Women’s Work and the Economics of Consent

If you have read anything about the recent allegations against Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, you probably know all the content warnings already. If you don’t know anything about the recent allegations against Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, you may want to start with Lila Shapiro’s “There Is No Safe Word.” I went back and forth about whether or not to make this a free post, because I think (hope) what I have to say is important. Ultimately, I realized that I wanted to make this available to readers already familiar with my work and give any new readers an opportunity to leave before it gets too graphic.

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are artists who inspire and cultivate fandoms that are deeply invested in parasocial relationships with their idols. Palmer is also someone with a long history of expecting people to work for her for free. Palmer has already gone to internet court for her experiments in alternative remuneration for artists, and I am not interested in relitigating that case. For me, asking domestic workers to labor for some sort of unspecified but very special something—rather than money—is very different, and this is something both Gaiman and Palmer seem to have done. This is not for lack of material resources. By his own reckoning, Gaiman is a very wealthy man.1 Although Amanda Palmer is not independently wealthy, she had access to wealth while she was married to Gaiman.

If you have never been someone who works in someone else’s house you probably don’t know that the vibe is, at best, cordially uncomfortable. You are being paid to be there and paid to work there, and, in my experience, the paying party would prefer to pretend that this is not the case because we do not like to think about or talk about class in this country and when you’re paying someone to clean your house the class differences are pretty hard to miss. I think most house will agree that the very best relationship is one in which you work when your employer isn’t home and the exchange of cash is contact-free, whether that means leaving a check on the dining room table or using Venmo. I have never been a nanny or any kind of live-in help, but I know that the boundaries get even blurrier when you are caring for someone else’s child and dependent on them for food and shelter as well as income.

Even in the best of circumstances, your job can metastasize. Maybe your payment comes with a note attached, one asking you to add a task to your routine without any suggestion that your pay will change. Maybe a task you do once for free because you don’t want to say no to your boss—who may not want to think of herself as your boss, so negotiating is always awkward—turns into something that you’re expected to do all the time. This sort of thing can happen in other jobs, for sure, but because we’re talking about women’s work—work women do as well as work women do at the direction of other women—the desire to make it seem like it’s not really work creates space for a lot of ambiguity. And it’s way easier for the employer to exploit that ambiguity than it is for the employee to take advantage because, obviously, the employer has almost all the power. This is just normal domestic labor shit. It’s also, by the way, why workers organize.

Scarlett Pavlovich entered into a parasocial relationship with Amanda Palmer when she watched Palmer’s TED Talk. Pavlovich clearly thought she was entering into a different kind of relationship when, after randomly bumping into Palmer, the musician texted her “It’s amanda d palmer. Your new friend.” What Pavlovich was, entering into was, however, not a friendship but, rather, a different kind of parasocial relationship. Palmer gave Pavlovich free tickets to her shows and invited her to parties, and then Palmer asked Pavlovich to do some favors for her. Eventually, Palmer asked Pavlovich to babysit. This kind of intimacy didn’t feel like a job to Pavlovich. It felt like a gift.

It seems that payment for services rendered wasn’t seriously discussed until Palmer asked Pavlovich to take on a weekend babysitting gig that would include time at Neil Gaiman’s house. This is when, according to Pavlovich, Gaiman raped her for the first time.2