Neil Gaiman, #MeToo, and the Moral Crisis of BDSM

How the normalization of sadomasochism exposes the dangers of a society unmoored from traditional values

Given recent events in the literary world, we have to talk about consent—and BDSM.

Last week, we learned that everybody’s favorite author of grim fantasy novels—Neil Gaiman—is actually somewhat of a cosmic horror himself. Gaiman, the beloved mastermind behind Coraline and The Sandman, has now been accused of sexual assault by a score of different women he encountered at various points in his life. The accounts vary both in level of detail and egregiousness of sin, yet they all have one thread in common: the presence of BDSM. This peculiar resurgence of the #MeToo movement in the literary community—addled as it is by the morally questionable practice of sadomasochism—presents not only a cautionary tale about the ills of male predation but also sheds light on the rapid decay of traditional values in our society—especially in the far-left literary world—and the urgency with which we must bring these values back into the moral spotlight.

Let me be clear (and let me be the first woman to say it outright): back in 2017, #MeToo did us much more harm than good. While this contentious awareness campaign raised valid questions about male aberrancies in our society and gave many rape victims the voices they needed to heal, the movement also preyed on innocent college boys in the wrong place at the wrong time and created a general culture of emasculation to the point where many men are now afraid to approach women even in the most benign of social settings. Women, on the other hand, have collectively distanced themselves from the male species, permanently rupturing male-female relationships through the belief that all men are hyper-sexualized beasts who exist simply to make them uncomfortable. And while #MeToo might have fallen to the sidelines over the past several years, the evidence of its permanent aftereffects is clear: relationships are on the decline, Gen Z is lonelier than ever, and we have created a quasi-dystopian world where men and women can no longer connect with one another. One must only briefly consider the state of sexual mores in our society to deduce that #MeToo is the natural consequence of a culture that hyper-scrutinizes sex and swaps out the sacred tenants of family and love for pleasure and degeneracy.

It is all too predictable, then, that Gaiman, the epitome of male degeneracy through his predilection for BDSM, has turned out to be a dangerous predator.

In July 2024, Tortoise Media published a brief piece accusing Gaiman of sexual assault when two women came forward to tell their stories. After following a similar event in the literary milieu in the wake of #MeToo with writer Sherman Alexie, an author I have deeply admired since childhood who was slammed with somewhat vague and likely apocryphal allegations of sexual assault in 2018, I was prepared to roll my eyes again at yet another set of women trying to ruin a decent man’s life in the supposed name of feminism. Yet opening New York Magazine’s Vulture article on Gaiman several days ago, I had a sense that this particular #MeToo moment was different—and not just because Gaiman, the author of many darkly brooding fantastical novels, is exactly the sort of person you might expect to embody the rapey badboy. What Lila Shapiro’s cover piece for New York Magazine described was not a kiss made in passing that might have been easily misinterpreted as non-consensual—it was a man’s continual obsession with BDSM.

Shapiro’s coverage of Gaiman’s sadistic tendencies is rightfully apprehensive. Because we live in a culture that has completely normalized the sort of sexual activities that men of Sigmund Freud’s day—or, indeed, Freud himself—might have described as “a great danger,” Shapiro lets not a sentence slip by without legitimizing the practice of BDSM, claiming, for instance, that there is a “crucial difference between BDSM and what Gaiman was doing” and justifying the prevalence of BDSM culture by citing its “long-standing norms.” Yet beyond Shapiro’s piece, Gaiman’s sexual proclivities have sparked a much-needed conversation on the morality of BDSM and the way in which we have allowed increasingly disturbing sexual acts to permeate our culture.

Writing for UnHerd, Kathleen Stock describes the dangers of supposedly consensual BDSM and how this behavior relates to Gaiman’s story. I first stumbled on Stock’s article before reading the full piece in Vulture, and after learning that Scarlett Pavlovich, the young woman whom Gaiman assaulted, was a friend of Gaiman’s wife, my gut reaction was to wonder where the wife stood in this whole ordeal—a natural reaction for someone who operates in the world of Judeo-Christian morality and condemns the practice of adultery. Yet after a quick Google search, I found that Gaiman and his wife Amanda Palmer have been in an open relationship for the entirety of their marriage and routinely encourage each other to seek external sexual partners. What this told me immediately was that Gaiman, a man of loose morals, was naturally the type to grow into a sexual deviant—because for what other reason might you get married to someone and then insist on continuing to sleep around? It is no surprise that Gaiman gravitated seemingly uncontrollably toward BDSM: lacking a strict moral code to guide his behavior, he preyed continually on innocent women through the most violent means possible, excusing his actions under the guide of allegedly consensual sadomasochistic activity.

Yet can BDSM, the epitome of “consensual non-consent,” really be consensual? Stock, for one, is skeptical. “The fantasy that violence somehow becomes neutral or even good when accompanied by a resounding ‘yes’ is crazy when you actually think about it,” she writes. “The whole point of BDSM is to mess around in the borderlands between yes and no.” BDSM might be more dangerous than we have been led to believe, yet those on the progressive left (though I take issue with the claim that a faction that advocates for a return to pre-biblical polygamy and relationship violence is at all progressive) unwaveringly maintain that there is nothing wrong with two consenting adults indulging whatever kinks suit their imagination. And while there might not be any such implications on a legal level, from a moral standpoint, there can be nothing more unthinkable: treating someone you purport to love with so steep a degree of disrespect and even violence creates no end of cognitive dissonance and encourages the sort of predatory behavior that several women have now described in Gaiman—that is to say, it is only natural that Gaiman, engaging in so-called “consensual” BDSM with a wide variety of sex partners, would then devolve into nonconsensual BDSM. As Stock observes, with a submissive party whose agency is necessarily “undermined” as part of the act, is there really a difference between consensual and non-consensual BDSM?

In other words, BDSM, a practice disproportionately admired by the so-called progressive left, creates no end of morally gray dilemmas—in no way, therefore, can it be morally virtuous. Stock points out, for instance, that prolonged exposure to “aggression and humiliation, insults, gaslighting, [and] negging” is likely to undermine a person’s secure sense of self, eliminating the possibility for consent even in a supposedly consensual setting. In this case, Gaiman was unambiguously in the wrong, but we can only imagine how many more unknowing women who consented to severe acts of degradation will later think back on such events in sheer disgust—and wonder whether consent was truly possible in a scenario that willfully strips a woman of her autonomy. Yes, Gaiman is fully to blame for coercing these women into sexual activity, yet to pretend that a culture that encourages BDSM was not somewhat responsible for his prolonged aggression is to deny the very psychological consequences that arise from the pursuit of sadomasochism. All of this is to say that of course the literary world, which routinely encourages and even celebrates BDSM, would create a man like Gaiman—a man with no respect for the institution of marriage, family values, or female autonomy who derives pleasure from seeing women in utterly degrading and humiliating situations.

The case of Gaiman should therefore be a cautionary tale. Without a society that promotes traditional values—without a world where men treat women with the utmost respect, especially in the bedroom—we risk severely damaging our women, if not physically then psychologically. As journalist

Kat Rosenfield

observes, Gaiman’s situation is partially “an unfortunate side effect of all our traditional sexual mores having been discarded in favor of vapid, anything-goes sex positivity with a monomaniacal focus on consent.” Touché. With a society that fails to separate the good and the virtuous from the morally questionable, touting BDSM—an act that in any normal circumstance would be an abhorrent demonstration of humiliation and violence—as a morally virtuous activity only leads the women engaged in such acts with severe confusion, for, as Rosenfield remarks, “we barely even have the vocabulary anymore to describe bad or cruel or execrable behavior that is wrong without being rape.” Women, in other words, lack the very words to describe the precise experience of BDSM, for in the absence of a certain context, it may well be unadulterated violence, degradation, or even rape. While it is undeniable that the sexual acts between Pavlovich and Gaiman were nonconsensual, many other women do choose to engage in consensual BDSM and then are left disoriented after coming out of their submissive trances, wondering what on earth they subjected themselves to and lacking the vocabulary to properly express their discombobulation—for we have been told that consensual BDSM is good and desirable.

While the progressive left as a whole has been responsible for the normalization of BDSM—with events such as San Francisco’s Folsom Street creating a Thanksgiving Day parade out of degeneracy and my own alma mater hosting one of America’s oldest BDSM clubs for eighteen-year-olds—the literary community has played a large role in normalizing and encouraging sexual perversions that inevitably lead to cases like Gaiman’s. Literary agents publicly announce in their bios that they participate in kink conventions, as if this credential somehow makes them more qualified to judge incoming manuscripts. The success of E.L. James’s steamy and poorly-written Fifty Shades of Grey, which has sold over 165 million copies as of 2021, has encouraged an alarming number of agents to solicit books with BDSM content, painting the contemptible sexual act as a largely positive activity to be met with enthusiasm. This hyper-fixation on BDSM from the literary community has led not only to a decline in moral values but also to an increase in Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-inspired and BDSM-related injuries. And with BDSM-apologists rushing to defend the practice all over the Internet, with Vulture’s Shapiro inserting the continual reassurance that Gaiman’s issue was that he was doing BDSM incorrectly, one must wonder why such an act, supposedly morally tenable and virtuous, necessitates so much defense and so strict a set of rules in the first place. One can only surmise that the actors who have brought this subculture to life suspect that they are doing something wrong but have lost sight of the sort of moral compass that would allow them to voice their discomforts and question their own behavior patterns.

I do not mean to shame anyone who engages in consensual BDSM—at the end of the day, we all operate in different moral stratospheres, and, in many cases, we are not responsible for the strange acts that may give us pleasure. But we cannot pretend that the the normalization of BDSM culture through works such as Fifty Shades of Grey is not at least partially responsible for the behaviors of men like Gaiman—we cannot pretend to be surprised when someone who participates in and condones this morally nebulous subculture actually turns out to be a creep.

As we continue to normalize nonstandard practices such as polyamory and BDSM—two subcultures venerated by the literary community in particular—we risk losing sight of the traditional values of our world that make sex and love sacred and holy; to love, after all, is to treat another person with respect, dignity, and humanity. BDSM, on the other hand, in pushing humiliation and degradation by definition, encourages the very opposite. If the #MeToo movement introduced gratuitous caution when it comes to sex, then let the case of Gaiman introduce a more warranted admonition: a society that continues to engage in degeneracy is a society that will continue to let degenerates run free. Today, we simply cannot risk further endangering our women. So let’s return to the model that has guided us for centuries: fall in love, pronounce your marital vows, and have fun with sex—so long as it is loving.