Situational is Ephemeral

A case-study in behavioral patterns

I’ve written several times here about the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman, not only because the media and entertainment industry is maintaining an immoral wall of silence, but because his alleged behavior is a perfect illustration of how ingrained SSH-related behavioral patterns reliably trump situational status.

It should be noted that the number of accusers have risen from two to seven so far; I fully anticipate that when the dam breaks, the final number will be closer to 50 than 10. And no matter how well Gaiman’s PR firm manages to scrub social media and attempt to drown out the outrage with astroturfing bots, he’ll be haunted by the pointing fingers of his alleged victims.

“You know fairy tales. You WRITE fairy tales! What did you think would happen?”

However, in addition to the allegations of sexual assault, a few people have come forward with stories that are extremely informative to those of us who are aware of the socio-sexual hierarchy and the implications of certain male behaviors.

The most notable thing is a general dishonesty about his experiences working on [Doctor} Who. He maintains, especially in the wake of Doctor’s Wife going down so well and Nightmare in Silver sinking like a stone, that he had much less control over the latter- ie. trying to wash his hands of what he sees as a failure. Only it’s completely untrue. We know from documented BTS material that, so severe was the crunch time making 7B for Moffat, he actually more or less allowed Cross and Gaiman to serve as executive producers on their respective episodes. They had say over things like signing off on designs etc which writers wouldn’t normally have. This is especially aggravating given how huge a part Moffat’s editing played in making Doctor’s Wife a success - a DW writer said to me the final script is at least 60% Moffat.

So, we allegedly have Neil Gaiman attempting to take credit for a success that wasn’t his, while attempting to avoid taking responsibility for his own failure. Is this sort of thing more indicative of Alpha behavior or Gamma behavior?

The other version of events comes from Moffat’s friend and former Who writer… The story this time goes that Moffat had Gaiman round to his house… Gaiman starts pitching, but none of the ideas are working out as anything plausible or workable. Feeling that Moffat didn’t like any of his ideas, Gaiman started doing these weird hand puppet scenes complaining about this in front of Moffat. As in literally holding up one hand and having it snarl to the other one, “the nasty man won’t commission my scripts”. Steven goes back to the kitchen and Sue sees him put his head in his hands.

“We hates the nasty man! We hates him forever!”

I think it goes without saying that this weird, passive-aggressive behavior is obviously Gamma, but what’s fascinating is that Gaiman is alleged to have felt comfortable behaving in such a bizarre and childish way in what was a professional situation, even if the pitch meeting was being held at the Doctor Who showrunner’s house. This is where the combination of Gamma + Situational Alpha comes into play; once a Gamma thinks he is a sufficiently big shot in the social context, he thinks he can get away with his strange Gamma shenanigans in public.

Remember, the Gamma always believes his behavior and motivations are opaque to everyone; that no one is smart enough to see through him at all. The fact that he is reliably wrong about this never seems to slow him down in the slightest.

The weirdest story someone told me (about a now known creep) that at an awards banquet, she was sitting next to him (did not know him personally) and after dinner ice cream was brought out. Her ice cream came out first and his was delayed and, after a moment, he reached over with his spoon and just started eating her ice cream while looking her right in the face.

Now, it’s certainly possible that Gaiman just thought he was being funny with an implicit Douglas Adams reference to a very funny scene in one of the Hitchhikers books, but to anyone who hasn’t read So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, this would strike them as a deeply weird and possibly worrisome act. But regardless of what he was thinking at the time, it’s another reported example of a Gamma doing what he imagines an Alpha would do, which, of course, is almost always light years away from what any real Alpha would actually do in the situation.

So, in light of what we have observed of Neil Gaiman’s alleged behavior, and what we already know about the Gamma mentality, this response of The New York Times to an inquiry as to why it hasn’t investigated or devoted any coverage to the ongoing sexual assault allegations will no doubt prove highly amusing.

For a Gamma, this is the deepest and cruelest cut of all.

In any event, this juxtaposition of Gamma and Situational Alpha should illustrate and underline the principle that the behavioral pattern that is cemented in a man’s formative years cannot be altered much by subsequent situational status. The situational is ephemeral, but the underlying pattern is for life.

And the art always betrays the artist.

Nobody came to my seventh birthday party.

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the centre of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organised the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

When it became obvious that nobody was coming, my mother lit the seven candles on the cake, and I blew them out. I ate a slice of the cake, as did my little sister and one of her friends (both of them attending the party as observers, not participants), before they fled, giggling, to the garden.

Party games had been prepared by my mother, but because nobody was there, not even my sister, none of the party games were played, and I unwrapped the newspaper around the pass-the-parcel gift myself, revealing a blue plastic Batman figure. I was sad that nobody had come to my party, but happy that I had a Batman figure, and there was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.

I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

• Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane