New York magazine has just published a very long investigative piece on alleged sexual misconduct by the author Neil Gaiman, both contextualizing previously-known allegations and introducing new ones.
Part of the issue is that *even the Gaiman piece itself* mixes serious allegations with things that are neither here nor there. I cannot be persuaded that it matters that Gaiman dated younger women if these were adult women. What matters is whether he abused them!
I took is as background of his evolution. He started out being the “hot young writer” on the scene and had a very promiscuous but consensual lifestyle. Then he couldn’t make the transition to “I’m a dad now” or “I’m a grandfather” and started to pursue women who were much more borderline with consent. Then, at the end, he’s assaulting a lady who is a few weeks removed from being homeless. He didn’t want to grow up or face his demons and this is where it led him.
It's a very strange piece. If Pavlovich's encounters with Gaiman were in fact nonconsensual, it sure doesn't seem like she was doing a great job of making Gaiman aware of that.
The text messages are the hardest evidence we have. Make of these passages what you will.
Not long after the alleged incident in the bathtub:
"After Palmer’s offer, Pavlovich texted Gaiman: “I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry. What a terrible creature you’ve turned me into.” The following weekend, she packed up her sublet and boarded the ferry to Waiheke."
After Pavlovich told Palmer about the affair:
"Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him. “It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she wrote. Anaru had been “triggered by something I think,” she added."
>>If Pavlovich's encounters with Gaiman were in fact nonconsensual, it sure doesn't seem like she was doing a great job of making Gaiman aware of that.<<
And this is why sexual liaisons across power boundaries are viewed so negatively at present that injunctions against them are all but codified: When the power balance between two people is that unequal, it's very difficult to say "NO."
I mean, would Leda say no to the swan? Doubtful. 😊
I feel like the writer/editor made some strange decisions in that article. It's a pretty harrowing read, so I imagine it was pretty harrowing to write too. Especially in such detail.
But things like including those photos of one of the victims seemed odd. Here she is taking a selfie looking sad in Neil's bed. Here she is taking a selfie curled up on the bathroom floor after speaking to Amanda. Those sorts of images have been kind of meme-ified as examples of soft millenials/Gen Zs crying on the internet for attention. It felt really out of place to include them alongside such graphic detail and accusations. And all the texts too - it feels like, however inadvertently - she's opening a vulnerable person up to lots of scrutiny.
Well, sure. "New York Magazine" is basically a tabloid for GenXers with college degrees, no? I mean rape, brutality, sexual sadism, Scientology!!! I didn't read it for its nuanced descriptions of sexual power plays. I read it for the DISH.
That doesn't mean there isn't a nuanced discussion to be had about sexual power plays.
And though, sans doubt, the writer/editor was exploiting the victim, too, the story will be part of a record that should win her a sizable settlement.
As to Gaiman himself? I'm sure after the ink dries on the settlements for all those civil suits, and Gaiman—welcomed back into Mother Scientology’s loving embrace—undergoes a suitable interval of OT VIII auditing, he'll reappear at Tom Cruise's right-hand side, snag the screenwriting credit for "Mission Impossible: Ascent From Hades", & take home an Oscar. 😀
What civil suits? There won't be a civil suit without a criminal case, and I don't think most of these will hold up.
Now, he might pay because it's cheaper to make them go away.
And your sarcastic forecast for him pretty much proves that the wise move is either cry rape right away or shut up. There's nothing in going public that's going to make life better for her.
Frankly, the worst person in this story is the wife. Gaiman's just an asshole with hideous sexual preferences.
The texts had to be included, given that the writer knew about them. Here's a story about Gaiman raping this girl in a bathtub. Ok, here's a text sent by her the next day saying how much she enjoyed it and can't stop thinking about it and wants to do it again.
Gaiman and his people presumably have it, and if you have the bathtub story without it they can just drop it and talk about a hit piece and a lying former lover looking for a settlement. If you want to get any traction at all you have to include it and try to excuse it.
Including the exculpatory evidence is what makes it an evenhanded piece.
I wish NY Mag had done a deep dive into the hokum of Huberman's content, and make it an indictment of the industry writ large. I have smart friends who have been so ear wormed by what he has to say, that it drives me bonkers.
The Gaiman stuff is just beyond the beyond awful. So funny to watch people on here defend him and calling these blatant tales of assault and rape as consensual. Wonder if these same folks feel that way about Bill Clinton's abuse of Monica Lewinsky?
I'd agree that Lewinsky & Clinton's sexual affair was consensual.
The abuse came afterward, as I see it, in the scapegoating of Lewinsky—mostly at the hands of Hillary Clinton.
This was one of the reasons why I refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. She totally vilified a very young, very naive woman for political gain. No real feminist does that.
They aren't blatant tales of assault and rape. They were consensual, and the same is true about Bill Clinton's blowjobs from, not abuse of, Monica Lewinsky.
Clearly, nobody's ever pressured YOU for sex. (And I'm not surprised.)
Also, you don't read very carefully. I said "all but codified." It _has_ been codified in practically every academic environment, in many corporate settings, & in the military where officers are strictly prohibited from having sexual relationships with enlisted personnel.
We can disagree about how much sympathy to pour like syrup on a young sponger, but the fact that injunctions against consensual sex with adults are "all but codified" is not a matter of opinion.
She’s a strange, inconsistent voice. But, unless she lied about every detail, he still assaulted his unpaid, young, isolated babysitter, had an intensely violent bdsm relationship with someone who would be homeless without him, and had sex with her in the same room as his son(!). And she’s the second woman who accused him of trying to do something sexual next to his son.
And by the way, her whole life story is squick. Wander around looking for people to glom on to and feel important because famous people let you do chores for them?
Paying someone in room and board is normally a crime in and of itself. And, if you can’t understand why having a violent BDSM relationship with someone who’s your live in unpaid nanny is abhorrent, I really don’t know what to tell you. I feel sorry for your mum.
I worked for Gaiman and Palmer very briefly about a decade ago, and came away with a very good impression of the guy. He came across as remarkably down to earth and respectful for such a famous, wealthy person. Famous, wealthy people don't typically assist the help when it comes to basic technical, physical tasks that help everyone involved in a situation, but when Gaiman helped us set up an air conditioning unit in a hot theater, it seemed like this was just his normal way of doing things. He didn't hesitate to lend a hand.
For the record Gaiman and Palmer (who frankly came across as considerably less approachable than Gaiman) also paid me better than I've ever been paid to work an "artistic" job (generally speaking, one is financially much better off working freelance for big corporations).
This was also around the time I myself was near homeless, and had unfortunately been taken in and "assisted" by some very unscrupulous, dysfunctional people, so I was no stranger to being taken advantage of by assholes myself. Does this mean that I might have been primed to be duped by someone like Gaiman, or does it mean that I was seeing the real contrast in his character as opposed to others that I was realizing weren't trustworthy after all? Well, you can decide.
Of course you can only know so much about someone from what really amounts to less than an hour of real interaction, and I guess to some extent I'm a biased voice here. On the other hand, I'm also (regrettably) very familiar with the sorts of milieus that Gaiman and Palmer spent a lot of their time involved with.
I understand that several women have made allegations against Gaiman, but this passage gives me pause:
"The kind of domineering violence he inflicted on them is common among people who practice BDSM, and all of the women, at some point, played along, calling him their master, texting him afterward that they needed him, even writing that they loved and missed him."
Given the sorts of women who hang around in these scenes, it doesn't seem at all far fetched to me that Gaiman might have involved himself consensually with several women who in some way felt violated, jilted, or weirded out by him, who rewrote, recast, or re-characterized their memories of how things played out after the fact, and are now seeking some personal benefit, attention, or vengeance.
Consider the Pavlovich selfies included here. Bedroom eyes on the bathroom floor in front of a toilet? Even the haircut gives me flashbacks to a particular sort of troubled woman. I don't mean to be prejudiced, but aesthetic patterns like these sometimes are indicative of real phenomena.
I specifically made a point to end my involvement in these sorts of scenes because oft the way that male guilt was so often assumed from the get go - it became a kind of omnipresent background factor in the midst of a social mania - and the way that they were a minefield of women (and some men) with cluster b personality disorder traits. I saw how dysfunctional all of this was (and it was extremely dysfunctional), and how many people were getting hurt as a result of the ludicrous deference to women (and people of various minority statuses) who claimed victimhood that became standard practice.
Keep in mind the Pavlovich story takes place in 2020. Do you remember the left-of-center cultural environment in 2020? I do.
As the story's written, it sounds like Pavlovich wasn't prepared to call any of what happened sexual assault or rape even when a couple of her friends, one of whom, based on a quick google search, appears to be something of male feminist, told her that they believed it was. In fact her text messages, considered alone, paint precisely the opposite picture. She even told Gaimain it was "consensual (and wonderful)!" after that, and said that she thought the other friend had been, "triggered by something."
Even backing up to the beginning of the story, because I think it's kind of an important point: if, after a sexual encounter, a man receives a text from the woman involved that says, "I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry. What a terrible creature you’ve turned me into," who then proceeds to come to him and stay at his house, what impression do you think he's going to get of the way he's been interacting with that woman and how acceptable and consensual it is?
Leaving aside the way the police threw the case out, it was only after Palmer decided it was best for Pavlovich not to return as a babysitter that she apparently started seeing whatever happened as sexual assault.
I think a lot of people are standing back from this one not only because of general metoo fatigue, but also because Gaiman publicly cast himself as a male feminist during the height of metoo. They see what looks like the movement turning on itself and say to themselves, "well, good riddance; these people were mostly hypocrites in the first place. Let them tear themselves apart."
But not all male feminists are secret predator/creeps. The bulk of them are just socially naive and/or have issues with asserting boundaries and keeping dysfunctional women at a safe distance. Could this be what it looks like when one of the latter is wealthy, famous, and revered, and generally deals with women throwing themselves at him?
In any event, even if the stuff about the kid in the room isn't true, there's probably a good argument to be made that kids shouldn't be exposed to these sorts of libertine relationships in the first place.
I'm not Gaiman's defense attorney in the court of public opinion, and for all I know he's entirely guilty here, but the past several years have also made it abundantly clear that salacious stories like these need to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I can understand the point generally, but what’s described in that article is far out of bounds, and the sense I got was that the dysfunction and blurred lines was a vulnerability a predator took advantage of.
He had an unpaid resident-employee who was way younger than him, socially isolated, and frankly an oddball that he was having extreme, violent sex with.
Whether she consented or not, she says he had sex with her while his young son was in the room — that’s abuse of the son, if nothing else, and the second (!) accusation of him trying to engage sexually while his son was in the room.
A second woman accused him of penetrating her after she said no while she had a UTI.
He had a third financially dependent, newly divorced woman — who, btw, didn’t sound like some artsy bohemian — that he engaged sexually while she was lying on the bed with his son.
Did you ever write about the Aziz Ansari “allegations?” I feel that also very much fell into this category. Unfortunately that one happened very much at the peak of MeToo so I think it was taken way more seriously than if it happened even a year and a half later.
I remember some folks on Reddit used to use Aziz Ansari as a comedic unit of measurement for low-level MeToos. As in "Unpleasant but not criminal - I rate it at 4.3 Aziz Ansaris".
I think the piece was very badly reported, but the young woman in the piece refused and rebuffed Aziz multiple times after kissing.
I actually think it had the potential to be a far, far more useful piece of reporting that the one on Gaiman since that kind of behaviour is more common and not necessarily committed by (quite possibly) unreformable sociopaths. If handled better it could have prompted a lot of necessary self-reflection from many men and some 25% of women [relying on self-disclosure] going by this piece of research:
Seriously, //fuck// Gaiman and (sadly for me, I basically like her and The Dresden Dolls) Palmer too. I really can't see seperating the art from the artist here and I definitely won't want to ever send a penny of my money either of their ways again at the very least.
The Anzari scenario to me in no way warranted the tone of coverage and level of reactions and consequences it got. Trying again to kiss a few times after some initial hesitation then eventually apologizing and stopping? The fact it was so common a thing to do is exactly why it had no potential to be useful as guidance on what people should be made post children for and potentially cancelled over.
Since all stories must turn on the idea of power, now, I find I am able to imagine an alternate scenario where Ansari - not an objectively attractive individual, though of course that doesn't mean he couldn't like all people, come to be seen so upon acquaintance - is the one with the least "power". For starters, owing to age and gender, he would have been more, uh, sexually frustrated than the young woman. Placing him in a position of need - not exactly powerful. Secondarily, he is presumably clever enough to know that she was in his apartment only because of his celebrity. We used to have pity on people for whom the wanting was one-sided. I guess changes in sexual mores - girls going on first acquaintance to apartments in the middle of the night and so on - mean we cannot afford to extend that pity, or empathy, anymore. We must be so hard on violation that a few unwanted kisses should be turned into a public humiliation. I'm impressed he came through it intact. I guess I should add the obligatory, I am impressed the young woman managed to survive this terrible nightmare as well.
I wrote about it and I agree re Ansari. That was really bizarre and unfortunate timing indeed. I wrote, in essence, that we need to teach young women that in fact, you can just call a cab and leave.
Freddie, Now here's an angle that NEVER gets discussed, germane to this piece. When I started hiring significant numbers of employees who travel, I assumed that there would be lots of footsie played by the "traveling salesman" types (even though mostly not salesmen) we were putting in the field. And I was not disappointed...there was surely a share of those who had a woman in every port.
But the giant surprise to me was that far more of the women who were on the staff were playing footsie than the men. My illusions were all shattered pretty hard...it just never crossed my mind. The women tended to have one consistent "friend" in every port more then the men who would take whatever came along, but there were more women messing about than men.
Yet no one ever covers this...not enough "Me, Too" about it I guess. But this is all the human condition and infidelity, whatever that may be and however one defines it, is definitely NOT a male trait -- just a human one. But it took real experience to take off my blinders.
It's not covered because we've been conditioned that whatever women do is fine, empowering even, no matter how manipulative or even immoral. And men need to be policed, constantly. It's fucking insane
No, we haven't been conditioned to believe that. I bet we'd agree on plenty of of your double standard thoughts, but what you wrote is just so overheated.
I guess the reason I disagree with you is that both you and I haven't been conditioned in those ways. And when I think of the very, very many people I know, I know the majority of them aren't conditioned in that way either.
But if you're saying that there is a reasonable segment of the population conditioned in that way, I'd agree with you on that.
I don't know what's gained in radically overstating the truth.
There is definitely a movement afoot to hold women and racial minorities as morally superior. I would agree that it hasn't gotten far because it is batshit insane.
The 'majority of people' don't hold institutional power, don't control the levers of propaganda, don't travel in Academia, don't hold political positions, and don't direct narrative via media.
Do you want newspaper articles about the infidelities of your travelling saleswomen? I imagine not, but you're responding to a post about news articles, and I'm not sure what else you could have in mind.
Back when I was traveling the only time I got laid on the road was when a saleslady picked me up in the bar at either a Hilton Garden Inn or a Hyatt Place close to Lubbock.
I've vaguely heard about the allegations against Gaiman and have been uncertain how seriously to take them, largely because things like the Huberman article exist. Seems like the best strategy is to suspend judgment and wait for a while to see if there's another shoe to drop.
The thing is he’s nothing like Joe Rogan, his show isn’t at least. Hubermans credentials are the real deal, and everything he talks about is backed by studies. He’s also always transparent about the relative strength of the evidence, and his messaging is always something like “here’s a study that shows X improved Y in lab mice, we still need to do human trials but you can give it a try yourself if you’re looking for something to help you with Y”. It’s never selling miracle cures or anything that could be remotely dangerous. He also has a feedback message box on his website incase he misrepresents any of the science, and has issued corrections in the past from it. He only started selling supplements after years of his listeners asking him for it.
People hate him because he’s high agency, and they have brains poisoned by cynicism. They hate that his goal is helping people take responsibility & control of their life, bc they think everything is a result of outside forces they have no control over.
I haven’t listened to him in like 2 years so perhaps he’s lost it, but I always felt this criticism was complete garbage because he’s always transparent about the power of studies and the relative strength of evidence for a claim. He’s wayyyyy more transparent and nuanced in his communication than the mainstream media is when they write articles on science. The science reporting in a lot of media is often atrociously misleading. Plus half his episodes are other researchers discussing their work.
The fact that he may get something wrong or unintentionally misrepresent the strength of a study is expected from anyone walking the tightrope of communicating science to a popular audience on a wide variety of health topics via 2+ hour discussions a few times a week. The bottom line is that he walks that tightrope better than anyone else. The fact that some people are too stupid to parse the nuance in the information he delivers and take everything he says as gospel also isn’t his problem.
I don't have a specific example to mind because I'm in the same boat where it's been years since I paid attention to him. My recollection of his style was to take a small-n in-vitro or animal model study and then wildly extrapolate from that to giving health advice. I'd imagine you'll dispute the "wildly", but that was my honest impression. The one extended interview I do remember was when he went on Peter attia's show, and that appearance was so bad I actually lost some respect for attia for putting up with his bullshit. The last time I remember hearing about him was when he got some Internet buzz for promoting butthole tanning as a health protocol, which doesn't make me believe he's changed his ways.
The bullshit he was spitting on the attia interview was about circadian rhythms and light exposure, you can look it up if you're curious. It was an observational study, not an experiment, hence why I don't put any stock in it. Not really sure why you feel the need to defend a guy you decided a couple years ago wasn't worth paying attention to
He’s always clear when it’s a study on mice or a small study and needs more data. He’s also very deliberate in looking at research that will be low/zero cost and essentially zero risk. That’s the whole point of the show. So it’s not like hes telling people to snort cocaine to enhance athletic performance, even though there’s probably some studies that support that.
His typical presentation looks like this. (This is a completely made up example for the sake of argument). Say the episode is on improving cardio endurance, distance running etc. He might share a study that’s like “a study of 35 college students at the University of Virginia from Dr John Smith found that a shot of vinegar an hour before running showed an increased lung capacity of an average of 7%”. He will then describe any potential, theoretical mechanism of action that could make this result plausible, and add disclaimers that this is a tiny study and way more research needs to be done to establish a firm connection. I think the thing that makes people mad is he will then encourage people to go try to shot of vinegar anyway, see if it works for them. If you train regularly, and are looking to shave 30 seconds off your 5k time, here’s something small you can add to your routine that has a tiny bit of evidence supporting it. See if it works for you. The thing is that people, especially athletes who are looking for marginal improvements in performance, find all kinds of weird things that help them individually. Huberman gives people who want to make marginal improvements some direction, some options to try that have at least some degree of established scientific basis.
He never told people to “tan buttholes” lol. That whole framing is just a bad faith attempt to discredit his project. Ironically, it originates from one of his most rock solid, utterly uncontroversial claims: getting sunlight is essential to a healthy hormonal balance. Sun exposure is good for testosterone levels, and more direct exposure of sunlight on to skin is going to be better than clothed, all things equal. Therefore, Sun your balls.
Here's my specific example of why I like Huberman. A while ago I listened to him do a long interview with a scientist who studies the way muscles use energy. This guy had a unifying story that it was all carbon atoms: you eat molecules with lots of carbon atoms stuck together, get energy by pulling them apart, and then expel the solitary carbon atoms as CO2. The interesting part was the hodgepodge of mechanisms muscles had for breaking down the organic molecules—this kind of muscle fiber does it this way while this other kind of muscles fiber uses some slightly different mechanism. Then they'd tie these processes back to different workout strategies. Everything was presented as being 100% true, but that was okay. I'm a big boy, I don't need to be reminded that all scientific knowledge is provisional and much of it is controversial. Their conversation was free of gee-whiz sensationalism, metaphor taken as literal truth, and outrageous self-help claims. It sounded like two experts talking shop, and it was fascinating to listen in on.
I don't have the expertise to evaluate the scientific accuracy of claims about muscle physiology, but I've worked in a couple scientific fields now and am particularly sensitive to the poor job the popular press does in reporting science. It generally takes the most sensational tack, turning the hype up to 11. Sometimes I'll go and read the abstract of the paper that's being misrepresented, and all the wild claims the story is reporting are toned-down, reasonable, and properly qualified. Recently Freddie had a post about the poor job the press does on science reporting that sums things up well. Plus I currently work in machine learning/artificial intelligence, so I have a clear idea of the gap between reality and bad reporting.
My sense is that Huberman doesn't make these mistakes. He's popularizer in the Stephen J. Gould/Oliver Sacks mold and he's good at it. Everything I've heard from him passes my sniff test and I too would need some specific examples to change my mind.
True, but he resembles Joe Rogan in that he's an athletic fifty-something white man with a very masculine bearing. (And high-agency. That's a good way to put it.) Someone fitting that profile is supposed to be the bad guy, but Huberman has the audacity to be soft-spoken and reasonable. He's even a professor at Stanford, so you can't hit him with the dumb jock stereotype.
Part of the resentment against Rogan and Huberman is professional jealousy. Newspaper and magazine business models got killed by the internet, and Rogan and Huberman are very good at a media form that is filling a lot of the space they used to occupy. Now the route to being a quasi public-intellectual media star is through podcasting, not long-form magazine journalism. That's a different skill set: talking instead of writing. (And don't think it's not a skill. Try it yourself: get the friend you have the best conversations with and record yourselves discussing a topic of interest to you both and see how soon it gets grindingly dull. Most people can't last five minutes. That Rogan can make a meandering three hour conversation with pretty much anyone engaging is a kind of genius.)
You've spent your life trying to be Joan Didion, and then when you've achieved some professional success get the memo that there aren't going to be any more Joan Didions. (Jia Tolentino was the very last one. Sorry.) There's going to be a similar niche though, and the people currently filling it are these burly weight-lifter guys. The same kind of jocks that back in high school inspired a lifelong quest for cultural superiority are now CULTURALLY SUPERIOR to you as well. It's gotta hurt.
Couldn't "the team at _New York_" (possibly rationally) speculate that the right kind of juicy story... spiked with just enough manly masculine scum-funk to be sexy and not so much ape-brain agency violation as to be a turn off.. might be the most effective engagement vehicle for their entertainment products?
Perhaps the marketing department is disappointed that the Gaiman saga has turned too bleak and too dark to really "get there" with the readers.
There is no downside for these magazines to publish anything about anyone in the social media / influencer sphere, the more salacious the better. There is particularly no downside for obnoxious progressive women to claim "toxic, masculine" scalps.
I disagree entirely that there is a quantitative difference between Neil Gaiman and Andrew Huberman, however. Allegations, particularly those unsubstantiated through legitimate criminal proceedings, are the putrid exhalations of a dying media who use such narratives to construct an extralegal hangman's noose for their targets. Lawfare conducted via regime media is still lawfare.
The problem with the Ansaris and Hubermans getting MeToo'd is hard to overstate.
Adult readers know that the ethics and legality of human behaviour exists on a spectrum, so they're always going to want to come to their own conclusions. They require facts, accurate terminology and balanced reporting with as little bias as possible. That gradually became increasingly rare from the '80s until MeToo, which was the end of that road.
Once the news industry had discarded journalism in favour of activism, there was too little chance of reward for readers for spending their time reading those pieces. Leaving only prurient interest. No Thanks.
So many of us will never know for ourselves whether Gaiman and others since have committed crimes or merely broken taboos.
"[That successful men sometimes see lots of women at the same time] is not criminal, and it is not in the same category of sexual harassment or assault."
I don't even think it's in the category of "interesting."
You're probably right about sunk costs. If they knew from the start that what they ended up with was all there was, I wonder if they'd have run any story at all. Never mind giving it the full MeToo.
It really isn't. I guess I thought it was pretty conventional in re - e.g. - professional athletes.
Glad to know I was mistaken!
The past kind of puts us to shame on this sort of thing. H.L. Hunt having 15 children with three wives, not all parties knowing about the others - that was pretty interesting, at least regionally.
The Gaiman article (which is absolutely horrifying and revolting - one of the best cases for a trigger warning I've ever seen) brings to mind the Robert Caro quote about how power doesn't corrupt, it reveals. Once you're a rich, powerful man, and feel shielded against all possible consequences, both personal and legal, you can be who you always want to be.
The thing is, these things operate on a bell curve, and most people's deep, dark secrets are disturbingly vanilla (something which is clear if you've ever read one of those Pornhub year-in-review articles). Most straight men want to be desired by attractive younger women - multiple ones at the same time even. And if you're especially inconsiderate, maybe you don't even care that much about the feelings you hurt along the way.
There's a whole spectrum on the slippery slope downward to actual sexual assault. Some guys are undoubtedly self-delusional enough that they'll not see cajoling someone into sexual contact for what it is. Then there's those who just don't care about consent, dubious or otherwise, at all - which is atrocious, of course.
But the Gaiman stuff - that's on another level. It's so monstrous that it makes legitimately awful cases like Cosby seem tame. At least Cosby didn't force women to eat their own shit and vomit, or rape a woman while his kid was in the room with his back turned. It's really so goddamned awful that it minimizes a lot of truly awful things that have happened to other women - and that, in and of itself, is disturbing.
"There's a whole spectrum on the slippery slope downward to actual sexual assault. Some guys are undoubtedly self-delusional enough that they'll not see cajoling someone into sexual contact for what it is. Then there's those who just don't care about consent, dubious or otherwise, at all - which is atrocious, of course."
This is the core right here to me. The spectrum you are describing simply does not include infidelity. It's like saying that speeding is on low end of the spectrum of violent crimes.
I do think this argument isn't considered enough. If most people knew their partner was sleeping with someone else, they wouldn't continue to sleep with them, especially when we bring undisclosed (or unknown by the person engaged in the infidelity) STDs and STIs into the mix.
I don't think you can make a hard and fast rule here. If having sex with someone drunk but not passed out is rape, I think, for example, pretending to be someone else (like your identical twin, tricking someone in the dark/blindfolded, ect.) is as well.
It was undeniably shocking. That is to say, I was expecting something much milder. I've never even looked into his fiction, though I once very much enjoyed listening to him read aloud with great aplomb Charles Dickens' "American tour reading copy" of "A Christmas Carol". It would be a shame if that must be taken down from "Open Culture". But I've known admirers of him, all female.
I was just describing this to a companion, without naming names, in order to make some dull observation - and finally he was like, who are you talking about? "Neil Gaiman".
"Neil Gaiman is a pervert? I'm shocked! Shocked to learn that Neil Gaiman is a pervert," he laughed.
Still, it is interesting to note the reason his lady admirers, particularly, were so unsettled by the news:
"By then, he had a reputation as an outspoken champion of women. 'Gaiman insists on telling the stories of people who are traditionally marginalized, missing, or silenced in literature,' wrote Tara Prescott-Johnson in the essay collection Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman. Although his books abounded with stories of men torturing, raping, and murdering women, this was largely perceived as evidence of his empathy."
I am not the biggest Gaiman fan, though I have some of his work. Neverwhere, American Gods, and Anansi Boys.
I am generally not a believer that it's worth getting rid of things you already own from (legitimately) "canceled" people, so long as you don't spend money on anything new. But in this particular case, I feel like there's a stain on my shelves, and I've been fighting the urge to burn the books in effigy.
What I remember from the Huberman article was it also questioned the existence of his "lab" and his business relationship to AG1, a nutritional supplement supported by tenuous research. I don't think being completely unfamiliar with his content is a virtue when it comes to why the article punctured his brand so effectively. His content was fully intertwined with his image, and that wasn't something people projected onto the podcast, it was encouraged by no one more than Huberman.
I actually think what Huberman did was really bad. You seem to be using a bespoke definition of misconduct here. Shitty behavior doesn't need to be legally actionable to be called misconduct.
Do you think it's newsworthy for someone to be pretending they run a lab when they don't and then using the pretense of that lab as credibility for their science podcast (and as a representative target of funding provided by listeners)? Have you read the article on Huberman?
How in the world does it make sense to mix that up in an article about his serial dating? Doesn't that sound like the writer had an axe to grind and threw everything they could find into one article, no matter how trivial?
The article should have been about one or the other instead of a hit piece that threw in everything and the kitchen sink. It just displays the writer's desperation to nail Huberman on something, anything.
I think Mark Halperin suggested that what was really damming about the Biden senility story and the WH press corps(e) is that it was the perfect opportunity for an ambitious young reporter to make his or her bones. Instead the media was just compliant and passive.
It's hard not to see these reports of writers trying to turn molehill into mountains and not wonder if it's because the incentives are all messed up.
Part of the issue is that *even the Gaiman piece itself* mixes serious allegations with things that are neither here nor there. I cannot be persuaded that it matters that Gaiman dated younger women if these were adult women. What matters is whether he abused them!
I took is as background of his evolution. He started out being the “hot young writer” on the scene and had a very promiscuous but consensual lifestyle. Then he couldn’t make the transition to “I’m a dad now” or “I’m a grandfather” and started to pursue women who were much more borderline with consent. Then, at the end, he’s assaulting a lady who is a few weeks removed from being homeless. He didn’t want to grow up or face his demons and this is where it led him.
It's a very strange piece. If Pavlovich's encounters with Gaiman were in fact nonconsensual, it sure doesn't seem like she was doing a great job of making Gaiman aware of that.
The text messages are the hardest evidence we have. Make of these passages what you will.
Not long after the alleged incident in the bathtub:
"After Palmer’s offer, Pavlovich texted Gaiman: “I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry. What a terrible creature you’ve turned me into.” The following weekend, she packed up her sublet and boarded the ferry to Waiheke."
After Pavlovich told Palmer about the affair:
"Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him. “It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she wrote. Anaru had been “triggered by something I think,” she added."
>>If Pavlovich's encounters with Gaiman were in fact nonconsensual, it sure doesn't seem like she was doing a great job of making Gaiman aware of that.<<
And this is why sexual liaisons across power boundaries are viewed so negatively at present that injunctions against them are all but codified: When the power balance between two people is that unequal, it's very difficult to say "NO."
I mean, would Leda say no to the swan? Doubtful. 😊
I feel like the writer/editor made some strange decisions in that article. It's a pretty harrowing read, so I imagine it was pretty harrowing to write too. Especially in such detail.
But things like including those photos of one of the victims seemed odd. Here she is taking a selfie looking sad in Neil's bed. Here she is taking a selfie curled up on the bathroom floor after speaking to Amanda. Those sorts of images have been kind of meme-ified as examples of soft millenials/Gen Zs crying on the internet for attention. It felt really out of place to include them alongside such graphic detail and accusations. And all the texts too - it feels like, however inadvertently - she's opening a vulnerable person up to lots of scrutiny.
Well, sure. "New York Magazine" is basically a tabloid for GenXers with college degrees, no? I mean rape, brutality, sexual sadism, Scientology!!! I didn't read it for its nuanced descriptions of sexual power plays. I read it for the DISH.
That doesn't mean there isn't a nuanced discussion to be had about sexual power plays.
And though, sans doubt, the writer/editor was exploiting the victim, too, the story will be part of a record that should win her a sizable settlement.
As to Gaiman himself? I'm sure after the ink dries on the settlements for all those civil suits, and Gaiman—welcomed back into Mother Scientology’s loving embrace—undergoes a suitable interval of OT VIII auditing, he'll reappear at Tom Cruise's right-hand side, snag the screenwriting credit for "Mission Impossible: Ascent From Hades", & take home an Oscar. 😀
What civil suits? There won't be a civil suit without a criminal case, and I don't think most of these will hold up.
Now, he might pay because it's cheaper to make them go away.
And your sarcastic forecast for him pretty much proves that the wise move is either cry rape right away or shut up. There's nothing in going public that's going to make life better for her.
Frankly, the worst person in this story is the wife. Gaiman's just an asshole with hideous sexual preferences.
The texts had to be included, given that the writer knew about them. Here's a story about Gaiman raping this girl in a bathtub. Ok, here's a text sent by her the next day saying how much she enjoyed it and can't stop thinking about it and wants to do it again.
Gaiman and his people presumably have it, and if you have the bathtub story without it they can just drop it and talk about a hit piece and a lying former lover looking for a settlement. If you want to get any traction at all you have to include it and try to excuse it.
Including the exculpatory evidence is what makes it an evenhanded piece.
I wish NY Mag had done a deep dive into the hokum of Huberman's content, and make it an indictment of the industry writ large. I have smart friends who have been so ear wormed by what he has to say, that it drives me bonkers.
The Gaiman stuff is just beyond the beyond awful. So funny to watch people on here defend him and calling these blatant tales of assault and rape as consensual. Wonder if these same folks feel that way about Bill Clinton's abuse of Monica Lewinsky?
How is the Lewinsky Clinton affair anything but consensual on both sides?
I'd agree that Lewinsky & Clinton's sexual affair was consensual.
The abuse came afterward, as I see it, in the scapegoating of Lewinsky—mostly at the hands of Hillary Clinton.
This was one of the reasons why I refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. She totally vilified a very young, very naive woman for political gain. No real feminist does that.
They aren't blatant tales of assault and rape. They were consensual, and the same is true about Bill Clinton's blowjobs from, not abuse of, Monica Lewinsky.
This is such crap. The law has to assume everyone is an equal adult, and it's such garbage to argue that she was so powerless she couldn't say no.
And injunctions against them are in no way codified. As a rule, if they get to a jury, the jury cries horseshit.
Clearly, nobody's ever pressured YOU for sex. (And I'm not surprised.)
Also, you don't read very carefully. I said "all but codified." It _has_ been codified in practically every academic environment, in many corporate settings, & in the military where officers are strictly prohibited from having sexual relationships with enlisted personnel.
We can disagree about how much sympathy to pour like syrup on a young sponger, but the fact that injunctions against consensual sex with adults are "all but codified" is not a matter of opinion.
Whatevs, dude. Good luck reaching Level 2500 in Leagues of Legend!
That's not legal codification. It's corporate policy. That's not "all but codified".
She’s a strange, inconsistent voice. But, unless she lied about every detail, he still assaulted his unpaid, young, isolated babysitter, had an intensely violent bdsm relationship with someone who would be homeless without him, and had sex with her in the same room as his son(!). And she’s the second woman who accused him of trying to do something sexual next to his son.
" someone who would be homeless without him"
No. She was his kid's nanny. And banging the nanny is a long-established path of infidelity.
They didn’t pay her!
She was clearly working for room and board.
And by the way, her whole life story is squick. Wander around looking for people to glom on to and feel important because famous people let you do chores for them?
Paying someone in room and board is normally a crime in and of itself. And, if you can’t understand why having a violent BDSM relationship with someone who’s your live in unpaid nanny is abhorrent, I really don’t know what to tell you. I feel sorry for your mum.
I guess I'll just come out and say it.
I worked for Gaiman and Palmer very briefly about a decade ago, and came away with a very good impression of the guy. He came across as remarkably down to earth and respectful for such a famous, wealthy person. Famous, wealthy people don't typically assist the help when it comes to basic technical, physical tasks that help everyone involved in a situation, but when Gaiman helped us set up an air conditioning unit in a hot theater, it seemed like this was just his normal way of doing things. He didn't hesitate to lend a hand.
For the record Gaiman and Palmer (who frankly came across as considerably less approachable than Gaiman) also paid me better than I've ever been paid to work an "artistic" job (generally speaking, one is financially much better off working freelance for big corporations).
This was also around the time I myself was near homeless, and had unfortunately been taken in and "assisted" by some very unscrupulous, dysfunctional people, so I was no stranger to being taken advantage of by assholes myself. Does this mean that I might have been primed to be duped by someone like Gaiman, or does it mean that I was seeing the real contrast in his character as opposed to others that I was realizing weren't trustworthy after all? Well, you can decide.
Of course you can only know so much about someone from what really amounts to less than an hour of real interaction, and I guess to some extent I'm a biased voice here. On the other hand, I'm also (regrettably) very familiar with the sorts of milieus that Gaiman and Palmer spent a lot of their time involved with.
I understand that several women have made allegations against Gaiman, but this passage gives me pause:
"The kind of domineering violence he inflicted on them is common among people who practice BDSM, and all of the women, at some point, played along, calling him their master, texting him afterward that they needed him, even writing that they loved and missed him."
Given the sorts of women who hang around in these scenes, it doesn't seem at all far fetched to me that Gaiman might have involved himself consensually with several women who in some way felt violated, jilted, or weirded out by him, who rewrote, recast, or re-characterized their memories of how things played out after the fact, and are now seeking some personal benefit, attention, or vengeance.
Consider the Pavlovich selfies included here. Bedroom eyes on the bathroom floor in front of a toilet? Even the haircut gives me flashbacks to a particular sort of troubled woman. I don't mean to be prejudiced, but aesthetic patterns like these sometimes are indicative of real phenomena.
I specifically made a point to end my involvement in these sorts of scenes because oft the way that male guilt was so often assumed from the get go - it became a kind of omnipresent background factor in the midst of a social mania - and the way that they were a minefield of women (and some men) with cluster b personality disorder traits. I saw how dysfunctional all of this was (and it was extremely dysfunctional), and how many people were getting hurt as a result of the ludicrous deference to women (and people of various minority statuses) who claimed victimhood that became standard practice.
Keep in mind the Pavlovich story takes place in 2020. Do you remember the left-of-center cultural environment in 2020? I do.
As the story's written, it sounds like Pavlovich wasn't prepared to call any of what happened sexual assault or rape even when a couple of her friends, one of whom, based on a quick google search, appears to be something of male feminist, told her that they believed it was. In fact her text messages, considered alone, paint precisely the opposite picture. She even told Gaimain it was "consensual (and wonderful)!" after that, and said that she thought the other friend had been, "triggered by something."
Even backing up to the beginning of the story, because I think it's kind of an important point: if, after a sexual encounter, a man receives a text from the woman involved that says, "I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry. What a terrible creature you’ve turned me into," who then proceeds to come to him and stay at his house, what impression do you think he's going to get of the way he's been interacting with that woman and how acceptable and consensual it is?
Leaving aside the way the police threw the case out, it was only after Palmer decided it was best for Pavlovich not to return as a babysitter that she apparently started seeing whatever happened as sexual assault.
I think a lot of people are standing back from this one not only because of general metoo fatigue, but also because Gaiman publicly cast himself as a male feminist during the height of metoo. They see what looks like the movement turning on itself and say to themselves, "well, good riddance; these people were mostly hypocrites in the first place. Let them tear themselves apart."
But not all male feminists are secret predator/creeps. The bulk of them are just socially naive and/or have issues with asserting boundaries and keeping dysfunctional women at a safe distance. Could this be what it looks like when one of the latter is wealthy, famous, and revered, and generally deals with women throwing themselves at him?
In any event, even if the stuff about the kid in the room isn't true, there's probably a good argument to be made that kids shouldn't be exposed to these sorts of libertine relationships in the first place.
I'm not Gaiman's defense attorney in the court of public opinion, and for all I know he's entirely guilty here, but the past several years have also made it abundantly clear that salacious stories like these need to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.
https://archive.ph/lgX09#selection-2173.504-2173.765
I can understand the point generally, but what’s described in that article is far out of bounds, and the sense I got was that the dysfunction and blurred lines was a vulnerability a predator took advantage of.
He had an unpaid resident-employee who was way younger than him, socially isolated, and frankly an oddball that he was having extreme, violent sex with.
Whether she consented or not, she says he had sex with her while his young son was in the room — that’s abuse of the son, if nothing else, and the second (!) accusation of him trying to engage sexually while his son was in the room.
A second woman accused him of penetrating her after she said no while she had a UTI.
He had a third financially dependent, newly divorced woman — who, btw, didn’t sound like some artsy bohemian — that he engaged sexually while she was lying on the bed with his son.
"Make of these passages what you will"
What I make of it is she decided she was raped long afterwards.
Did you ever write about the Aziz Ansari “allegations?” I feel that also very much fell into this category. Unfortunately that one happened very much at the peak of MeToo so I think it was taken way more seriously than if it happened even a year and a half later.
I remember some folks on Reddit used to use Aziz Ansari as a comedic unit of measurement for low-level MeToos. As in "Unpleasant but not criminal - I rate it at 4.3 Aziz Ansaris".
I think the piece was very badly reported, but the young woman in the piece refused and rebuffed Aziz multiple times after kissing.
I actually think it had the potential to be a far, far more useful piece of reporting that the one on Gaiman since that kind of behaviour is more common and not necessarily committed by (quite possibly) unreformable sociopaths. If handled better it could have prompted a lot of necessary self-reflection from many men and some 25% of women [relying on self-disclosure] going by this piece of research:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10707600_Tactics_of_sexual_coercion_When_men_and_women_won't_take_no_for_an_answer
Seriously, //fuck// Gaiman and (sadly for me, I basically like her and The Dresden Dolls) Palmer too. I really can't see seperating the art from the artist here and I definitely won't want to ever send a penny of my money either of their ways again at the very least.
The Anzari scenario to me in no way warranted the tone of coverage and level of reactions and consequences it got. Trying again to kiss a few times after some initial hesitation then eventually apologizing and stopping? The fact it was so common a thing to do is exactly why it had no potential to be useful as guidance on what people should be made post children for and potentially cancelled over.
Since all stories must turn on the idea of power, now, I find I am able to imagine an alternate scenario where Ansari - not an objectively attractive individual, though of course that doesn't mean he couldn't like all people, come to be seen so upon acquaintance - is the one with the least "power". For starters, owing to age and gender, he would have been more, uh, sexually frustrated than the young woman. Placing him in a position of need - not exactly powerful. Secondarily, he is presumably clever enough to know that she was in his apartment only because of his celebrity. We used to have pity on people for whom the wanting was one-sided. I guess changes in sexual mores - girls going on first acquaintance to apartments in the middle of the night and so on - mean we cannot afford to extend that pity, or empathy, anymore. We must be so hard on violation that a few unwanted kisses should be turned into a public humiliation. I'm impressed he came through it intact. I guess I should add the obligatory, I am impressed the young woman managed to survive this terrible nightmare as well.
You missed the obvious one of he’s not white and the woman I get the sense was.
It crossed my mind but I thought that particular would drown out the universal.
I wrote about it and I agree re Ansari. That was really bizarre and unfortunate timing indeed. I wrote, in essence, that we need to teach young women that in fact, you can just call a cab and leave.
Freddie, Now here's an angle that NEVER gets discussed, germane to this piece. When I started hiring significant numbers of employees who travel, I assumed that there would be lots of footsie played by the "traveling salesman" types (even though mostly not salesmen) we were putting in the field. And I was not disappointed...there was surely a share of those who had a woman in every port.
But the giant surprise to me was that far more of the women who were on the staff were playing footsie than the men. My illusions were all shattered pretty hard...it just never crossed my mind. The women tended to have one consistent "friend" in every port more then the men who would take whatever came along, but there were more women messing about than men.
Yet no one ever covers this...not enough "Me, Too" about it I guess. But this is all the human condition and infidelity, whatever that may be and however one defines it, is definitely NOT a male trait -- just a human one. But it took real experience to take off my blinders.
It's not covered because we've been conditioned that whatever women do is fine, empowering even, no matter how manipulative or even immoral. And men need to be policed, constantly. It's fucking insane
No, we haven't been conditioned to believe that. I bet we'd agree on plenty of of your double standard thoughts, but what you wrote is just so overheated.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man....
I guess the reason I disagree with you is that both you and I haven't been conditioned in those ways. And when I think of the very, very many people I know, I know the majority of them aren't conditioned in that way either.
But if you're saying that there is a reasonable segment of the population conditioned in that way, I'd agree with you on that.
I don't know what's gained in radically overstating the truth.
There is definitely a movement afoot to hold women and racial minorities as morally superior. I would agree that it hasn't gotten far because it is batshit insane.
The 'majority of people' don't hold institutional power, don't control the levers of propaganda, don't travel in Academia, don't hold political positions, and don't direct narrative via media.
THATS THE POINT, Micky!
What is there to discuss?
Do you want newspaper articles about the infidelities of your travelling saleswomen? I imagine not, but you're responding to a post about news articles, and I'm not sure what else you could have in mind.
Back when I was traveling the only time I got laid on the road was when a saleslady picked me up in the bar at either a Hilton Garden Inn or a Hyatt Place close to Lubbock.
The Huberman story was a shocking reveal that nobody on New York's masthead has ever had a roster.
I've vaguely heard about the allegations against Gaiman and have been uncertain how seriously to take them, largely because things like the Huberman article exist. Seems like the best strategy is to suspend judgment and wait for a while to see if there's another shoe to drop.
Andrew Huberman was punished for the crime of resembling Joe Rogan.
The thing is he’s nothing like Joe Rogan, his show isn’t at least. Hubermans credentials are the real deal, and everything he talks about is backed by studies. He’s also always transparent about the relative strength of the evidence, and his messaging is always something like “here’s a study that shows X improved Y in lab mice, we still need to do human trials but you can give it a try yourself if you’re looking for something to help you with Y”. It’s never selling miracle cures or anything that could be remotely dangerous. He also has a feedback message box on his website incase he misrepresents any of the science, and has issued corrections in the past from it. He only started selling supplements after years of his listeners asking him for it.
People hate him because he’s high agency, and they have brains poisoned by cynicism. They hate that his goal is helping people take responsibility & control of their life, bc they think everything is a result of outside forces they have no control over.
Anyone who knows anything about clinical science would be embarrassed to promote trash studies the way Huberman does
Care to give a specific example?
I haven’t listened to him in like 2 years so perhaps he’s lost it, but I always felt this criticism was complete garbage because he’s always transparent about the power of studies and the relative strength of evidence for a claim. He’s wayyyyy more transparent and nuanced in his communication than the mainstream media is when they write articles on science. The science reporting in a lot of media is often atrociously misleading. Plus half his episodes are other researchers discussing their work.
The fact that he may get something wrong or unintentionally misrepresent the strength of a study is expected from anyone walking the tightrope of communicating science to a popular audience on a wide variety of health topics via 2+ hour discussions a few times a week. The bottom line is that he walks that tightrope better than anyone else. The fact that some people are too stupid to parse the nuance in the information he delivers and take everything he says as gospel also isn’t his problem.
I don't have a specific example to mind because I'm in the same boat where it's been years since I paid attention to him. My recollection of his style was to take a small-n in-vitro or animal model study and then wildly extrapolate from that to giving health advice. I'd imagine you'll dispute the "wildly", but that was my honest impression. The one extended interview I do remember was when he went on Peter attia's show, and that appearance was so bad I actually lost some respect for attia for putting up with his bullshit. The last time I remember hearing about him was when he got some Internet buzz for promoting butthole tanning as a health protocol, which doesn't make me believe he's changed his ways.
In other words, you can't name anything in specific.
The bullshit he was spitting on the attia interview was about circadian rhythms and light exposure, you can look it up if you're curious. It was an observational study, not an experiment, hence why I don't put any stock in it. Not really sure why you feel the need to defend a guy you decided a couple years ago wasn't worth paying attention to
He’s always clear when it’s a study on mice or a small study and needs more data. He’s also very deliberate in looking at research that will be low/zero cost and essentially zero risk. That’s the whole point of the show. So it’s not like hes telling people to snort cocaine to enhance athletic performance, even though there’s probably some studies that support that.
His typical presentation looks like this. (This is a completely made up example for the sake of argument). Say the episode is on improving cardio endurance, distance running etc. He might share a study that’s like “a study of 35 college students at the University of Virginia from Dr John Smith found that a shot of vinegar an hour before running showed an increased lung capacity of an average of 7%”. He will then describe any potential, theoretical mechanism of action that could make this result plausible, and add disclaimers that this is a tiny study and way more research needs to be done to establish a firm connection. I think the thing that makes people mad is he will then encourage people to go try to shot of vinegar anyway, see if it works for them. If you train regularly, and are looking to shave 30 seconds off your 5k time, here’s something small you can add to your routine that has a tiny bit of evidence supporting it. See if it works for you. The thing is that people, especially athletes who are looking for marginal improvements in performance, find all kinds of weird things that help them individually. Huberman gives people who want to make marginal improvements some direction, some options to try that have at least some degree of established scientific basis.
He never told people to “tan buttholes” lol. That whole framing is just a bad faith attempt to discredit his project. Ironically, it originates from one of his most rock solid, utterly uncontroversial claims: getting sunlight is essential to a healthy hormonal balance. Sun exposure is good for testosterone levels, and more direct exposure of sunlight on to skin is going to be better than clothed, all things equal. Therefore, Sun your balls.
Here's my specific example of why I like Huberman. A while ago I listened to him do a long interview with a scientist who studies the way muscles use energy. This guy had a unifying story that it was all carbon atoms: you eat molecules with lots of carbon atoms stuck together, get energy by pulling them apart, and then expel the solitary carbon atoms as CO2. The interesting part was the hodgepodge of mechanisms muscles had for breaking down the organic molecules—this kind of muscle fiber does it this way while this other kind of muscles fiber uses some slightly different mechanism. Then they'd tie these processes back to different workout strategies. Everything was presented as being 100% true, but that was okay. I'm a big boy, I don't need to be reminded that all scientific knowledge is provisional and much of it is controversial. Their conversation was free of gee-whiz sensationalism, metaphor taken as literal truth, and outrageous self-help claims. It sounded like two experts talking shop, and it was fascinating to listen in on.
I don't have the expertise to evaluate the scientific accuracy of claims about muscle physiology, but I've worked in a couple scientific fields now and am particularly sensitive to the poor job the popular press does in reporting science. It generally takes the most sensational tack, turning the hype up to 11. Sometimes I'll go and read the abstract of the paper that's being misrepresented, and all the wild claims the story is reporting are toned-down, reasonable, and properly qualified. Recently Freddie had a post about the poor job the press does on science reporting that sums things up well. Plus I currently work in machine learning/artificial intelligence, so I have a clear idea of the gap between reality and bad reporting.
My sense is that Huberman doesn't make these mistakes. He's popularizer in the Stephen J. Gould/Oliver Sacks mold and he's good at it. Everything I've heard from him passes my sniff test and I too would need some specific examples to change my mind.
True, but he resembles Joe Rogan in that he's an athletic fifty-something white man with a very masculine bearing. (And high-agency. That's a good way to put it.) Someone fitting that profile is supposed to be the bad guy, but Huberman has the audacity to be soft-spoken and reasonable. He's even a professor at Stanford, so you can't hit him with the dumb jock stereotype.
Part of the resentment against Rogan and Huberman is professional jealousy. Newspaper and magazine business models got killed by the internet, and Rogan and Huberman are very good at a media form that is filling a lot of the space they used to occupy. Now the route to being a quasi public-intellectual media star is through podcasting, not long-form magazine journalism. That's a different skill set: talking instead of writing. (And don't think it's not a skill. Try it yourself: get the friend you have the best conversations with and record yourselves discussing a topic of interest to you both and see how soon it gets grindingly dull. Most people can't last five minutes. That Rogan can make a meandering three hour conversation with pretty much anyone engaging is a kind of genius.)
You've spent your life trying to be Joan Didion, and then when you've achieved some professional success get the memo that there aren't going to be any more Joan Didions. (Jia Tolentino was the very last one. Sorry.) There's going to be a similar niche though, and the people currently filling it are these burly weight-lifter guys. The same kind of jocks that back in high school inspired a lifelong quest for cultural superiority are now CULTURALLY SUPERIOR to you as well. It's gotta hurt.
Couldn't "the team at _New York_" (possibly rationally) speculate that the right kind of juicy story... spiked with just enough manly masculine scum-funk to be sexy and not so much ape-brain agency violation as to be a turn off.. might be the most effective engagement vehicle for their entertainment products?
Perhaps the marketing department is disappointed that the Gaiman saga has turned too bleak and too dark to really "get there" with the readers.
There is no downside for these magazines to publish anything about anyone in the social media / influencer sphere, the more salacious the better. There is particularly no downside for obnoxious progressive women to claim "toxic, masculine" scalps.
I disagree entirely that there is a quantitative difference between Neil Gaiman and Andrew Huberman, however. Allegations, particularly those unsubstantiated through legitimate criminal proceedings, are the putrid exhalations of a dying media who use such narratives to construct an extralegal hangman's noose for their targets. Lawfare conducted via regime media is still lawfare.
Seems a lot of ppl love to utilize concept creep when it comes to sexual interactions btwn heterosexual men and women.
As usual, it's a power move intended to nullify integrity and character.
Continuing to listen to and/or pay attention to the Acela Corridor chattering class is as futile as listening to Hollywood. We should prob just stop.
I’m shocked and disgusted a Gaiman would do that to women.
The problem with the Ansaris and Hubermans getting MeToo'd is hard to overstate.
Adult readers know that the ethics and legality of human behaviour exists on a spectrum, so they're always going to want to come to their own conclusions. They require facts, accurate terminology and balanced reporting with as little bias as possible. That gradually became increasingly rare from the '80s until MeToo, which was the end of that road.
Once the news industry had discarded journalism in favour of activism, there was too little chance of reward for readers for spending their time reading those pieces. Leaving only prurient interest. No Thanks.
So many of us will never know for ourselves whether Gaiman and others since have committed crimes or merely broken taboos.
Spectrum we can't. Too hard. Black or white!
"[That successful men sometimes see lots of women at the same time] is not criminal, and it is not in the same category of sexual harassment or assault."
I don't even think it's in the category of "interesting."
You're probably right about sunk costs. If they knew from the start that what they ended up with was all there was, I wonder if they'd have run any story at all. Never mind giving it the full MeToo.
It really isn't. I guess I thought it was pretty conventional in re - e.g. - professional athletes.
Glad to know I was mistaken!
The past kind of puts us to shame on this sort of thing. H.L. Hunt having 15 children with three wives, not all parties knowing about the others - that was pretty interesting, at least regionally.
The Gaiman article (which is absolutely horrifying and revolting - one of the best cases for a trigger warning I've ever seen) brings to mind the Robert Caro quote about how power doesn't corrupt, it reveals. Once you're a rich, powerful man, and feel shielded against all possible consequences, both personal and legal, you can be who you always want to be.
The thing is, these things operate on a bell curve, and most people's deep, dark secrets are disturbingly vanilla (something which is clear if you've ever read one of those Pornhub year-in-review articles). Most straight men want to be desired by attractive younger women - multiple ones at the same time even. And if you're especially inconsiderate, maybe you don't even care that much about the feelings you hurt along the way.
There's a whole spectrum on the slippery slope downward to actual sexual assault. Some guys are undoubtedly self-delusional enough that they'll not see cajoling someone into sexual contact for what it is. Then there's those who just don't care about consent, dubious or otherwise, at all - which is atrocious, of course.
But the Gaiman stuff - that's on another level. It's so monstrous that it makes legitimately awful cases like Cosby seem tame. At least Cosby didn't force women to eat their own shit and vomit, or rape a woman while his kid was in the room with his back turned. It's really so goddamned awful that it minimizes a lot of truly awful things that have happened to other women - and that, in and of itself, is disturbing.
"There's a whole spectrum on the slippery slope downward to actual sexual assault. Some guys are undoubtedly self-delusional enough that they'll not see cajoling someone into sexual contact for what it is. Then there's those who just don't care about consent, dubious or otherwise, at all - which is atrocious, of course."
This is the core right here to me. The spectrum you are describing simply does not include infidelity. It's like saying that speeding is on low end of the spectrum of violent crimes.
Infidelity isn't sexual assault, but if you use lies to obtain sex, you can't really argue your partner is giving informed consent, can you?
"That's my Porsche outside."
I do think this argument isn't considered enough. If most people knew their partner was sleeping with someone else, they wouldn't continue to sleep with them, especially when we bring undisclosed (or unknown by the person engaged in the infidelity) STDs and STIs into the mix.
It’s still not rape, though
I don't think you can make a hard and fast rule here. If having sex with someone drunk but not passed out is rape, I think, for example, pretending to be someone else (like your identical twin, tricking someone in the dark/blindfolded, ect.) is as well.
Sure, though the identical twin thing would be pretty funny
I suspect that the pervier you are, the more getting that kind of power is attractive, imperative, even.
It was undeniably shocking. That is to say, I was expecting something much milder. I've never even looked into his fiction, though I once very much enjoyed listening to him read aloud with great aplomb Charles Dickens' "American tour reading copy" of "A Christmas Carol". It would be a shame if that must be taken down from "Open Culture". But I've known admirers of him, all female.
I was just describing this to a companion, without naming names, in order to make some dull observation - and finally he was like, who are you talking about? "Neil Gaiman".
"Neil Gaiman is a pervert? I'm shocked! Shocked to learn that Neil Gaiman is a pervert," he laughed.
Still, it is interesting to note the reason his lady admirers, particularly, were so unsettled by the news:
"By then, he had a reputation as an outspoken champion of women. 'Gaiman insists on telling the stories of people who are traditionally marginalized, missing, or silenced in literature,' wrote Tara Prescott-Johnson in the essay collection Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman. Although his books abounded with stories of men torturing, raping, and murdering women, this was largely perceived as evidence of his empathy."
I am not the biggest Gaiman fan, though I have some of his work. Neverwhere, American Gods, and Anansi Boys.
I am generally not a believer that it's worth getting rid of things you already own from (legitimately) "canceled" people, so long as you don't spend money on anything new. But in this particular case, I feel like there's a stain on my shelves, and I've been fighting the urge to burn the books in effigy.
What I remember from the Huberman article was it also questioned the existence of his "lab" and his business relationship to AG1, a nutritional supplement supported by tenuous research. I don't think being completely unfamiliar with his content is a virtue when it comes to why the article punctured his brand so effectively. His content was fully intertwined with his image, and that wasn't something people projected onto the podcast, it was encouraged by no one more than Huberman.
I actually think what Huberman did was really bad. You seem to be using a bespoke definition of misconduct here. Shitty behavior doesn't need to be legally actionable to be called misconduct.
Does it rise to the level of deserving an article?
Do you think it's newsworthy for someone to be pretending they run a lab when they don't and then using the pretense of that lab as credibility for their science podcast (and as a representative target of funding provided by listeners)? Have you read the article on Huberman?
How in the world does it make sense to mix that up in an article about his serial dating? Doesn't that sound like the writer had an axe to grind and threw everything they could find into one article, no matter how trivial?
What makes you think the article was only about his serial dating? Third-party ruminations as opposed to... actually reading it?
The article should have been about one or the other instead of a hit piece that threw in everything and the kitchen sink. It just displays the writer's desperation to nail Huberman on something, anything.
Then write an article just about that and not the serial dating crap.
Or write about all of it under a more general thesis, which is exactly what the article did
Why not discuss his terrible handwriting and lousy choice in streaming shows as well?
I read and enjoyed the Huberman article, so I guess yeah, I think it did warrant being printed
I think Mark Halperin suggested that what was really damming about the Biden senility story and the WH press corps(e) is that it was the perfect opportunity for an ambitious young reporter to make his or her bones. Instead the media was just compliant and passive.
It's hard not to see these reports of writers trying to turn molehill into mountains and not wonder if it's because the incentives are all messed up.