Neil Gaiman accused of sexual assault

[WandsOut]

www.yahoo.com/entertainment/sandman-writer-neil-gaiman-denies-142813982.html

Story still unfolding in the news

When Gaiman was a kid and his dad was one of the top leaders of Scientology, they had a practice they called "overboarding".

What it meant was, Hubbard was living on a ship to avoid the multiple governments trying to bring criminal charges against him. The young volunteers, often teenagers, who manned the ship had to obey Hubbard's every whim. If they displeased El-Ron, they would literally be thrown overboard.

Neil is very good at the soft-spoken, damp-eyed nice guy routine, but I think he's more than comfortable with pain and humiliation being inflicted on those he doesn't care about.

Lest we forget.

Here's something else I wrote about this - it's meant to be funny 😁
https://open.substack.com/pub/thedistracted/p/five-go-to-a-book-burning?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=36x6j

'They' hated Blyton because of her lower-middle class sensibilities. And the being a woman thing. 'They' pushed William Mayne, another author whose people (except in the Cathedral books) never seemed quite real as people. Which made me feel a bit flawed and inadequate, as with Gaiman, because they were pushed on us as good. Then we learned that W M liked to rape his young girl readers. No wonder he didn't characterise us as human.

The characters in the Cathedral school series were all boys, obviously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mayne

'They' still bang on about how great W M was. Once you're in the old pals club you're in the old pals club, so what if you damaged a few female children. Looking at Mayne's ongoing reputation makes me think nothing will be let dent Gaiman.

Where are you, Neil?

I'm on an Iain M Banks group on the facebooks and the recent Gaurdian article on 40 years anniversary of The Wasp Factory has been mentioned, with posters mentioning it but not in so many words. The word is out tho

He did open one of his books with the quote at the start being “Never apologise, never explain”.

Can he really ride this out by pretending it isn’t happening? Can the BBC and Guardian really just ignore these allegations? It sounds like Scarlett was confused and bewildered by Gaiman’s actions in the bath but just because she didn’t run screaming to the hills, and she sent him nice messages afterwards, it means she consented? She, as a young and sexually inexperienced lesbian, was really ok with a much older man intimately touching her within hours of their first meeting?

Consent is a murky and messy thing when you have a much older individual in a position of power over a young, vulnerable and starstruck person. Scarlett hadn’t set out that day to have a sexual encounter with an old man, she was simply expecting to be looking after his little kid.

The whole thing is really sordid and dodgy, whether or not a crime was committed in the eyes of the law.

It's vile @CorruptedCauldron

It really is, and the silence from certain parts of the media is baffling when you consider how things went for Phillip Schofield and his ‘unwise but not illegal’ affair with the young runner.

Conversion therapy eh Neil!
He definitely thinks he can ride it out.

If I hadn’t already cancelled my tv licence years ago I’d be cancelling it over this.

None of these men, including the "progressive" men at the BBC, Guardian etc give a fuck about sexual assault of women by other men, they just jumped on the MeToo bandwagon to virtue signal. You only have to look at Gaiman's own #Metoo post that I quoted way upthread. As Amy Hamm said "Women need to realize that the men who say this stuff are, well, men like Neil Gaiman."

This reminds me very much of the Roman Polanski case, or Woody Allen. There's a cadre of highly-thought-of men in the arts and creative professions who seem to be able to get away with a great deal - or at least the criticism of their conduct is somewhat muted because they've made films or written books that have pleased the critics.

🙄

Yes, but the runner was a man. Y'know, the people who have dicks and therefore matter under patriarchy.

Chatting with someone under one of my articles about this, and he says that when Gaiman visited his uni, there were hundreds of screaming girls in the audience - like beatlemania type thing. He reckons that they fancied Gaiman, that "power is an aphrodisiac" and that he's basically the equivalent of a rock star. I disagreed and said I don't think most young women/girls fancy old men even if they are famous and powerful. In my experience, you would have to be handsome or sexy for girls to obsess over you or react to you in that way. But am I wrong? Is Gaiman considered to be sexy?

Obviously there are some women who will pursue rich, powerful men because it suits them to do so, and maybe some of them really are genuinely attracted. But surely for the vast majority of young women, that's not the case?

I don't think it's even that clear cut. I think it's quite possible to get caught up in group hysteria- and even fun. Doesn't mean they would actually fancy him if they were alone with him.

That's true. It could even just be screaming for the fun of screaming and getting caught up in a group. I doubt very much that it means that they all fancy him. I do think that's an insight into Gaiman's mind, though... I bet he thinks the same as my commenter: they all fancy him, would all love to have sex with him, worship him, etc.

Many many years ago my mother asked a group of her top-stream grammar school pupils why they'd been screaming outside one of 1960s Norwich's few nightspots (and photographed for the local paper), and they explained that they'd been told to by one of the venue staff. 'Create an atmosphere'.

Young women are trained to live up to expectations and instructions in so many ways - it's a reason why they are easy to abuse.

Probably the screaming was down to group energy but if he wasn't a creep I wouldn't say NG is unattractive physically. Girls and young women can find older men attractive, but that doesn't mean they necessarily want to have sex with them.
But really it's a moot point - he hurt her, and in any case he shouldn't have had sex with someone where the power difference was so stark.

It's not an uncommon thing with musicians or movie stars, but it's really weird to see it with a writer. There are lots of writers whose work I enjoy who I'd struggle to pick out of a lineup.

I think the whole "rockstar writer" thing is partly marketing and partly NG's ego. Even in the fantasy field he's an outlier. The most successful fantasy writer, with readers if not critics, is Brandon Sanderson, and he's a stereotypically polite and unassuming Mormon. Many of the other top writers in the genre are women, and obviously they don't carry on like this. NG's "putting on a leather jacket and imagining you're Mick Jagger" thing seems to be very much NG.

All male fans of music/the arts are fans. All female fans are groupies/want to be groupies.

'I do think that's an insight into Gaiman's mind'
Or your friend for that matter. Its his version after all, not your direct experience of events. We had a famous alternative musician as teacher, a sort very much like Gaiman,he got attention because he was transgressive and it was an all girls school, and he exploited that as much as possible having sex with the 'older' girls.
But, we all thought he was a twat and laughed at his too tight purple jeans and his endless pretensions.

All I'm going to say is, if your DD asks about recommendations for good fantasy authors, try her out on Kelley Armstrong. Her books can be quite dark and violent, but there's a lot of relatable stuff in there for girls and young women, and she'd be a viable alternative to "leather jacket guy who hangs out with David Tennant".