Against Kathleen Stock On Neil Gaiman

Anti-kink feminism is surprisingly blase about rape

[content note: explicit descriptions of rape]

By Cyndy Sims Parr - #ME TOO and her too and them too and him too, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

I.

The feminist writer Kathleen Stock has written an article about the rape allegations against Neil Gaiman that I think captures why anti-kink feminism is so dangerous and so antithetical to any attempt to think seriously about sexual ethics.

Stock repeatedly refers to the sex Gaiman had with Scarlett Pavlovich, his victim, as “unexpected.” She criticizes the BDSM community for having a “heavy emphasis… upon obtaining resounding expressions of consent at every stage, making it look more like a liability waiver than a responsible exploration of what participants really want.”¹ She writes:

More often than not, [sadomasochism] is very bad for the submissive in the scenario — not just because it leads her to physically dangerous situations, but also because it tends to put her in a state of mind in which agency is undermined and subsequent choices aren’t those of her true self, however confidently things started out. Meanwhile, for the sadist — and especially the famous one, as Gaiman has discovered — it leaves your good reputation a hostage to fortune, hoping that those with whom you had degrading sex in the past never properly get to know their own minds.

Let us be clear here: the allegation against Neil Gaiman is that he had sex with multiple women after they said “no.” I would not call this “unexpected sex,” because I’m not a 4Chan poster from 2008. Nor would I say that the problem is that the woman’s choice to say “no” to sex wasn’t that of her true self.

Let’s imagine that Neil Gaiman had perfectly loving, gentle, sweet, vanilla sex with Pavlovich.

As feminists, do we think it’s all right for a person to have gentle, loving, sweet, vanilla sex with someone who has said “no”?

As feminists, do we think it’s all right for a person to have gentle, loving, sweet, vanilla sex with their employee?

If a woman says she was raped, and a man says that a lesbian decided spontaneously to lose her virginity (through loving, gentle, sweet, vanilla sex) with her sixtysomething male employer whom she had met a few hours ago, which of these scenarios do we believe is most plausible?

If a woman has loving, gentle, sweet, vanilla sex with someone who raped her, and doesn’t explicitly object to the sex, do we think she consented? Or do we think that her consent was obtained through duress—knowing, as she does, that her partner won’t stop if she refuses him? Is the duress more severe if she lives with him and will be homeless if he decides to kick her out? What if, when she refuses sex, he rapes her?

Should you lovingly, gently, sweetly, and in a vanilla fashion finger a woman who has told you that ‘you cannot put anything in my vagina or I will die’? If she tells you to stop fingering her, is this an invitation to lovingly, gently, sweetly, and in a vanilla fashion put your penis inside her?

Is it all right to have loving, gentle, sweet, vanilla sex with someone in front of your child?

If you, a man, have consensual loving, gentle, sweet, vanilla sex with your virginal lesbian employee whom you had met a few hours ago—is that, like, a responsible thing to do? Does that show an adequate respect for your partner’s feelings and likelihood of regretting the sex? Does it show awareness of the possibility that she might be scared to say ‘no’ to you?

Should you have loving, gentle, sweet, vanilla sex with people that you know they don’t like?

Should you have loving, gentle, sweet, vanilla sex with people that makes them feel like you don’t care about them or their experiences and are just acting out a script?

It is almost as if the BDSM is completely irrelevant to the problem here.

This is, I think, why anti-kink feminism is so dangerous. Anti-kink feminism reframes the conversation to be about whether people can really consent to hard verbal humiliation, acting out rape, or sex that involves urine or vomit. They’re so good at reframing the conversation that they erase minor details like whether the victim consented in the first place.

The details of Neil Gaiman’s kinks are titillating and salacious, but what actually happened is old and boring. A man² doesn’t care about the experiences of his sexual partners. He acts out a script that gets him off, with the person he’s having sex with as a masturbatory aid. It doesn’t matter to him whether they like it, any more than it matters if a vibrator or a Fleshlight likes it. To get sex whenever he wants, he gets as close as he can to the rape line while technically not raping anyone. Because he is rich, powerful, and famous, he gets away with it. Eventually, he misjudges the line and commits rape.

You’ve heard this story before. Rapists aren’t very original people. No wonder people want to argue about age gaps and BDSM edgeplay and whether you can revoke consent after sex, subjects about which there is actual dispute.

But feminists need to do better. As long as the old, boring story keeps happening, we need to keep saying the old, boring things: no means no; don’t have sex with your employees; don’t have sex with people who don’t want to have sex with you. We can’t let disgust distract us from the reality of sexual violence—not if we want to have any hope of fixing anything.