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I can't help but disagree here. Lots of 21-year-olds like kinky sex. Not to mention with a celebrity! WhT a bonus! Where's the immorality?
It seems pretty clear from the fact that this is coming up at all that she didn't like it. It is not, at all, difficult to imagine a boss pressuring his 21 year old domestic servant girl into sexual activities she didn't really want to do. This is not an uncommon scenario, and our prior for twenty one year old nannies having sex with their married bosses is that the poor girl probably didn't want to do it.
Look, he's not fucking groupies off IG and then ghosting- that's deplorable behavior, but the girl shouldn't have gone along with it. This is a case where it was simply not a realistic expectation that she could have held out under pressure, and that comes with extra ability to judge him for misbehavior. Like the comment below, he's clearly a cad in that he's not doing anything illegal, or at least not seriously illegal(if he makes a habit of this as it seems like he has been then he's almost certainly given alcohol to a twenty year old) but it's clear that he's doing things that are dickish.
I agree that we should bring back "cad" as a condemnatory term.
This whole case makes me see nothing but bad faith on all sides. Lefties want women to be able to retroactively retract consent for sex that days, months, or years later they decided they didn't like. Righties don't want men to be held responsible ever for wanting to get their dicks wet, not even to the degree that we might say "Tut tut" and socially shun him. Or I guess we can do that but if and only if we also agree that women are property.
( * Not all lefties, not all righties. Just the ones who seem to have very strong feelings about whether it's okay to criticize either Neil Gaiman's life choices or his ex-lovers'.)
You cannot accuse a man of trespassing upon a public road.
While hilarious, this is wildly inappropriate to say under most any circumstances imaginable. These are people going through the same struggles we all go through.
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If it was public, you wouldn't be accused. Tough luck.
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People aren't roads, as much as some might wish otherwise. Even the past was rarely as Dread Jim and his fanboys represent it.
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It does clarify the conversation when people are willing to express themselves in a straightforward manner.
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"Righties" is doing a lot of work here.
Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro look similar to their outgroups but have totally different values.
One group wants infinite women to abuse and so don't want to be blamed.
Another group simply thinks you can't fix this shit the way feminists want (blaming men and creating cyclical witch hunts) and so you have to let people face the consequences of their actions and learn the hard way. Given that women are the selective sex, they have to deal with it and be circumspect. They don't really admire or like men like Tate but those men will always exist and are easier to check when women are onboard.
It's not significantly different from their view on say...welfare. No one made you get that kid. You're not foisting the problems unto us.
I mean, Amadan was specifically agreeing with me. Not all righties was kind of implied.
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Man, you read my clarification, right? And yet still I use the word and get the inevitable (another cursed word) "Not all righties." I know not all righties.
Of course I know most "righties" don't literally want to make women property. I know there's a large gulf between your first group and your second. I am talking about the first, and for all their verboseness about the dangerous power of female sexuality and how all ancient societies wisely "controlled" it, yes, what they really want is infinite women to abuse without blame. They pretend that the social controls they advocate are about preventing abuse of women, but just as they will be quick to point out that men will always act stupid about sex regardless of social rules, they also pretend that this doesn't apply to women as well, and therefore their rules just create a permanent class of "legal to abuse" women (a class into which any woman can fall if she strays outside the controlling structure).
True, sorry. I guess I got triggered and instinctively went into my version of "the Democrats aren't left wing!"
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Yes. Put me in group b.
Men should not engage women in mutually enjoyable sexual relationships that the men have reason to believe the women might regret later
Men should not treat women paternalistically
You can consistently pick only one. I am probably less conservative than many in that while I find the old man/young woman thing viscerally wrong, I don't believe my gut determines morality.
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Isn't treating women as though they are responsible for their own actions the opposite of saying they're property? This is what's so incoherent about the feminist approach to this issue, it's positively patriarchal, which is the only reason you can get away with telling people "I don't even believe that you don't actually believe Neil Gaiman did anything wrong".
If you think that these women are probably making bad faith accusations about consensual relationships and Neil Gaiman is probably a creep who shouldn't have been messing with them, then we don't really disagree.
Fair enough.
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I am entirely happy with men being held responsible for wanting to get their dicks wet in pretty much every circumstance. I'm even entirely happy if the social theory used to achieve this end isn't one I believe in, so long as it doesn't impose a bunch of other results I also disagree with. I'd bet ya Hlynka would agree as well. I don't disagree that there's a bunch of people, here and elsewhere, commonly percieved as "righties" who would disagree with us vociferously, but it seems to me that they often disagree vociferously with a lot of my other opinions as well. This is the sort of thing that drives the Hlynka thesis. Obviously the thesis is both fraught and inflammatory, but it's the way these sort of out-of-step moments keep recurring that gives it such endurance.
Precisely this. I'd say that a bunch of people in one vein reject the dominant social theory entirely, in part because of how poorly it even talks about such situations. It's mostly the "righties" who have otherwise accepted many of the underlying premises of the dominant social theory who end up driven to taking the position that men should never be held responsible.
The dominant social theory can marshal a standard set of what I believe to be poor arguments in favor of not holding responsible any particular group of people they would like to indemnify. With those same tools, such folks would like to simply apply the same class of results to men. They've bought the premises, the worldview, and are like folks who argued about how best to apply the principles of Lysenkoism to some particular set of circumstances. That they are said to be "on the right-wing of Lysenkoism" is pretty immaterial. One could view it as them all arguing in bad faith... or one could just believe that they're all just starting from the same completely whack set of premises such that their weird little sectarian scuffle appears utterly bizarre from the outside.
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Taking a "both sides wrong" stance here, as usual, supports the side that is actually more wrong. Which is to say the ones accusing Neil Gaiman of misconduct because they regretted the relationship long after the fact. Neil Gaiman need only be "held responsible" if what he did is wrong, and he's only wrong by a conservative view that no one involved held.
Using your pure conflict theory approach, only one side can ever be wrong and the other side must be 0% wrong. Which is both morally and logically wrong.
"Both sides wrong" doesn't mean both sides equally wrong. I have seen no allegations that make me think Neil Gaiman should be arrested, and I'm not in favor of "cancelling." But saying he's a skeevy perv you probably wouldn't want your 21-year-old daughter going to work for as a nanny? Yes, heavens forbid we so much as waggle a disapproving finger in a way that might grant some tiny bit of support to your political enemies.
As soon as you waggle that disapproving finger you are implicitly accepting the justice of anything done to him. Everything else is before the "but".
No, that is not how it works. I don't even believe that you don't actually believe Neil Gaiman did anything wrong. You have just identified his accusers as being your enemies, and fuck your enemies, therefore we must not admit Neil Gaiman might have done something wrong.
It is indeed.
I find old famous guys screwing starstruck pretty young things kinda gross, but then, I haven't written any best-sellers. But I find said women crying rape over it to be orders of magnitude worse, and to respond to their accusations by focusing on Gaiman's offenses is to validate the accusations.
There's a difference between focusing on his "offenses" and saying "If you weren't a skeev then you wouldn't inevitably catch accusations like this."
I'm very comfortable saying I feel little sympathy for these women's accusations, and I feel little sympathy for Gaiman being accused. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, FAFO, he fucked the leopards... Pick your meme.
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And what will be done to him? I'll wager nothing unjust.
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I've been using Whoremonger a lot in conversation to refer to someone like Deshaun Watson. I like that it cuts through the "Is it her fault?" question and gets to the point: regardless of her behavior his is still blameworthy.
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I suspect it qualifies as workplace sexual harassment - which while not criminal is definitely illegal. The details of sexual harassment law differ by jurisdiction, but convincing your employee that her continued employment depended on saying "yes" qualifies almost everywhere.
If this happened in the UK, the drinking age in private homes is 5.
I thought that was just if a relative was providing it, not in-general? EG in most US states it's legal to give your own child alcohol, but not someone else's.
The unrestricted drinking age in the UK is in any case 18; the US is unusually uptight about alcohol. (as usual)
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lots of 21 year olds like heroin, too, but I would feel, you know, kind of bad if I was a rich guy trading them heroin for sex. Just because someone likes something in the moment doesn't mean it's ok to make an elaborate effort to set up an environment where they feel good temporarily but feel terrible in the long term.
Their long-term feelings are their responsibility, no? The idea that a man should refrain from enjoying a multi-year relationship with a woman, which she also enjoys at the time, because he somehow knows that she'll feel bad after, is rank paternalism.
If you really did somehow know... Then yeah. Build memories with others that they will cherish not memories they will regret. Intentionally exploiting the naive and shortsighted is rotten behavior.
But from everything I've seen in this thread it looks like Neil had every reason to believe he was building positive memories here. It brings to mind traumatic pains I myself have felt- the buyer's remorse of realizing that the things I did to bring other's happiness has brought them pain is just awful.
I'm just projecting here but- empathetically I imagine Gaiman as going through something similar. We have a duty to at least look back in post and imagine whether that pain might have been prevented. Might be preventable in the future.
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The actual social conservative response to this is yeschad.jpg. The idea that a resource as socially valuable as access to prime-age pussy should be under the absolute control of people as irresponsible as teenage girls is obviously silly if you start from the basic moral perspective of pre-liberal conservatism. Under herder* culture patriarchy, fooling around with a girl in a way which leaves her as damaged goods is treated as a property crime against her father or husband (which might be forgiven if the perp was sufficiently high-status relative to the victim). Under Christian patriarchy, it is treated as spoiliation of a community resource and (in times and places where the system of Church-led community justice worked as intended) the remedy was making the man clear up the mess through some or all of shotgun-marrying the girl, paying her "dowry" to bribe the village herb into marrying her, or acknowledging and supporting the bastards.
Feminists, like tradcons, are clear-eyed that a functioning society needs to stop lotharios manipulating silly girls into relationships which, while good for the lothario, are net-negative for society. They just have to take some extra steps in order to obfuscate the hate-fact that most prime dating-age women are silly girls.
* The mods have asked me not to call it goatfucker patriarchy, so I won't.
That's a rather straightforward example of apophasis you've got there.
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Obviously. But these women and their advocates aren't social conservatives and want it both ways; they don't want to be treated paternalistically, but they want to blame the men who didn't treat them paternalistically for not doing so.
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