and, fair warning, spoilers follow). Marketed as an erotic thriller, it’s really a story about self-actualization, in which a married, middle-aged woman who is a powerful executive finds sexual fulfillment, presumably for the first time in her life, through a B.D.S.M. relationship with a male intern. This transgressive relationship threatens to overturn her perfect lean-in world, but in the end its effect is redemptive, not destructive: Her marriage is not wrecked, but saved, not least because her husband finally begins to offer her the sexual domination that she’s always craved.
The relationships in this movie obviously do not abide by the ideals of managed intimacy and B.D.S.M. best practices suggested in the passage from the Gaiman article. Kidman’s character does not interact honestly with her husband (played by Antonio Banderas, finally at a career stage where he can play the cuckold) and receive formal permission to open up their marriage; she deceives him and reaps his anger. Her relationship with the intern clearly does not pass the exacting tests that a professional sex educator would impose. This is not the liberal bureaucracy of desire in action, it’s something much more chaotic and destabilizing.
But the thing the chaos yields, the awakening for Kidman’s character and the potential improvement, via infidelity, of her marital relationship, is itself the dream that social liberalism wants to preserve. And the managerial apparatus and litany of therapeutic best practices envisioned for the good sexual citizen are supposed to make such awakenings possible — even commonplace — without the risks that Kidman’s character runs, and the greater risks of falling into a predator’s snare or experiencing domineering violence unmediated by unambiguous consent.
Meanwhile, the alternative theory that you might get less danger and more happiness overall with simpler norms — be monogamous, be faithful, stay married, don’t indulge fantasies of violence — is still viewed warily, as a path back to repression, puritanism, the loss of some essential actualization of the self.
No, there has to be a way to avoid the alleged Neil Gaiman scenario while preserving the imagined “Babygirl” breakthrough. So theorizes social liberalism, in a world where what once was taboo is now ubiquitous — even choking during teenage sex — but somehow neither men nor women seem much happier for it, and romance and marriage and the continuation of the human species all slip away into the dark.
Breviary
Leah Libresco Sargeant and Lyman Stone on the costs of euthanasia.
Ed West and Nathan Pinkoski on the British crisis.
Adam Kirsch on the L.A. fires.
Patricia Lockwood on the mystics.
Why George R.R. Martin can’t finish.
Why the written word is finished.
Why Ezra Klein fears the future.
David Lynch on angels. (R.I.P.)
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