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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7399 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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The newest issue of the Atlantic contains an article about our increasing social isolation titled: The Anti-Social Century (You can get behind the paywall here). The author of the article blames our information technologies: TV and more recently cell phones, destruction of third spaces like libraries, parks and neighborhood bars, national and international mobility, and a culture that chooses convience over forging genuine connections over time. In terms of solutions, the author posits that we need a national culture change towards a more skeptical attitude towards new technology like AI and deliberate attempts to be more social. He cites the rapid growth in independent bookstores and board game cafes as a cause for hope in this kind of change.

I'm directionally on board with the diagnosis and prognosis offered in the Atlantic article, but I worry about the vagueness and naivity of the solution. I had similar worries after reading a similar piece, the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which highlighted the deleterious effects of phones on our attention spans. Hari spends a summer phone free in Provincetown, MA which he really enjoys, and manages to recover much of his attention span. However, upon returning to the "real world" he finds himself sucked right back into the vortex. Hari rightly recognizes that this is an issue he cannot tackle alone, and advocates for collective action on a national or international level. He draws inspiration from movements like women's suffrage, the fight for gay rights, and the campaign against CFCs. Perhaps I am cynical, but I find this level of optimism to be hopelessly naive for a number of reasons.

Firstly, those examples which I just listed were examples in which the forces of capital were neutral (CFCs, gay rights), or in fact in favor of the so-called revolution (women's suffrage). In this case, like that of the fight against climate change, or degrowth, capital is fundamentally against a system that would free our attention, as such a system would reduce profits.

Secondly, I'm not sure democratic change will actually work in this scenario. As we saw with prohibition & the failed war on drugs, people like their vices. I'm not sure my generation would be in favor of something like banning TikTok. Hari even states that his first week on Cape Cod was pretty difficult psychologically without the soothing mind-wipe of scrolling. Faith in democracy also misses the forces of capital arrayed against the interests of the common people who have so clearly been gaming our electoral system since the Civil War. If we can't stop Big Pharma from price gouging insulin, what makes the author think that we could upend the entire media ecosystem?

I think change fundamentally has to come from a level in-between the individual & the state (or global culture). I think many cultural critics miss the very existence of this level of culture, possibly because it has almost totally vanished from our world as an element of social change. I'm talking here about the family, the local community, and to some extent, the parishes/church.

Yet I think this new Atlantic article, and my experiences over the past few years has revealed how frustrating trying to affect change at this level can be. There might well be an explosion of board game bars and independent bookstores, but at least where I live in the US, even thriving institutions have problems with inconsistency and high turnover on the scale of years which makes it very difficult to build real community. A couple examples from my personal life might be helpful.

1). I'm pretty involved in the running community here in Baltimore and in some senses the running scene has never been better. Races are packed and the casual running clubs are seeing more people come out than ever. But the more serious running teams are doing very poorly. We can't get people out for organized workouts, or for important team races. It's very hard to build team camraderie or real friendships in this kind of environment where everyone is a flake.

2). With my local church the problem is similar. Plenty large mass attendence, but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass. In addition to the flakiness present in the running scene, there's also a geographic transience: many people are here for school or temporary work, and are not inclined to work towards any kind of more permenant community.

There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community. I'm clearly guilty of this too: I would probably be a stronger running club participant or parishoner if I didn't have so many hobbies, although I like to think I lack the worst of the scrolling/TV vices.

I'm kind of at a loss about what we can do about all this. A big part of the problem is clearly the phones,which hopefully the upcoming Tik Tok ban will help with, but I think there's also a large element of constant geographic mobility at play at here too. I grew up in Chicago, went to college in Boston, and currently am doing my PhD in Baltimore. At each stage of life I built or was part of a community, which, in the case of the first two, I have gradually lost. The thought of the same happening with my friends here fills me with dread, but staying in Baltimore is not a rational economic prospect, and also requires that most of my friends here don't leave themselves. But if not going to stay, why would I ever want to sink my roots in deeper?

Any thoughts/advice appreciated. I also think there's a lot of value in online communities that I have found here at the Motte, in my philosophy book club (university friends), and on Substack, and I'm immensly grateful for their existence, but I don't think they can even come close to fulfilling many of the needs that meatspace does. But that's a whole seperate post.

Firstly, those examples which I just listed were examples in which the forces of capital were neutral (CFCs, gay rights)

For an even more cynical interpretation I'd like to point out that CFC ozone damage was first discovered in a research paper in 1974. The CFC patent expired in 1978. Things didn't get rolling on a CFC ban until the 80s.

Sure these things take time, but I think the forces of capital saw the introduction of new patentable refrigerants as an opportunity.

I think we should at least mandate that tech companies provide the ability to opt out of maximally addictive features.

For example, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, to an extent X, basically every social app has adopted the “infinite scroll of short video reels” that makes TikTok so addictive.

You used to be able to opt out of automatically being shown “shorts” on YouTube. However, they’ve taken away that option.

Instagram, used to be a place where photography enthusiasts post their pictures. Now it’s an attention on screen maximizer using algorithmic suggestions and infinite scroll short videos.

I read a book recently which if anyone is curious I can link the name, but basically identified that a problem with the digital age is that all of our digital tools and utilities come built in with distraction maximizing features. An article tries to shove 3 videos and 4 advertisements with maximally weird looking photos in my face while I read it. A currency exchange rate app is showing me ads. Everything that I do is trying to grab and divert my attention.

Some people say it’s choice, e.g. it’s my choice to use instagram for example. And I could always go for a dumb phone. Yes, but. The choice has largely been engineered out of my environment. And I believe we should mandate the ability to opt out of addiction and attention maximizing features on the tools and the so called town squares of our digital age.

The choice has largely been engineered out of my environment.

I'm not so sure this is true.

I don't use Instagram, I don't use X, I don't use Snapchat, I quit Facebook a few years ago, I have never installed TikTok. Facebook is the one I miss the most, as it's an easy way to access information on small businesses, and Messenger is an easy way to keep in touch with people you know in real life. WhatsApp is similarly useful outside of the US. But I have no regrets over my abstinence from the other platforms.

I do use YouTube, but not because anyone has engineered me to use it -- I just get net value out of it, and rarely watch shorts.

So I don't see why you'd say that these addictive apps are required. Sure, you won't be able to participate in "the so called town squares of the digital age." But in almost all cases, the actual net value of participating in the so-called town squares is negative. I can confidently predict that you will accomplish nothing of true value on X unless you're profoundly lucky, and even then the harm will exceed the benefit. Your voice will be drowned out by a billion other voices, all nonsensical, and your greatest triumphs will be forgotten in an instant.

There are absolutely choices that have been realistically taken away by the environment, like not having a smartphone or not reading messages on the go. There may also be careers where some level of networking online is necessary. But none of that requires anyone to use Instagram or TikTok or X, unless you are a social media manager. And the job of a social media manager is emphatically not to watch shorts, any more than the job of a bartender is to drink alcohol.

I grew up reading the kinds of novels that are popular with homeschool girls. Ann of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald, the Bronte Sisters, the kind of novel where the girl's only friend is a horse, and it's not even her own horse. Solitude seems intrinsic to whatever culture it is my family belongs to. It's the class of pastors, teachers, and the kind of farmers who moved to the Western US. When I read novels and hear accounts from older relatives, it sounds like people were mostly reading books in their leisure time. My father recounts playing wall ball with himself in the sweltering summer heat, but mostly reading Tarzan novels that summer. My mother recalls trying to learn to write in Elvish. She didn't have school friends, due to bussing, despite the city not having black kids or ghettos. My grandmother recalls reading Les Miserables in elementary school. Maybe according to the article they weren't alone, because it would be two or three teens and their mother silently reading in the same room.

According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

This is interesting. Why do these alienated, lonely people want more "me time?"

Was going to a theater ever actually social? I used to go to movies, and the norm was to sit there quietly, and not engage with anyone, even the people you came with, in a dark room. It's more social to watch TV in my house with my family. We talk to each other and interact.

My grandparents didn't go to restaurants alone because they couldn't go to restaurants more than once a month, and it was an occasion. Take out was an occasion, even when I was a kid. I can't think of anyone I knew in real life who met up in bars.

Because I'm from a long line of bookish but high openness introverts, it's unsurprising that I'm posting on my online culture war club instead of arranging play dates and attending potlucks.

My parents still keep in touch with their five college friends, even though they've all moved to different cities. I just met up with a friend from youth group I haven't seen in four years, and it was nice.

As I write this, my husband has been talking to me about joining a lapidary club, and taking our kids to look for local rocks at a nearby wash. It has taken me most of an hour to write this post, as I made cookies, put the kids to bed, and discussed going to the mineral show.

I'm not saying that there isn't a problem, but perhaps it's a recurrent problem. Or a problem that's always with us.

Solo dining is more of a city thing, and I think it's largely due to small apartments and a decline in public spaces.

If you live in a 300 square foot unit, you're going to want to get out of the house to eat. Cooking and eating alone in a tiny space is depressing. The "me time" response is just a poor classification of the problem. Trying to schedule things with friends every time you leave the house is a huge amount of work. No one ever did that all the time. Prior to cell phones it was basically impossible.

Due to the difficulty in scheduling everything, striking up conversations with random people was way more socially acceptable.

Also people would pick up location based hobbies like bird watching and just chat with the other bird watchers.

I suspect that packing a meal and eating it in the park was more common in the past. People in the park were able to beat up anyone harassing picnickers without the police getting upset. Police carried batons and used them to deal with small problems without the courts getting involved.

Old homes have front porches because prior to TV people would just sit there in the evenings. Watch their kids play, chat with neighbours.

Maybe your experience is more common in the vast low-density landscapes of America, but to me that sounds pretty atypical. Even in a tiny village you'd have a bunch of kids you'd hang out with. This wasn't always for the better, because bored kids in a low-stimulation environment would come up with dumb ideas, but the specific problem of isolation wasn't really there.

I don't know if comparing watching TV with a trip to the theater makes sense, it's not like you'd do the latter every day after work, for most people I knew maybe went once or twice per year. It's not something you'd do to be social, but something you'd do to "uplift" yourself culturally. The mention of restaurants also feels neither here nor there, yeah it was a treat, normally you'd just eat at home with your family, and the typical family size tended to be larger that 2+1.

Don't get me wrong, there were always loners that preferred their own company, and by the sound of it, that seems to have been the case in your entire family, but it was nowhere bear as widespread as nowadays. Plus, the technology we have nowadays turned even social activities, like playing games with your friends or dating, into something rather alienating.

I'm not saying that there isn't a problem, but perhaps it's a recurrent problem. Or a problem that's always with us.

Maybe, but I'm skeptical. It's not just a question of looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, I can literally just travel to parts of the world that ate less affected by these social changes and notice they still have things like kids of all ages playing by themselves on the streets, and compare it to my country where it used to be a common sight, but isn't anymore.

Traditionalists always catch heat for nostalgia, but as far as I can tell the problem is perfectly symmetrical. There are people who find it really hard to believe that progress caused something to get worse, and once they get over that hump they'll insist nothing can be done about it.

Is there a supportive book you can cite that isn’t by the notorious plagiarist Johann Hari? I think we shouldn't be rehabilitating him.

I find the framing of capital vs people to be misleading. There's only really one vector for commerce to care about or impact your focus, advertising, which we can certainly attack in a number of ways. Its demise would result in the death of a lot of things like most massive free websites but that could be seen as a benefit. I don't think banning it outright is really possible, there needs to be some mechanism for matching products to people who would like to have them but surely many forms could be banned and with them the goes the doom scrolling media sources that rely on hooking you into watching ads to exist.

The other end of the coin for rootedness is family. having kids gives you a ready made community with a shared prosocial interest in the kids. The decline in family formation is really probably partially the upstream cause of most of the ills of modernity. As someone who also moved across the country away from family I think this probably isn't a good thing in hindsight. My immediate family has since split into several different cities and only now has there started to be some interest in coordinating moving back closer together, maybe not surprisingly as my generation has started to work on families of our own. Much ink has been spilt on suggestions for increasing family formation, I won't put another attempt at a solution here.

Its funny, I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract. I was able to adapt from the old nokias to the slick flipphones to several different form factors for 'smartphones' and I think this gave me a practical view of the phone as a tool for organizing IRL activities and keeping in touch with distant friends. That's what we used it for originally.

BUT, I work with 20-21 year old Zoomers, and holy COW they treat their phones like an inseparable appendage, and you can catch them doomscrolling constantly. I can SEE that growing up with this influence leads to a qualitatively different relationship to/dependence on the gadget, which could be source of the other observable problems. Oh, and now they're used to having a semi-reliable AI assistant in their pocket at all times, so now they can use this machine to do a lot of their literal thinking.

And now there's been a couple decades of engineering and testing to optimize the apps for taking your money and sucking up your attention and otherwise making you dependent on various digital services that we previously lived without.

Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?

There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community.

Seen this issue a lot. You can't build a community without a core of dedicated people constantly showing up and doing the work to put together events, and that core of people will get frustrated and burn out or give up if there's too much turnover in membership or members are extremely flaky and unreliable. So hard to even get one off the ground.

My martial arts gym, which HAS an extremely dedicated core tries to hold social events every so often, with plenty of advance notice, and it still a crapshoot as to who will show up outside of that core group.

I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience. Wrangling adults to hang out together is HARD. Some can't find a babysitter, this one's busy with work or school, that one's just tired and wants to go to bed at 9. So you invite people on the assumption that there'll be a number of last minute dropouts.

Everyone has like 15 different commitments going on at any one time, so getting them to TRULY prioritize a commitment to one group over the other is nigh-impossible. And this also seems to have shifted how humans value individual relationships. There's billions of humans you can potential interact with, and if you aren't satisfied with the ones in your circle of friends, discarding them for new ones is easy. Even if you can't find local friends, your phone offers the potential to make 'infinite' friends! Parasocial relationships! You can spend all day chatting with an AI version of Hitler or Tony the Tiger if it strikes your fancy! Why value real-life relationships at all?

This becomes especially stark on the dating apps. Human connection is immensely devalued.

As somebody whose preferred method of making friends is to identify good people and then forge a deep, long-lasting bond with them (my best friend, whom I still talk to regularly, has been in my life since Kindergarden, literally 30 years), this world of ephemeral connections where people flit in and out of your life on a whim is a bit of a waking nightmare.

but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass

I can say for myself, I used to attend the soup kitchens, food pantries, and service to shut-in elderly folks to mow their lawns and such. It was fulfilling in its way.

But what I concluded is that this was basically burning up the manhours of competent people to provide modest benefits to people who simply aren't able to produce value on their own. It is literally more efficient to donate money to some professional org that will pay to provide these services than for me to go out and spend hours on a weekend mowing a lawn myself, and I could do something more enjoyable, to boot. I guess I was engaging in prototype effective altruist logic.

But I do think that engaging in activities that constantly expose you to the 'dregs' of humanity, and seeing that no matter how much money and effort is poured into these folks, at best you're basically just raising their standard of living by 2-3% temporarily, not dragging them permanently out of destitution and fixing the problems that put them there. If you're not a certain type of person, the futility of it probably burns you out. I even tried volunteering at a dog shelter, but that burned me out EVEN QUICKER because holy cow the problem of stray and abandoned dogs is intractable, and there will never be enough funds to shelter all those poor animals, just the few that we can locate, rehabilitate, and get adopted. Volunteering your time for such a sisysphean endeavor seems irrational unless you honestly do have a deep and abiding love for animals. Which some do.

Now, I'm not denying that engaging in acts of service is enriching, and exposing yourself to that side of humanity probably makes you a better-informed person. But its also easy to do it just for the virtue-signal points.

That might be another part of the equation. Sympathy for strangers seems to be on the wane, and this has pushed us ever deeper into our chosen ingroups, and built up a wall of suspicion against all outsiders who might want to forge a connection with us.

Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?

Jonathan Haidt is trying. But he’s getting the entire academy screaming at him for it. There’s certain forces deeply invested in ensuring teens stay addicted to their phones, and to my eyes it appears to be leftists primarily who desire to keep the status quo, who will try to argue you that it’s “alarmist” to be concerned at all about the massive societal rot and atomization occurring all around you. Phone addiction is politics addiction and a massive opportunity for political brainwashing of young impressionable kids. It’s done wonders for their movement. The moment people stop being addicted to their phones is the moment the trans movement and other adjacent movements wither and die. So it’s not just capital set against you - it’s woke capital.

I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience.

For about four years now, my thing has been trivia night. It helps that I enjoy it, so I’m almost always there. It’s super low-pressure, and I don’t have to overthink it. Meet a couple at a coffee shop who seem cool? No need to try setting something up, “I’m at the same place the same time every week. If you want to hang out, that’s where I’ll be.” You work through the chaff and start finding a core group of consistent people. Really this is what church was but that's just too much for most people to bite off.

Another key, though, is that if you want to develop a social circle, oneself has to show up when others put on events.

With my local church the problem is similar. Plenty large mass attendence, but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass.

I'd speculate it might be prevalence of stay at home moms. Stay at home moms give a lot more bandwidth for that sort of thing.

Stay at home moms are probably the most important ingredient of social fabric.

Or women otherwise engaged in home industry, to account for the historical pattern.

I think the issue of lost trust has an impact on the park and 3rd space issue. Those places often end up attracting homeless people, criminals, drug users etc. because they’re free to the public and thus nobody can stop them. Which makes nobody else want to really use the space for the intended purpose. And thus when people want a third space that they can be relatively sure is safe for them and their family, the admission charge is a feature, not a bug. The same sort of problem plagues the building of public transit. It cannot go anywhere useful (because people move to good neighborhoods to avoid the kinds of people who ride buses, subways, and trains), and because the public transport itself often invites the criminals and homeless and others. You aren’t going to see either thing take off until the issues creating a low trust society are solved.

I think in some cases it’s why the internet has become the hangout of choice. Watching TV or doing things online doesn’t involve contact with such undesirables or the results of their activities. Buying online is simpler because you don’t have to hunt down an employee to unlock the item you want.

I think in some cases it’s why the internet has become the hangout of choice.

What follows is speculative but, this feels to me as completely backwards causality. The internet didn't become a hangout because of the decline of 3rd spaces it's the opposite. People go to third spaces for things like

  • It's a schelling point for engagement
  • To get stimulation
  • To get information

The internet is much more efficient at all of these things. Unfortunately, efficient doesn't= better at scale, and there are a bunch of 2nd and 3rd order benefits that have been lost to the point that the system of community is worse off for it in many respects.

But you can't return people to libraries by getting rid of the homeless. You have to get rid of high-speed, wireless internet. The homeless are in these places because communities abandoned them, not the other way around.

The decline in social connection has happened across the first world, whereas the takeover of public space by derelicts is mostly US-specific. So that is unlikely to be a major contributor.

With my local church the problem is similar. Plenty large mass attendence, but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass. In addition to the flakiness present in the running scene, there's also a geographic transience: many people are here for school or temporary work, and are not inclined to work towards any kind of more permenant community.

This is the main problem- married homeowners will participate in community, but otherwise you need some draw. If they’re transient, good luck.

There are a fair number of married homeowners, but they don't generally tend to do a good job of participating in the community beyond attending mass and doing things like inviting the priests over for dinner.

If I can steelman an argument: If they're married, working professionals trying to build their own life, have kids, etc. its not particularly efficient for them to donate times to various causes that, while altruistic, are also burning up manhours that they could use on things that produce more value, and for which they capture more of the value.

They're married, so they don't need to meet potential partners.

If they donate a sufficient portion of their money to the church, ostensibly this should substitute for actually doing the low-value work themselves?

What does the Bible actually command about spending your own time in service of the poor?

Yeah, I've become significantly worse at contributing to church events since having a family. In my experience, it's the stable single adults, and couples with older children who hold things together.

Interestingly, my observation is that it’s couples with older children, irrespective of whether they also have younger children.

's also a geographic transience: many people are here for school or temporary work, and are not inclined to work towards any kind of more permenant community.

The geographic transience is the hardest, that I have personally dealt with. Almost all of my close friends I've known for over a decade have moved away. Many of them want to come back because they're lonely, but constraints of work / family / finances make it difficult.

It's a very stupid and annoying cultural situation that everyone moves all the time. Sigh.

Geographic transience in America overall is overstated - the median American lives 18 miles from their mother.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html

I'd imagine among the sort of intellectual elite class the numbers are FAR higher. Anecdotally for me it's well over 50% for the well off amongst my friend groups.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but this is not true at all for my community in Baltimore. Every single person I know, except for my boss who moved his parents here when their health started to decline, lives more than 18 miles from their mom.

The Baltimore region seems to have a higher median fwiw.

The use of median rather than mean suggests a selective approach to characterizing transience relative to other parts of the world.

I don't know how it's characterized in other parts of the world, but median makes intuitive sense given that the distribution has a long right tail and it tells you what the situation of the typical American rather than an ""average"" American who may not exist in any large numbers.

It's precisely because the distribution has a long right tail that you want a mean rather than a median if you want to discuss relative differences. The relative differences are themselves located in the nature of the right-end tail.

Mean, median, and mode are all forms of averaging, but imply different things and thus serve different demonstrative / comparative purposes.

Median average is just '50% of the population is below this number, and 50% is above.' It's decent for centering on clusters, but when spectrums are non-symmetrical it's also non-representative. This can be a good thing- it's a way to ignore outliers- but it can also be a bad thing- because it ignores outliers. In the structure the claim- 'American transience is overstated'- the very premise is about the nature of the outliers (if Americans are more transient than others), but the model of averaging chosen specifically omits the role of outliers.

A mode-average is just the most common category in a set. If you broke the average distances of [distance from mother] in 20km blocks (0-20 km,20-40, etc.), a mode-average could tell you which category was the most common, but not actually what a mean or even median average was. After all, there is only 1 20-unit blocks between 0 (co-located with mother) and 20, but there are potentially infinite blocks beyond 20, but as long as more people in the single 0-20 block than in any single 20-unit block beyond it, it wouldn't matter if a hypermajority of people lived beyond 20 units from their mothers, the 'average' would still be 0-20.

Median averaging is where you'd expect to the differences in cultural differences show up in data, because the nature of the right tail is itself going to be that difference. Being a long right tail is itself a demonstration of transience compared to a population which has a short right tail. However, only a median-average would be expected to capture that if/when mode-groups or medians are skewed towards a hyper-concentrated left.

This is especially true when you consider reasons why mother and adult-child might live close other than a lack of transience. The article / you worked with an assumption that it's because people never move away in the first place (non-transient), but a transient-lifestyle could alternatively simply move back after some point (to take care of an elderly parent)... or see the parent move after the child (moving closer to the grand kids). Transience could be very high, but the median being used (heh) wouldn't reflect it. This is something that only a highly transient, but also exceptionally rich, society could do. It would have very different implications from a society where the generations never left the home village at all, even if both fit the same median average.

It's not that median-average doesn't serve very important roles, but for comparing different populations- and thus the validity of macro-trends such as relative transience- you need means.

when spectrums are non-symmetrical it's also non-representative.

On the contrary - it is representative in that half the people you meet will be above that number, and half below. A mean would represent a much more unusual case.

In the structure the claim- 'American transience is overstated'- the very premise is about the nature of the outliers (if Americans are more transient than others), but the model of averaging chosen specifically omits the role of outliers.

The claim is not about the nature of the outliers, it's about the nature of the median experience. The other comments in this thread talk about all or many/most people being transient and not living in a particular place for a long time. The median speaks directly against that in a way that the mean does not, because you're more likely to encounter a median American than a mean one

As for cross country comparisons, I didn't say anything about those at all. Obviously you should compare means with means and medians with medians. My point is that 18 miles is not very far, and that stands regardless of what happens in other countries.

The article / you worked with an assumption that it's because people never move away in the first place (non-transient), but a transient-lifestyle could alternatively simply move back after some point (to take care of an elderly parent)... or see the parent move after the child (moving closer to the grand kids). Transience could be very high, but the median being used (heh) wouldn't reflect it.

This is a legitimate point and I'd be interested to see more data that looks at this side of the equation.

As for cross country comparisons, I didn't say anything about those at all. Obviously you should compare means with means and medians with medians. My point is that 18 miles is not very far, and that stands regardless of what happens in other countries.

The transience of Americans being transients isn't based on how much Americans move in and of themselves- it is how much Americans move compared to non-Americans.

What happens in other countries is what matters when characterizing a relative characteristic of a country-level population (Americans), just as minority difference in the face of overwhelming similarity are key distinguishing factors in other forms of overall-population comparison.

This can go from comparisons of GDP per capita (we don't go with a median income), to comparisons of intelligence (the interesting difference in a 100 vs 120 IQ is not the 100 they have in common), to even species (the DNA overlap between humans and monkeys sharing 99.8% DNA would not imply a difference if you took a more median-concept basis of comparison).

That both Americans and non-Americans have 50% of their populations that live in the same pattern isn't what would indicate whether Americans and non-Americans significantly diverge in ways that drive a population-level characterization.

What happens in other countries is what matters when characterizing a relative characteristic of a country-level population

Again, I never implied anything about any relative characteristics. My point is that 18 miles is not much in an absolute sense.

This can go from comparisons of GDP per capita (we don't go with a median income)

Median income is often more useful for the same reasons I describe above, and the same goes for the rest of your points (although I must again stress that between country comparisons have nothing to do with my claim).

Probably "hours of travel" to one's mother is a better metric, as the functional difference between living in LA and living in Chicago for me would be an extra two hours spent on the plane, whereas the difference between Trenton and Montauk is larger than the mileage would indicate. Like, the difference between Philly and Richmond is pretty linear to distance, but the difference between Richmond and Chicago and LA are unmoored from it.

I think this is a salient concern when discussing two regimes (driving distance vs flying distance) but less salient when we're really just focusing on the driving regime. I'd be surprised if there's any plane route that you can take that's faster than driving 18 miles anywhere in the country (excluding perhaps LA at rush hour?) once you account for driving to the airport, security, waiting, baggage claim, driving from the airport, etc.

Differences come back around at very close distances within urban areas. Around me ten miles is practically a neighbor. The fifteen miles from Brooklyn to Yankees Stadium is a trek, no matter how you do it.

A big part of this data is captured by "more people live in cities than is popularly imagined by middle class Americans."

Yep, I think this is at the root of much of the problem, even more so than TV, and would explain the early data from Bowling Alone where there wasn't very high TV penetrance.

Looking back I wish I had just gone to the University of Chicago and either got a job in the city afterwards of went to grad school at Northwestern or something. Right now I'm kind of stuck between my parents living in Chicago (and wanting to move back to the UK where my sister lives), my college friends in Boston or the Bay, and others randomly scattered all over.

Your second link seems to go to a First Things article about secular monks.

Fixed. Thanks!

I want to read about secular monks. Can you share the original (but mistaken) link? It sounds really interesting.

First Things article about secular monks

Maybe this one? https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/secular-monks

Yep, that's it. We did it The Motte!

The vibe shift continues.

Starbucks ends its ‘open-door’ policies

Starbucks doesn’t want to be America’s public bathroom anymore.

Starbucks is scrapping a policy that had let anyone hang out at its cafes or use the restrooms without making a purchase. The new rules are part of a larger effort to improve Starbucks’ cafe experience and deter homeless people and non-paying customers who have come to use Starbucks solely for shelter and bathroom access – but they reverse a policy that was put in place after one of the company’s biggest-ever PR disasters.

The new code of conduct, announced to stores Monday, is part of CEO Brian Niccol’s strategy to lure back customers, boost sagging sales and improve worker relations. It applies to all locations in North America and will be displayed on store doors.

The changes are a “practical step that helps us prioritize our paying customers who want to sit and enjoy our cafes or need to use the restroom during their visit,” said a Starbucks spokesperson in a statement. “By setting clear expectations for behavior and use of our spaces, we can create a better environment for everyone.”

Other changes include a ban on panhandling, discrimination, consuming outside alcohol and vaping, according to the policy posted online. Employees will receive training on the new policy.

Starbucks is also trying to incentivize customers to stay in its cafes instead of ordering to-go by giving perks for in-store orders. Beginning January 27, all customers can get one free hot or iced coffee refill served in its ceramic mugs or reusable glasses. Previously, the perk only applied to members of Starbucks’ loyalty program.

Opening restrooms and cafes to the general public has helped Starbucks brand itself as a “third place” between work and home and bring potential customers through the door. However, the policy has created challenges for employees and customers alike.

The open-door policy began in 2018 after two Black men were arrested at a Philadelphia location while waiting for a friend. One of the men said he asked to use the restroom shortly after walking in and was told it was only for paying customers. The incident was caught on camera and morphed into a PR disaster for Starbucks.

In 2022, Starbucks’ former CEO Howard Schultz said it might not be able to keep its bathrooms open, blaming a growing mental health problem that poses a threat to its staff and customers. That same year, Starbucks closed more than a dozen locations, primarily located in downtown spots, citing safety concerns.

“This is another example of the complications caused by the lack of public bathrooms in the US, and of Starbucks shifting its tune — benefitting at times from the lack of public infrastructure and being hurt by the same things,” said Bryant Simon, a historian at Temple University who has written a book on Starbucks and is currently working on one about public bathrooms in the United States.

I just had a conversation about this with someone a few days ago. I was saying that this event is what killed Starbucks as a brand. People used to actually go into Starbucks, and that rule was completely reasonable. Now, it's gross and full of homeless people. The bathrooms are disgusting. Their drinks are too expensive and not good enough to justify the cost. People used to like to go into Starbucks and hang out and read or study. A bunch of places around me that do enforce these rules opened up, including no dogs except service dogs, and they are always packed. At this point, I think it's too little and too late. I don't think they can get back to what they were before.

What's amazing to me though is that this was completely predictable as an outcome. How could it have turned out any other way? Why was nobody in charge able to see this and take the short term PR hit for long term benefits? Now their brand is permanently tarnished as a place full of homeless people. Companies can recover, but I'm not bullish on their prospects.

Starbucks in the UK is little different from our other major coffee chains like Costa or Cafe Nero. The cafes are perfectly good places to spend a few hours etc. lounging around. American Starbucks reads like it totally dropped the ball.

Like 10 years ago I used to frequently spend hours in a Starbucks, reading books or writing and getting wildly overcaffeinated.

I stopped in part because they seemed to be deliberately enshittifying the experience by replacing comfortable furniture with bare wood, and kinda making the overall vibe less inviting. Just felt like they were discouraging spending time there.

Reading this, I'm beginning to suspect why. My theory is instead of making a ballsy policy like they're doing here, they decided to just sort of passive-aggressively make the place less inviting in hopes the riffraff would stay out, of their own accord. Of course, that did not happen, but the good people stopped coming, so now it's all riffraff and no good people and the whole vibe of Starbucks is way off from what it used to be.

Somebody tell Brian Niccol to bring back the comfy chairs, maybe we can turn things back around.

Hahaha. The Bauhaus strikes again!

There was always a set of bentwood chairs,blessed by Le Corbusier, which no one ever sat in because they caught you in the small of the back like a karate chop. The dining-room table was a smooth slab of blond wood (no ogee edges, no beading on the legs), around which was a set of the S-shaped, tubular steel, cane-bottomed chairs that Mies van der Rohe had designed—the second most famous chair designedin the twentieth century, his own Barcelona chair being first, but also one of the five most disastrously designed, so that by the time the main course arrived, at least one guest had pitched face forward into the lobster bisque.

Though, in this case I guess it kind of makes sense, serving double duty to both look cool and as hostile/defensive architecture to prevent people from sitting there too long.

the second most famous chair designed in the twentieth century, his own Barcelona chair being first

The Eames chair would like to disagree. These people were so far up their own ass they didn't even notice huge developments happening at the same time as them adjacent to their own aresa. The answer these ******* would probably give is that the Eames chair was made to be comfortable, hence it had utilitarian use and was thus not suitable to be considered a work of art, making it unworthy of comparison to anything they were putting out.

Is there an objective ranking somewhere for "top five most famous chairs of the 20th century?" How would you measure that?

Don't know if there's a ranking but measurement is simple, you just show people a picture of the chair and ask them whether they know its name and then sort by most known. Can also do it the other way around where you show people the name and ask them to pick out which picture represents that chair etc.

Honestly the Herman Miller Aeron is very likely also going to beat the Barcelona chair in such a test, let alone this other "S-shaped, tubular steel, cane-bottomed chair" which I'd wager 95%+ of people wouldn't know of (even though they've probably seen it a few times in their lives). I dislike it immensely because it reminds me of sterilized metal hospital waiting room chairs (not the good private hospital types, those are more the Papa Bear Chair, but your bargain bin NHS hospitals).

My personal favourite design from that era has to be the Womb Chair though. It's extremely comfortable.

this article was published more than 43 years ago

Thank you nyt, I'd already noticed because of how funny and well written it was.

I stopped in part because they seemed to be deliberately enshittifying the experience by replacing comfortable furniture with bare wood, and kinda making the overall vibe less inviting.

Why did they think this would work, when one would imagine that homeless people aren't unfamiliar with sleeping on bare concrete?

The other reason they would replace comfortable furniture with wood is that it's cleanable, and much harder for bed bugs to hide in.

I just had a conversation about this with someone a few days ago. I was saying that this event is what killed Starbucks as a brand. People used to actually go into Starbucks, and that rule was completely reasonable. Now, it's gross and full of homeless people. The bathrooms are disgusting. Their drinks are too expensive and not good enough to justify the cost. People used to like to go into Starbucks and hang out and read or study. A bunch of places around me that do enforce these rules opened up, including no dogs except service dogs, and they are always packed. At this point, I think it's too little and too late. I don't think they can get back to what they were before.

I've always hated the times when I rolled into a Starbucks and it's packed full of homeless people, such that I have to do a 360 and find another place.

The only thing worse is when I entered a Starbucks and it appeared hobo-free, so I ended up joining the queue and buying a Starbucks drink.

It's funny seeing the civil war in /r/starbucksbaristas, between those who are relieved their stores will now be hopefully, finally free of hobos harassing and threatening them and their customers, and those who insist that letting Persons of Unhousedness hang out in your store and giving them free drinks is Doing the Bare Minimum and Being a Decent a Human Being. Very Decent and generous indeed, to voluntell your co-workers who you've never met in meatspace to volunteer your employer's resources to satiate your sanctimony and moral busybodying.

I have seen QT employees explaining that nonthreatening hobos who stay out of the way are sometimes given free drinks in exchange for keeping the, uh, worse crowd of homeless away. This is probably not what those baristas are advocating, but it is a reasonable case for giving out free stuff.

That's hilarious. It's like paying protection money.

The decline of rome in barista form lmao

To nitpick, it's 180, not 360.

It's a 4chan meme.

To nitpick, it's somethingawful, not a 4chan meme.

Early 4chan had a good overlap with somethingawful before SA turned into a pinko-sj hellhole.

Gentlemen.

In my region, every Starbucks I went to was not filled with homeless people, and was still a reasonable but overpriced place to hang out. I’m guessing this was more a problem in cities. My prediction is that they will recover, although at this point they are far too big and old of a chain to ever be “cool” again.

Being able to pop into a restaurant or coffee shop or bar to use the restroom real quick used to be a totally normal thing. As someone who commutes exclusively via public transit, I frequently find myself needing to find an available restroom wherever I’ve gotten off the bus or trolley. Some places still let me walk in and use their restrooms without paying; however, even the food court at my local shopping mall now has a lock on the bathroom door, requiring a code which has to be provided to paying customers by one of the food vendors. I found this shocking when they implemented it, but the reality is that same bathroom has often been closed for cleaning at very inconvenient hours of the day, usually because some homeless junkie has made it filthy in some way. This is just yet another tax which normal people are forced to pay because of the existence of a massive parasitic underclass of homeless. A normal middle-class person should be able to enter a public establishment and take two minutes to use the bathroom without impediment, just as a basic courtesy offered between human beings, but such a system cannot survive the proliferation of a class of individuals who are by nature abusive of that trust.

A perfect example of the tragedy of the commons in action. Amazing.

Funny story about this. The summer before I started law school I took a job painting houses. I was out in the sun on a ladder all day and, consequently, I drank a lot of water. I had just moved to the city and one job was only a few miles from my house, so I walked there. Well, I'm on my way home and all that water catches up to me, so I start looking for a place to relieve myself. I pop into a random bar figuring I'll just buy a beer if I have to, but as soon as I step inside I realize that something isn't quite right. There are no doors on the bathroom. And while a bar not having any women present isn't exactly uncommon, the men were acting a little friendlier with each other than one would ordinarily expect. Having never been in a gay bar before, I unnecessarily freaked out a bit, not knowing if there was some etiquette norm I'd be violating, so I glanced around the room like I was looking for someone before turning to leave. As I'm walking out of this place I see my ex girlfriend getting off of a bus. I just waved and kept walking.

I'm just imagining it slowly dawning on you like.

A normal middle class person can do that, it just takes asking. If you’re normal and middle class they’ll give you the code, 9/10 times. If you’re a wigger they won’t, if you’re homeless or look like a drug user they won’t.

Yeah, but standing in a line to get the code for the bathroom is still annoying.

I’ve found that this is only sometimes the case. I’ve had plenty of places give me the code upon asking, but I’ve also had a number of employees tell me it’s against their policy to let non-customers use the restroom. Chain restaurants seem to have stricter guidelines around this, probably for liability reasons, or just employees not feeling empowered to make autonomous common-sense decisions.

Perhaps this is a Texas-California cultural difference- it would be extremely rare for me, a non-teenaged white guy with a conservative haircut and no tattoos, to be refused a bathroom code, regardless of the actual corporate policy- and that policy is understood to be there so as to protect employees who refuse access to drug addicts.

Just dropping a couple bucks in the tip jar is usually enough

I feel like a lot of this could be avoided if we had paid public toilets, like they do in Europe. But those are illegal in America, so we rely on private businesses to offer bathrooms as a weird public service, and that trust can easily be broken.

But those are illegal in America

Is there a list of perfectly normal stuff that is illegal in the US? Today I learned that adaptive and matrix headlights are illegal there as well.

Paid public toilets were banned under anti-discrimination law- urinals were free(there is, after all, no practical way to charge for them) and so it was thought to be discrimination against women.

I’m sure that checking American building codes and construction permitting regimes will give you plenty of examples.

there is, after all, no practical way to charge for them

These did actually exist in the before-fore time. I can distinctly remember a pay restroom in a convenience store in the middle of Bumfuck when I was a teenager. I forget if it was 50 or 75 cents but it was entirely self-service. The mechanism was similar to the old-school washers and dryers in laundromats, IE, a lever on the door latch with two or three quarter slots that one pushed inwards to operate the latch and allow one to use the restroom. Comparatively speaking, a 16 oz bottle of soda would have been $1.25-$1.50 at the time.

At some point in North American history they cost ten cents, so my guess would be this goes back quite a ways.

Citation:

Here I sit, broken-hearted,
paid my dime and only farted

Next time when I take a chance,
save a dime and shit my pants

This is what Turkey has. I found it basically fine, it took about once for me to notice that I needed to carry a certain amount of change.

The convenience store at one of the major public transit hubs in San Diego still has a pay-to-use toilet that works precisely this way.

And I was wondering if I just missed the boats on pay toilets being outlawed-TIL!

there is, after all, no practical way to charge for them

Surely there is, unless you consider nearby bushes a urinal. You pay at the door that says "Men" or 🚹, before you reach the room with the sinks and the urinals.

Scott mentioned this in a links post years ago. A bunch of people campaigned to ban paid toilets, working on the dubious assumption that it would result in toilets being made available for free. Instead the only alternative was restaurants and cafés where the toilets were for paying customers only, and the cheapest thing on the menu is usually significantly more expensive than whatever the fee was for the paid toilets.

That doesn't help the issue of people with empty wallets and full bladders/large intestines. If there is no legitimate place in public where people can relieve themselves without spending any money, everyone else will have to navigate a bio-hazardous obstacle course on the side-walk.

My recommendation:

  1. Tax businesses who do not offer public bathrooms (defined as allowing anyone to come in, use the toilet, and leave without buying anything).
  2. Use the revenue from the tax to fund (a.) subsidies for businesses who do offer public restrooms (as defined above), or (b.) construction and maintenance of free-at-point-of-use public toilets.
  3. Once there are plenty of places where one can empty one's excretory organs without spending anything, it will be much more justifiable to take strong measures against those who continue to No. 1 on walls or No. 2 on the pavement.

Once there are plenty of places where one can empty one's excretory organs without spending anything, it will be much more justifiable to take strong measures

If it turns out that political considerations keep you from doing those strong measures, will you give the businesses a refund on their taxes? My guess is no.

"Part one: hurt people by making them do X, part 2: ameloriate the harm from part 1" is a terrible idea because it's easy to say you'll do part 2 without actually doing it. The most charitable scenario is that you're too optimistic, but in the real world sometimes people just lie about part 2 so they can get part 1,

If it turns out that political considerations keep you from doing those strong measures

...there will still be less excreta on the pavement, because some of the people previously doing their business there will now be using toilets. Even if it isn't a complete solution, we're still better off.

Part one: hurt people by making them do X, part 2: ameloriate the harm from part 1

My proposal isn't making anyone do anything. If you want to reserve your business's toilets to paying customers, I am not proposing to forbid that course of action!

Under the status quo, businesses are in a position isomorphic to the prisoners' dilemma:

  • if all businesses offer public toilets, I am better off than if none of them do, because there are fewer bowel movements on the ground.
  • However, if all the other businesses offer public toilets, it is in my financial interest to reserve the toilets in my business to paying customers, and thus spend less on maintenance.
  • If none of the other businesses offer public toilets, it is also in my financial interest to reserve the toilets in my business to paying customers.

Under my proposal, the extra taxes paid by businesses not offering public WCs would be reserved for the exclusive purpose of either directly providing facilities, or subsidising other businesses' provision thereof. (I apologise if that part wasn't clear.)

it's easy to say you'll do part 2 without actually doing it.

Hence the specific tax, from which businesses can make themselves exempt if they provide restrooms one can use without spending anything.

My proposal isn't making anyone do anything.

"If you don't do this, we will take some money from you at gunpoint" is making people do it.

All I see here is the Road to Serfdom. The further growth of the State by involving itself in all matters to solve issues it has created itself.

Why not simply relinquish the silly ban on paid public toilets and enforce the law as it exists? I'm sure

I guess that doesn't create thousands of jobs in the bureaucracy to manage the whole situation. But then if that's what we want we might as well get the benefit of that approach and empower the State to intern vagrants. Using state capacity to manage the results of not using it to actually solve problems is silly.

Why not simply relinquish the silly ban on paid public toilets and enforce the law as it exists?

Because I am trying to come up with a solution for the problem of 'providing restroom facilities to people who cannot pay for them'.

It is generally considered unacceptable (at least in the West) to put someone in a position in which they have no choice but to violate the law, and then punish them for doing so. As people do not cease to have bodily functions when they cannot legally perform them, there needs to exist places in which someone can exercise the Greater and Lesser Conveniences, even if they cannot pay to do so.

(I suppose one could allow private businesses to operate paid toilets, subject to taxation used to fund the free-at-point-of-use facilities....)

Why not simply relinquish the silly ban on paid public toilets and enforce the law as it exists?

Because political forces that want to accommodate vagrants won't let you enforce the law as it exists.

They say it now applies to all North America, but I wasn't aware they had an open bathroom / hangout policy before in Canada.

I've never seen homeless people in any Starbucks, even though we definitely have homeless people around. It's always just crowded with early 20s girls ordering ridiculously priced drinks that are 60% sickly sweet syrup, 39% whipped cream and 1% coffee.

I’m in the US moderately often and didn’t see many homeless people in Starbucks in NYC, Boston, Miami or Seattle over the last year. McDonald’s was always (and likely still is) full of em, but not really Starbucks.

I've traveled a lot for the last year, and it's been like that at most Starbucks I've been to that aren't in really nice areas. And in the nice areas, they are usually empty and the people go to a local coffee shop. I've been to around 15 states in the past year too. Obviously, n=1, but that is my experience and the experience I have heard from other people.

I imagine it has a lot to do that with the same amount of money they get panhandling, they can have a decently filling meal from McDonalds, or a small drink from Starbucks.

I see a distinctly lower class crowd at mcdonalds, even in the same area, than I do at starbucks in my neck of the woods. It's entirely possible that homeless(who are basically all from lower class backgrounds) just prefer mcdonalds to starbucks, even if it's the same deal.

People used to like to go into Starbucks and hang out and read or study.

They're banning that now too though.

Never got any studying done in a Starbucks when invited there during college. Waste.

You just have to buy something.

More notes from the AI underground, this time from imagegen country. The Eye of Sauron continues to focus its withering gaze on hapless AI coomers with growing clarity, as another year begins with another crackdown on Azure abuse by Microsoft - a more direct one this time:

Microsoft sues service for creating illicit content with its AI platform

In the complaint, Microsoft says it discovered in July 2024 that customers with Azure OpenAI Service credentials — specifically API keys, the unique strings of characters used to authenticate an app or user — were being used to generate content that violates the service’s acceptable use policy. Subsequently, through an investigation, Microsoft discovered that the API keys had been stolen from paying customers, according to the complaint.

Microsoft alleges that the defendants used stolen Azure OpenAI Service API keys belonging to U.S.-based customers to create a “hacking-as-a-service” scheme. Per the complaint, to pull off this scheme, the defendants created a client-side tool called de3u, as well as software for processing and routing communications from de3u to Microsoft’s systems.

More articles here and here.

Translated from corpospeak: at some point last year, the infamous hackers known as 4chan cobbled together de3u, a A1111-like interface for DALL-E that is hosted remotely (semi-publicly) and hooked up to a reverse proxy with unfiltered Azure API keys which were stolen, scraped or otherwise obtained by the host. I probably don't need to explain what this "service" was mostly used for - I never used de3u myself, I'm more of an SD guy and assorted dalleslop has grown nauseating to see, but I'm familiar enough with general thread lore.

As before, Microsoft has finally took notice, and this time actually filed a complaint against 10 anonymous John Does responsible for the abuse of their precious Azure keys. Most publicly available case materials compiled by some industrious anon here. If you don't want to download shady zips from Cantonese finger painting forums, complaint itself here, supplemental brief with screencaps (lmao) here.

To my best knowledge,

  • Doe 1 with "access to and control over [...] github.com/notfiz/de3u" is not Fiz, the person actually hosting the proxy/service in question.
  • Doe 2 with "access to [...] https://gitgud.io/khanon/oai-reverse-proxy" is Khanon, the guy who wrote the reverse proxy codebase underlying de3u. I'm really struggling to think what can be plausibly pinned on him given that the proxy is simply a tool to use LLM API keys in congregate - it's just that the keys themselves happen to be stolen in this case - but then again I don't know how wire fraud works.
  • Doe 3 with "access to and control over [...] aitism.net" is Sekrit, a guy who was running a "proxy proxy" service somewhere in Jan-Feb of 2024 during the peak of malicious spoonfeeding and DDoS spitefaggotry, in an attempt to hide the actual endpoint of Fiz's proxy. The two likely worked together since, I assume de3u was also hosted through him. Came off as something of a pseud during "public" appearances, and was the first to get appropriately spooked by recent events.
  • Does 4-10 are unknown and seem to be random anons who presumably donated money and/or API keys to the host, or simply extensively used the reverse proxy.

At first blush, suing a bunch of anonymous John Does seems like a remarkably fruitless endeavor, although IANAL and have definitely never participated in any illegal activities before officer I swear. A schizo theory among anons is that NSFW DALLE gens included prompts of RL celebrities (recent gens are displayed on the proxy page so I assume they've seen some shit - I never checked myself so idk), which put most of the pressure on Microsoft once shitposted around; IIRC de3u keeps metadata of the gens, and I assume they would much rather avoid having the "Generated by Microsoft® Azure Dall-E 3" seal of approval on a pic of Taylor Swift sucking dick or whatever. Curious to hear the takes of more lawyerly-inclined mottizens on how likely all this is to bear any fruit whatsoever.

Regardless, the chilling effect already seems properly achieved; far as I can tell, every single person related to the "abuses", as well as some of the more paranoid adjacent ones, have vanished from the thread and related communities, and all related materials (liberally spoonfed before, some of them posted right in the OPs of /g/ threads) have been scrubbed overnight. Even the jannies are in on it - shortly after the news broke, most rentry names containing proxy-related things were added to the spam filter, and directly writing them on /g/ deletes your post and auto-bans you for a month (for what it's worth I condone this, security in obscurity etc).

If gamers are the most oppressed minority, coomers are surely the second most - although DALL-E can burn for all I care, corpo imagegen enjoyers already have it good with NovelAI.

The point of suing anonymous John Does is that the suit will allow the Plaintiffs to get a pre-discovery subpeona directed toward the relevant parties that could help identify them. Whether or not they'd actually be able to collect, or what the damages would even be, is an open question, though. Sometime the point of a lawsuit isn't to win the judgement but to demonstrate your willingness to defend you rights.

—spend two billion dollars creating AI whose only commercial application is creating naughty pictures of Taylor Swift

—move heaven and earth so it can’t do that anymore

—go bankrupt

—???????

—PROFIT

The Fascist-Feminist synthesis that the majority of normies implicitly agree with is that men viewing explicit material is metaphysically damaging in some way, and thus it must be curtailed as much as possible. There's a bunch of laws that obliquely touch on these aspects (often relating the "production of child porn"), as well as a ton of potential PR damage. That's why webhosts, credit card processors, sites like Patreon, etc. have always been weirdly prudish about any explicit material. We should expect the same thing to happen to image generators. It'll probably reach a similar steady-state eventually, with explicit stuff existing on the periphery while facing periodic crackdowns.

Why expect that as opposed to a pornhub model, where there’s a separate image generator for porn? Mind geek gives 0 fucks, I’m sure.

Mind geek gives 0 fucks, I’m sure.

I'm quite sure no service would be willing to be declared the world's first public-use CP generator, which it will become 100% within 4 seconds of its release to the plebs (whether it would be actually deserved is entirely irrelevant). The possibility of genning anything that looks even remotely teenage remains a hard technical problem, as of yet unsolved; while open-source's answer can be "yes, and", I think this will not fly for anything corpo-adjacent. This was discussed earlier wrt textgen, and the same is doubly, triply, orders of magnitude more true of imagegen; doing it properly requires painstakingly curating the dataset of your model, and even then I imagine there will be no shortage of borderline cases from crafty coomers proompters to incense the normies.

The…what?

Hosts and processors have generally erred on the side of prudishness because that’s the side of caution. It is harder to get sued or boycotted or arrested for not doing something than for doing it.

Why is explicit material so risky? Because most people recognize some sort of lazy deontology, and pornography triggers most of the common “boo” lights. For the spiritually inclined, that’s metaphysical damage. The rest of us have to dig for some physical justification. Harming children is a PRETTY GOOD REASON to criticize something. Thus, near-universal condemnation of the central examples, plus an umbrella of distaste for anything remotely related.

It sounds like we agree on almost everything here, we just use different language.

The only bit I'd raise an objection to is the "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" excuse being a good reason for much of anything.

I think describing this casual morality as a “fascist-feminist synthesis” is either very confused or very inflammatory.

Why rely on random anonymous compilations? Courtlistener has the full docket and will almost certainly be updated as the case progresses. So far looks like no defendants or lawyers for any of them have made an appearance. If the case continues this way the most likely outcome is Microsoft secures a default judgement against them.

Why rely on random anonymous compilations?

I just linked the first source I saw in the wild, thanks, this is better.

So far looks like no defendants or lawyers for any of them have made an appearance.

Is that not the norm for anonymous wire fraud or whatever charge they're levying here? I'm near-certain none of the Does (none of the major ones, at least) live in the US.

this way the most likely outcome is Microsoft secures a default judgement against them.

I'm a rube unfamiliar with the American legal system - what do the results of that typically look like in ghost cases like this? Does Microsoft get their damages, if yes then whence?

Is that not the norm for anonymous wire fraud or whatever charge they're levying here? I'm near-certain none of the Does (none of the major ones, at least) live in the US.

Probably? Microsoft did secure subpoenas to various ISPs to try and determine the actual identities of the individuals involved. Whether that can be done remains unclear.

I'm a rube unfamiliar with the American legal system - what do the results of that typically look like in ghost cases like this? Does Microsoft get their damages, if yes then whence?

Microsoft is going to get a legal judgment from a US court that X individuals are responsible for Y damages. How likely they are to actually get Y damages likely depends on the legal jurisdiction that X individuals reside in and their perspective on enforcing the judgement of US courts. US courts, for example, won't respect foreign civil judgements regarding liability for speech where that speech would be protected by the First Amendment in the United States.

So the generation takes place in Azure, and there are sets of totally unrestricted API keys which give access to an uncensored model?

Not uncensored per se, afaik it still required some prompting (as mentioned in the erstwhile rentry) but the keys commonly used definitely had laxer filtering, nowhere near the hair-trigger user-facing model where you get dogged for the dumbest things. I'm not sure a totally uncensored model exists, in the current climate it sounds like something that'd require nuclear plant-level security clearance. But yes, this is basically how keys work, the entire point is that you can call the model from any source (including a reverse proxy) as long you do it through a valid key with a valid prompt structure - which most frontends, image- or textgen, take care of under the hood.

I imagine that the model is not more or less censored than the one the public interacts with, but on top of the model's basic suitableness/unsuitableness for generating naughty content, there's likely an additional layer of filtering on public interfaces and public API keys. And since that will interfere with some applications, I would guess that there are probably API keys shared with trusted 3rd-party that Microsoft / OpenAI trusts will implement their own filtering that bypasses those additional layers of filtering.

My memory is that Neil Gaiman's name occasionally pops up around here (edit: here). New York Magazine pulled no punches today. Headline?

There Is No Safe Word How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.

The headline is false, though maybe not for the reasons you would immediately guess. As far as I can tell the story itself is not a scoop so much as a rigorous summary of things already known. It's difficult to know where to begin, commentary-wise; probably this belongs in the long tail of 2017's "#metoo" movement? But maybe we should begin with Sandman.

If you don't know who Neil Gaiman is, he's... a writer! A talented writer--not so talented a comic writer as Alan Moore, not so talented a novelist as Neal Stephenson, not so talented a screenwriter as Joss Whedon, but what makes him remarkable is that he is almost as good as every one of those writers within their respective mediums of mastery. He became Alan Moore's protégé; he collaborated with Terry Pratchett (Discworld) on Good Omens (1990). But it was his new take on an old DC character, Sandman, that became his own personal magnum opus. Running from 1989 to 1996, the book briefly outsold even Superman and Batman as DC's top title.

If you read it today, you'll see a lot of English punk, a gothic flair, deep cut literary references, edgy takes on stuff that 21st century Westerners now take culturally for granted... and a whole, whole lot of not-even-repressed sexual deviance, both of varieties that have since become more culturally acceptable, and varieties that have not. Hence my suggestion that the headline is false; as near as I can tell, Neil Gaiman never hid the darkest parts of himself from anyone, ever.

In fact, owing to decades of involvement in fringe geek fandoms, I have had a handful of glancing personal encounters with Neil Gaiman. The first thing to know is that he basically sweats charisma. Where Alan Moore is a spectacle, where Joss Whedon is a douche, Neil Gaiman is patently avuncular. He is warm and articulate, a storyteller every second, and when you meet him you know immediately within you, down to the marrow of your very bones: this man fucks.

And as far as I could tell, he made absolutely no secret of it. By no later than 2010 I had heard multiple totally separate stories from women claiming to have accompanied Gaiman to his home for playtime, hippie-style (or rationalist style, if some of the things I hear about San Francisco group homes are true). It is entirely possible that some or all of them were lying! Certainly they were all boasting. One was very clearly imagining that this would be her big break into the literary world, which seems like a strange hope to express if you are lying about the sex.

This is not the sort of behavior I want to encourage from anyone, for a variety of reasons, but it's probably worth noting, very clearly, that this did not seem at all surprising to me. I remember Bill Clinton, I remember Bill Gates, I know what a groupie is. Famous, powerful, wealthy, men have for all of history been inclined toward promiscuity, and women have been inclined to indulge them that.

The article seems to confirm my own, limited historical experiences:

It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. But in my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual.

Inevitably, it seems, in such contexts there is never any shortage of... misunderstanding. The article gets into pretty explicit detail concerning accusations of outright rape--often, however, with women who had been involved with Gaiman for some time, and continued to be involved with him for some time afterward. His second marriage (to a C-list celebrity in her own right) was "open"--

During the early years of their marriage, they lived apart for months at a time and encouraged each other to have affairs. According to conversations with five of Palmer’s closest friends, the most important rule governing their open relationship was honesty. They found that sharing the details of their extramarital dalliances — and sometimes sharing the same partners — brought them closer together.

Indeed!

In 2012, Palmer met a 20-year-old fan, who has asked to be referred to as Rachel, at a Dresden Dolls concert. After one of Palmer’s next shows, the women had sex. The morning after, Palmer snapped a few semi-naked pictures of Rachel and asked if she could send one to Gaiman. She and Palmer slept together a few more times, but then Palmer seemed to lose interest in sex with her. Some six months after they met, Palmer introduced Rachel to Gaiman online, telling Rachel, “He’ll love you.” The two struck up a correspondence that quickly turned sexual, and Gaiman invited her to his house in Wisconsin. As she packed for the trip, she asked Palmer over email if she had any advice for pleasing Gaiman in bed. Palmer joked in response, “i think the fun is finding out on your own.” With Gaiman, Rachel says there was never a “blatant rupture of consent” but that he was always pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her. Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him “like a toy.”

That sort of thing only lasted a few years. Eventually, Palmer was pregnant and decided to try to close the marriage. This seems to have been the beginning of the end of that, and the New York Magazine story could be viewed through the lens of "hit piece intended to influence the drawn-out divorce proceedings." I do not (and cannot) know the truth of these events for myself, but it probably doesn't matter; his career has been drying up for a while now, and once studios milk the requisite profits from their current investments in his IP, those contracts seem likely to be among his last. Well, he's in his 60s and he has plenty of money (even if Palmer absconds with half of it), I don't feel too badly for him.

But the whole charade does remind me once more of the peculiar way in which Western culture has come to insist that there is nothing problematic about sexual promiscuity. Marriage is just one choice among many! Homosexuality, polyamory, open marriages, monogamish couples, as long as it is consensual then it's fine, right? Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries. Gaiman's putative victims do not say that they unequivocally rejected his advances; some, indeed, texted him after the fact with reassurances that their encounters were in fact consensual.

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.

That's the kind of evidence that keeps Gaiman out of jail, regardless of what social media mob justice decides on the matter. Even assuming she was being completely honest when she later said, in effect, "I texted him lies because I was scared," there's no evidence of what she was thinking at the time, except what she actually wrote. A world with clear relationship-grounded boundaries around sexual activity alleviates such ambiguities!

I am sort of peripherally aware of some of the "sex pest" stories that occasionally circulate in rationalist circles, and certainly I am aware of the polyamory (and e.g. Scott's occasional defense of it). Apparently it can work, for some people, at least for a time. But more often it seems to end up like this: if you want an open marriage, probably you don't really want a marriage in any robust sense of the term. And wealthy, powerful men who do not commit themselves to monogamy wholly and from the outset, Pence style, will be promiscuous, and it will eventually create headaches for them, of one kind or another.

Hm. Maybe someone should write a comic book about that.

Maybe I'm conservative now but this reminds me of the hit piece on Huberman the other day for having a harem of girlfriends all a secret from each other. My takeaway from that was even the most high status males, or especially high status males, can't make poly work and have to lie about what they want.

I'm not saying Gaiman is not a dirtbag or sex criminal. But I think I am agreeing that it's probably impossible to be a gigantic kinky man slut if you are Gaiman without being accused of being a dirtbag or sex criminal.

This is not a neat comparison, some of Gaiman's related sex practices seem pretty fucked up (like the thing with his kid in the room) but I think the article exists even in the universes where that stuff didn't allegedly happen.

I don't think there exists a human being who will come out clean in a motivated hit piece by an ex lover. We have no evidence except the word of aggrieved ex lovers that any of this happened.

Not that I have any opinion whether it did or didn't, but no one else does either.

Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned

nor hell hath any fury like a woman scorned.

-- William Congreve

I'm on good terms with exactly zero of my exes and I'm trying to imagine what it would be like if I had 10x as many ex-lovers, we were poly, I did BDSM and CNC with them, and I was famous. Ugh.

In my future utopia the age of consent for women will be 36 and the age of consent for men will be 12. Future generations of men will thank me for hagmaxxing.

I'd be able to buy a mansion with the extra dues from the national American statutory rapist association, so thanks in advance.

Congratulations, you made straight shotacon real.

Monkey's paw curls

You have lots of middle-aged women who are sexually interested in young boys, but those women want to make those boys into women, not men.

Gaiman, it seems clear, didn’t commit rape- he committed seduction. It can be scummy to have sex with a woman who wants it, which is what he did. These women were it seems led to believe that their sex would be repaid, either through commitment or through benefits within the community, and this didn’t happen.

To say nothing of pressure tactics that he’s alleged to have applied. Again, not rape- seduction.

Some of the stories fit into rape and or sexual assault and not just seduction. Pavlovich was also working for him as a babysitter and so there is that factor also in play.

Gaiman asked her to sit on his lap. Pavlovich stammered out a few sentences: She was gay, she’d never had sex, she had been sexually abused by a 45-year-old man when she was 15. Gaiman continued to press. “The next part is really amorphous,” Pavlovich tells me. “But I can tell you that he put his fingers straight into my ass and tried to put his penis in my ass. And I said, ‘No, no.’ Then he tried to rub his penis between my breasts, and I said ‘no’ as well. Then he asked if he could come on my face, and I said ‘no’ but he did anyway. He said, ‘Call me ‘master,’ and I’ll come.’ He said, ‘Be a good girl. You’re a good little girl.’”

In 2007, Gaiman and Stout took a trip to the Cornish countryside. On their last night there, Stout developed a UTI that had gotten so bad she couldn’t sit down. She told Gaiman they could fool around but that any penetration would be too painful to bear. “It was a big hard ‘no,’” she says. “I told him, ‘You cannot put anything in my vagina or I will die.’” Gaiman flipped her over on the bed, she says, and attempted to penetrate her with his fingers. She told him “no.” He stopped for a moment and then he penetrated her with his penis. At that point, she tells me, “I just shut down.” She lay on the bed until he was finished. (This past October, she filed a police report alleging he raped her.)

One evening, Palmer dropped Pavlovich and the child off with Gaiman and retreated back to her own place. Pavlovich was in the kitchen, tidying up, when he approached her from behind and pulled her to the sofa. “It all happened again so quickly,” Pavlovich says. Gaiman pushed down her pants and began to beat her with his belt. He then attempted to initiate anal sex without lubrication. “I screamed ‘no,’” Pavlovich says. Had Gaiman and Pavlovich been engaging in BDSM, this could conceivably have been part of a rape scene, a scenario sometimes described as consensual nonconsent. But that would have required careful negotiation in advance, which she says they had not done. After she said “no,” Gaiman backed off briefly and went into the kitchen. When he returned, he brought butter to use as lubricant. She continued to scream until Gaiman was finished. When it was over, he called her “slave” and ordered her to “clean him up.” She protested that it wasn’t hygienic. “He said, ‘Are you defying your master?’” she recalls. “I had to lick my own shit.”

I guess I'm going to be that guy, but: what the hell was Pavlovich doing going back there after the first time? Losing your babysitting gig hardly seems like a powerful coercion to being possibly raped a second time.

Or, what was she doing getting naked and into a bath outside at some guy's house? And then just chilling there when he jumps in unexpectedly?

That's obviously not an excuse to get raped but it really makes me wonder if this is a faithful accounting of what happened. I can't really imagine just going along with all of this.

Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries.

Unless you don't believe in the idea of marital rape, consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages.

Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries.

Unless you don't believe in the idea of marital rape, consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages.

@quiet_NaN also raised this point below, but I think it begs the question. "What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible. I think most Westerners today do not think of marriage that way! But when you take that away from marriage, it becomes rather less clear both what the point of marriage really is, and what else can/should constitute "consent."

Somewhat recently, a pre-2020 essay on "maintenance sex" popped up in my social feeds, and I found it faintly amusing. The "expert" being interviewed clearly wanted to say "it's normal and healthy to have sex when you don't want to, simply because your partner wants to and you care about giving them what they want." But he kept having to dance around it, resulting in amusing elocution seeming to simultaneously suggest that the indulging partner was both willing and not-willing. It included bad advice like "make sure both partners climax," instead of acknowledging that--particularly as people age--orgasm can sometimes become exhausting to pursue, or even totally unreachable, and this doesn't necessarily make sexual activity undesirable.

As I read, I reflected somewhat on the model sometimes taught to college students today, that "consent is voluntary, informed, and enthusiastic," and should be re-affirmed periodically throughout every sexual encounter. I perceive a very strong likelihood that this can, will, and probably already has led to some serious sexual dysfunction in Western relationships. Many people find themselves psychologically unable to express sexual desire in an overt and expressive manner; this is one reason why people sometimes consume alcohol with the intention of getting laid. People enjoy being swept away in emotion and sensation, becoming inarticulate with desire, etc.

Put all this into the context of a marriage, and the idea of "marital rape" becomes incredibly fraught. Realistically, the most common application of "marital rape" laws is to prosecute men who, prior to the finalization of a divorce, force themselves on their soon-to-be-exes. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the law should be able to react to such a development--and besides, I find it difficult to imagine anyone in a healthy and functioning marriage prosecuting their spouse for anything. That seems like a clear commitment to the immediate or eventual termination of the relationship. But since the advent of "marital rape" laws, I have seen a gradually increasing number of people (usually, women) wield the concept of consent as a form of control: by default, sexual activity becomes locked to the mood of the lower-libido spouse, with no compromise (or "maintenance sex") possible. After all--wouldn't that be rape? But it seems clearly absurd that the definition of "rape" should become "any sex you don't enthusiastically desire," much less "sex you later decide you wish you hadn't had."

So when you say "consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages," my inclination is to respond, sure, not necessarily--but they can, and ideally probably should, and the evolution of "sexual consent" as a concept in premarital and extramarital contexts is in this way directly corrosive to marriage as traditionally practiced. This is what people actually mean, I think, when they say that no fault divorce erodes the concept of traditional marriage. After all, someone else's divorce isn't going to change my marriage, right? Shouldn't I just let others do what they want, while I do what I want? But here we are talking about importing "consent" into marriage, as if it is a separate thing--when traditionally, marriage was how you consented.

"What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible.

Vanishingly few cultures genuinely held that husbands had unlimited physical dominion over their spouse, with no concept of consent possible. Some saw no place for the law in such a situation, but most (hedging here: for which we have sufficient written evidence to have some idea what people thought about that kind of thing) still recognized some social opprobrium against wife beaters. If it's wrong to beat your wife too violently, then it follows that there is at least a concept of it being wrong to rapeit is wrong to rape your wife, as the path from "no" to "rape" runs through "physical violence."

Most places at most times have figured that a man's wife owed him sex. Fewer would have considered it acceptable for him to beat the shit out of her until she agreed.

Of course, the level of agency expected of women at the time was far higher than modern standards. Women were expected to actually experience violence, not merely the threat of it, before rape could be charged.

Vanishingly few cultures genuinely held that husbands had unlimited physical dominion over their spouse, with no concept of consent possible.

Yes--of course. There are many different legal traditions that parse things out differently. A common Western one is that because husband and wife are "one flesh," and one cannot commit an offense against oneself, many interpersonal crimes are impossible between man and wife. However, one could still do morally atrocious things which were against the law--so for example, adultery was illegal, even though under the doctrine of coverture adultery was not strictly an offense against one's spouse. Rather, it was an offense against God and the State (which approved the marriage).

A common Western one is that because husband and wife are "one flesh," and one cannot commit an offense against oneself, many interpersonal crimes are impossible between man and wife.

Sure, and we also have a long tradition in Western culture of mocking and denigrating wife beaters. Even where it was not legally prosecuted, it was understood as a bad thing to do (too much of).

"What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible.

Sure, we could redefine words so that you couldn't call women being physically forced to have sex with their husbands against their will victims of "rape", but I'm not sure what the value of that is.

But when you take that away from marriage, it becomes rather less clear both what the point of marriage really is,

Do you mean that the point of marriage is that the man can have sex with his wife whenever he wants?

As I read, I reflected somewhat on the model sometimes taught to college students today, that "consent is voluntary, informed, and enthusiastic," and should be re-affirmed periodically throughout every sexual encounter. I perceive a very strong likelihood that this can, will, and probably already has led to some serious sexual dysfunction in Western relationships. Many people find themselves psychologically unable to express sexual desire in an overt and expressive manner; this is one reason why people sometimes consume alcohol with the intention of getting laid. People enjoy being swept away in emotion and sensation, becoming inarticulate with desire, etc.

I broadly agree.

Realistically, the most common application of "marital rape" laws is to prosecute men who, prior to the finalization of a divorce, force themselves on their soon-to-be-exes.

I would imagine the most common application of marital rape laws is invisible, i.e. deterring husbands from forcing themselves on their wives against their will.

But since the advent of "marital rape" laws, I have seen a gradually increasing number of people (usually, women) wield the concept of consent as a form of control: by default, sexual activity becomes locked to the mood of the lower-libido spouse, with no compromise (or "maintenance sex") possible. After all--wouldn't that be rape?

No, half-hearted maintenance sex isn't rape. There's a healthy compromise position between "Everything is rape" and "nothing in marriage is rape".

So when you say "consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages," my inclination is to respond, sure, not necessarily--but they can, and ideally probably should, and the evolution of "sexual consent" as a concept in premarital and extramarital contexts is in this way directly corrosive to marriage as traditionally practiced.

I don't hold traditional ways of doing things as sacrosanct. I think it's entirely worth knocking down the Chesterton's fence of forcing women (and probably some men) to stay in relationships they don't want to and to submit to sex against their will. This doesn't mean I want to end marriage as an institution, rather that I think there are things from the past worth keeping and things worth discarding.

"What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible.

Sure, we could redefine words so that you couldn't call women being physically forced to have sex with their husbands against their will victims of "rape", but I'm not sure what the value of that is.

No one is proposing to do that.

But when you take that away from marriage, it becomes rather less clear both what the point of marriage really is,

Do you mean that the point of marriage is that the man can have sex with his wife whenever he wants?

No; kindly stow the strawmen, please. Sex is, however, central to the concept of marriage, historically.

I would imagine the most common application of marital rape laws is invisible, i.e. deterring husbands from forcing themselves on their wives against their will.

You don't have to answer this, of course, as it is a somewhat personal question, but... are you currently a member of a marriage in which the higher-libido spouse refrains from forcible intercourse partially or primarily because it is against the law? Because, like, if you are, my condolences? But if you aren't, then where in the world would you pick up such a bizarre model of marital relations?

In fact I already briefly mentioned the (true, historical) primary driver of "marital rape" laws, which basically never apply to functional marriages. There were actual cases of H and W getting divorced. Enraged, H stalks W, rapes her, and then law enforcement responds "nothing we can do, sorry, it's not illegal to have sex with your spouse." This seems like a genuine problem! But there are many possible solutions, some of which do not have the same cultural drawbacks as introducing the "enthusiastic and continuing" consent model of sexual intercourse into private marital relationships, which should be mature and caring enough to negotiate such things without the assistance of a government cudgel.

No, half-hearted maintenance sex isn't rape. There's a healthy compromise position between "Everything is rape" and "nothing in marriage is rape".

Yes, that's true. The "enthusiastic and continuing" consent model isn't it, though.

I don't hold traditional ways of doing things as sacrosanct. I think it's entirely worth knocking down the Chesterton's fence of forcing women (and probably some men) to stay in relationships they don't want to and to submit to sex against their will. This doesn't mean I want to end marriage as an institution, rather that I think there are things from the past worth keeping and things worth discarding.

Again--I am broadly in agreement. What you don't seem to want to discuss in a careful or nuanced way is the idea that maybe there are times when people should be socially pressured to stay in relationships they don't want to, and submit to sex they aren't enthusiastically interested in having. I can only imagine why this might be; I do think Western attitudes toward increasingly absolute "bodily autonomy" have generated some peculiar attitudes toward sex, for example. The treatment of marriage as purely a matter of romance, rather than a union that can sometimes be practical or beneficial in other ways, may also play a role. I'm not exactly opposed to everything the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has introduced into our culture.

I just think we're being deliberately obtuse if we try to pretend that Neil Gaiman, and others like him, are not also the fruit of that tree.

I don't know that "marital rape" only happens when a soon-to-be-ex assaults his wife. You're right of course that in a healthy relationship, there is no need to be constantly negotiating "consent" and boundaries. But what about unhealthy ones, where the wife is never in the mood and the husband decides he's sick of taking no for an answer? If there is no such thing as marital rape, then all she can do is divorce him, I guess? (Which most tradcons who oppose marital rape laws also tend to think should not be an option.)

It is entirely possible to define marital rape as domestic violence(which could basically never be allowed) but not rape; this was the position of Alphonsus Ligouri IIRC.

I don't know that "marital rape" only happens when a soon-to-be-ex assaults his wife.

I mean, presumably there are other cases--that's just the one that I've actually seen in court, and the one I've heard used to justify the changes. I don't make a habit of following criminal prosecutions meticulously, but the overlap between "marital rape" and "divorce" proceedings parties appears to be damn near 100%, whatever the gory details.

But what about unhealthy ones, where the wife is never in the mood and the husband decides he's sick of taking no for an answer? If there is no such thing as marital rape, then all she can do is divorce him, I guess? (Which most tradcons who oppose marital rape laws also tend to think should not be an option.)

I don't feel like I know any tradcons who would reject "physical abuse" as possible grounds for separation, but I suppose they're probably out there. But really--someone who puts their spouse in prison for marital rape must surely understand that it is tantamount to a divorce anyway? This seems quite analogous to "battered woman syndrome" to me--the law has rarely faced any shortage of ways to answer domestic violence of various kinds; rather, a host of influences (love, material need, desperation, actual insanity, you name it) bring women back to their abusers under a wide variety of circumstances. Whether that's a "systemic" problem or a psychological problem or whatever, revamping central tenets of the ancient institution of marriage to better serve outrageous edge-cases does not seem to have especially helped matters improve.

This is a pattern I see repeated endlessly in conversations about "moral progress." I could hand you a dozen different papers purporting to explain how we can reduce violence against women through various social engineering programs, but none of them really explains the evidence for their own effectiveness. As far as I have been able to determine, the biggest progress in reducing violence against women has been made through IQ gains resulting from the near eradication of malnutrition, combined with an overall increase in the absolute wealth of the average American. Outside of America and Europe, "intimate partner violence" remains stubbornly unaffected by cultural interventions (though that hasn't stopped anyone from insisting their programs just need more money).

Cases like Gaiman's are special. He obviously isn't an impoverished blue collar laborer, lashing out at his long-suffering wife due to poor executive functioning. He's damaged in a different way: he's a wealthy, powerful man living in a world where sex and marriage have been decoupled, to the primary detriment of the very women the sexual revolution so often purported to advantage.

don't feel like I know any tradcons who would reject "physical abuse" as possible grounds for separation,

This is the official stance of the Wisconsin Synod of the Lutheran church, probably the most consistently tradcon major protestant denomination in the English speaking world.

On the other hand, I have seen tradcath priests admitting they counsel battered women to get a civil divorce(and remain celibate afterwards), despite theoretically stricter rules about divorce. So it's entirely possible that this is a theoretical doctrinal idea that isn't reflected in the breach.

If you're not willing to bite that bullet, you're not really in favor of traditional marriage.

Unless you don't believe in the idea of marital rape, consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages.

A married woman has a lot more leverage against that sort of behaviour even outside of legal sanction. After all, a man has to actually live with his wife. Unless a man is willing to become a tyrant who is in constant conflict with the woman he shares a house with, he's going to listen to her preferences at least somewhat.

Not so for the disposable groupie/employee.

Even traditional cultures have and had forms of protection for married women from sexual violence, namely her brothers, uncles, cousins, father if still alive and the men of her tribe.

Yeah and those cultures were terrible, for women especially! I really don't want to emulate almost anything about them. I'd much rather have married women's safety guaranteed by the police than by roving gangs of male relatives getting into street fights with each other.

But this protection wasn't unique to married women. Shotgun weddings were a thing not so long ago.

I'm glad someone did the write up on this so I didn't have to.

I have to update some previous thoughts from six months ago on this matter.

A lot of the described behavior is bad enough to absolutely deserve moral approbation.

I'd still argue that the contributions the man makes to the culture 'outweigh' the harms he's caused, so its simply not economically efficient to lock the man out of writing stories, but maybe do lock the guy in his house and don't let him leave, and any ladies who visit should be fully informed of his proclivities and signing off on a very explicit waiver so they know what they're getting into.

One thing that did jump out though, some of these women attached themselves with clear hopes of career advancement or increased fame thanks to his influence. It seems like none of them got any of that.

So here's an out-there question: Is Neil's conduct arguably worse than Harvey Weinstein's? Weinstein, at least, had the juice to make the women he abused into stars once he was done with them.

Is it worse to NOT actually do a quid pro quo when using your status to get women to sleep with you for favors? Especially with the more painful stuff he inflicted.

Is it worse to NOT actually do a quid pro quo when using your status to get women to sleep with you for favors?

Yes, but only in this limited aspect. Weinstein was convicted of other crimes, such as rape. Which is much worse than the non-crime of lying to women to get laid.

For women that leverage sex for career advancement it is definitely worse. For everyone else it's good that the risk of getting scammed exists. Sure, it sucks to get the raw end of an underhanded deal, but that risk is baked into under-the-table dealings. Is a drug dealer that stiffs, then robs, a customer worse than an honest, yet 1000x more vicious, cartel kingpin?

Lying to get laid, while scummy, is common. Women and men lie on first dates. Sometimes they lie in big ways that waste everyone's time. That can be months or years. That doesn't seem any better than a tryst without receiving an expected return.

If a woman wants to curry favor through sex with a powerful -- in this context -- guy that may help her career, then she has to use her judgment of his character and cross her fingers. If she wants to curry favor with a powerful guy that is known to be a womanizer that should enter into her assessment. If she wants a binding agreement, then she should write up a contract.

EDIT: I'm reminded of listening to Dan Savage speak about the Older Gay Guy/Young & Dumb Sexy Twink age gap relationship phenomena a few years ago. He judges a relationship with a significant age gap as ethical if Older Gay Guy leaves the Young Sexy Twink no worse or, ideally, "better off" at the end of the relationship. If you use a younger, inexperienced person for young, sexy sex, then don't leave them homeless, friendless, and drug-addicted at the end of it.

Can't say I fully understand the dynamic above, but if we apply the same framework here, then if all that's lost is some sex without financial benefit, then it's not an exceptional problem. If Gaiman doesn't deliver a book deal and wrecks a marriage -- other than his own -- in the process, then we can call it extra bad and tell the Young Sexy Twinks to avoid such a person.

He judges a relationship with a significant age gap as ethical if Older Gay Guy leaves the Young Sexy Twink no worse or, ideally, "better off" at the end of the relationship. If you use a younger, inexperienced person for young, sexy sex, then don't leave them homeless, friendless, and drug-addicted at the end of it.

That's approximately my take on age-gap relationships. But the question of better off can be 'squishy' because its hard to really imagine the counterfactual scenario where they didn't have the relationship.

But it seems that ethically the older person should be actively trying to leave them in a better position, financially, career-wise, or at least creating a more stable life-path for them so that when the older guy exits, the woman's life isn't immediately thrown into chaos.

For heterosexual women, there's the issue of their eventually waning fertility, where a dalliance with an older man that lasts a year or more is inherently decreasing their chances of having kids. Or if they do have kids and the guy leaves, now they're really up a creek, and the kid is probably worse off too in ways that giving them financial support probably won't make up for.

So I think there is an inherent cost to a powerful man using his status to string along young, possibly naive women and making it much harder for said woman to end up in a stable, happy life situation, and those costs often are NOT internalized by that man.

If a woman wants to curry favor through sex with a powerful -- in this context -- guy that may help her career, then she has to use her judgment of his character and cross her fingers. If she wants to curry favor with a powerful guy that is known to be a womanizer that should enter into her assessment.

The objection here is that its often hard to know when a guy is a 'known' womanizer and exactly how bad his proclivities are. Sure there's an obvious baseline for most guys, but unless other women are taking down detailed notes of their experience and sharing it with other females (sometimes happens!) there's a clear information asymmetry there, and one that a woman may not even knows exist.

For heterosexual women, there's the issue of their eventually waning fertility, where a dalliance with an older man that lasts a year or more is inherently decreasing their chances of having kids

Unless he marries her, that is. One would imagine, all else being equal, older guys to be more marriage minded- and eligible- as a rule.

Someone could make a crazy work of fiction out of Garmin's life. This whole Calliope story in the Sandman (https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/the-sandman-episode-calliope-ending-explained) along with the scientology connection where his parents were apparently second in charge in the UK. They could have Garmin making a pact with the aliens to commit rape against women in order to spread an alien virus in exchange for his fame.

As she packed for the trip, she asked Palmer over email if she had any advice for pleasing Gaiman in bed. […] Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him “like a toy.”

Amazing the passive language. Like she willingly presenting herself as a sex toy, but also had no agency in this decision. Which could well be, there are also comments on Reddit how Palmer used egoistically other people, so it could be she & Gaimann preyed on vulnerable and weak characters.

Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries.

To be fair, for most of the history of marriage, consent covert at most the act of marriage itself, and even there it was often coerced. Once a woman was married, her husband most certainly was free to rape her. In Germany, marital rape was only criminalized in 1997 (against the vote of likely future chancellor Friedrich Merz).

You are certainly right that consent is especially hard with new sexual partners when boundaries are not yet established, but it does mean that it is all that simple for monogamous relationships. There are certainly plenty of relationships which are a total mess.

To be fair, for most of the history of marriage, consent covert at most the act of marriage itself, and even there it was often coerced. Once a woman was married, her husband most certainly was free to rape her.

For most of the history of marriage, consent to individual episodes of sex was not a concept. You would consent to marriage, and marriage came with certain obligations, one of which was sexual. The wife could accuse the husband of sodomy instead if he tried to get her to perform something out of Gaiman's bucket list.

Yeah, its a bit hard to compare Apples to Apples with regard to marriage when the concept used to be a set of mutually reinforcing obligations/responsibilities to the other party that were considered ironclad expectations of each party under penalty of literal hellfire in some cases.

And since connubials included an expectation of regular sexual relations (although with the intent of conceiving children, I suppose), one of the parties denying that to the other was a clear breach or default of their obligations, and enforcing 'specific performance' on the party in default... rather makes sense as a solution?

I get that it's a squishy question, how much sex is it 'fair' to expect from a partner, but it is weird to think that we still have the general ceremonial trappings of marriage as an ironclad 'contract' ('til death do us part!) and yet have tossed away almost any 'enforcement' mechanisms and let people breach and exit them at will.

I am sort of peripherally aware of some of the "sex pest" stories that occasionally circulate in rationalist circles, and certainly I am aware of the polyamory (and e.g. Scott's occasional defense of it). Apparently it can work, for some people, at least for a time. But more often it seems to end up like this: if you want an open marriage, probably you don't really want a marriage in any robust sense of the term. And wealthy, powerful men who do not commit themselves to monogamy wholly and from the outset, Pence style, will be promiscuous, and it will eventually create headaches for them, of one kind or another.

I think the sort of binary thinking that's been ingrained into these discussions is part of the problem: Infidelity is wrong, but discreetly (discretely?) having a mistress is not the same as carelessly sleeping around, which itself is not the same as whatever degenerate stuff this guy was doing (some other comments mention shit and vomit, I'm disinclined to inquire further).

If "consent" and "fidelity" are your only measures of correctness, and only on a "yes/no" basis, you're bound to end up with a Puritan <-> Borderline Sex Criminal barbell.

Infidelity is wrong, but discreetly (discretely?) having a mistress is not the same as carelessly sleeping around, which itself is not the same as whatever degenerate stuff this guy was doing...

I agree with you to this point.

If "consent" and "fidelity" are your only measures of correctness, and only on a "yes/no" basis, you're bound to end up with a Puritan <-> Borderline Sex Criminal barbell.

This doesn't seem quite right, however. While I'm not sure where it takes the argument, exactly, I feel it necessary to point out that both adultery and fornication have been, and in many places still are, sex crimes. They are not prosecuted in the same way as groping, which is not prosecuted in the same way as rape, so it does seem like societies are capable of recognizing gradations while still maintaining a clear line (essentially: formal social approval in the form of a marriage certificate) between "yes" and "no."

In the 1960s/1970s, feminism and the hippie movement decoupled sex from marriage on the view that this was liberating individuals from the shackles of social opprobrium. That doesn't seem to be wrong, prima facie; the idea that my community should have any say in my sex life seems like a pretty obvious violation of liberal (and libertarian) thinking. "Behind closed doors" wasn't even part of the equation--the sex and nudity of that era was often quite public!

But to whatever extent society is going to punish sexual deviance--every consequence from ostracism through to actual legal penalties--should be attached to reasonably clear expectations. A marriage certificate says, presumably among other things, that "society approves of sex between these people." This was the substance of the Obergefell case--that society should formally approve homosexual relations as socially legitimate. One of the most interesting arguments I ever heard against gay marriage was from a young gay man whose reaction to this was that this was a total abandonment of the "queer" ethos; that the point was not to become accepted by society, but to break down its oppressive norms.

I do not know, but strongly suspect, that this is the mindset of people like Gaiman. "Look, I'm a brilliant, caring, utterly free individual who has transcended the boring, tradition-bound nonsense against which you youngsters rail. Behold my boundless freedom! Partake in it yourself by gnawing upon my engorged genitals, you free, sexy rebel, you." And of course, his critics can be easily dismissed as uptight religious whackjobs, or uptight feminists.

I also don't know what the answer is. My own inclination is toward freedom! I have always enjoyed Gaiman's writing, for whatever that's worth. I am inclined toward smaller government, however, which Gaiman generally was not. I don't want to make marriage a legal requirement for sex; I don't want us to prosecute fornication and adultery as a matter of law. But I'm increasingly concerned that we haven't really come up with a good alternative. The "consent model" seems like a failure and a burden. My instinct is that it would be best to have strong cultural norms in favor of traditional monogamous marriage, without legal requirements. But in the absence of those cultural norms, it seems like we as a culture are asking for the return of legal norms along those lines. This puts me in mind of Ben Franklin's (somewhat ironic) proclamation:

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

In the 1960s/1970s, feminism and the hippie movement decoupled sex from marriage on the view that this was liberating individuals from the shackles of social opprobrium. That doesn't seem to be wrong, prima facie*; the idea that my community should have any say in my sex life seems like a pretty obvious violation of liberal (and libertarian) thinking. "Behind closed doors" wasn't even part of the equation--the sex and nudity of that era was often quite public!

I agree with your final conclusion but that's why I don't see how small-l liberalism necessitates - even reading on the surface - the elimination of social opprobrium? In fact, that is clearly not what's happened and it's not what anyone actually wants to happen.

Your community has a say in your sex life because your community will bear the costs of enforcing violations of a notoriously hard to prove nature (when the violation is not the act of having sex itself). Tell-all articles about degenerate celebrities, for example, are written with the expectation that society as a whole will make some judgment and enforce consequences where the criminal justice system cannot.

I agree with your final conclusion but that's why I don't see how small-l liberalism necessitates - even reading on the surface - the elimination of social opprobrium? In fact, that is clearly not what's happened and it's not what anyone actually wants to happen.

So first let me say that I do not believe that small-l liberalism necessarily aims toward the elimination of social opprobium; most people do not chase the idea of liberty all the way to Ancapistan. But "not what anyone actually wants to happen" is probably asserting too much. I don't think it's a coincidence that the essay where the term "anarchocapitalism" was coined was first printed in Playboy in 1969; perhaps most notoriously, it was Playboy Press that published nude glamour photos of a certain 10-year-old celebrity in 1975. This was one year after the initial publication of Richard Farson's Birthrights, which contains the following passage (page 147-148 in the hardback I just pulled from my shelf)--

The most ruinous situations are usually not the sexual activities involved in the act of molestation, but the community's response to the act when it has been discovered. The guilt and fear that are induced can be worse than the experience of the act itself.

This is typical of bleeding-edge conversations surrounding sex and gender in the 1960s and 1970s. Nudity and sexual activity, being "natural," could not be bad; any shame or embarrassment or reticence felt in connection with one's body and its functions was a social construction in need of deconstruction. Meaningful harms were not the result of human activity, but of systemic oppression. Practical considerations like "bear[ing] the costs of enforcing violations of a notoriously hard to prove nature" scarcely entered into the conversation, except perhaps with hidebound conservatives whose opprobrium could be safely dismissed as mere patriarchy.

In hopes of maybe steelmanning American counterculture circa 1960, it's probably worth observing that there were (and arguably are) indeed many oppressive aspects to American culture! But people fighting for "freedom" do not typically concern themselves with the nuances of application, as we see even today with the "burn it to the ground" mentality of various anti-capitalist, "woke," or otherwise revolutionary types. These often find themselves hoist from their own petard, as it is not the elimination of social opprobrium they crave, but rather it is control of social opprobrium they crave, and when this becomes evident, many of their "anti-authoritarian" views turn out to just be different authoritarian views, and they lose their punk cred.

But there are purists out there, whether by naiveté or aspiration, who either believe or at least aspire to believe that what would really be best, is total independence from the all the pressures imposed by society. I think it is an unrealistic attitude. But I can grasp the appeal, the dream, of simply doing as I please, all the time. For the wealthy and powerful, it is more often a live option, and their revealed preferences routinely paint a startling portrait.

as we see even today with the "burn it to the ground" mentality of various anti-capitalist, "woke," or otherwise revolutionary types. ...

But there are purists out there, whether by naiveté or aspiration, who either believe or at least aspire to believe that what would really be best, is total independence from the all the pressures imposed by society.

Sure. "Anyone" is too strong. These sorts of optimists exist.

I guess my take is that this sort of hope is like one of those strange particles that exist for rare and fleeting moments. Like those who think they're going to turn Seattle into an autonomous zone or Occupy was going to reshape all society: they get overtaken quickly by events and more pragmatic/ruthless people.

It may be the first step for the movement is to question norms. But college kids need some guidelines when there's a he-said, she-said. Workplaces need rules. Someone got abused (or "abused") by a famous man and needs to make sense of that. There needs to be consequences for legal yet unethical behavior.

Liberty from both government and society (as anything other than the privilege of the few) isn't a thing. Sooner, reality will force you to pick. In fact, destroying norms forces you to default to the government to enforce rules so you already picked.

There may have been people arguing that shame was all socially constructed but that certainly didn't drive the MeToo movement. Because none of that shit would have been helpful.

Was there meant to be a footnote explaining "prima facie"?

No, that was me failing to open the italics properly, sorry.

What dilemma is there in this gossip rag? The man is innocent. A crying woman is not a story. People's disgust is not an argument.

it will eventually create headaches for them

It’s not ‘it’ that creates headaches for them, it’s people who try to get them cancelled or prosecuted. Assume your role of censor and hangman.

I'm not sure being married to palmer(edit: pavlovich) would have helped: the rag would have printed the lurid details of what they did behind closed doors, people would have felt 'iffy', they would have moved the blurry boundaries of consent to marital rape, and the tabloid life goes on.

The man is innocent.

At least one of the allegations (Stout saying she didn't want penetrative sex due to a UTI, Gaiman sticking it in anyway) is an absolutely clear case of rape if true. It can't be adjudicated to the criminal standard, but given the pattern of behaviour revealed by the publicly-available information I think it is more likely than not.

The allegations by Pavlovich (again, if true) clearly include criminal sexual assaults. I suppose you can take a maximally pro-Gaiman view and say that all the penetrative sex was consensual on a "silence equals assent" basis, hence no rape strictu sensu, but I don't see why someone who is screwing the babysitter deserves that level of charity.

Even in libertine culture, "don't screw the babysitter" and "if you want to pick up MOTAS for casual BDSM, do it in a BDSM community so you know that they have the necessary skills to protect their own safety" are about as hard as customary rules can get when the mos maiorum isn't written down by the Censors. And Gaiman sailed over those lines on multiple occasions. I am well up for laughing at feminists calling mainstream Western culture a "rape culture" because it isn't one, but the culture that thinks that the behaviour Gaiman is accused of counts as "innocent" is a rape culture. This is a pre-Christ Roosh/Andrew Tate level of behaviour.

I don't have much sympathy for the groupies who chased down Gaiman for sex and ended up having sex they didn't want, and I don't think that adjudicating the difference between "the groupie was miserable the next morning because the popstar performed the consented-to sex act badly" and "the groupie was miserable the next morning because the popstar performed a different sex act to the one consented to" is a good use of police and court time. But "Caroline" and Pavlovich were not groupies - they were brought into Gaiman's orbit as employees, and both were living in de facto tied housing at the time that most of the sex happened. A woman who puts up with a skeevy boss because the alternative is homelessness and finds herself in a situation where homelessness would, with hindsight, have been the better choice is not the same thing as a groupie who gets a dicking other than the one she was cruising for, to use Jim Donald's crass but apt metaphor. If the difference between "I let the skeevy boss kiss me because I really needed the job and eventually we escalated to consensual sex under the same unfortunate terms" and "I let the skeevy boss kiss me because I really needed the job and then he raped me" is too hard to adjudicate, then I would support drawing the bright line rule on the side of "don't fuck employees".

The law agrees with me on this point - even if mostly-consensual, Gaiman's behaviour towards "Caroline" and Pavlovich is illegal (usually a tort rather than a crime, admittedly) as workplace sexual harassment, and not of the bullshit "hostile environment" variety that a lot of people want to legalise. There is a good reason for this - a world where being bait-and-switched into sex work is a normal incident of accepting a job as a nanny is a very bad place for a lot of people, including me as a non-skeevy man who has nannies in the house while I am working from home.

the rag would have printed the lurid details of what they did behind closed doors, people would have felt 'iffy'

Without the employees' stories, there wouldn't have been enough material for the article.

do it in a BDSM community so you know that they have the necessary skills to protect their own safety

This may well be a good idea (or maybe not), but I find the article's (and this comment's, implicitly) assertion that "the BDSM community" is some sort of authority to which BDSM practitioners must submit pretty weird -- the BDSM community's approval of various sexual activities does not feature in any legal codes that I'm aware of, and I see no reason why anybody should be expected to pay any more heed to the BDSM community's opinions about their sex life than (say) the BDSM community would pay to those of the Christian community.

In short, who died and made the BDSMC the sex cops? (although clearly they would the goto if one were looking for sex cop uniforms)

I've already written a bit about the totalizing nature of progressive sex norms (all fucking within the party, no fucking outside the party, no fucking against the party). But this is an especially good example of how it's done in practice.
Encourage deviant behavior to the point of basically making it mandatory (you don't have an open relationship? You're not a square are you?), then make it socially and legally risky to engage in outside of party-aligned social institutions.

And most notably that support isn't just contingent on following the ever-changing rules about sex; it can be withdrawn for insufficient zeal in other matters. Remember all the stories threatening naming and shaming valley sex party enjoyers when the media was pressuring them over insufficient anti-fascist censorship?
The rich, high status libertine techbros thought they had a deal that enabled them to have casual sex within the emerging leftist monoculture. Then the deal changed. I suspect that incident quietly did more to turn them against leftism than the rocks thrown at their employees.

Encourage deviant behavior to the point of basically making it mandatory (you don't have an open relationship? You're not a square are you?), then make it socially and legally risky to engage in outside of party-aligned social institutions.

The actual life path followed by Blue Tribe elites is to fool around a bit in your twenties, then to get married (to someone of your own social class, naturally) and stay married. The idea that polyamory and swinging are standard for married couples in prog circles is absurd if you have spent time with them - this is the whole point behind Charles Murrays "the elite should preach what they practice" thesis in Coming Apart. Even though the official prog position is that there is nothing wrong with swinging if everyone is consenting, it has always been the case that a male public figure who did this kind of thing and got caught was liable to be hauled over the coals by feminists for bullying his wife into it.

Blue Tribe opinion-formers promote sexual deviance because promoting deviance of all kinds feels like rebellion against oppressive authority. But the actual rules enforced by Blue Tribe morality police have included things like "don't engage in drug-addled casual sex" since the feminist backlash against 60's libertinism. And banging women of a significantly lower social class than your own (including whores) has always been mildly low-status behaviour for elite men, even though it is common. If the libertine techbros had thought that drug-fueled orgies were normal for Blue Tribe elites then they were making the classic mistake of believing what the NYT says and not watching what the sort of person who gets published in the NYT does.

"the BDSM community" is some sort of authority to which BDSM practitioners must submit

Yeah, they wish. (well, some of them do)

I never heard of no ‘don’t screw the babysitter’ rule. Babysitters will fuck parents and employees will fuck employees. All the effect of these laws, the ‘real’ sexual harassment laws as you term them, is to ‘multiply crime’. It gives women a legal joker they can play when they feel like it, way down the line. Like here.

I have an old school understanding of rape: victim screams no, immediately goes to the police. All the rest, the sordid relationships, the misunderstandings, the regrets, the quid pro quos, I don’t want to hear. Not any of my or the state’s business.

I just think women are people, and they have the capacity to say no, even when saying yes is the most comfortable path.

I never heard of no ‘don’t screw the babysitter’ rule.

I think I may have learned it in the same kind of place I learned "don't use double negatives to express a single negative meaning in formal writing". It was one of the paradigmatic examples of behaviour which, whether or not legal (the minimum age to babysit in those days was about 13 and the age of consent was 16), was beneath contempt in the society I grew up in.

All the effect of these laws, the ‘real’ sexual harassment laws as you term them, is to ‘multiply crime’.

Compared to the previous system that actually works, there is a lot more space for licit sex. So it is only "multiplying crime" relative to a baseline which essentially nobody wants. If we are talking about explicit government prohibition here, and your argument is that historically quid pro quo workplace sexual harassment is the type of behaviour which, while socially unacceptable, is outside the proper scope of government coercion, it is worth noting that government regulations affecting both employer-employee relationships and illicit sex were old hat by the time Hammurabi got down to writing them down.

I have an old school understanding of rape:

The old school understanding of rape related to the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent, not to the boundary between licit and illicit sex. (The old school understanding formed at a time when the vast majority of sex was illicit, and most illicit sex was considered to reflect shared fault between both participants.) There has never been a society where the rules were "anything goes except rape strictu senso" and I would eat my hat if there ever was.

victim screams no, immediately goes to the police

So if you are dangerous or powerful enough that someone would reasonably want time to think things over before calling the police on you, you can rape with impunity and it doesn't count? In the instant cases (both "Caroline" and Pavlovich) the woman would have been unemployed and homeless within 24 hours of calling the police on Gaiman - that is something you need to make plans for, and making those plans can take weeks.

I just think women are people, and they have the capacity to say no,

The snarky response to this is that sometimes we decide we need to limit the ability to push the cost of saying "no" repeatedly onto the people saying "no", and that the same argument you are making implies that the laws against spam and telemarketing are illegitimate.

The serious response is that if you are a physical threat to someone (and almost all men are to almost all women in a one-on-one situation), or otherwise in a position to hurt them (let's say your wife, who will predictably take your side in a dispute, is their boss and landlord) it is really easy to make saying "no" difficult. When Luca Brasi asks you if you are going to sign the contract, he shouldn't need to say that "no" implies that your brains will be on the contract instead - under normal circumstances the threat is implicit, and forcing Luca to make it explicit is going to take a zero off the already-below-market price the Corleone organisation is offering you to release Jonny Fontane from his record deal. The same is true in more mundane contexts. If your boss says "Can you run down to Fatbucks and fetch me a coffee-flavoured double sugar-water with extra lard?" then you might be able to give an excuse, but a simple "no" is what Sir Humphrey would call a brave career move. Is it different when your boss asks you "Will you kneel down under the desk and blow me?" How confident in your answer are you, given that the political tradition who thinks we should be libertarian about this also thinks that people who are fired for not blowing the boss should be allowed to starve if they can't find another job quickly enough?

Gaiman had set up an environment where saying no was not just difficult - it was almost maximally dangerous. To say a woman should be able to say "no" is to say that a woman should be able to make a high-stakes judgement call about whether saying "no" will end badly for her - Pavlovich wasn't in a situation where saying "no" at the wrong time could get her killed (although you imply that you have no problem with deliberately creating and taking advantage of such situations) but apart from that the full range of bad outcomes were on the table - physical pain, unemployment, homelessness, community ostracism.

The "solve-for-the-equilibrium" response is to note that people remove themselves from situations where they repeatedly have to say "no" under unpleasant circumstances. Tourists stop going to cities which are full of unpleasant panhandlers. People stop using online services which are full of spam. Women stop going to the bars and clubs where they are pestered by men they don't want. The equilibrium in societies where quid pro quo sexual harassment is a normal incident of being a woman in the workplace is that women with options stop working outside the home.

The serious response is that if you are a physical threat to someone (and almost all men are to almost all women in a one-on-one situation), or otherwise in a position to hurt them (let's say your wife, who will predictably take your side in a dispute, is their boss and landlord) it is really easy to make saying "no" difficult.

This is a slippery slope all the way to "all hetero sex is rape". Would you bite that bullet? ISTM that there needs to be a pretty large bias against second-guessing the judgment of individual women if their claim to fully equal members of society is to hold any value.

I don’t think any historical system can be said to ‘actually work’, but especially not the chimera of incoherent nonsense embodying our sexual mores these last years. And even if the old ones did, technological advances like the pill have made them obsolete.

I don’t propose my strict rape standard as some glorious RETVRN point, it’s just the best, most legible standard, gender-neutral, as liberal as it gets and in line with the rest of (less emotionally and religiously charged) jurisprudence.

(the minimum age to babysit in those days was about 13 and the age of consent was 16),

I feel like you’re trying to sneak in ‘underage’ into your draconian ‘babysitter rule’ from earlier. I was thinking, schwarzenegger.

The old school understanding of rape related to the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent, not to the boundary between licit and illicit sex.

Most of what they considered illicit sex (between two unmarried adults, between men, with vestal virgins, etc) has rightly been declared licit, because sex is of little consequence in the modern world. So its ongoing criminalization in eg the workplace, is a pure loss (while being quietly tolerated as long as the woman feels like it, which is also harmful to the rule of law).

But what some ancients considered illicit-innocent-women-sex is an actually decent, generalizable standard for illicit sex. The rest is yesterday’s garbage.

In the instant cases (both "Caroline" and Pavlovich) the woman would have been unemployed and homeless within 24 hours of calling the police on Gaiman - that is something you need to make plans for, and making those plans can take weeks.

I find that a far-fetched scenario, no one needs weeks. But even if the women were ready to flee, were they going to starve on the street? Again, I expect people to show just a little bit of courage, instead of warping the justice system to accommodate them.

I don’t fear luca brasi. The state protects me from luca brasi’s superior force (which is a gun btw) , like it protects women from mine (and I don’t even have a gun). Equality before the law works. Let’s not make up arcane rules about -if citizen A is heavier/smarter/more famous than citizen B, give B retroactive consent-cancelling power on all his contracts.

If your boss says "Can you run down to Fatbucks and fetch me a coffee-flavoured double sugar-water with extra lard?" then you might be able to give an excuse, but a simple "no" is what Sir Humphrey would call a brave career move. Is it different when your boss asks you "Will you kneel down under the desk and blow me?"

No? I don’t get your point here. People fetch their boss’ coffee, and do other tasks they feel queasy about for the paycheck, all the time. This doesn’t give them the legal right to attack their boss five years later.

The equilibrium in societies where quid pro quo sexual harassment is a normal incident of being a woman in the workplace is that women with options stop working outside the home.

And in societies where fetch me coffee is a normal incident, people with options stop working outside the home, because working sucks.

I'm not sure being married to palmer would have helped

...well, yes, but they are married, have been married for 14 years, and are going through a divorce.

I meant pavlovich

Ah. Got it.

Stuff like this makes me think that "consent", as a binary yes/no, is not a good model of human relations. Like, we all agree that having sex with who's falling-down drunk is wrong, even if she enthusiastically says yes. And there's no clear line for "how much alcohol is too much." For age, there's a clear legal line, but most people still think it's creepy for a too-old man to have sex with a too-young woman. But everyone has different opinions on how much age gap is too much. A supervisor at work dating their employee is also not inherently illegal, but there's a lot of guidelines about it and situations where it can be considered into sexual harassment.

In this case, there's all sorts of things that create a power imbalance. The guy was rich, famous, and apparently charming. He had legions of fans reading his stuff when they were teenagers, so he was effectively "grooming" them without even having met them. He liked to play dom during sex, and had a lot of experience in it, while he was meeting young women with very little experience. It seems like he met a lot of women who were enthusiastically into it, to the point where he might be genuinely confused that someone wasn't consenting with him.

I wish there was a middle ground. Something in between "he's guilty of rape, send him to prison for 20 years" and "he did nothing wrong, so let him off scott-free." A fine seems meaningless when he's so rich. Maybe a good dose of social shaming is the right punishment. Even rich people still care a lot about their social reputation, and this can be a good lesson to everyone about some of the darker sides of human sexuality. Maybe sex-ed classes could include a lesson on the dangers of falling in love with a celebrity.

As a I wrote before when this topic was discussed, a power imbalance is generally a prerequisite for heterosexual relationships. Even holding age aside, women will usually require—subconsciously or consciously—that a sexual partner be taller than her (and other men), physically and mentally stronger than her (and other men), higher status than her (and other men), more sexually experienced than her, if not have an explicit position of authority over her.

A female virgin is a feature not a bug for men (perhaps even a holy grail); a male virgin is over-9000 ick-inducing for non-virgin women, and risks inducing ick even in virgin women. For the most part, both virgin and non-women virgin expect men to be more experienced, read their minds, and lead the interaction forward.

If you want to treat women as having agency, you have to assign blame for the consequences of their decisions to them. There was no power imbalance tantamount to force here; Gaiman was rich, famous, and (apparently) charming but he had no authority over them. Writing books read by the public is not "grooming"; calling it such casts doubt on the concept of grooming. A woman's later regret does not make a man's actions any sort of offense against her. If you don't think women have agency, you may as well join the "Fight for 25".

Certainly there are conservative-morality reasons that it's wrong for an old celebrity to have sex with starstruck young women. But either such moral systems treat women as being lacking in agency, or the offenses aren't against the woman (or both).

I don’t want to treat women as having agency. They have far less than men.

Taking advantage of your celebrity status for short term relationships as he did is morally wrong. Women consenting to be in them are also wrong. These two things don’t cancel out.

I don’t want to treat women as having agency. They have far less than men.

And?

Having less of a thing does not mean you are lacking in the thing, let alone that you are so deficient in the thing that your possession of the thing should be disregarded.

Allowing the in-between state just gives cover for treating women as having agency when it it helps them but not when it harms them.

Sure- the nybbler presented it as a binary. If he’d said ‘either women have as much agency as men’ then I would have phrased it differently.

I don’t want to treat women as having agency. They have far less than men.

Fine, repeal the 19th and otherwise change the system so women no longer get the benefits of being assumed to have agency, and then maybe it will be reasonable to penalize men for acting as if they have it.

I think those are fine and dandy ideas.

There are many forms of power besides just physical force, which is the entire reason we have laws against underage sex or sex with drunk people. Please don't tell me you think it's fine and dandy for a boss to tell his female employee that she must have sex with him to get a job because "she has agency and can say no."

Since this is the Motte, assume this is indeed someone's position.

Why is it wrong to ask for quid pro quo? The market will price in the value of it and you'll be able to pay a premium not to have sex with your boss. Nobody is technically forced to do anything here. Sex work is real work. Etc.

To account for these hazards, consent based moral systems have to make up tortuous definitions of power, as you do, that taken to their logical conclusion make any sort of arrangement involving sex (including marriage) into rape. Some feminists see this as a feature. I think this just demonstrates the absurdity of such a lens either way.

This is how we end up with zoomers persecuting 20 year olds for having 18 year old partners, or how having any sort of popularity somehow turns women that court you into children. These are absurd propositions.

I submit to you that the reason you think it is wrong has absolutely nothing to do with any conceit of logic but that you are intuiting, as many do, that sex is sacred and people who trade it it engage in sacrilege.

Why is it wrong to ask for quid pro quo? [...] Sex work is real work. Etc.

It's wrong for the same reason all other forms of prostitution are wrong; because it creates a race-to-the-bottom effect in which the economy demands that women be sexually immoral. Now, I'd be basically fine with women sleeping with their bosses in a world where that meant marrying them, but that's not the world we live in, and in any case there ideally wouldn't be so many women in the workplace to begin with.

For similar but non-financial reasons, I remember finding a lot of the sexual norms in high school especially disgusting because they placed strong status incentives on girls being sexually active. Abstinence propaganda aimed at teens is impotent and doomed not simply because teens are horny, but because they're facing much stronger peer pressure from other horny teens.

it creates a race-to-the-bottom effect in which the economy demands that women be sexually immoral.

This is true but it also doesn't matter if consent is all you care about axiomatically. And can't be reconciled with individualism unless you believe in and enact freedom of association.

I believe the rebuttal within this framework is usually termed thus: what business is it of yours what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms?

Why is it wrong to ask for quid pro quo?

Under libertarian ethics, it isn't wrong to hire a sex worker on mutually agreeable terms, but it is wrong (because dishonest) to hire an employee for some other job and then after she has resigned from her previous job, relocated etc. pull a bait-and-switch and tell her she is now your sex worker, and the door is that way if she doesn't want her new job. You can't be a good person if you are going around saying "You fucked up - you trusted me. Learn the lesson and don't trust people like me next time."

It is noteworthy that a lot of right-on-right arguments about whether a woman who is sexually harassed in the workplace is a victim of obnoxious behaviour come down to an argument about whether some particular job counts as sex-work adjacent (such that the implicit employment contract does include putting up with this stuff) or not.

Doing this to your employees is a type of wrongdoing that the US has (unusually from a global perspective) decided is beneath the notice of the law in the case where sex isn't involved, but is tortious when sex is involved.

Well, the short easy answer is that it's clearly illegal, and almost everyone would think that it's morally wrong. So this feels like you're asking a weird academic question like "can you logically justify from first principles why murder is wrong?" I'm not an ethical philosopher, I'm just some guy, going off of what feels right and wrong.

But sure, I'll play along. To start. this:

you are intuiting, as many do, that sex is sacred and people who trade it it engage in sacrilege.

Absolutely not me lol. I'm a lifelong atheist, and a huge degenerate who has often paid for sex. I also have some friends who were former sex workers.

I think I can confidently speak on this topic because I have so much experience with it. When you're paying for sex, it's not just a simple business transaction. It's still an intimate act that triggers strong emotions. Scientifically, it causes a huge spike of oxytocin, which is a hormone linked to pair-bonding, especially in women. So it's actually really hard to just wham-bam-thank you maam with no emotions. The girls I met who could do that seemed incredibly damaged. Most still liked to talk a little and have some sort of emotional intimicy (and I liked that too).

They also usually have a pimp/manager who can handle the business side of things. Partly that's for pragmatic reason (they can bring in customers and chase down the deadbeats who don't pay up). But I think it's also an emotional need, to separate the business side away from the sexual side. Most working girls have strict rules that they do not have sex with their own manager, and the less-shady managers should also follow that rule. If they do, they usually end up horribly abused. In that sense, even asking for sex is wrong, because it turns what used to be a strictly business relationship into this weird mixed thing, and the woman will have to constantly think about that every time she's with her boss now. Sex work is work, but it's emotional work in a weird way that's very different from normal jobs, and part of that emotional work is just dealing with men constantly propositioning you for weird sex acts.

The market will price in the value of it

In my experience there's not much of a "market price," you have to haggle for everything like an old-school bazaar. So that's another area where it gets weird, and the girl can get taken advantage of if she doesn't know how much to ask for. (or the customer can get ripped off also). I guarantee this 20-yr-old Au Pair did not know how much to charge a famous rich guy for kinky BDSM sex.

as you do, that taken to their logical conclusion make any sort of arrangement involving sex (including marriage) into rape.

Also that is totally not my position. I was trying to explain why I think what he did was morally wrong, even though it wasn't rape. There should be a middle ground of scumminess, where there's deception and coersion but not actually rape.

@FiveHourMarathon this is also my answer to you

Absolutely not

[...]

When you're paying for sex, it's not just a simple business transaction. It's still an intimate act that triggers strong emotions.

You contradict yourself. Lest we be under the illusion that only the religious can be sacred.

The vocabulary you're grasping for, the "weirdness" is only here to justify a preexisting irrational bias against turning emotions into a moneyed exchange. It literally is wrong because it feels wrong.

You're operating under the same moral intuition as the religious people. This isn't even to say that's bad. I think it has merit for the same reason I think it has merit that buying an old piece of art to destroy it is evil.

But none of this has anything to do with consent and my objection is indeed that the moral philosophy you're espousing to justify all this is a rotten edifice that is much better served by expliciting this bias instead of trying to hide it behind consent.

Because doing so creates the insane applications that turn normal human behavior into some monstrous exploitation for no reason but the requirement to deny this bias in the name of Reason.

I don't think it's an "irrational bias" to say that hurting someone emotionally is wrong. What about hurting someone physically? Can you logically prove that it's wrong to hurt someone physically, or is that also just an irrational bias?

I think it's fine to turn emotions into a moneyed exchange. Normal people do it all the time with therapists, and maybe with all service jobs like bartenders, salesmen, etc. But those people know what they're getting in for, it doesn't get sprung on them by surprise from someone with power over them. It would also be wrong to trauma dump all of your psychological problems on some poor retail cashier.

Can you logically prove that it's wrong to hurt someone physically, or is that also just an irrational bias?

Tragically, we can not, which caused the death or around 200 000 000 people in the previous century. Much of what is good and moral cannot be arrived at through reason.

I don't have anything against sentimentalism, or even against irrational biases. I'm only suspicious of people who hide such natural tendencies in the cloak of logic and reason so that they may not be checked by tradition.

It is all well and good that disgusting sexual practices remain obscure and shameful, actually. But any proper application of this principle is completely incompatible with society as it is, and the strategic application of this principle to some has only been a font of power.

The irony of course being that many of the people using this mechanism do so under the auspices of the very philosophers that tried to denounce it.

I appreciate the in depth response, and confess that I have little to add to a conversation about bona fide prostitution, I have no experience with it, to the point where it's something I honestly have trouble grokking that it exists.

But I'm going to persist: if a woman lacks agency to say no to sex with her boss because saying no might cost her the job, how does she have agency to say no to being asked to walk his dog, or to taking a cut in pay, on threat of losing her job? They haven't had sex yet, oxytocin hasn't come into play. The intimacy of sex isn't implicated yet.

Now if you wanted to argue at a more granular level that such and such acts can't be done because of the oxytocin and the pressure, that would make sense.

Or if we're talking about high leverage deals and job opportunities, common in show business. That I can see the logic.

I don't really understand your point. Isn't it genuinely considered wrong for a boss to order their employee to do something that's wildly out of their job description? Or likewise to suddenly cut their pay for no reason? Usually there are rules against that sort of thing. Of course she has some agency, she can say no, but her life is going to get messed up when she gets fired, so she'd be justified in filing a lawsuit in that situation. Or at least cursing out her boss to anyone who'd listen. Making it about sex just makes it worse because it makes her think about gross things, so it's emotionally disturbing even if she can say no.

Are you an anarcho-capitalist who thinks that absolutely everything should be legal as long as there's no physical force used? I know there are some people who think that way, but that's a really fringe view that now many people share.

Isn't it genuinely considered wrong for a boss to order their employee to do something that's wildly out of their job description? Or likewise to suddenly cut their pay for no reason? Usually there are rules against that sort of thing.

I feel like this is a very urban-corporate-PMC attitude towards employment, where many small business owners take more of an attitude of "I'm paying you for eight hours of your time, during that time you do what I tell you to do." If that means helping with putting up Christmas lights at the owner's house, that's your job description today. Obviously in a corporate setting a middle manager having personal tasks done by his underlings is bad, because he is embezzling. But there's no law against a restaurant owner asking some of his waiters to help him move his mother in law to a new apartment on the clock. But there's that word again, ask. This isn't ancient Rome, an employee can always exercise agency by saying no, and if his employer no longer wishes to employ him he can be fired, and if the employer operates his business in such a way that employees don't stick around then he'll have to close his business or reassess his ruleset.

Where I agree it would be genuinely bad would be a bait and switch, where the employee accepts the employment on the promise of the opportunity to do certain work and develop certain skills and is instead given low level work. The magazine intern who gets stuck getting coffee and is never given the opportunity to work on articles, etc.

In all these cases, I expect the employee to advocate for themselves. If they don't want to do something, it is incumbent on the employee to say no to it, and to threaten to quit if forced. If that makes me an AnCap then so be it.

I don't particularly think that fucking your employees is good, but I do think that trying to make it into a consent violation is confusing and dumb. It's not a consent violation, otherwise women are incapable of consent and agency which is obviously a repugnant conclusion to most people making the argument against Gaiman in the New Yorker, it's a different category of thing.

More comments

Having celebrity may be a form of power in the broad sense, but not in the sense of curtailing agency.

What deals with her employer is she allowed to consent to, in your view? Or, why is sex special? Why can she consent to any terms of employment at all?

A not entirely unreasonable point. Our economic system gives too much leverage to employers; if Alice hires Bob, Bob has a lot more to lose than Alice does; thus Alice can make unreasonable demands knowing that: 1. Bob will probably back down first, and 2. if he refuses, she won't have any difficulty finding someone more desperate. If we try to patch specific abuses with rules like 'don't make sex with one's boss a condition of employment', we end up playing Whack-a-Mole as Alice keeps finding more indignities to inflict on Bob, and campaigns against any intervention with the argument that Bob 'voluntarily' agreed to her terms, in the same way as the victim of a highway-man 'voluntarily' agreed to hand over his valuables.

Under full employment, however, if Alice demands that Bob offer her sexual favours, or forgo safety equipment in order to work faster, or stand up for his entire shift even though he could do his work just as well sitting down, or answer his phone at zero-dark-thirty for something could have waited until morning, or refrain from eating rice on Tuesdays, &c. &c., Bob is more likely to leave, and, having done so, is less likely to experience financial hardship as he can readily find a more reasonable employer, while Alice, less able to find anyone who will accept her onerous terms, will be incentivised to be more reasonable herself.

In such a system, the libertarian argument that Alice and Bob mutually agreed to whatever terms would be much more likely to hold water.

Does this apply to all aspects of employment contracts, or only to sexual favors? Is Bob bound by anything in his employment contract, or can he break it as he sees fit because he is being held hostage by reality?

Does this apply to all aspects of employment contracts, or only to sexual favors? Is Bob bound by anything in his employment contract, or can he break it as he sees fit because he is being held hostage by reality?

It applies to unreasonable provisions, i. e. ones Bob only accepts because Alice can afford to hold out longer.

It doesn't apply to 'doing the task for which he was hired, to a reasonable standard'.

An that's why I always say the best anti-rape policy is to lower the minimum wage and fight the unions.

Doesn't the US have full employment already, therefore Bob was not raped?

An that's why I always say the best anti-rape policy is to lower the minimum wage

But then you have the problem of people who work full-time who still can't afford the costs of an existence worthy of human dignity.

and fight the unions.

That goes in the wrong direction; unions are an attempt to solve the very problem I am alluding to, namely the gross imbalance of power between Alice and Bob!

Doesn't the US have full employment already, therefore Bob was not raped?

Perhaps 'full employment' was not the exactly correct term; I am referring to the balance of power between management and labour, and economic circumstances in which the lack of an agreement has similar costs to both sides.

My greatest insight from reading the article is that my wife is incredibly lucky I am not a charismatic and sociopathic creative, because my gut reaction to Gaiman's escapades was not revulsion, it was envy.

Having a nanny lick shit and blood off your dick or piss off of your hand while your 5 year old is in the room or eat vomit?

Pavlovich says. Gaiman pushed down her pants and began to beat her with his belt. He then attempted to initiate anal sex without lubrication. “I screamed ‘no,’” Pavlovich says. ... She continued to scream until Gaiman was finished. When it was over, he called her “slave” and ordered her to “clean him up.” She protested that it wasn’t hygienic. “He said, ‘Are you defying your master?’” she recalls. “I had to lick my own shit.”

I get he liked sharing younger women with his wife. They both liked fucking 20 year olds and I won't pretend to be shocked. But the degradation and torment of these women including in front of a young child is vile. The boy was confused and thought she was supposed to be referred to as "slave".

Apparently his wife also cheats on him, are you envious of that too?

That's not something the article spent much time on.

My reaction has me wondering if my (heterosexual male) sexual desires are unusual in their, uh, vanilla-ness. I remember briefly stumbling into the fanfic community long ago and realizing that the tags were helpful because anything beyond "MF" was probably not for me. Which isn't even a comment on volume, just that the entire "kink" scene is a pretty instant turn-off for me, and honestly fulfilling monogamy sounds great to me.

Uh, you know fan fiction writers are mostly teenaged girls, right? Like I get the default assumption to deranged sex stuff is ‘a man wrote that’, but…

Fair, I suppose. But the same comment could easily be applied to the vast majority of the content on your average porn site too: most of the content is IMO off-putting, although I won't deny some degree of prurient interest in the most vanilla parts.

Is it when you account for relevance?

I have no interest in visiting a pornsite. But my guess is that the default recommendations are 'teen' or otherwise "appealing to normal heterosexual males" content, and pageviews are mostly on those videos. Weirdos producing a lot more content seems like a general rule and if 90% of customers(say) prefer 'My neighbor's BLONDE daughter HAS A SECRET' or something equally generic the other ten percent will produce more videos just to account for variety.

I've read some survey that showed that women were on average kinkier than men. Memes about headpats and handholding are there for a reason.

FWIW I personally doubt having any amount of adoring fangirls would make me want to force them to drink my piss.

If you were as charming, rich and charismatic a sociopath as Gaiman, your wife would be finding girls for you to do the sick stuff with so she didn't have to. About half the girls in the article were procured by Palmer.

not revulsion, it was envy.

Although I've been married and monogamous for twenty years it was not always so. I now mostly regret most of the degeneracy and excess young libertine AvocadoPanic was mired in for a decade. I wasn't cut out for it.

You’re saying the average man wants a woman to lick her own shit off his dick after anal, eat her own vomit after oral, fuck his mistress in front of his 5 year old son? Go ahead, disappoint me.

Maybe—or maybe not—those three acts in particular (especially the last), but it’s fairly common that men enjoy attractive women doing gross, degrading acts for them and fairly common that women enjoy doing gross, degrading acts for men they find attractive. And the more attractive she finds the man at the time, the grosser and more degrading the acts a woman is eager and willing to do.

For example, in my experience, the probability that a chick is down to do ATM for you given that you're already fucking her in the ass is pretty high, possibly verging on 1. That is, P(ATM | Anal) > 1 – epsilon >> 0. If you pull your cock out from her ass and wave it in front of her face, in the heat of the moment she’ll just start sucking it as if you just pulled it out of her puss. And sometimes it’s not Just the Smellz, so sometimes she’ll be eating a little bit of her own shit. I can’t recall a girl ever having actually refused ATM: when ATM didn’t occur after anal, it was when I was young(er) and still under the impression that there was no way an otherwise wholesome-seeming girl would do ATM, so didn’t attempt it. Oh, to be young(er) and naive again.

While perhaps less gross than vomit or shit, if not within the context of sex acts, women would likely find the taste and texture of semen, puss juice, or bile to be off-putting, to say the least. Yet facials, cum-in-mouth, puss-to-mouth, and sloppy deepthroats are pretty common nowadays, and many women rather enjoy them in the heat of the moment. It’s merely a difference of social acceptability and degree of grossness, not kind.

I didn’t feel like reading about Gaiman’s exploits (again), but among those three acts per se, the only despicable one I find is the fucking in front of his son. If a chick is down to eat her own shit off a guy’s cock, or eat her own vomit for his viewing pleasure if he’s into that, bon appetit for her and Slay, King for him. I wtf and turtle-up at the thought of fucking in front of one’s own child.

I wtf and turtle-up at the thought of fucking in front of one’s own child.

Which is interesting!

While it's obviously taboo today (and for good reason in my mind), that's probably the one most present historically since large families and a lack of space meant that parents had to make do with little boundary from their kids.

Oh, come on; generalize a little. He obviously means that the average man wishes he had an endless parade of young women eager to have sex with him and willing to do whatever gross, perverted kink he had. Which, you know, is obviously true.

Where have I said that?

edit: what @Blueberry said, the dark corners of my psyche are my own

You said you were envious of Gaiman, who allegedly did all of these things. It seems a reasonable inference.

I do not consider myself average at all.

I don't know what that has to do with my comment.

The accusation was “You’re saying the average man wants …” to which orthoxerox clarifies now to you, that he never tried to speak for the average man, but only for himself.

Ah.

I had that thought too. I think a lot of us just don't have to think about these things very much, because we don't live a life where young attractive women are constantly throwing themselves at us. For most guys "sexual ethics" are pretty simple- you go to your wife/girlfriend/LTR and see if she's in the mood. I don't know what I would do if I was living the celebrity life. I imagine that must be one hell of an intoxicating experience, and this guy has been living it for decades.

It's not just pure hedonistic pleasure, it's picking up something delicate and intricate and vulnerable and trampling it under your foot, forcing it to turn itself inside out because you want it to, denying it its existence without your permission. Living the life of Judge Holden, if you will.

If you don't, some other high-status male will, so you might as well take what you can get. None of these girls were going to remain virgins until marriage. Like unto a communal plate of French fries; such is the tragedy of the commons.

To solve the problem, need to privatize the commons.

That analogy falls down when you equate the 'commons' to someone with feelings.

Hey if you're rich old and famous, why not be a horrible lech? Social capital is just another currency you can't take to the grave with you, may as well spend it on something fun.

not so talented a novelist as Neal Stephenson

Couldn't you have picked a better writer to compare him against?

No, no. It's perfect.

This was my reaction to the Whedon comparison.

edgy takes on stuff that 21st century Westerners now take culturally for granted... and a whole, whole lot of not-even-repressed sexual deviance, both of varieties that have since become more culturally acceptable, and varieties that have not.

I've never read Sandman, could you expand on this please?

It featured a transwoman, whose new identity was rejected by her parents and an ancient witch, but embraced by her friends.

It featured an androgynous paragon of desire, played completely straight (no pun intended). Played by an ugly enby in the TV series, I've been told.

It featured a convention of serial killers, who the Sandman punished by curing them while leaving their memories intact.

It featured a man who could live forever, struggling with his former career as a slaver.

It featured the Sandman himself, slowly coming to terms with the fact that he sucked and orchestrating his death and replacement with a less sociopathic paragon of dreams.

I don't remember a lot of really edgy stuff, but maybe I did take it culturally for granted? I mostly remember how mad I was at them for getting Marc Hempel to draw the climactic volume.

Also gay characters casually accepted. This being the 80s to mid 90s even that was outside the mainstream.

I've never read Sandman, could you expand on this please?

It was a late 1980s/early 1990s comic that touched on transsexuality, homosexuality, BDSM, child abuse, and rape, just off the top of my head.

There was also a lot of nudity, which was arguably "artistic" but was not usual for mainstream comics at the time. My personal experience of the 1990s was that I often encountered neo-hippie arguments about nudity being "not inherently sexual," which in retrospect seems like a pretty obvious motte-and-bailey approach to the matter.

(The ninth episode of the second season of The Simpsons, "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge," which first aired in 1990, ends with Marge conceding that it is hypocritical to censor a children's cartoon but not a field trip in which children see Michaelangelo's David. The episodes remains culturally relevant to this day.)

It was a late 1980s/early 1990s comic that touched on transsexuality

I wonder if someone's going to dig up that one issue of the sandman with the transexual to cancel him. I haven't read it in 15 years but if I recall correctly it had something along the lines of "moon magic won't work for you, YWNBAW".

In the 80s-90s there were a lot of people talking about Gaia Earth Mother Magick spelling Womyn with a Y, who have since Evolved and now spell it correctly (with an X). It's sort of like the permed mullets and neon spandex fashion land mine: you can't cancel anyone for it because they've got your yearbook pics too.

I read the wholesale series for the first time a few months ago. Yes, moon magic works for women and the witch asserts the transwoman is a man so it won't work for them.

Learning that Grant Morrison was more progressive than Neil Gaiman during that time period was not on my bingo card for today, but here we are.

I've read a fair amount of previous Gaiman discussions on Twitter, including from before the allegations, and the trans themes in A Game of You have been problematized exactly in this way approximately a 1,000 times.

Least shocking MeToo reveal.

In general, I think the press is the right way to go about these things. Jail? No, and in any case as you say the women all sent him texts saying they loved it / it was consensual, which is the nail in the coffin of an assault prosecution.

But social humiliation? Yes, that’s necessary. Demanding a woman lick her own faeces off your dick? Eat her vomit off the couch? That’s objectively degenerate, deeply disturbed behavior, regardless of consent, and he deserves any resulting opprobrium.

It isn't a reveal. The same allegations were the subject of a social media happening and discussed extensively on the Motte six months ago.

Least shocking MeToo reveal.

I read once a short story collection by Gaimann but I don’t remember anything. Did his work alude to his private life?

He made one woman call him master like a character in Sandman made the muse when he enslaved her as his rape slave. That one issue in retrospect is almost a confession.

The rest of Sandman, not really unless we strain ourselves.

I don't remember any of the short stories being particularly weird in this way, no.

The way Laura dies in American Gods is a bit salacious but not like this kind of thing; it's something of a cosmic punishment for infidelity. I don't recall Neverwhere or The Ocean At The End of the Lane being explicit, but it's kind of in the background of both that Gaiman is channeling a disturbed psyche. I didn't expect these kinds of revelations, but they're not surprising, either. Maybe I just have very low expectations of fantasy authors from 80s England.

An above description of The Sandman comics gives a couple hints, also his parents were abusive and his father nearly drowned him for Scientologist reasons.

Demanding a woman lick her own faeces off your dick? Eat her vomit off the couch?

Jesus

the clarity of consent

There can be no "clarity of consent" because "consent" doesn't actually exist- it suggests that women are just as dominant as men are just as submissive as women (1), but then as we see a bit later...

She protested that it wasn’t hygienic. “He said, ‘Are you defying your master?’” she recalls. “I had to lick my own shit.”

...that's pretty obviously false. That's the inherent tension with having a gender whose average participant gets off on the submission- and if they start to resent that for whatever reason, and have the political power to get their top/dom jailed, then arises the incentive to abuse that power. But the fact that this woman isn't availing herself of that power that she knows (or can be reasonably expected to know, especially since she demonstrates an understanding of what the word "consent" is implying) is at her beck and call is actually quite significant, so I'd take the claim of "yeah, it sure was a time, I have made my peace that this is just how [my] sexuality works, this isn't a big enough deal so fuck off" at face value in this instance. (Actually, it kind of reminds me of this.)

But the whole charade does remind me once more of the peculiar way in which Western culture has come to insist that there is nothing problematic about sexual promiscuity.

Fundamentally, it comes down to whether you think sex (and by extension, whether or not you've made peace with the fact consent doesn't exist) is a big deal or not. The people who think sex is a big deal are unwilling or unable to deal with the fact sex no longer leads to pregnancy or disease (2); and the people who think sex has no consequences are unwilling or unable to deal with the fact that implies it's child-safe (3). And the world turns.

(1) Which makes sense, considering "consent" was manufactured by non-gender-conforming men and women in the late '80s as a reaction to the free '70s, so it's only natural those [in a purely descriptive sense] trans-gender individuals would come up with a system that doesn't match how normal human beings actually function, then get all defensive when it doesn't work.

(2) If you don't allow needle-shaped objects to penetrate your ass, you're relatively safe from the only STD of actual consequence (and even then, it's "take these pills for the rest of your life or you'll die 2 weeks after someone coughs on you", but diabetics and epileptics manage that just fine, so...). You're still going to get herpes but the cold sores are just the cost of doing your mom business.

(3) "But what if the 5 year old girl consents" is specifically meant to call out the fact that "consent" doesn't actually mean "accedes to"; the concept is, quite literally, used as a condom. It's so thin at times ("my 5 year old is trans") it feels like it's not even there, which is exactly how Trojan claims it should be.

Sex has strong emotional consequences, even if the physical ones are solved. Yes, yes, it’s not illegal to have casual sex, but it’s also not illegal to call your neighbor a giant piece of shit every time you see him.

Your message here is quite unhinged, and I mean that as a compliment, and that I enjoyed reading it. I might have misunderstood you though, as verbal intelligence is not my strong suit. I want to make sure I understand "Consent doesn't exist" correctly, are you saying that she did in fact consent because she didn't resist enough, because she enjoys submission (and therefore of having her consent overruled), or because of how human nature works fundamentally? Again, I'm genuinely interested.

I have to disagree with your assessment of the harm of sex. You're being materialistic, seemingly ignoring the psychological parts the equation. Pregnancy and disease are the physical risks. Even if sex is child-safe physically (which is theoritically possible, but rarely the case in real life scenarios), there's still psychological consequences. You can avoid some of these consequences by turning materialistic and deciding that sex isn't special, but I think that would be a shame, and that you'd fail partly (for the same reason that fighting ones own biases is impossible in a sense). It's like getting over the situation that nobody wished you happy birthday by realizing the fact that birthdays are only special if we consider them to be. In other words, birthdays aren't real. A lot of things which "exist" are just agreements, so they're a sort of collective roleplay. But if you destroy these games to get rid of their consequences, then you also lose the advantages, and your life will take another step towards emptiness/nihilism. So I just want to warn you in case this is what you're doing to your own perception of sex.

I choose to think that sex is special for aesthetic reasons, and this is not a delusion since it becomes true by believing in it, which I mean literally, and which implies that people can be hurt if they consider sex to be special and their partner does not.

(1) Which makes sense, considering "consent" was manufactured by non-gender-conforming men and women in the late '80s as a reaction to the free '70s, so it's only natural those [in a purely descriptive sense] trans-gender individuals would come up with a system that doesn't match how normal human beings actually function, then get all defensive when it doesn't work.

Can you explain that more?

that's pretty obviously false. That's the inherent tension with having a gender whose average participant gets off on the submission- and if they start to resent that for whatever reason, and have the political power to get their top/dom jailed, then arises the incentive to abuse that power.

The easy solution for men worried about this is simply not to engage in degenerate, promiscuous behavior. Oh, you got burned by a BPD whore? Shouldn’t have fucked her. The same, by the way, applies to getting in the outdoor baths of strange old men after being invited to.

I agree that it would be great if we had a society that called guys like that degenerate whoremongers. But what we actually have is one that celebrates "BPD whore behavior," and actively encourages young women to follow that script in relationships (see literally all advice column and lit fic for women from the '10s).

And we don't even condemn the whoremongering. We celebrate men for it until he ages into the Weinstein zone where imagining him holding their leash makes fangirls ick instead of tingle, then retroactively mob him for it.

It's not a coincidence that Gaiman was one of the last metoo targets, and it wasn't his fame protecting him; far more famous men got hit, and his sphere of leftist YA fantasy lit nerddom was ground zero for it. It's just that he only recently aged out of the schlick zone and became a target

(see literally all advice column and lit fic for women from the '10s).

I am genuinely curious, since advice columns aren't my thing and I'm fairly sure I wouldn't even be looking for the right ones. Could you please provide what you would consider three archetypical examples from the era?

"when having an affair is an act of self care," (it's a way for women to take back her patriarchal restrictions that have been put on us), "cheating on my husband made me a better mother," "cheating on the sisterhood: infidelity and feminism" (a third wave feminist take focuses on the individual woman and her rights to sexual pleasure), "what open marriage taught one man about feminism" (that it should be women who choose, not men, even the men they're married to)

That's four I remember off the top of my head focusing entirely on the "whore" part, but there's lots more content for the BPD bit.

I remember that at least two, possibly three, of those were specifically articles of the same Guardian writer.

I continue thinking that to look at the life of rich celebrities and seek to derive any conclusions about what rules the rest of us ought to live by is foolish. Even if the data actually suggests that it was a mistake for people like him to not live by the Pence rule (and this hasn't been established - for every blob of drama like this, do we know how many happy celebrities have left happy groupies with A+-would-bang-again experiences that they will treasure for a lifetime?), the data says nothing at all about whether an open marriage can work for any of the instances that don't fit this pattern, where the man is not an idol seen as holding the keys to a magic world of glamour or de facto bottomless affluence, the women are not secretly competing for exclusive access to this resource and there is no hovering media machine that would involve the whole world in the conflict for the promise of eyeballs.

do we know how many happy celebrities have left happy groupies with A+-would-bang-again experiences that they will treasure for a lifetime?

I'm of the understanding that David Bowie had one of these and got (largely posthumously) cancelled for it anyway (because underage).

do we know how many happy celebrities have left happy groupies with A+-would-bang-again experiences that they will treasure for a lifetime?

Considering we already know the ones who regret it have massive incentive to say something now that they have a worldwide platform to get sympathy, and considering how many gay now-celebrities give glowing reviews of getting raped laid in their early teens (to say nothing of Milo Y.), I expect the rate of satisfaction from these encounters to be in excess of the base rate of satisfaction per encounter for normal sexual relationships, which for reference averages around 69%.

I continue thinking that to look at the life of rich celebrities and seek to derive any conclusions about what rules the rest of us ought to live by is foolish

I think this but for people who make unconventional choices more generally.

Just because it works [or is within the bounds of acceptable risk] for them (for reasons you might not know, and maybe it isn't working) doesn't mean it will work for you (because you just want to stick it in the new hotness rather than your wife- she's not as hot any more, you see), and if you can't understand why it's working for them (because it's not done with the implicit or explicit intention of taking more than they put into the relationship/they're capable of dealing with the pitfalls) then it will hurt you if you do it (because that is why you are doing it).

(Which is the positive justification for censorship of infohazards like open marriages are; too bad the principal-agent problem is a thing, so you make the choice between ensuring the high-performance unconventional people have everything they need or blinding them so the less-able are less distracted by bad options they don't have the mental or social capacity to avoid. It's almost like the people in these relationships owe it to the less-able not to broadcast it to the ends of the Earth, and the less-able owe it to the more-able not to interfere; perhaps this comprises some sort of social contract?)

I expect the rate of satisfaction from these encounters to be in excess of the base rate of satisfaction per encounter for normal sexual relationships, which for reference averages around 69%.

Now THIS is the sort of argument that keeps me coming back to The Motte.

Seriously. Asking about the base rate of 'satisfaction' with celebrity sex encounters is a 'fun' and relevant question.

I can't actually disagree with your estimate, either. I'd guess that the glow of having someone you idolize giving you the most intimate of attention and (one hopes) pleasure is a particular kind of ecstasy for the monkey brain. Like, imagine a teen boy who was fantasizing about, I dunno, young Christie Brinkley for his entire adolescence, then after he turns 18 he has a chance encounter with her where she gives him the thing he'd dreamt about and he has an incredible story to tell for the rest of his life. Hard to imagine the guy having any regrets.

But I also expect that the same idolization leads to expectations that necessarily exceed the reality of human capabilities, so there's likely to be some amount of disappointment upon realizing that well-maintained celeb is but a man and thus has finite stamina, makes awkward sounds and smells during sex, and may not administer amazing pillow talk. So the delta between expectations and reality is probably where some of the 'regret' can be found.

Forgive my naivete here, but I'm not really sure what the story here is, beyond "Neil Gaiman is a creepy sexpest."

Well, yes, and I will happily join in with condemning his sordid exploits. Promiscuity is bad and this seems quite a straightforward example. I'm just wondering what particular light is shed by this specific case?

I feel like the real story is that this isn't just one guy. It's part of an ongoing pattern where a lot of men turn into creepy sexpests when they're given fame and power. And this guy was able to cover it up for decades, so it makes you wonder if basically every celebrity is secretly like this and they're just hiding it. And to some extent it makes me wonder- are these celebrities uniquely terrible, or is every man a creepy sexpest at heart, and we just restrain ourselves because we don't have the power to get what we want?

On the internet we get to chose our own celebrities

Littlewood and Hardy instead of Laurel and Hardy

Paul J. Cohen instead of Leonard Cohen

Frank Ramsey instead of Gordon Ramsey

David Moon of X3J13 instead of Keith Moon of the Who

Which raises a different question. Rather than ask whether "every celebrity is like this", we might ask "Why are we choosing these guys as our celebrities?". Or we might ponder who is choosing our celebrities? Us? Really?

Are there hidden influencers choosing our celebrities from behind a curtain, much like I'm trying to force you to celebrate Paul J. Cohen? Harvey Weinstein is a partial example; not entirely hidden, not able to make just any-one a star, but still wielding substantial covert power over which attractive young actress becomes a minor celebrity for a while.

My impression is that the pathologies of locally high-status men engaging in dubious pussy-chasing are basically the same in other contexts and this isn't specific to conventional celebrities. Gamergate happened because Zoe Quinn looked like she was cheating on her boyfriend with someone locally high-status in the indie game community, and the community seemed to think there was nothing odd about this. This kind of thing is absolutely rife in academia - probably more so than it is in Hollywood, although the press doesn't cover it as much.

If you're asking me, my guess is that:

  • Not every celebrity is like this, but a significant proportion are, and that proportion is much too large for anybody to feel comfortable. You should not feel confident that your favourite celebrity is an exception.
  • This is true of both male and female celebrities. In general you should assign a high probability to the thesis that any given celebrity is an awful person in private. That said, I theorise that sexual misconduct specifically, at least in the sexpest sense, skews heavily male among celebrities, just as it does in wider society.
  • This is in part due to selection effects. Celebrities aren't a random selection of the populace, but rather are skewed heavily towards certain personality types and ambitions. I confidently theorise that celebrities, on average, rate higher on Dark Triad personality traits than the general populace.
  • That said it is also due to the corruption of power; or as you put it, because everyone has a lot of darkness in their hearts, and we are restrained by social pressure and lack of opportunity as much as by morality. We should not be confident that we would act better.

From here on I'm going to get more religious, so you may wish to disregard the following if you have a more secular mindset:

The conclusion I draw from these observations, personally, is to be very aware of the depth and temptation of human sin, to show mercy even to those who seem like great sinners to me, and to be aware of and do my best to fight against my own inclination to sin. I very much hope that I'm not as bad as some of those public figures I'm aware of, but it would be foolish of me to be confident in that, so this is another reminder for me to repent and seek a conversion of the heart.

As mentioned, I think disordered sexual behaviour is a more common manifestation of the inner sinful nature among men. I don't think it's entirely absent among women, but I think it's probably more common for women to engage in different types of sin. Both sexes, however, stand very much condemned by their own inward natures and desires. So I don't see any final moral advantage, as it were, for women over men, nor for men over women.

Good answer! Thanks. I'm not religious, but I do think in a similar way- we're all vulnerable to temptation, and we have to constantly use willpower to guard against it. Different people respond to different types of temptation, so I think women more often go down the path of emotional manipulation and narcissm rather than physical sexual debauchery.

I don’t think it’s quite either. After watching vast numbers of successful and apparently sensible men ruin themselves for affairs with not very pretty girls, I’ve honestly started to believe that there is a built-in switch in the male brain that looks around and says, ‘Hmm, we appear to be the alpha around these parts, time to spread the genesSEXSEXSEXSEXSEX!’. Any sufficiently powerful man either has to commit to a rigorous system like Pence or have his brain melted.

I don’t present this as an excuse, quite the opposite. Just an observation.

Women spend their entire lives being hit on by men constantly, they then have to decide who and when to reject vs. accept and have significant training in establishing their boundaries for these things.

Many men spend their entire lives without being hit on without them initiating to the point that they will continue to flirt when it isn't acceptable to do so (because they are in a relationship, old, power dynamics and so on) because they don't expect it go anywhere.

If it does get reciprocated or it comes out of nowhere ....they don't know what to do and have little familiarity with saying no.

This is the flip side of the power dynamic - men may use power and prestige when they shouldn't to get laid, but women can also take advantage of men's weakness and this is seldom acknowledge or commented on.

I don't really recommend it but it's an interesting experience, just like everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth every guy with a reason not to feels like they can reject a pretty woman coming onto them...but many fail in that moment.

I mean, maybe Gaiman is a creepy sexpest, assuming the truth of the allegations. Certainly the evidence seems to be that he is quite promiscuous, like so many other men of similar repute.

Will he be cancelled entirely? Is this evidence against the plausibility of "open marriage?" Should we accept the article's allegations at face value, or question the veracity of the claims, victim-blaming style? What is "consent," really?

There seemed to me to be a plethora of culture war angles--that's all.

Ah, to be clear, I'm using 'sexpest' mainly just to mean 'aggressively promiscuous person'. It doesn't imply non-consent for me. I like it as a gender-neutral alternative to 'slut', I suppose? It also implies actively seeking out or badgering others for sex, and that also sounds like Gaiman. This is enough for me to morally condemn Gaiman.

But this was known already, and I'm not sure what Gaiman's case specifically, or the vagaries of whether he gets cancelled or not, tells us about either the broad issue of sexual ethics, or even that much about the moment. Gaiman is an ageing white man who's also, at best, what we used to call a dirty old man. He seems potentially vulnerable to cancellation, but then, cancellation has never had a 100% hit rate, so it could go either way.

So I think I'm with 4bpp in terms of what we can draw from Gaiman's case, even if I suspect we differ on overall sexual ethics. There's just a limit to how much can be inferred from any one case.

I like it as a gender-neutral alternative to 'slut', I suppose?

I think it implies male as much as 'slut' implies female. You can have a woman who's a sex pest just like you can have a man who's a slut.

I think the distinction that comes most naturally to mind for me is that a sexpest is someone who aggressively pesters others for sex, and a slut is a person who rapidly or unhesitatingly gives in to such pestering. They're complementary, I suppose?

And, as far as throwing fuel on the fire, JK Rowling has weighed in:

The literary crowd that had a hell of a lot to say about Harvey Weinstein before he was convicted has been strangely muted in its response to multiple accusations against Neil Gaiman from young women who’d never met, yet — as with Weinstein — tell remarkably similar stories

My understanding is that the venn diagram of "people who hate Rowling for her trans views" and "Neil Gaiman superfans" is very close to a circle, so I'm expecting there to be either a lot of cognitive dissonance, deliberate head-in-the-sand, or crazy explainers as to why they're on the same side.

What about the part where he was having sex while in the same room as his young kid? That's pretty messed up. Guy really went down the deviancy rabbit hole.

On February 19, 2022, Gaiman and his son spent the night at a hotel in Auckland, which they sometimes did for fun. Gaiman asked Pavlovich if she could come by and watch the child for an hour so he could get a massage. It was a small room — one double bed, a television, and a bathroom. When he returned, Gaiman and the boy ate dinner, takeout from a nearby delicatessen. Afterward, Gaiman wanted to watch a movie, but the child wanted to play with the iPad. The boy sat against the wall by the picture window overlooking the city, facing the bed. Pavlovich perched on the edge of the mattress; Gaiman got onto the bed and pulled her so she was on her back. He lifted the covers up over them. She tried to signal to him with her eyes that he should stop. She mouthed, “What the fuck are you doing?” She didn’t want the child to overhear what she was saying. Gaiman ignored her. He rolled her onto her side, took off his pants, pulled off her skirt, and began to have sex with her from behind while continuing to speak with his son. “‘You should really get off the iPad,’” she recalls him saying. Pavlovich, in a state of shock, buried her head in the pillow. After about five minutes, Gaiman got up and walked to the bathroom, half-naked. He urinated on his hand and then returned to Pavlovich, frozen on the bed, and told her to “lick it off.” He went back to the bathroom, naked from the waist down. “Before you leave,” he told Pavlovich, “you have to finish your job.” She went to the bathroom, and he pushed her to her knees. The door was open. (Gaiman’s representatives say these allegations are “false, not to mention, deplorable.”)

There's plenty of other bizarre accusations that paint him as more than just a regular sex pest.

One evening, Palmer dropped Pavlovich and the child off with Gaiman and retreated back to her own place. Pavlovich was in the kitchen, tidying up, when he approached her from behind and pulled her to the sofa. “It all happened again so quickly,” Pavlovich says. Gaiman pushed down her pants and began to beat her with his belt. He then attempted to initiate anal sex without lubrication. “I screamed ‘no,’” Pavlovich says. Had Gaiman and Pavlovich been engaging in BDSM, this could conceivably have been part of a rape scene, a scenario sometimes described as consensual nonconsent. But that would have required careful negotiation in advance, which she says they had not done. After she said “no,” Gaiman backed off briefly and went into the kitchen. When he returned, he brought butter to use as lubricant. She continued to scream until Gaiman was finished. When it was over, he called her “slave” and ordered her to “clean him up.” She protested that it wasn’t hygienic. “He said, ‘Are you defying your master?’” she recalls. “I had to lick my own shit.”

Eh. Back when everyone lived in one-room hovels, parents always had sex in the same room as their kids.

And at that time, by the time the kids were capable of a reaction other than "eww, gross", they had already moved out.

What baffles me is that she is all hating that, and the article all points out the defiant disapproval of our heroine, and then Gaimann just has to snap his fingers and she is on her knees again.

The only explanation given is that sex is confusing “for the brain”. And that she hated herself, so the degradation made him her soulmate?

I am not sure it is possible to condemn him for “rape”, that is sort of difficult if he gets enthusiastic consent love messages per text, but I condemn him morally for abusing a sort of mentally ill woman. Like, you wouldn’t think someone with Down syndrome being able to give consent, because they don’t understand things and make good decisions and a predator is running intellectually circles around them, and this is true for her too.

true for her too

It's true for many women.

Guy really went down the deviancy rabbit hole.

Yes! But I feel like, having read American Gods and Sandman, this is totally unsurprising.

American Gods

Have I just blocked out or forgotten the deviancy? Yeah, Laura's death seems like a cosmic punishment for infidelity, and the ancient god in Wisconsin (?) is disturbed but I don't remember it being a sexual thing. Might have to just pick it up for a reread.

Have I just blocked out or forgotten the deviancy?

Bilquis?

Oof, yeah, totally forgot about that one.

Salim and the Jinn came to mind after more thought, though I'm sure most people now complaining about Gaiman still wouldn't take kindly to calling that one deviant.

I just reread the entire Sandman like a month ago and didn't remember that there was that much rape. I mean, of course I remember the most famous rapes (Calliope, Fun Land attempts to rape Rose, the diner scene etc.) but even beyond those there's quite a lot of it.


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