Flytrap Roundtable Special: That Whole Awful Neil Gaiman Thing

Editor's note: Today we’re bringing you a special bonus edition of The Flytrap. What follows is a lightly edited transcript straight from the founders’ Slack wherein we take that Neil Gaiman story as a launch point for unpacking a bigger picture: the problem of “cool male feminists” who are exposed as bad actors or abusers, the pain of having work ripped off by ego-driven dudes, and, of course, the eternal quandary around whether it’s really possible to separate art from artist.

This post is free, but paid subscribers (upgrade or subscribe here!) get to join in the conversation in the comments. We’re dying to hear what y’all have to say about this whole terrible ordeal, so don’t hold back!

Andrea Grimes: So, the kick-off for this was my post/thread on Bluesky about my weird experience with Neil Gaiman, wherein I reflected on both being a fan and getting weird vibes from his arm’s-length support of my niche advice tumblr blog.

The tl;dr is, I've been running an advice tumblr for 11 years as the "Bad Advisor," basically yelling at advice column letter-writers who wanted validation for their worst ideas. Gaiman, who was active on Tumblr, picked up the blog and began reposting it, which pushed it into ~ viral ~ status pretty early on.

The weird upshot of Gaiman's reposting was that people thought Bad Advice was his blog, and for nigh on 11 years, I've had to quietly and occasionally correct people (when convenient) to say that it was me, not Neil Gaiman, writing Bad Advice. Despite the confusion, Gaiman never corrected anyone, though he knew who I was as an individual and a writer.

When news broke of allegations of Gaiman sexually assaulting women last year, I stopped wondering why he'd never stepped in, and realized that his behavior was entirely in keeping with the allegations.

Women, trans and non-binary writers and creators are all too familiar with this experience: meeting, befriending, and even idolizing men who rip off our ideas and deny culpability for same.

After the Gaiman dam broke, there have been so, so many stories about him and others, varying on a scale from abuse to just standard rip-off-shit. But the thread I keep coming back to is: We always had a feeling. Something was off.

And so thus I open the discussion to the Flytrap co-founders: what the fuck.

s.e. smith: You know there's such a long history of these 'cool male feminists' positioning themselves as rebels and renegades who really care about women, and leveraging that to build a loyal fanbase of women and girls who so want to be seen in any kind of media. Gaiman, of course, but also Joss Whedon, and your story has me thinking about another commonality between the two that Chrissy I think was the first to mention in our editorial meeting earlier, around how these men take credit for the work and achievements of women and just keep getting away with it, even in plain sight. So here's Gaiman not saying that he's the Bad Advice person, but not NOT saying it either, or the interactions between Joss Whedon and Jane Espenson, and, like, every 'feminist man' in a meeting ever.

Andrea: I keep coming back to the Hugo Schwyzer of it all. Not that I would give that mf credit for anything, but he pretty quickly decamped from Cool Male Feminist to Red-Pill Asshole once it stopped being ... whatever it was ... to him in terms of the attention of ~ feminist ~ women.

And Hugo is a great example of the extent to which white feminists (and feminists aligned with white feminism, regardless of their identities) will defend men who even performatively do the bare minimum.

s.e.: Oh MAN the 'cool male feminist' to 'redpilled because those bitches didn't give me enough respect' pipeline is SO REAL and as someone who SCREAMED that Hugo was Bad News Bears while everyone was cooing over him...it makes me feel like I am living in an alternate universe to see this play out over and over.

And Schwyzer, like Whedon, like so many others, also tried to slink back and rehab his reputation multiple times! They're like cats who have learned enough to not be directly ON the counter but will instead sit on the garbage can NEXT to the counter. 

Andrea: I would try to defend cats in general here but it's too good a metaphor to quibble with.

s.e.: Ash knows what he did.

Tina Vasquez: (Just popping in to say that despite his repeated efforts to rehab his image, Schwyzer now appears to write pieces for The Federalist that criticize "the left.")

s.e.: That definitely sounds on track with the petulant “woke culture” complaints of men mad about being caught

Andrea: This draws me back to The Flytrap's mission in the first place. Feminist blogs (and before that, outfits like GURL and teen-gal focused mags) were some of the only places that it was ever even suggested to me, as a young woman, that "perhaps this man is creeping on you, perhaps his attention is Not Great."

I want to be optimistic about the ways in which social media in the post-feminist-blog-era has been positive for young women and folks of other non-cis-white-dude-identities; if something like TikTok had existed when I was an impressionable young woman starting out I think I would have arrived at "Oh dear, a creep!" much sooner than I did for a lot of the men who paid attention to me when they perceived me as vulnerable.

I think it's a hard place to be in to hear something like that and know what to do about it (or not) esp if you haven't had a lot of experience with it and/or don’t have a strong analysis related to it necessarily.

There are so many Ask A Manager letters about "I know this thing happened to a colleague/friend, what now?"

s.e.: There's something deeply intertwined in failing to hold these men accountable for the way they use women as tools, and using feminism as a cover also helps them build a following who will back them up when challenged, like 'Oh I'd be so flattered if Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer propositioned me in an elevator because of the feminism of it all' is directly related to 'Oh I'm sure Dave just didn't hear you say the thing right before he said the same thing and got credit for it, he's a feminist, he would never.'

Tina: There's another layer for me in that media (publishing, journalism, etc.) is highly competitive. It's sort of ingrained in media culture that we're all sort of fighting for scraps because of all the publication closures, because of how hard it can be to those unfamiliar with the industry to understand how to get an agent or how to spin something into a book deal.

As a person who's almost 40, I'm now very wary of highly successful men who seem a little too willing to help young women in particular figure out the ropes. But 20 year old me would have taken any assistance that was offered, perhaps not seeing the endgame.

It's intensely strategic for men like Gaiman to target young women.

In journalism, I've found a dynamic in which well-established men befriend reporters online who are doing interesting work for much smaller outlets. But then they rip that work off, never cite the less established reporter, and present the work to a larger audience, and thus get credit for breaking the story. That particular dynamic has played out a few times for me. It's a different kind of use/discard cycle, but it still fucking sucks.

Andrea: This is a story I've seen play out so many times, both firsthand and from women journos (including those working in major mainstream/legacy media, from within their own newsrooms) and it's so thoroughly gross.

Chrissy Stroop: Sometimes you also simply see basically the same story appear in a major legacy outlet as one that appeared in a smaller indie outlet earlier, with no credit or linking to the original very similar story.

As someone who comes from academia, it aggravates me to no end in general how little credit is given in journalism. In another instance, an author I know once found a major New York Times staff reporter--one who had a review copy of her book--published a long read, much of which seemed to be lifted from her book's introduction.

She pushed back online, the reporter claimed not to have read the book, and nothing ever happened. In this case, the reporter was a (white) woman, but obviously a very privileged one at a very out-of-touch legacy institution. It seems there are no mechanisms for accountability for these issues at major papers, no incentive for elite reporters not to do it (other than their own obviously defective consciences) and no recourse for those whose work is stolen.

Personally, I've had people tell me my work inspired them to publish something, then find that I'm not referred to and my work is not linked to in their work.

And then, one obnoxious thing happened to me with a male reporter. He interviewed me for my expertise on Russia and the Putin regime's connections to the western Right. When his article dropped, he tweeted that he had spent the last two weeks "becoming an expert on this topic"! MY. DUDE. You SPOKE to experts; you are not an expert. Expertise is not acquired in two weeks. I can't really complain because he did quote me properly in his article, but the tweet was just so shitty--and so typically mediocre white dude.

Andrea: "Expertise is not acquired in two weeks" is something i would like to embroider on a pillow and send it to ... a number of folks

s.e.: Yes, all of this! I feel like this rise of creditless/ripoff culture also highlights a turn away from valuing work that is in conversation with other work, and doing the reading, and toward being the originator of an idea, the first. If you need to be an Original Special Boy, you have to trample everyone else down.

Kind of tangentially, because I just read this piece by an old classmate, I am thinking about this 'Well Gaiman was never a real feminist' line of thinking that I see coming up. The reason that men like this thrive as 'male feminists' is that they are publicly held up and supported as feminists. You don't get to then take that back when they turn out to be monsters...instead you should ask why so many monsters successfully hide under the cloak of feminism. There's a deep history of monstrosity within feminism that many mainstream feminists don't care to engage with, and that's precisely why that monstrosity thrives unchecked. Keep in mind, after all, that many people identified Gaiman as a threat, but they weren't taken seriously. I think about who is believed when they speak out, and how the people who warned about Gaiman (including me!) are feeling right now.

Nicole Froio: Disavowing someone as a feminist is much easier than analyzing why certain people were allowed to call themselves feminists or were allowed in feminist spaces or produced work that many people read as feminist. We are living through an era where feminism or feminist allyship can be used as a marketing tool, particularly by abusive men. Liberal politics are used as shields which are an obstacle to actual liberation. It actually reminds me of my recent essay on the importation of the 4B movement and how not all feminisms are inherently ethical, moral or effective. I loved Sophie Lewis's suggestions that dismissing something or someone as "not feminist" is not productive, instead urging for a recognition of feminism's roots in white supremacy, transphobia and eugenics. I think we can frame a reflection on Gaiman's supposed feminism similarly. 

I am obviously NOT saying feminism is to blame for Gaiman's reputation of feminism. But I think it's important to reflect on the current moment and how virtue signaling of values that I/we hold so dear, is being used to manipulate, refresh reputations, and launder the image of abusive, powerful men. I mean, Kevin Spacey and Justin Baldoni share a lawyer--there's a lot of money being invested in bringing abusers back from cancellation. We can argue that these men are just using feminism, but it dismisses those of us who fell (so to speak) for their feminism, who uplifted it, and didn't look beyond it. 

Chrissy: Nicole, I just want to chime in here that your 4B piece, which was so thoroughly researched and fascinating, prompted me to rethink how I have sometimes been willing to simply write people out of feminism. Since I'm a trans woman, it's probably unsurprising that I've denied that TERFs are "real" feminists, but I now realize that approach is wrongheaded. There is a wide variety of feminisms out there, and some of them are harmful. Maybe that's tangential to the issue of whether predatory "feminist" men are simply cynically using feminism--some of them probably are, and some of them probably believe their own bullshit. But it's important to think about the broader issues here. It's funny I hadn't given it much thought before, given the obvious parallel with liberal Christians and other (aspiring) good people affected by Christian hegemony insisting that Trump-supporting Christians are "fake Christians," and the years I've spent fighting against that.

Nicole: And to s.e.’s point, there are kinds of feminisms that ally with monstrous people and ideologies. Looking that straight in the face is important.

Nicole: Just one last point that I think it's very natural to dismiss an abuser's work when he is exposed, but that I want to suggest that maybe it would be interesting to analyze why that body of work was considered feminist in view of what's been exposed. When people say, for example, that they never liked [insert an actor who was exposed for abuse here] anyway, it denies us the opportunity to understand how [that actor] became so influential, how he "got away with it" and what ecosystems/social culture his art/influence created. 

s.e.: I think you're really cooking with this one too! Like before we throw the man out let's maybe think about why everyone thought this was the best thing since sliced bread until 15 minutes ago

Chrissy: I'm ambivalent about "separating the art from the artist," but whatever one thinks of that there are certainly valid reasons to look back at the works of predators with fresh eyes and see if any red flags, patterns, or trends stand out that we didn't pick up on or downplayed before.

I also suspect that many of our faves in various media and genres are likely to have been produced by people, men in particular, who got away with an awful lot of predatory behavior that we will never know about. I don't know exactly what to do with that thought, but I'm throwing it out here.

s.e.: I feel this too, Chrissy! Including about these nice guy creators like are you really, though? (Think Ned Fulmer being the 'wholesome' 'wife guy' Try Guy and then it turned out he was the one cheating on his wife, how much of his persona was a cynical grab for fans who want a wholesome face...)

Chrissy: Louis CK comes to mind.

Andrea: I've been thinking about our discussion here in light of the Pete Hegseth confirmation (and others, but his is the most recent and among the most horrifying examples of a demonstrable fucko just sailing on through life) and how different these conversations are on ~ the left ~ versus the right

Of course we must and should have the conversation about how/when/why ~ feminism ~ has such a tendency to celebrate/welcome men who are perceived as doing only slightly more than the bare minimum. There's no reason to expect that patriarchal, white supremacist bigots would not welcome a Pete Hegseth with open arms, but how different are those two things really when you get down to it?

s.e.: I guess the big thing here is that I see bad behavior (in big ole scarequotes) as a selling point for the right, the worse the better, whereas on the left bad behavior (small scarequotes) might be considered a “quirky artist” thing that you overlook For the Sake of the Art, and you should definitely Not Talk About?

Like, everyone likes a bad boy but it has to be the right amount of bad for the audience.

'Oh that's just Neil, you're overreacting, he didn't mean anything by it.'

Andrea: No i think you're onto something there, it's a simple "pro" in the shitbag column and a "Hmmph, let's ruminate endlessly on this" in the other column

s.e.: And in both cases it's a very distinct performance of masculinity and both are bad, whether you're the 'anti-woke, non-PC' guy (which, like, look at Bill Maher...not limited to the right!) or the ~ artiste ~ who's just an aw schucks tiny baby

'I'm just a little guy' is not actually a defense though??

Andrea: It sure tf isn’t! And they can’t have it both ways — if they want to be taken seriously when they are “good,” the flipside is being taken seriously when they fuck up. But so few of these guys on either flank

ever experience consequences or a true reckoning.

I guess that’s a real depressing way to end this roundtable, but here we are. UGH.

This post was edited by Andrea Grimes and s.e. smith, and copyedited by Chrissy Stroop.