Neil Gaiman Is A Predator and The Community Knows That.

The man who "introduced" me to BDSM is also the man who introduced me to abuse. I was actively looking for kink, but even outside of that, as a person who exists in the world, is sexual and wants to develop sexual connections with people, I was looking for people to fuck and love too. I wore my eroticism on my sleeve. I enjoyed wearing my sexuality like beautiful lingerie made of delicate chains and barbed wire. I liked how it made me feel to be a confident woman who was comfortable with the idea of what she wanted. That’s often the first mistake for which women are called up, isn’t it? If you didn’t want to be raped and abused, why did you text that charming guy you met and tell him you enjoyed meeting him? Are you actually...interested in sex? Clutches pearls. If you didn’t want a cock forcibly pushed into your ass, why did you agree to take a private bath by yourself in the garden tub of a man who insisted you do so?

If it wasn’t clear enough, I am talking about Neil Gaiman and all the accusations against him that he has decided to explain away as BDSM (and sometimes even poorly practised BDSM), cloaking the entirety of the practise in a shroud of suspicion. To tell the truth, it’s hard to holistically approach this occurrence in any meaningful way in a single essay, though I think the article by Vulture did a pretty great job of reporting it and there are a million thoughts I have about various aspects of it that I am sure will come up for years. The part that I find completely unsurprising, though? It’s the part where a man, based on his perception of his power, used a phenomenon that mimics some of his desire and none of his responsibility, to explain why his behaviour was being misunderstood as part of a larger social pattern of misunderstanding deviance. The fact that a lot of people have decided to turn on BDSM, and evaluate the practise itself, is not just part of the strategy, it’s also proof that all the mainstreaming, salacious films and latex-based high-fashion, doesn’t actually lead to meaningful understanding for most people.

To most of us here, I am sure it is very clear, Neil Gaiman is not a master, he’s just a fucking predator.

Predators don’t put thought or attention into what they do, they put thought and attention into how they’d get away with it. If Gaiman talked about his ideas of BDSM within the kink space, he’d be laughed out of every fucking group and satire would be written about him. If he talked about how he told women to call him master without so much as discussing what it meant, even the twue-wayers would lecture him about honour and 800-page contracts. While our community itself is hardly exempt from harbouring predators and mirroring some of the practices carried out by Gaiman (they differ largely only in scope), there is a genuine (not always successful) attempt to guard against that, especially by the people who came to it not just to find someone to do this with, but also to find out more about how to do it at all. Education within the BDSM space is advanced enough that you can not only take a class on the techniques of worship through leather-care but also on the the ideology of it. If you expect me to believe that Neil-Fucking-Gaiman couldn’t access that information, you’re buying into the strategy. If you expect me to believe anyone is better positioned for access to subcultures and their ethical exploration than Neil Gaiman, you're being at least a little specious.

It's a variation on a very simple version of weaponized incompetence. For ages, men expected us to believe they were the only ones who could build tanks and split atoms, but they couldn’t, for the life of them, figure out how to work a washing-machine. Only women could figure out how to do laundry. Neil Gaiman expects us to believe that he could have consenting women offer to him exactly what he wanted, he could create intricate worlds that mirror the social phenomena of society, depict ideal modern-day ethics within heinous situations with gallant, fantastical characters, but he couldn’t possibly understand the complex social, ethical and consent-based structures that surround sexual relationships, alternative lifestyles and BDSM. He couldn’t be expected to know they existed. He is shocked and hurt that these women thought of their experiences as abuse, rape or assault because to him that is what BDSM is. No, the truth is that he did not care about that at all because he put all his intelligence into figuring out how he would get away with it and the it he wanted to get away with was not the BDSM-part of it, it was the deliberate exertion of power to the end of usurping control from his victims. That's what he is really into. He's into abuse.

That’s what predators do. My ex taught me BDSM exactly this way. As a violent, uncontrollable thing that drew from his existing social power and privilege, and exacerbated the volatility of my emotions because it couldn’t be an intense experience in the absence of strife and actual trauma. He just told me that is what BDSM was, that real BDSM meant I would be a mess, and that being a mess was part of the experience. That attempts at consent culture sanitized real sexuality and kink. It meant it was working. He never discussed BDSM with me to figure out our boundaries or optimal methods of engagement, not at all, he only brought it up in specific situations. He brought it up to contextualise my desires, if I wanted pain, then obviously I had to accept violence. If I wanted surrender, then obviously I had to accept complete lack of control. He made it so that I was the driver of the BDSM (which differs in some regards to the situation at hand), and Gaiman conveniently explained how it was a woman who introduced him to BDSM by asking him to “whip her pussy” and he was just this naïve, little boy who couldn’t even believe someone could want that, he was so innocent he thought she wanted him to whip his cat, but once he did it, it was all he ever knew again. It’s so clever, it places his corrupted origins into the hands of a woman and somehow that makes it okay to assume all women would want that, and react how she did, even though he never asked them or checked if they were even interested in this thing he does. We're just expected to believe that one woman teaching this to him was construed as consent by all women because he was so innocent he couldn't even fathom this and she turned him into who he is. He’s not smart enough to know better, the poor baby.

My ex would also discuss BDSM with me when he needed to explain something with which I had an issue or if he wanted me to do something that I didn’t want to do. If I complained that the anger and complete lack of safety protocols were uncomfortable for me, he would explain it was BDSM that made it so and I wanted BDSM, after all. If I said no to something, he explained (rather violently) how the conventions of the roles that I had participated in meant that I wasn’t allowed to do that. My ex wasn’t smart enough to do some of the other things that Gaiman did, like deliberately have conversations on the record about feeling terrible if someone thought what had happened was non-consensual, crafted to get them to admit in an admissible way that they didn’t feel that way. Legitimizing his integrity by positioning a woman on his side (and no, I don’t think Palmer is blameless here, but I do believe to him she’s part of the strategy) in a way that if she says she knew of his behaviour, we all immediately question (not entirely erroneously) why she continued to expose her children and other women to him, and if she says she didn’t, we can basically assume she was complicit and he gets to hide in the background of this discussion. Finally, my ex talked BDSM whenever he was publicly accused of abuse or something worse.

That was the plan because that’s what predators do.

My ex had an arsenal ready the second I started to say abuse and from the way it was presented, it was clear a lot of the weapons had been years in storage and all of the plans of war had been carefully, thoughtfully laid-out. A part of our relationship had always been adversarial because that is what happens when you oppress a person, you know that there will come a day when you will run the risk of exposure and to predators that does not mean they should reform themselves, it means they should be prepared for the possibility of war. As the victim, I never thought to preserve evidence against my partner, for every picture of a bruise I can produce, he can produce a poetic caption that I wrote while depicting another. For every excuse he makes for his behaviour, he can find two better excuses I made on his behalf. For every morsel of fear I can examine, he can point towards hundreds of nights when I came back to get in bed with him. I never prepared for war, when you know abuse to be true in your broken bones, you don’t think you’ll be unable to prove it, in fact, most of the time you don’t even think it terms of evidence and procedure. Our war is different, it’s often escape and recovery, and justice is something we’ve been taught not to rely upon when we script our recovery.

I cannot prove my ex abused me, but he spent years gathering proof that he didn’t. He wouldn’t spend one minute gathering resources on safer, more deliberate practises, but he had years of catalogued conversations and binders full of proof that I wanted BDSM and all he ever did to me was BDSM. That was the plan all along. To me BDSM is the heart of my sexuality, to him it was an escape tunnel that enabled his predatory behaviour all along and it's the predatory behaviour that got him off (because the truth is that if he wanted BDSM to get him off, safe, consensual ways of doing that exist and are easily accessible to him). This conversation is not about whether Gaiman was really into BDSM or not, it’s not about whether BDSM is a good or bad thing, it’s about how predators optimise systems, people and social environments to get away with it. Gaiman is using BDSM to try to get away with it, it’s not a novel strategy, and in the community, I think we know that, and there are some signs that message may be reverberating out into larger conversations. I hope I am right about that because perhaps worse than mainstreamed kink is condemned kink and I’d hate to go back here because of one loud predator.