Patriarchal Protection Racket - Gaiman Edition
Will they call him Cthulhu Mind Flayer after what he's done to a young lesbian and virgin? To many women?
I'm not really writing to inform you. You already know, sisters & readers. I'm writing this because I'm exhausted and writing is what I do with both my ire and joy.
I wasn't going to write about this because for fucks sake radfems have been writing about this since the dawn of movement, but after a few rounds of saying this on twitter, I realized that one element of Men's Bottomless Awfulness needs more attention.
It's fun for them. It's entertaining.
That's an element of MVAWG and buying women's bodies and creating these force fields of warped perception around themselves whether it's the small-time nice plumber next door to Gisèle Pelicot or the world renowned and idolized horror-fantasy author Neil Gaiman. Or even the cheese-curd-bodied troll that is Trump.
The betrayal is just as much pleasure, maybe even more, than the rape and coercion and mental destruction of women and girls and boys. That Telegram Chat. Some of those men are eating breakfast today across the table from a woman or girl they raped last night. That's part of the fun.
When our justice systems and civic institutions and churches and culture industries and workplaces and schools and families let this abusive/violent/harmful shit slide they are protecting men's right to a kind of fun.
A kind of fun that flows from violence, because once your endorphin and oxytocin release is connected to harming others, nothing else feels quite as yummy.
Feminist are killjoys. You bet your ass. We want to kill the joy men take in reducing women to emotional rubble whether by a thousand cuts or shock and awe.
And I think we need to get real clear about this. When we gather stats on harm to imprisoned women from trans-identified men housed with them (because nobody else will fucking do it) and present them and say “Look, these women are being harmed, this is wrong and terrible and has 90 Quadrillion knock effects that are also horrible” – what we also need to say is that all that harm is being done in the name of men's enjoyment, entertainment, and happiness and nothing like social justice at all.
Maybe framing it this way, brutally, clearly, will cut through a some of the fog? So far, displacing men's fun (superiority and entitlement) has proven as difficult as changing the orbit of the Earth.
So, the radfems were right again.
Men like Gaiman and Trump and the rapey transwomen obviously loathe women, like gleefully. It feels weird to write about betrayal here, but everything I'm writing about in this post is betrayal or adjacent.
The TERFs were right about Gaiman (it's on the Internet Archive, too), and the TQ kids got big mad at them for them like the obedient indoctrinaires most of them are. So the women who wanted to protect those very TQ kids from men like him were betrayed, told to die in a fire because it's transphobic to hate on an ally, or what the fuck ever. But all the while Gaiman got to watch these kids, much like the young woman featured in the Vulture article, defend him against women.
I bet he loved it. Just like Trump's MAGA minions doxxing and threatening his adversaries, Gaiman has a little army of Social Justice Enforcers harassing women who Just Want Shitty Men Put Where They Belong Which Is In Prison. Men like this are all the same, and their betrayals are all same. Time and time again.
But, many, many TERFs were wrong on Trump. If they haven't clocked it yet, they will soon. They may overlook the Jack Smith Report as much as they overlooked So Much Else about Trump and MAGA, but when they come for birth control and the vote I think these adult human females will ping to the situation.
Not all men, but sure enough men.
Patriarchy was designed by terrible men for terrible men, so it protects terrible men very well. When Dworkin described the protection racket as that myth that “men protect women” from other men, she was (as always) right that it's a myth in that form – one that consumes women bones and all, every day. But, Dworkin also noted, it's a pillar of patriarchy that “men protect men” and convince many women to help out. Big patriarchal reversal, that.
Even their famously feminist wives, so beloved by alt-girls. I was an alt-girl and punk/alt woman (now more punk-alt-witchy-apocalypse-chic if I'm honest) for most of my life, it went well with my feminist refusal of the 90s style glitzed-and-blitzed-out patri-feminity.
Epstein had Maxwell. Gaiman had Palmer. Trump has practically a harem of women who help hunt and intimidate his antagonists. I hope they are all eaten by ants from the feet up until dead. I don't want a special place in hell for women who betray women. I want those women punished here on Earth alongside the men – not instead of them.
But Gaiman. The Ocean at the End of the Lane was one of my favorite little scary books. And I'll be honest, after the TQ's tried to deny the most famous woman author in history even the dirt her flowers would grow in AND THEN also defended to the teeth this author whose depravity and violence is greater even than that of some of his evil characters, I had pretty well just written off the literary world to the Gender Borg and moved on.
And then.
Will the TQ activists ritually burn his books? Will they write scholarly papers without using his name? Will they suggest his name be removed from his books?
Will they call him Cthulhu Mind Flayer after what he's done to a young lesbian and virgin? To many women?
Will the righteous TQ activists who have hounded women out of their communities and professions punish this man, this ally!!!, who betrayed them so??
Here's the RadMatFem deal.
Our manifesto does not deny the TQ their dignity or right to self-expression or seek in any way to interfere with the civil and human rights they share with all the rest of us vanilla normie mortals. In fact, be your most fantastic and amazing and successful selves.
What we will not stand for is any community or super-special identity being used to ignore, excuse, or in this case directly ENABLE harm to women. We don't care what the abuser looks like – a cornfed pastor from the US Midwest or the least fabulous recent social transitioner on his way to prison, or a scruffy British writer married to the ultimate/worst of all Cool Girls – stopping abusers is how we stop abuse.
RadMatFems seek thriving for humans, but primarily for women. It's one of those parallels that feels cosmic even if it's only economically structural but women are the portals for human life into this world and we are the portals through which that world is then supported. Give women in a village somewhere in the Global South or impoverished regions of the Global North a microloan, and she will support her family and village. RadMatFems consider the first portal a matter of biology (and sometimes spiritual significance) and the later as a lucky knock on effect coopted by patriarchy as a source of economic extraction.
We don't seek women's thriving for the community. We seek it for women. And what everyone else gets from that should be dependent on how well they treat us, whether they are individuals or social orders.
And that's why when we hear about that movement for women that needs to stop centering women we think a con is running. And this one has been running for a couple decades now.
It's the same one it's always been. The Patriarchal Protection Racket For Men.
