why are (some) artists like this?

a Neil Gaiman post

If you’re unfamiliar with the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman, you should know they are disturbing. He’s been accused of multiple acts of violation by at least five women who were all positioned in some vulnerable relation to him: young fans, employees, or tenants. This is distressing enough to read about in general, but I’ve also found it personally disturbing in a way I’ve been struggling to understand. I adored Sandman in high school—when I was a vulnerable young person myself, I guess—and I read most of Gaiman’s novels until around the mid-2000s when I began to lose interest in him. Sometime in the past twenty years I began to actively despise Neil Gaiman, and I even had him muted on Twitter and then Bluesky. I had no inkling whatsoever that he was a sexual predator—I just couldn’t stand his twee, oopsy-whoopsy “power of stories” bullshit.¹ Gaiman’s public persona is probably what makes this case so especially creepy: the kindly, supportive, feminist, hyper-positive champion of genre fiction was only a mask, hiding a calculating malice that hated women and wanted to hurt them.

The question of “why is Neil Gaiman like this” is really “why are so many famous artists like this,” and by “famous artists” we usually mean “famous men.” I’ve been taking a pottery class lately and the teacher—a cool and tough young woman—mentioned how common this sort of thing is in the pottery world. She named a few men (I’d never heard of them) who are considered superstars in the field and are adept at surrounding themselves with—and preying on—young women students. Basically every artistic medium is full of guys like this: known predators who are usually whispered about at best until a sufficient number of victims come forward (and even then, usually the creeps continue to thrive, unpunished.)

The usual reason given for why this happens is that we—the collective we—have a problem with worshiping artists into heroes. The “great men of art” are, in this sense, our own creation and our own responsibility. There’s a degree of truth to this, but I think it slightly misplaces the agency in this situation (incidentally, wide-eyed “power of art” claims also tend to confuse the question of agency.)² We didn’t personally, as a collective body, create social and economic inequality in artistic fields. Our usual model of artistic creation—encompassing how we regard artists, how we educate them, and how we pay them—is that most artists are talented but only a few are special geniuses, naturally and objectively earning their position high above the rest. And when “we” raise great male artists to such dizzying heights and praise them as gods, they simply can’t help but view the people around them as lesser mortals—especially young and vulnerable women, whom they pursue with an energy and intensity that often rivals or overtakes their artistic output.

The thing about Neil Gaiman, however, is that he’s not that great. This is unrelated to the allegations against him; plenty of famous sex creeps are also legitimately great artists (Roman Polanski, let’s be real.) But Gaiman, sorry, isn’t a genius. He’s best understood as a curator of ideas, especially established myths, and he’s always better when he’s working with talented collaborators. Sandman is gorgeous in large part because of Dave McKean and the other artists who worked on it; Good Omens is charming because Terry Pratchett is charming. Gaiman’s work translates well to visual mediums like screen adaptations, which is part of why he’s made so much money and been so successful; he’s not particularly good with descriptive language, and his characters often need an actor or an artist to bring them to life. Really, his novels are a lot like lyrics: decent to read on their own, but their power comes from the fact that they can and should be set to music.

The point of this isn’t to dunk on Gaiman for being mediocre; the point is that he earned the label of “great artist” mostly because he happens to be famous and successful, which is not the same as actually being great. The keys to his fame and success can be found partly in the fact that he does have an infectious gift for finding good stories (if not quite in telling them), partly in how good he is at choosing collaborators, and partly because he must have been really good at advocating for himself. Gaiman is certainly very charming in person, and comes across as a guy who really, genuinely cares about writers and writing. I saw him once “in conversation” with Margaret Atwood, and they had a lovely discussion about the writing process. At one point Atwood brought up some interesting historical tidbit, and Gaiman said that one of the things he loved about talking to other writers is that they all carry around these pieces of history and myth, shyly offering them to each other across the table. It was a lovely image and I’ve never forgotten it. I wonder if, after the event, he was secretly plotting to have degrading sex with an impressionable young fan.

A while back, I read a posthumous profile of David Foster Wallace—another “great artist” type who preyed on vulnerable young women, including fans at book events and creative writing students. In the profile, a friend of his (who I think may have been Jonathan Franzen? you’ll understand in a second why I’m not googling this to confirm) alleged that Wallace claimed at this point in his career that the most important thing to do with his life was to stick his penis into as many vaginas as possible.³ This comment has not helped me take DFW more seriously as a writer, but I do wonder if it’s revealing of what’s actually going on here, something that runs deeper than temptation or hypocrisy. We like to think that writers are writers: that their intention, especially if they’ve been labeled “great artists,” is to continue to write as skillfully as possible. And I think that may be true—but, at the same time, a certain kind of predatory writer seems to also want something else, possibly even over and above actually being a great artist. What if being a great artist is, for some, always a means to an end, that end being power over others, and power over women especially? What if abusing other people isn’t a perk, a late-in-life revelation—but always, whether consciously or unconsciously, a deliberate intention?

If this is true, then I think the reasons behind it may be Jungian (or Alan Moore-ian, if you prefer.) I don’t think it’s much of an accident that most—though not all—of these great artist perverts are men who prey on women. This has little to do with gender or even sexuality; it’s not just about who tends to hold the power in given situations but how “power” itself is imagined. Why do these supposedly great male artists spend so much time pursuing, using, and humiliating vulnerable women? Because they don’t totally believe that they exist without women’s attention. They prove their existence and their strength by demonstrating power over women—not even real women (they don’t think of women in real terms), but woman as symbol: the uncontrollable life force, the unreliable spark of Psyche, the creative instinct itself. Being an artist is very difficult, and often enough a finished work isn’t at all what you might have hoped it would be. Creative frustration can come out in a lot of ways; it can metabolize itself into strange symbols and acts. (I maintain that J.K. Rowling has descended into TERF-dom out of artistic frustration and self-hatred; attempts to control and humiliate women come in many forms.)

“Great artists” of this type try to dominate women because—no matter how great they actually are, or how rich or powerful they become—they never actually feel that they can dominate art, the world, their own bodies, which will always be stronger than they are. Their abuses are best understood not as an act of power, but of fear. The Tortoise Media podcast about Gaiman is titled “Master,” because he wanted at least one of his victims to call him “master.” But of course, he’s the one who sought out his victims—in terms of the classic master/slave paradox, he’s the one who needed them; they never needed him. They thought they had a totally different sort of relationship. They were universally surprised when he attacked them.

In a way, these great artist-rapists are acting out an ancient ritual: Man dominating Nature. As a piece of treasured myth, to push across the table to each other and use in our stories, it’s a profound image. As a lifestyle it’s just kind of embarrassing. And I think it’s important to see it as fundamentally embarrassing, rather than as the inevitable consequence of fame going to a man’s head—if, for no other reason, that literally not all men are like this, and also because the structures governing artistic creation are unlikely to be reformed any time soon. We can agree that we shouldn’t worship famous men, but that’s not going to stop the rise of men whose ultimate goal isn’t the art of making, but the conquest of making, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get there. But in the meantime the rest of us just want to create, and live.

1. In fact I use a quote from Gaiman in my upcoming book as an example of the usual “power of stories” rhetoric and why I find it so empty.

2. Second obligatory “buy my book” footnote etc etc.

3. Yeah lemme just open google and type “David Foster Wallace” “Jonathan Franzen” “penis” “vagina,” I will definitely not be scarred by the results.