[Content Note: talk about abuse and sexual assault with specifics and hypotheticals]
The Vulture recently published There Is No Safeword, a rigorous deconstruction of the ongoing history of predation by author Neil Gaiman, acting against multiple, vulnerable women. This, alone isn’t new information. Nor is the role by which he used BDSM to try to justify his actions. What the article did did, which other discussions didn’t tend to go into as much, was talk about the role of how the community he is part of collectively enabled his behaviour, and how this problem was not just a handful of acts occurring in a vacuum, but an ongoing problem stretching back over a considerable period of time. It was an account that was darkly familiar to me.
Gaiman, whatever else he is, is a textbook community predator or, in common slang, “missing stair”. His history of abuse operated via taking advantage of risk factors in his professional, lifestyle and creative/fan network. He did so via leveraging significant celebrity and money, but also via structuring his social relationships as a part of a larger group to compound the vulnerability of his victims and provide himself with cover. In the immediate experience of those he harmed, it’s a tragedy. In the aggregate, the summation by The Vulture is a powerful teaching tool to help stop it happening again.
For the last decade, in addition to blogging and various creative pursuits, a significant part of my life has been dedicated, with various levels of success, to community safety. I was hardly the only one to try. The groundswell of weird, creative, queer and/or horny geriatric millennials coming of age was to demand better, different and center consent. What I got out of it, other than stress related IBS and a few community hazards at least temporarily disabled, was an awareness of just how universally replicable the behaviour of serial abusers are, and what sort of groups are particularly vulnerable to making a home for them.
I found it in every group I joined or explored, from kink, to LARP and tabletop, to computer games, to dance and writing. I found it in groups I wasn’t part of, film and television, right wing news, straight to religious home schooling.
Pretty much every creative/passion community from churches to 3D open source animation is particularly vulnerable to gaining missing stairs like this and maintaining an ideal habitat for them. The BDSM community, of which you, the reader of this blog are probably part of, is absolutely incredibly vulnerable. I don’t know how much we can stop it from happening, but we can understand why, how and through that what best practices let you fight back, not just from being victimized, but becoming an enabler of someone.
Here are 6 factors that put your community at risk of creating a safe space for missing stairs:
- Lots of reliance on volunteers/low paid labour to function and little or no oversight
- Huge power disparity in group members due to massive differences in money, resources and popularity
- An entwinement of the personal and professional where the two are functionally the same and everyone participating in the larger community must do both to stay engaged
- External stigmas creating an Us VS them dynamic with any resource that might be leveraged against abuse being a hazard to everyone continuing to have the group or project (and providing a pool of people experiencing marginalization)
- Recruitment, with a supply of new people coming in or joining.
- Mind altering substances (drugs and/or alcohol)
Hey wait, that’s everyone!
Sharp eyed people may notice that virtually every community they could be part of is subjected to most or all of these factors, so I suggest another framing tool.
Treat predatory dynamics entrenching themselves in your community as being much like controlling for things like the spread of STIs. This might seem counter intuitive, in so much that having or spreading a disease is almost always involuntary whereas sexual predation very much involves the very human agency of the person doing it. However, missing stairs need the rest of the staircase to be dangerous.
The point of knowing risk factors is not necessarily to stop doing things, but to handle risk with the respect it deserves. You, the reader, likely inherently understand that nothing can be made perfectly free of potential harm, but taking risks means that you need to construct a structure or series of practices to mitigate them AND you need to be brutally honest about the risks involved with everyone participating. At a personal level, kinky people do things like only doing bondage if they supervise the tied person the whole time. At a community level, acknowledging risks means establishing means to reduce or remove harm collectively.
The Anatomy of a Community Predator
I will say this first, a community predator is not just limited to rock star authors. It could be a volunteer, a mentor, and oldbie or anyone who leverages their established role in a community to attack its members. The community could be as vast and prestigious as a ruling political party or as small and humble as the choir in a single senior care facility. The fact that we keep catching men doing it is not because anything about being a man makes you biologically inclined to rape, but that the social factors that favour disparity in power and status predominantly also favour men, particularly cis dudes. For the same reason that it’s easier to be a successful novelist if you are a white cis dude, it’s simply easier to be a successful predator (and go longer before you get caught). If sexism ended tomorrow we would still have community predators.
Thus, anyone could be abusive in their personal relationships, but who we hold in more scrutiny selects for who is more likely to be in that role. As such, even though the majority of abuse examples are cis men, I deliberately use gender neutral language.
Abusers are parasites. They pursue the idea that they are a great person/seminal in their field/the lifeblood of the community/the one person speaking truth to power. Their work might be real, but it will be weighted disproportionately even above whatever it was.
Their behaviour not only stacks up victims, but selects for people who they believe won’t challenge them effectively and eventually drains resources from the collective to the maintenance of themselves and the harm they do. For example, it’s often remarked how humouring the predatory behavior of certain great sci-fi and fantasy authors within their writing community discouraged more women to participate. If being letched on was the price of admission for most of the women trying to break in, of course many of them would decide the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Satisfying one person’s ego therefore comes at the expense of the potential of countless others. To add insult to injury, they often warp everything around them so when you attempt to remove or stop them they do a great deal of damage to the group itself in the process.
Abusers also benefit from grey areas, and benefit of the doubt. They suck up all the grace and good faith we extend to others, counting on us to cut our losses or forgive. Community predators depend on our desire to only speak when we think we will be believed, and when we ourselves are beyond reproach. They very much thrive in positioning their victims in a state of perceived mutually assured destruction. More frustratingly, abusers can also be victims, either sharing marginalization, a past history of trauma or existing as a catspaw on someone else’s predation.
Questionable behavior also becomes a sort of means to get power over even those they aren’t directly abusing. Getting you to participate or turn a blind eye to their behaviour makes you complicit, and of course they will blur the distinction between their abuse and fun but socially frowned on activities. If the culture at large hates consensual promiscuity or kink they will recast criticism of themselves as the voices of prudes and fuddy duddies. If they want to play with alternative “traditional” social structures, they will cast criticism as wicked and worldly. BDSM, in particular, has a distinct culture of silence and a very real fear of both outing and engaging formal law enforcement.
Importantly, in understanding the harm community predators cause, they also do not tend to confine themselves to just sexual violence, but leverage their uneven power disparity, be it star power, professional contacts, money (including being a funding guru), life saving resources and so on to make or break the experience of others. They will steal, redirect the labour of others to their benefit and ostracize those who challenge them. If there is a whisper network, they clog it with conflict and counter rumors, until it becomes unreliable. If there is a community accountability process they will become a vexatious litigant or rules lawyer their way into making complaints against them nullified.
They will pursue personal vendetta and redirect popular scorn not just on people who oppose sexual violence, but anyone who blocks them getting what they want. As in the case of Gaiman, community predators absolutely overlap with labour exploitation even as they frame themselves as a saviour, rescuer or donor.
And, by blurring the personal with whatever projects they are part of, community predators will reframe conflicts according to whatever suits them. Conflict is simplified to “drama”, accusations of sexual conduct are blurred with it being a civil dispute over resources or a political squabble over control. That these may be happening simultaneous to sexual abuse essentially adds insult ot injury.
I share all this to stress that it can be tempting to dismiss a community predator as simply a personal matter. Even if you are not the preferred “type” for this person, remember that there’s a higher than average chance they will eventually harm everyone. The best time, when you detect a community predator, to remove them was yesterday, but you cannot simply let these people be and expect the matter not to escalate and spread.
[Part 2 Pending]