sexual violence by famous author, autism as excuse
Listening to the story of one of Neil Gaiman's victims (who used the name "Claire") and Oh FUCKING HELL Gaiman tried to claim his autism as an excuse for assault? https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/s4-ep2-claire-i-ignored-it-and-i-believed-him-because/id1491575384?i=1000663604978 (about 11:05 into the episode if you have the stomach for it, no transcript that I could find)
That is so fucking beyond the pale and I want to throw up at how dangerous this rhetoric is for autistic people who don't have the power and privileges he does. I'm so grateful Claire had absolutely none of it, pointing out that having difficulty reading social cues had Jack and also Schitt to do with his ignoring her when she actively tried to push him away, and that autistic people are likelier to be victimized than be perpetrators. Holy hell am I sick of autism being claimed as an excuse for shitty (mostly) male behavior. If I had by some chance held on to any scrap of respect for Gaiman I would have lost it all by this point.
sexual violence by famous author, narrative thoughts (long)
(also creepy creepy author/predator influence)
Claire's recollection of her visit to Gaiman's mansion, of this scared and brave young woman as she walked into the insidiously entrapping and entangling space ruled by her rich and powerful "god"--yes, she and the host use the word several times to refer to him--feels like something out of the tradition of Gothic horror of which Gaiman himself is a part. And he is a frankly acknowledged influence, with Claire having grown up reading his stories and listening to his voice on audiobook from childhood on (ew ew ew ew ew).
She called him "the storyteller" and recounts how she believed the narrative he spun around them as she believed in his other stories, but honestly I find her account in this one podcast episode more compelling than everything I ever read by him put together; I was never a huge fan but did read much of the Sandman and a few short stories.
One critique of Gaiman that has stuck with me is that he writes stories about "running away with the fairies," where the supernatural and larger-than-life is always more real, more worthy, and more powerful for being supernatural. There's nothing wrong with that in of itself, of course, no moral superiority in choice of entertainment, but I did find a stark contrast in which Claire repeated that her healing was a journey back to reality. She went from believing his story about how she had wanted him and used him and it was her fault, to her own that she had known in her body all along, that he had groomed and influenced her to do things she didn't want, taking advantage--even unintentionally, though I highly doubt it--the enormous sway he had over her. He took her to the land of the made-up and she made her way back, saddened and hurt by the experience but not broken, as she put it at the end.
His sexual pursuit of Claire persisted, by the way, despite her explicitly telling him before her visit that she didn't want to have sex. This is another reason he can eat shit with his shitty fucking autism-as-excuse: I do not know or care to know a single person, autistic or not, who would not have dropped any thought of sex on someone young enough to be their daughter putting it so clearly to them, not without an EXTENSIVE and EXTENDED persuasion that the person had changed their mind.
It also strikes me how one aspect of his manifestation in Claire's healing process was to show up in her dreams, including during her pregnancy (again, EW GET OUT), which is oddly and sadly fitting for a man who wrote a huge series about the lord of dreams. She fought her way out of the murky depths of a nightmare spun by a predator who shaped so much of her better dreams, to emerge into her lived reality, returning from Fairyland to solid earth, to all the pain, grief, love, and kindness found there.
She called him "the storyteller," but there were two storytellers in this tale and I know which I respect and believe. Her journey and her triumph was in her courage to believe her story over his.
sexual violence by famous author, narrative thoughts (long)
@ljwrites re: the whole “Neil didn’t know what he was doing” spiel, he posted in two thousand FOUR about how he identifies with the wolf from red riding hood because it “makes the story happen” and explicitly acknowledges the stories rapey overtones. So like, he’s literally told us himself he identifies with rapists?
sexual violence by famous author, narrative thoughts (long)
@Satsuma Idk. Sure, I can see it as a red flag in retrospect, but in isolation it feels like an ordinary writerly observation.
It's just -- I know SO MANY people, including myself, who have weird/creepy fantasies/obsessions. I know furries who are into vore and it's not because they want to do RL murder and cannibalism. I don't want to go "How could you not KNOW they were an RL criminal when they fantasized about [awful thing]???"
sexual violence by famous author, narrative thoughts (long)
@Satsuma @rowyn yeah, this line is disturbing in hindsight. "The wolf defines Red Riding Hood. He makes the story happen. Without him, she'd just be another girl on her way to her grandmother's house." There are a lot of unfortunate echoes in this one little essay of the way he spoke to Claire and what he showed of his thought process, constantly bragging about how rich and important he is and putting her down in comparison. A world-famous rich man in his 50s to a 22 year old fan--pathetic.
Of course, someone making the exact same analysis could well be a great person and no literary analysis can be taken in isolation. But yeah, I never quite vibed with him--guy always seemed too full of himself, even in his stories.
sexual violence by famous author, narrative thoughts (long)
@ljwrites to be clear, you can tell just from his victims own narratives he knows what he’s doing and he’s lost the right to tell his own stories about himself on this subject with his heinous actions
but its pretty creepy how he was able to just basically come out and say it and no one…cared