Manic Pixie Dream Girl Nightmare

On Neil Gaiman, poetic living, and abuse of spiritual power

This essay is the first of two parts. I’ll publish the second next week

This week’s scandal par excellence is a New York Magazine long read on the bestselling fantasy and comic-book author Neil Gaiman, alleging his track record of sexually abusing young women who came into his orbit. It’s a compelling, queasy-making essay, that has proved a cultural Rorschach test. What are we seeing? Is it a rich and calculating sexual predator, or a damaged young woman rewriting her own past? What was Gaiman’s wife’s role?

Taking the account at face value, Gaiman does indeed seem to have been sexually forward and strikingly un-boundaried: demanding bizarre or disgusting sex acts, or initiating at best ambivalently consensual sexual encounters with the women mentioned, sometimes with his child present in the room. Critics, though, have dismissed the report as #MeToo ambulance-chasing, pointing out that all the women in question continued the relationship with Gaiman even after he supposedly assaulted them.

I’m not going to re-litigate these takes. Instead, I want to suggest that the very undecidability of the story, plus the sense it conveys of entanglement and culpability spreading in all directions, offers a clue as to its real governing theme: abuse of spiritual power.

The High Priest and Priestess

The three principal actors in this drama, taken together, offer a picture of three common roles within this kind of abuse. The first of these is the High Priestess, played here by Gaiman’s ex-wife, the musician and writer Amanda Palmer. Per NYMag, Palmer is adept at using her charisma to attract acolytes: the article describes her as famous “for her ability to attract a tight-knit and devoted following wherever she goes”. She is just as deliberate about conducting her life via complex, unbounded interpersonal entanglements of ambiguous reciprocity: ““messy exchanges of goodwill and the swapping of favors” in which “There was no distinction between fans and friends.” For her it appears to read as a utopian form of community-building, conducted in a high, idealistic register; just how conscious and intentional this MO was is evident from the fact that she’s even written a book about how to live like this: The Art Of Asking.

But while a High Priestess may see herself as a pure force of idealism, conducting interpersonal life in this high, utopian register can serve accidentally-on-purpose to obscure real asymmetries of social or financial power. One friend interviewed for the report observed of Palmer that “Her idealism could blind her to reality” - and particularly to the vulnerabilities of those she drew into her orbit. More bluntly: sticking to the register of presence, connection, and love can obscure substantive imbalances in power and resources, often to the benefit of the one with more of these.

The second character in this picture is the High Priest: in this case Gaiman. We learn from NYMag that Gaiman’s parents were high-ranking Scientologists, and that - while he has never spoken about his childhood - it’s likely that he himself was subjected from a young age to the psychologically harrowing and sometimes cruelly punitive processes believed within this cult to result in spiritual development. Gaiman himself was exhibited by his parents as an exemplary product of the cult, even giving an interview to the BBC, and was performing the cult’s hypnosis-like “auditor” work when just a teenager. This is, in other words, someone whose early years were steeped in the classic cultic mashup of moral and personal power, and who was trained from childhood to operate instinctively within the moral/spiritual register - including in using it, as cults classically do, as a means of dominating others.