Marylin Manson, Los Angeles, 1999. (Credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns)


January 21, 2025   7 mins

The Marquis de Sade was obsessed with the torture of women. “Sex without pain is like food without taste,” he wrote — and his life was positively a buffet. When he was not writing horny screeds from behind bars in a mental asylum, he was pouring hot wax into the open wounds of beggerwomen, poisoning prostitutes and raping servants. He has since become an icon of alternative sexual practices, revised as a champion of freedom and tolerance in a way his contemporaries would find impossible to imagine.

A bald fact about this most famous of sex pests is that his appetites were, by their very nature, destructive — bad for society and positively pestilential for women. But the lending of his name to that sainted acronym, BDSM, has brought about a rehabilitation which blows the central problem of this muzzled cult wide open: that it’s not at all concerning for men to want to hurt women in the first place, and that instead of addressing these grim tastes, they should indulge them. The moral crisis of sadism is the engine of two parables of celebrity scandal this month, about author Neil Gaiman and the spidery metal rockstar Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner), and their frightening magnetism among vulnerable women. The first emerged in a mega-viral Vulture article with harrowing testimony from one principal accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich. The second came in the form of a three-part Channel 4 documentary, Marilyn Manson: Unmasked, with accounts from fans, bandmates and ex-girlfriends.

If the testimonies prove correct, both Gaiman and Manson saw sexual sadism as a way to challenge boundaries — a positively sophisticated indulgence, and evidence of their cultivation. But as Angela Carter argued in 1978, de Sade himself was no proto-liberator, no feminist libertine. From its roots, BDSM has served the ill intentions of violent men, and it remains predicated on the violation and humiliation of women to this day. Yes, there are exceptions; yes, the “community” is hot on consent. But as Kathleen Stock argued last week, consent is tenuous in a scenario where arousal requires people to suspend disbelief, to pretend someone is in pain or unwilling. The acceptability of BDSM now, couched as it is in flexible doctrines of consent, cows women into compliance for fear of being labelled intolerant — intolerant, that is, for wincing at the tastes of men who only want to fuck women they can frighten or hurt. In this (allegedly), Gaiman and Manson are in esteemed company — remember when Armie Hammer was accused of saying he would “barbeque and eat” a lover’s ribs?

The opening scene of the Manson documentary might begin to explain why sadism holds such sway among certain male celebrities. In Manson’s case, it was part of a pompous artistic endeavour: “Marilyn Manson is about transcending morality and sexuality,” he tells admirers in a backstage clip from early on in his career. Beneath his towering form, two young girls inexpertly kiss, awkwardly writhing for the singer’s delight. Grand statements of creative intent like this always seem irredeemably cynical with hindsight; this clip now reads as a group of perverted prats gassing off in lipstick and leather trousers. But the performativity of Manson’s sadism is important: at one point, his satanic persona is described as having a “WWE feel” — that is, an aesthetic of villainy which belies a careful, risk-assessed choreography. But it was not play-acting: according to one ex-girlfriend and accuser, Manson was able to “hide abuse by doing it during sex”, excusing away violence and coercion as part of exaggerated sexual roleplay. Equally, his cartoonish, evil lunatic persona does the same thing: beneath all this white paint, I am a serious artist. I will hurt you, but it’s all part of the show.

Similarly, Gaiman’s towering popularity in the world of fantasy fiction is contingent on the aesthetics of sadism. His message of sainted victimhood, of the way the young and powerless might prevail over their oppressors (notably explored in his semi-autobiographical novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane) relies on a preponderance of dangerous, monstrous freaks to be vanquished. Coraline, his young-adult hit, is awash with the blacks and reds of BDSM. The villain at its heart, the Other Mother, has hair “as black as coal” and teeth “as sharp as knives”, dark, red fingernails and a “jagged red slash” for a mouth. He could almost be describing Manson. And it’s telling that Gaiman’s alleged private endeavours mirror the strange darkness of his own villain.

An uncomfortable part of the Manson documentary’s “hiding in plain sight” narrative is the naivety of the fans. One interviewee is a woman who, at 14, established a group called the “lunchbox girls”, so called because they mimicked the band’s habit of posing with kids’ lunchboxes. The way she describes her friendship with Manson certainly sounds like grooming — he asked the girls to call him “Daddy”, received underwear pics from a graveyard photoshoot where the teens posed with sex toys and, autographing the girl’s lunchbox, wrote “To Jen, you cum-guzzling gutter slut, love Marilyn”. All of this, as an accuser called Bianca says elsewhere, was exciting rather than skin-crawling for the mere fact that it would have shocked their parents.

That’s how things go when you’re 14; indeed, it seems rebellion drove many of Manson’s young fans to buy into his predatory aesthetics. In one clip from outside a concert, a goth girl, who in another era might have been a blushing teenybopper, shouts “I wanna rape Twiggy!”, referring to another member of the band, Twiggy Ramirez. That she was compelled to say this shows how the language of sexual sadism is connected to rock-and-roll rebellion, and so is ultimately “safe”, part of the performance — an “in-joke”. But by definition, the power dynamics preclude this. If the documentary’s claims are to be believed, and Manson did pluck underaged girls from audiences and rape them on his tour bus, that young fan becomes a symbol of his victims’ vulnerability, and her joke about rape is sickly turned in on itself.

“It’s telling that Gaiman’s alleged private endeavours mirror the strange darkness of his own villain.”

Manson’s own view on the matter is a little more straightforward: in an unearthed interview, he told Rolling Stone: “I’m not into rape whatsoever… I prefer to break a woman down to the point where they have no choice but to submit to me.” In this unbelievable defence, Manson says he cannot be a rapist because he’s not into it — he prefers other methods of leaving women with “no choice”. Little matter that this would seem to be precisely the same thing.

The magnetism of metal or goth scenes for awkward and vulnerable young girls is fascinating in itself and has parallels within BDSM. In each case, women seem drawn to these subcultures for their vague promises of being progressive and alternative, a respite for the marginalised and a way to process darkness. The tour-bus accuser Bianca speaks of a sense of kinship with other teens at Manson’s shows, who were invariably troubled, from “broken homes”. There is a similar black-lipsticked brokenness to Gaiman fans who, just as hypnotised as Manson’s, were taken in by his nerd-centric apparent sexiness, described in the Vulture piece as a “penchant for dressing in black, a shock of unruly black hair, and an erotic power seldom possessed by authors of comic books and fantasy novels”. “Women would turn up to [Gaiman’s] signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth attire of his characters and beg him to sign their breasts,” we are told. One “fell to her knees and wept”. Gaiman’s look — that of the floppy-haired, mild-mannered intellectual — combined with his outspoken feminism was, if the allegations prove true, all part of the act, communicating a certain effete harmlessness.

A world preoccupied with shallowly designating men as “toxic”/”alpha” and “safe”/”sweet” disarms women against the fact that hot nerds are often the worst of the lot, beset as they are by the long shadow of teenaged awkwardness and rejection. Many of those men see themselves as outside of the dynamic of “women and their rapists”; rapists are hypermasculine bullies, but tender loverboys or gangly outcasts would never do that. Manson, conversely, leaps from the pages of a Gaiman novel — a villainous Sadeian caricature. This is not to say that Warner embodies the cruel core of sadism, rather the flatness of its grand claims about breaking taboos and sexual sophistication. If Gaiman’s public face was all children’s charities and comic books, it was equally confected — both men, in light of their respective allegations, were sad, ageing clowns whose costumes furnished shameful appetites. In Manson’s case, there is a profound emptiness, a sense of wretched impotence, to his intent to shock for shock’s sake and in Gaiman’s, to his simpering desire for progressive acclaim.

Marilyn Manson, for his part, is no longer shocking anyway: the provocateurs of the 2020s are more about ribald female sexuality than male violence (allow me to introduce our readers to 21-year-old rapper Ceechnyaa, who has gained international fame for the line “I’m peggin’ that man at the back of the bus”). But the inheritance of those Nineties goth sex freaks is still rich, and the cult of violent satanism still has great purchase among young weirdos.

Only last week, a 19-year-old internet forum nerd called Cameron Finnigan was jailed for encouraging a girl to kill herself on camera as part of a Hitler-worshipping satanic cult linked to the Order of the Nine Angles. That same group had inspired 18-year-old Danyal Hussein to kill sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a London park in 2021. The Order’s tenets, which a brief glance suggests involves Aryans taking over the Milky Way in a galactic empire, are tellingly tailored to sci-fi dorks. Members are encouraged to commit acts of violence and human sacrifice as part of a spiritual endeavour; it is no coincidence that this resonates with Manson’s stated aim to “transcend morality and sexuality”. The O9A, as it’s known, has inspired various metal groups, particularly among provincial Euro-goths, for decades, and satanic aesthetics more generally underpin metal as a genre, if only for its pearl-clutching potential.

So, sadism continues to hold sway — and is as dangerous for women as it ever has been. The home of BDSM is not cellophane-sheeted “playrooms” at ticketed, consent-centric sex parties. The true consequences of sadism play out in quiet corners, abandoned buildings, internet forums, Hinge dates gone wrong. They play out behind closed doors — and women really get hurt.

In a noxiously “sex-positive” culture which increasingly privileges the titillation of men above the safety of women and girls, the only solution is this: we must return to stringency on the simplest demands, and jettison kink/casual-sex apologists. Don’t choke me, don’t hit me, don’t frighten me, don’t use me. Be intolerant, be prickly and uncool, if it keeps you safe. After all, a system in which it is fine to strangle a girl you meet on an app, or (allegedly) make a girl who nannies your young son vomit during fellatio then lick it up, is not one which is remotely feminist, even with that golden ticket, “enthusiastic consent”. Obscuring that fact, and keeping the lines between exploitation and experimentation hazy, is essential for predatory men if they are to continue to intimidate women into silence.

In the arts, the thrilling aesthetics of dark, twisted desire will, and should, always belong — think of the electrifying strangeness of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, or the strangled strains of the Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs. This is no Mary Whitehouse manifesto. But when it comes to the real sex lives of real people, these celebrity stories show us that some men have used the grim utopia of BDSM, and its atmosphere of progressive sophistication, to conduct horrors. So do not be afraid to be disgusted — even if it is at the cost of some weirdo’s grand artistic and sexual mission to, as one of Manson’s school friends glibly puts it, “push boundaries”.


Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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