Dear Neil Gaiman: consensual ≠ consent

Being in a consensual relationship does not mean one consents to everything the other demands. Particularly in an unequal power dynamic. Related: NDAs are another form of intimate partner violence.

This is a tricky one for me to write. For one, I know Neil Gaiman, subject of this recent article in New York Magazine. For another, I’ve been in a consensual relationship with a man, not Neil Gaiman, in which consent was neither asked for nor given for acts, unwanted, that took place within the presumed safety and sanctuary of that relationship. Moreover, like so many women who experience intimate partner violence¹, I didn’t immediately leave.

Those are my caveats. Let’s just get the Neil part out of the way. I met Neil at a wedding several years ago. At one point, my glasses flew off my face during a raucous hora and landed on the dance floor, where their hinges were immediately crushed. As was I: how would I drive home in the dark on narrow country roads without my glasses? Neil, who was seated at my table, spent the next hour fixing the mangled hinges with a butter knife: a kind gesture for which I was grateful. A month later, he helped organize a meeting for my son, my friend, her son, and me with the admissions director of Bard. Then he hosted a dinner for us at his nearby house after the college tour.

Between the wedding and the dinner at Gaiman’s house, a mutual friend had suggested Neil and I should maybe date. He was getting divorced. I was newly single. I was dubious—I’d heard rumors of his polyamory, I prefer monogamy, fantasy’s not my thing, I’d never read any of his books—but I was willing to keep an open mind. The dinner at his house, however, confirmed my hesitation. I did not sense any attraction on his part to me. Nor did I feel anything for him. In fact, being around him and his son and the boy’s babysitter that night felt both familiar—insofar as I spent many years with a man on the spectrum—and off-kilter in a way neither I nor my friend who was with me that night could put into words. But both of us definitely felt it. Dark energy, if I were forced to name it, underlying a more benign and normal single-parenting chaos with which I, as a single parent, was more familiar and forgiving. Nevertheless, I just knew, after so many wrong turns and wrong men in my life, that his was not the kind of energy or personality type I wanted to be around.

Fast forward to last week, when I read the bombshell article in New York Magazine, which described, in excruciating detail, what happens when dark energy meets those too young, yet, to see it. Specifically, what happens when an older, wealthy man manipulates younger women of more limited means into fulfilling his needs over hers. Sexual abuse, after all, is never about sex; it’s about power and control over another. Was the story surprising? No. Was it enraging and horrifying and made me feel ill while reading it? Yes, but, if anything, it simply confirmed both my gut instinct about Neil in particular and what we’ve all been learning about men in general.

Yes, yes, I know #notallmen are rapists, but given the stomach-churning details of the recent Pelicot trial; of society and the law’s baffling confusion over intent versus consent, as

Monique El-Faizy

so brilliantly wrote in The Persistent; and of the mere fact of a website that was used to organize those 51 rapes plus 23,000 more, it has become shockingly clear to all of us that many otherwise “normal” men, given the opportunity, will not only do the unthinkable, but that our society has failed to teach men that a lack of consent, even within the context of a longstanding and otherwise loving marriage—see: Dominique Pelicot—is rape.

Take Gaiman, whose non-mea culpa mea culpa took no responsibility whatsoever for the real harm he caused his accusers. Not only did he not apologize for their pain at his hands—some of them were fans, others were his son’s babysitters and therefore his employees, which, a priori, is an obvious abuse of power even if two of them didn’t count on him for housing as well—but he also wrote the following: “I don't accept there was any abuse. To repeat, I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.”

Seriously?

Let’s take it as a given that Gaiman, by his own admission, has autism. And that he endured trauma in his youth by virtue of his parents’ association with Scientology. And that both his autism and his childhood trauma might make understanding the wrongness of what he did to these women hard if not impossible. I’m willing to see and feel empathy for all of that. But—not to get too circumstantial evidency here—no one forces a woman they believe they have never harmed, let alone two, into signing NDAs forbidding them from ever discussing what you did to them. And when multiple women come forward describing the same kinds of intimate partner violence, that’s a pattern of abuse that’s hard to brush under the rug or justify with, “But it was consensual!” Yes, even in the context of an agreed-upon BDSM framework. (And, look: I know a lot of women are hot-to-trot these days about Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. But literally nothing about that film and its depiction of BDSM rang true or even remotely sexy to me.)

Moreover, NDAs are yet another form of intimate partner violence that create long-lasting trauma to women who are already traumatized, no matter how much they get paid in exchange for their silence. Being forced to hide—from everyone, even (and often) your own family members, sometimes even from your own shrink—the most traumatic chapter of your life’s narrative becomes a modern-day sword of Damocles over these women’s heads, a suicide vest which they must wear around their waists until death do they part. As one researcher put it:

NDAs function as coercive instruments of powerful institutions and patriarchy. By closing off access to social and political space, the victim’s responses are compressed into the intrapsychic domain where they are experienced as shame, self-doubt, and worthlessness. Outrage is turned inward and shame is transferred to the victim. Silencing and isolation collapse mental space for thinking and prevent the relational processes necessary for recovery.

Meanwhile, if anything, we, as a society, need to be talking more about the frequent lack of consent in a consensual relationship, not claiming the latter gives you the right to the former.

To wit: a couple of months before the Gaiman story broke, still trying to understand not only why I did not leave an abusive relationship earlier but why my former shrink did not even acknowledge its abuses, I interviewed Rosemary Parkinson, author of a recent study called, “Subtle or covert abuse within intimate partner relationships: a scoping review,” which I found both fascinating and eye-opening. Subtle or covert abuse, according to Parkinson, derives from “a pervasive self-centered attitude” on the part of the abuser, who feels entitled, in the context of a consensual relationship, to do anything he wants. In other words, for such men, the mere fact of a consensual relationship equals consent. For whatever the men want or, in some cases, don’t want. (Withholding sex, too, is a form of abuse.)

At my age, I’ve lived long enough now to personally know many otherwise intelligent women who’ve spent years in consensual relationships and/or marriages I would place under the umbrella of IPV, whether that intimate partner violence was sexual, psychological, financial, or some combination of all three. Often, it takes these women decades to recognize and name what they’ve experienced as abuse, and only then after years of therapy with a therapist who is experienced enough to spot subtle or covert abuse, which was Parkinson’s whole point in doing her research: most shrinks do not spot it. Not because they’re not good at their jobs, but because we’ve failed, as a society, to name it. Most of the men who impose this kind of abuse do not consider themselves abusers. Most of the women who endure it don’t have the tools or knowledge to name it thus either. Worse, many of these women often choose, out of either inertia, naiveté, or their shrinks’ inability to call what they’re experiencing as abuse, to continue living with their abuser.

“In my more recent research,” Parkinson said, “there were some participants who talked about sexual withholding and criticism but also some who felt pushed into sexual activity that they didn't particularly want so it works both ways. And I think if you come back to that central idea of it coming from a pervasive self-centered attitude [on the part of the men], a pervasive sense of some sort of entitlement whether that's based in society or based in the individual, then it's easy to see how it can manifest in these different, sometimes opposing ways.”

To be clear, I’m not calling Gaiman’s alleged abuse of these women either subtle or covert. What I am saying is that statements like this one, in Gaiman’s public reaction to the article, should never be taken at face value:

“I went back to read the messages I exchanged with the women around and following the occasions that have subsequently been reported as being abusive. These messages read now as they did when I received them – of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again. At the time I was in those relationships, they seemed positive and happy on both sides.”

And look, this is not just about Neil Gaiman. There are millions of Neil Gaimans out there—perhaps, even, your own spouse—imposing their wills upon women with whom they are in consensual relationships in the privacy of their own dyad while also, say, helping a stranger fix their crushed glasses, or organizing college tours, or hosting dinners and being generally kind and generous to others. Both things can be true. A man can be kind in public and a monster in private. Is that kindness another form of manipulation or grooming? Would this man have spent an hour fixing the crushed glasses of a man with a butter knife? I don’t know him well enough to say. But I do know his type. And it makes me ask the question. And until we name what Gaiman did to these women as wrong—until he understands what he did is wrong—men like him will continue to do what they want, when they want, without consequence.

I write this on the morning when a sexual abuser of dozens of women, including his own late wife, is about to take the oath of office.

We have so much work yet to do.

1. This is the preferred terminology for harmful physical, sexual, and psychological acts that occur within an intimate partnership. ACOG defines IPV thus: “Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a pattern of assaultive behavior and coercive behavior that may include physical injury, psychologic abuse, sexual assault, progressive isolation, stalking, deprivation, intimidation, and reproductive coercion. These types of behavior are perpetrated by someone who is, was, or wishes to be involved in an intimate or dating relationship with an adult or adolescent, and is aimed at establishing control of one partner over the other. It can occur among heterosexual or same-sex couples and can be experienced by both men and women in every community regardless of age, economic status, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or educational background. Individuals who are subjected to IPV may have lifelong consequences, including emotional trauma, lasting physical impairment, chronic health problems, and even death.”