Ambrose & Elsewhere

I used to hold the unproven and unprovable belief that old age magnifies moral qualities, so that past a certain point you become more and more evil as you age, or the opposite. I’m not noticing any haloes when I look in the mirror, lately, so I’ve started to hope that I was wrong about that. But there does seem to be a thing that happens to some men in middle-age and afterwards, where they give themselves license to do terrible stuff because they figure they can get away with it.

Finding out that one of your heroes is a member of the club of horrible old men can be disturbing in a distinctly painful way. I’m not feeling that regarding Neil Gaiman (whose success I have always found somewhat bemusing), but the work of Woody Allen and Isaac Asimov was once deeply important to me, so I feel a degree of sympathy. You have to uproot a part of yourself to get past this stuff.

Don’t read Lila Shapiro’s meticulously reported account if you’re not ready to confront some explicit and repugnant details about Gaiman’s sexual behavior (and how his ex-wife Amanda Palmer enabled some of it). But if you can stand that, I think it’s worth reading and reflecting about what makes these men so horrible.

https://www.vulture.com/article/neil-gaiman-allegations-controversy-amanda-palmer-sandman-madoc.html

There are horrible old women, too. Marion Zimmer Bradley and Alice Munro come to mind. It’s the horrible old men who concern me more, though–maybe because the way society is set up allows them to do more damage.