Neil Gaiman has now been accused on record, by multiple women, of serious acts of sexual misconduct. Instead of creating the right conditions for a legal proceeding against Gaiman, however, these allegations have merely torpedoed his ersatz second career as the presiding genius of media based on his writing. Only a few months ago, Gaiman’s graphic novel Sandman was a popular live-action series on Netflix and the hottest new ensemble performance on Audible.com for fans of cerebral fantasy. Those projects have now been shuttered. Good Omens, Gaiman’s so-so television series on Amazon Prime, is dead as well. One of Gaiman’s two publishers has dropped him. His name is on everyone’s lips. He’ll never get clear of this.
The scandal has a lot of implications for Gaiman’s future life and career. Some of are trivial, unless you are Gaiman; others are works in progress, their outcomes uncertain. One thing, however, is clear. Gaiman will not be serving jail time, paying fines, or suffering other legal repercussions for his indiscretions. That’s good, because most of the allegations describe him acting in ways that are unseemly, even shocking, but not explicitly against the law.
On the other hand, whatever you may think of Tortoise Media engineering Gaiman’s “cancellation,” they’ve succeeded in getting his name added to the global blacklist that multinational corporations started keeping after they got walloped by #MeToo. Defending Gaiman isn’t only difficult, given the nasty details of his relationships with women; it’s also pointless. If you’re worried about him, you shouldn’t be. Gaiman’s rich and thick-headed enough to survive infamy. Furthermore, even if he never writes another word, he’s already given us the best of his productive capability. He peaked as a graphic novel writer with Sandman, as a novelist with American Gods, and—with Coraline—as a writer of books for children.
The rest of Gaiman’s tenure as the thinking West’s villain of the week will be inconsequential for him. But he’s not the only one with something at stake. You’re involved too, and you have more to lose than you may realize. Here’s a two-part guide to surviving Gaiman’s downfall without being party to the nonsense of late-arriving think pieces that don’t know the meaning of the verb, “to think.”
Neil Gaiman’s story is not universal.
The sordid history of Gaiman’s love affairs is a story that could only center around a rich, famous, creatively-gifted man. It would be different for a woman, obviously. But it would be different, as well, for someone who couldn’t pay a suborned housekeeper to sign a nondisclosure agreement, or couldn’t send angry ex-lovers hush money “to be used for therapy.” It would be different for someone without the power to awe and intimidate everyone around them with magical texts they alone know how to summon from the void. Reducing Gaiman to a symbol of male privilege, male aggression, feckless wealth—or even duplicitous feminism—is a mistake. There are predators, like Donald Trump, who we (collectively) treat as if they’re too big to fail, no matter what they’ve done wrong. There are also cruel, self-deluded men of no importance who abuse women. Naturally, their lovers have stories and scars, but those traumas will never come to light because outing anonymous bastards doesn’t pay.
From a journalist’s standpoint, Gaiman’s a rare, lovely combination of things. He’s ripe for his comeuppance. He’s vulnerable because he’s an artist; artists are frequently mistaken for role models. But if you think he’s betraying a sacred trust, you’re wrong. Gaiman stands on the shoulders of earlier writers like Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Lewis Carroll. Poe was a vicious, temperamental drug addict. He also married a 13-year-old girl at the age of 27. Carroll was a confirmed pedophile who never married anyone. Hoffmann was an alcoholic who died of syphilis. We’re stuck with them because their literary creations were indelible. The same might be said of Sandman, I guess, but otherwise we don’t have to canonize anything written by, or based upon, the fiction of Gaiman.
That’s another key aspect of his vulnerability: he’s easy to replace. The whole situation reminds me of the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink, where an enraged studio head screams at Barton Fink. “I’ve got a thousand guys who can give me that ‘Barton Fink’ feeling!” Fink’s employer yells, cutting his problem child loose. I’m sure, right now, somebody at Disney and somebody else at Amazon is looking for the next Neil Gaiman. And they’re going to find him. He’ll be a white man, just like the last fella. He’ll write dark fantasy. Just like we did with Gaiman, we’ll foolishly assume he can write all that spooky stuff without being, or becoming, a spooky person himself,
Gaiman’s public shaming is an act without any repercussions for other men who (partially) resemble him. The ones who can hide will continue hiding. The ones who can get out of jail free, at taxpayer expense, will continue living in the White House. The definition of consent is the same as it was two months ago. Society hasn’t benefited from Gaiman’s losses, and the writers who are currently publishing larger social critiques, using this scandal as fuel, are writers who think they can overlook reality’s inconvenient details to pierce the patriarchy’s veil. They’re wrong. Gaiman isn’t being sacrificed as part of a counter-movement rising up against Trump and Trump’s depredations. Gaiman is our way of paying for making a predator into a president.
Neil Gaiman is not a male feminist, now, nor was he ever one.
We’re not witnessing, by watching Gaiman tumble, the ouster of a duplicitous feminist from a chastened industry that has grown wise at last. I say this because feminism doesn’t live on social media sites where you can impress people with chatty, one-sentence posts about the “fact” of the patriarchy. Feminism isn’t built around pandering stories about women with exceptional abilities and sassy wits. Feminism ought to be, for someone like Gaiman, the internal struggle to live up to the values of a powerful, persistent movement that elevates all of us. But we gave him another option, a tempting one: we let him stand there while we projected all our feminist hopes onto his inoffensive mug shots. We pretended that books like Coraline were feminist books because they had brave female protagonists. They also had hysterical, oppressive “mother” characters, but we didn’t worry too much about that. After all, he was clearly doing the right thing. His heart was in the right place. Or was it?
Here's the truth. Gaiman, in a widely adored Tumblr post, wrote, “I definitely consider myself a feminist.” Then he went on to say: “[I] am aware that there are people who do not feel that my version of feminism matches theirs and thus I don't count, and there are also people who consider that as a cis male I don't count.” There are such people, and if you’re reading him closely, you can see Gaiman thinks they’re totally wrong. The subtext of his self-important little manifesto is this: I certainly do count. A lot. Then he adds, “As far as I can see, being in society on this planet at this time makes you part of the patriarchy because that's the world we're in—you don't get to leave it or not be part of it.” Here’s the real meaning of that creepy generalization: Welcome to the patriarchy, everyone. It is here to stay, so make yourselves comfortable. There’s nothing remotely liberating or empathetic about Gaiman’s actual words. But we were so damn happy that he'd actually said “patriarchy,” while being famous, and a really smart writer, weren’t we? We thought he meant we were all being drafted, against our wills if necessary, into joining the good fight against a world unfair to women.
But reading Gaiman accurately doesn’t, on the whole, yield an equally gruesome crop of horrible insights. Seeing him on Tumblr, answering fan mail that suits his purposes, is seeing him at his worst. His best works, and even the mediocre collabs like Good Omens, tell upsetting little stories but inspiring big ones. Here’s one “little” story that makes for especially queasy reading: in the Gaiman novel Stardust, where a star’s also (somehow) a living human woman, you can lead fallen celestials around by the nose. All you need is a magical chain that renders them obedient, prone, and pouty.
But the man’s big, overarching stories, like Sandman and American Gods, are about the ironies of moral power. The gods, Gaiman keeps revealing, aren’t beings we need. It’s the other way around. The gods need us. The protagonist of American Gods is a hard-luck simpleton named Shadow, but for no clear reason, everybody immortal wants him to accept their friend requests. Odin wants Shadow’s help; so do bad new deities like Mr. World or Technical Boy. In Good Omens, a collection of supernatural characters are engaged in courting the “Antichrist,” who’s Adam Young, a normal boy with loving parents, loving chums, and a small town upbringing. The best angels aren’t half as good as little Adam. The worst denizens of Hell can’t break him. He ruins an entire nuclear apocalypse just by staying true to his own decent self.
It’s too late for Neil Gaiman; we can’t save him, even if he deserved saving, which he doesn’t. He’s become one of those mortals who fancied himself a god; he put himself at our mercy, like every god does, and now he’s gonna pay for it. Gaiman let himself become The Most Famous, Reputable, Smartest, Most Lovable Writer On Earth without thinking about the potential downsides of embracing that much limelight. That’s his lookout. While we’re unplugging from him, though, and throwing out his books, other gods are getting their fangs deeper in us. I’m talking about gods like Mr. Podcast, Mr. Facebook, and Mr. Newsfeed. They’re relatively new, compared to the God who comforted the Spanish inquisitioners, or the God who spoke through William Stoughton in old Salem. But they can’t help being every bit as needy as their older cousins. Without our assistance, our lifeblood, they’ll die. Imagine it. Wouldn’t that be an interesting sight. Wouldn’t that be worth seeing come to pass, just this once. It’d be like something out of—gosh, I don’t even know. Wait, yes, I do. Like something out of a fairy tale.