Neil Gaiman, Justin Baldoni, and the End of the Male Feminist – Slate

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.The allegations against Neil Gaiman are plentiful, detailed, and horrifying. First reported last summer in a podcast from Tortoise Media and expanded in a monster New York magazine cover story this week, they include stories of sexual assault and coercion from multiple women across several decades and continents. Together, they paint a picture of a man who reportedly used his fame and good-guy reputation to earn the trust of people he’d go on to mercilessly abuse.This image of Gaiman, an English writer beloved for his fantasy novels and comic books, contradicts the public persona his fans have grown to cherish. Once highly active on Twitter, he called himself a feminist, spoke out in support of trans people, and exhorted followers to “believe survivors” and fight for women “at the ballot box & with art & by listening.” His outspoken feminist wife, Amanda Palmer, would loudly congratulate Gaiman on social media and in the press for being a committed co-parent, partner, and champion of women. (The couple are now estranged.)With his writing, too, Gaiman seemed the picture of a well-meaning ally. His works—which include The Sandman, Good Omens, Coraline, and American Gods—often contain storylines of empowerment for marginalized people. He stood out in the notoriously male world of comic book writing for his empathetic depictions of complex, intrepid women sometimes grappling with abuse from men. In one novel, magic is the sole province of women; two literary scholars published a whole book of essays parsing the feminist themes of his oeuvre.Through representatives, Gaiman has denied the claims of misconduct and described any sexual activity between him and his accusers as consensual. But their allegations are similar—several women say he pushed past their protests of sexual pain, demanded they perform degrading acts of submission without their explicit consent, and occasionally pressed them into sexual contact in the presence of his young son. Multiple women received payments from Gaiman after they confronted him about his behavior.And so Gaiman joins an ignominious crew of famous men whose work and statements seemed to align with women against sexist oppression in public, even as they allegedly assaulted, harassed, or otherwise mistreated women in private. This pathway is now so well trodden as to have become a trope: the male feminist who deeply, appallingly wasn’t.At the height of #MeToo, these guys were everywhere. There was Louis C.K., who made searching, seemingly self-aware work that scrutinized gender relations and male sexual entitlement. And yet, several women have said that he masturbated in front of them without their permission or otherwise sexually harassed them. There was Aziz Ansari, who made sensitive, thoughtful comedy about heterosexual dating—and reportedly tried to pressure a woman into sexual contact with unceasing persistence after she repeatedly resisted. Then there was Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general who sued Harvey Weinstein’s company for creating a “toxic environment.” Months later, four women accused Schneiderman of physical violence, often during sex. (Schneiderman, like Gaiman, said he was practicing consensual BDSM.)The “fallen male feminist” category includes plenty of lesser-known entries too—like comedian and podcast host Jamie Kilstein, once applauded by Feministing for telling actually-funny rape jokes before multiple women came out with allegations of sexual and emotional abuse, and sociologist Michael Kimmel, who literally wrote the book on male privilege before he was accused of sexual harassment by former students.The unmasking has continued over the years. Many former romantic partners of Joss Whedon, another fantasy storyteller who made works (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer) about underestimated women showing the world their power, have accused him of lying, cheating, and manipulating them. People have also said he was verbally abusive on sets, making sexist and demeaning comments toward women. And just this year, Justin Baldoni, the actor and director who famously gave a TED talk on “redefining masculinity” and hosted a podcast about challenging “rigid gender roles,” was sued by his It Ends With Us co-star Blake Lively for a litany of sexist misdeeds, including pressuring her to be fully nude in a scene, making sexual comments about her clothing, improvising sexual behavior in front of the camera, and telling her about his pornography addiction. These events reportedly all occurred during filming for a movie that was specifically about ending gender-based violence.When a man who seems generally enlightened in public is alleged to have mistreated women in private, there is a sense among his fans of having been duped. The reaction to such allegations is often accompanied by a question: Were his feminist bona fides part of the reason his accusers trusted him in the first place? No matter how many men like Gaiman are hit with troubling allegations, it’s still hard for supporters of male “feminist” creators to internalize that speaking out against gender inequities doesn’t preclude a man from being a jerk—or even a serial rapist.Through a certain lens, the hypocrisy of a male “feminist” abuser seems even more repugnant than the abuses of an unrepentant sexist. One of these men is at least honest about who he is, adorning himself in red flags that read caveat emptor. The other uses his knowledge of feminist discourse to lure people closer with the intent of using them. It’s almost a secondary violation to have the language and narratives of a social movement co-opted in service of a pattern of abuse.There seem to be two psychoanalyses of male “feminists” accused of misconduct. One is that he was evangelizing for gender equity as a deliberate fraud, in a ploy to camouflage the self-interested cruelty at his core. The other is that he truly believes he is one of the good guys, convinced that forcing a woman into sexual humiliation is harmless adult fun and any hurt feelings are a misunderstanding.To me, these debates are pointless. The damage is done either way. A more productive question would turn the focus inward: Why are feminists so entranced by male “allies” in the first place?Any progress toward gender equity requires the buy-in of men. But the extent to which advocates for women have been eager to celebrate any minor artistic or political contribution from men has long struck me as extreme. I have attended at least three major events centered on women’s health and rights at which the presenters have stopped and asked for a round of applause to recognize the few men in attendance. Some organizations that promote women’s interests, like Vital Voices, offer specific awards for men. (Vital Voices gave its award to Baldoni in December, then rescinded it a few weeks later, after the lawsuit was filed against him.)Maybe it’s a practical strategy to keep men in the movement who might leave if they don’t feel adequately coddled, or a reflection of the idea that men are doing something uniquely brave when they reject sexism, or a symptom of the internalized self-hatred that leads marginalized groups to overvalue approval from those outside the community. (See also: GLAAD’s consistent fawning over straight people who support LGBTQ+ rights.) Whatever it is, it is insulting to give men special credit for advocating for women when women do it all the time, and often suffer for doing so.The adulation of male feminists has quieted a bit over the past several years, partly due to the rising intensity of threats to women’s lives in the Trump era. (Hearing a man say that women deserve equal treatment just doesn’t hit like it used to.) The label of feminist itself has also lost some of its currency. For a time, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, there was an fixation on getting celebrities to say whether they were feminists. Their answers could power entire news cycles. That black-and-white framing has, thankfully, mostly evaporated in popular discourse. Trump’s rise showed many progressive white women the error in approaching feminism as a narrow, single-issue movement having to do with gender alone. And the term began losing the thread when right-wing conservatives who oppose abortion access and promote traditional gender roles began calling themselves feminists.But even though we know that people betray their professed values with self-interested actions all the time, and even though we have seen this happen with supposedly feminist men again and again, the assumption that men who talk the talk also walk the walk remains stubbornly hard to shake. There is a kind of desperation to the search for men who might vindicate their gender through thoughtful art or decent behavior. It’s as if there’s a hope that the accumulation of enough pro-woman men could be a bulwark against the broader anti-woman thrust of the political and social tides.But that hope is so often a road to disappointment. On her Patreon, the writer Ella Dawson wrote about being captivated by Baldoni’s TED talk and taking his side against Blake Lively in her initial social media posts, then feeling sickened when she realized, after reading about the smear campaign Baldoni had orchestrated against Lively, that she may have been mistaken about the man she’d admired. It wasn’t just the extent of Baldoni’s alleged misbehavior that upset her—it was the feeling that she herself had done wrong by supporting him.Per the Milkshake Duck meme and the admonition to “never meet your idols,” there is a broad understanding in adult society that human beings (and ducks) are complicated. They often hurt others—some number of them hurt others in particularly monstrous ways. The male “feminist,” as a figure of wish fulfillment in the search for a better world, has circumvented the natural skepticism people might otherwise have about public figures. Fan culture plays into this too: The world of comic cons and fan sites that Gaiman inhabits encourages obsessive parasocial relationships with media creators. In that milieu, it can be hard to remember that the public image of a celebrity is just a carefully crafted facade designed for maximum monetary gain. No matter what they post or how they write, we don’t really know these people at all.
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Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/neil-gaiman-end-of-male-feminist-baldoni.html