Neil Gaiman, ‘Babygirl’ and the Ethics of Social Liberalism

It is clichéd-sounding but still accurate to say that the allegations of sexual assault and abuse against the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, as recounted in a New York magazine cover story by Lila Shapiro, read like a gothic tale invented by a writer like Gaiman himself.

Here you have the traditional stereotype of gothic masculinity: Black-clad, wealthy, long of face, creative, hanging out on the edges of civilization (New Zealand, the Isle of Skye, upstate New York), with a mysterious semi-estranged spouse (evoking the first Mrs. Rochester or de Winter, but much more in the picture), and some kind of buried secret trauma (related to Scientology, apparently) to torment him. Then the traditional gothic questions — Is he a good man underneath? Can the heroine trust him? Is she safe with him? — give way to answers out of horror, not romance: No, the allegations say; he’s monstrous, cruel, abusive and perverse.

But this paragraph from the story is a bit harder to imagine appearing in a Gothic novel:

Last spring I wrote a column about the novel kind of sexual morality that social liberalism finds itself cultivating today. Recoiling from Hefnerian permissiveness, returning in certain ways to older critiques of (mostly male) predation, but still wary of traditional norms of chastity and monogamy and determined to retain its faith in sexual liberation, liberalism (or, at least, its would-be vanguard) has ended up with a peculiarly managerial attitude toward human sexuality. In this worldview, almost everything is permissible so long as it is adequately litigated and consented to in advance: adultery if the polycule’s rules are set to everybody’s satisfaction, sadism and masochism if the norms of express and enthusiastic consent are honored, fornication between consenting adults in all circumstances save when age gaps or power imbalances seem to make fair litigation suspect.

In that essay, I did a combined reading of several New York magazine cover stories to discern the outlines of this ethic, but the Gaiman piece gives you the same tangle in a single story. You have a set of allegations that includes accusations of sexual assault (which Gaiman denies; in a statement on Tuesday, he said “I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone”), but whose context also reveals the inadequacy of bare consent as the lone restraint in situations involving celebrity, power, dominance. But then you also have the need to shield and even rationalize not just libertinism but certain very specific forms of outré conduct from broader judgment. There can’t be any general problem with sadism and masochism as sexual appetites, any more than there can be a general problem with open marriages or promiscuity or any other liberated practice.

No, where the system breaks down, when bad things happen, it’s because of a failure to establish appropriate parameters, or a refusal to abide by the therapeutic rules — even when, as with the allegations against Gaiman, the entire surrounding story underscores just how hard it can be to constrain a predator’s behavior or litigate the murky landscape of power and desire.

To understand the ideal that all this litigation is trying to protect, it’s useful to watch the new Nicole Kidman vehicle “Babygirl” (though I don’t recommend it otherwise, and, fair warning, spoilers follow). Marketed as an erotic thriller, it’s really a story about self-actualization, in which a married, middle-aged woman who is a powerful executive finds sexual fulfillment, presumably for the first time in her life, through a B.D.S.M. relationship with a male intern. This transgressive relationship threatens to overturn her perfect lean-in world, but in the end its effect is redemptive, not destructive: Her marriage is not wrecked, but saved, not least because her husband finally begins to offer her the sexual domination that she’s always craved.