An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.
Kat Rosenfield has written a piece on the recent Neil Gaiman exposé that I found really interesting. For those who haven’t read the New York Magazine piece, the (all too familiar) story goes like this:
Famous man represents himself as a progressive and a champion of women (“actually, I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer.”)
Famous man actually likes to degrade women in the bedroom, for instance by instructing them to eat their own faeces (yes, really).
Mentally fragile young woman has sexual relationship with famous man which she later comes to understand as coercive and abusive.
Famous man releases a statement via his representatives: “sexual degradation, bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism may not be to everyone’s taste, but between consenting adults, BDSM is lawful.”
Repeat ad infinitum.
Bizarrely, New York Magazine chose to illustrate this piece with selfies of Gaiman’s primary accuser – a young New Zealander by the name of Scarlett Pavlovich – taken during the period when she was having sex with Gaiman. Maybe zoomers think it’s normal to take selfies while naked and crying, or lying on the toilet floor in distress (any zoomers in the comments, let us know). But I agree with Anna Khachiyan that it definitely isn’t normal for editors to reprint such photos next to highly detailed accounts of sexual violence committed against the woman in the photo. Maybe the intention was to make the piece seem ‘arty’? I really don’t know.
Perhaps to the same ‘arty’ end, the piece dwells at length on Pavlovich’s confused feelings about her relationship with Gaiman. She tells us that she “screamed ‘no’” when he had sex with her on one occasion, and also that she texted him “it was consensual (and wonderful)!” when he later asked if she regarded him as a rapist. Journalist Lily Shapiro repeatedly asserts that this kind of confusion is typical in such cases. As Rosenfield writes:
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich's behavior (including the "it was wonderful" text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that's just because women do be like that sometimes.
I want to hone in on that word “lied.”
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