Yeah. I don't feel outraged at the patriarchy oppressing all women through Mr. Ellison; I just feel mildly amused at a notorious bad boy acting within expected behavior. My feminism is stronger than that, is not threatened by a single instance even if it is public and between famous people.

Sure, it's yet another example of patriarchal behavior. Big deal: Asimov got away with far worse for years, if rumor is true.

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i don't think i am amused by this -- i generally don't find crude sexual joking funny, and because i have something of a consent fetish, if i have to guess at whether something is consensual, i get annoyed really quickly. because there is a space in which i feel ... sorta responsible for acting to preserve the public peace. i mean, what if she had been triggered and had just frozen, and he wouldn't have stopped -- i would have felt moved to intercede at some point had i been in the audience.

so there's her space, where she is responsible for taking care of business, and i don't belong there, telling her how she should be acting. but there's also the greater space we share, and where certain behaviours are not ok. i get anxious when somebody's behaviour is of the kind that makes intervention seem possible. and his behaviour definitely would have gotten me anxious right there.

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Had I been there, and she slugged him in the face, I'd have cheered. And booed him off the stage, if possible.

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Hell, Asimov wrote far, far worse for most of his career. Even I have a hard time thinking more than "Oh, Isaac" when reading it.

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My feminism is stronger than that, is not threatened by a single instance even if it is public and between famous people.

Well, where do you draw the line--what is worth complaining about? This is a genuine question, not sarcastic.

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The line for personal behavior is drawn by (a) the person upon whom it is performed and (b) the people who choose or reject a person as a friend based on that behavior (or, perhaps, talk to the offender about it).

So Mr. Ellison is a jerk: this is not news. Lots of men are. That is far more important than any one instance: the idea that it's widespread behavior, which is one that many men (and women) reject because they're not seeing it. It's more important to me to address this blind spot about what women tolerate and what men get away with, than to get upset about one particular jerk.

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Ah! I can see what you're saying, but I see the two issues of complaining about it in general and complaining about specific instances as working together rather than being in competition.

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i always find it much easier to act in an individual instance of abuse than in a more general one -- for one i tend to feel i have better data, for another, i feel changes are more effective when they come up from the grass roots, from individual people, and the effect to be had on the abusee and abuser both is strongest when it comes from people in their "tribe" rather than from the larger, more amorphous blob "society".

the whole "lots of men are jerks" thing always seems to get bogged down right after that statement has been made; it makes men who're not jerks defensive, it makes those who know lots of men who're not jerks defensive for them, it makes those who think lots of women are jerks too feel te problem isn't men, it's jerkdom, but that's apparently ignored; it also is data-lossy ("he grabbed her without permission" is much more specific than "he's a jerk" -- what does that even mean? ... while pointing at one specific person and incident and saying "this is NOT OK", that sort of thing has had life-changing effects for me.

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I think much of the anti-Ellison backlash is coming less because of this specific incident (which does appear to have had a context), and more because of this incident plus many other Ellison Incidents over the years.

In general, I agree that basically, context does matter, and people rushing to judgement... often forget that.

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*nod*. yeah, i wouldn't be surprised if there is lots of penned up energy that really wants to see ellison GET HIS JUST DESSERTS one of these days. i am too far on the fringes of fandom to really care about that.

i think it's completely ok for any audience member to consider what he did in extremely poor taste -- i would. for that context, i think they're justified in being ticked off.

i was just talking with the *poing* about that, and even if it had been sorta-obviously consensual, we wouldn't have liked it. just having to wonder whether it really was consensual would have felt out of place.

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Harlan Ellison is an alcoholic asshole. I won't read his work and I won't support his antics (which I've heard about far too often). If he ever tried anything like that and I was present, I'd knock him flat on his ass.

There is no redeeming merit to him; he's a waste of protoplasm.

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I was under the impression that he's a sober asshole. In almost all of his work he constantly mentions the fact that alcohol makes him sick and he can't even stomach a single drink.

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Griff - I think you're being far too black/white about this.

The problem with Harlan is that there *is* some redeeming merit to him, but he engages in *so* much of this assholery that it gets in the way of appreciating his worthwhile contributions to humanity.

This is, incidentally, similar to the problem I have with Orson Scott Card, but Harlan at least does not act to justify his sort of behavior for anyone other than *himself*, at least in words. Harlan may be condoning by example, but he's also done other things that are condemning bad behavior by example as well. OSC, on the other hand, evangelizes what I see as bigotry and hate.

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I am glad to read this. I was pretty disgusted by the description I read on PNH's blog, but it's been really disturbing to watch this spin out of control in the linked LiveJournals of all sorts of people who weren't there. I'm sure Patrick's telling honestly what he saw, and I trust him; on the other hand, all these other people weren't there and have no idea what the context was. From the descriptions it sounded like the two of them were bantering with each other in a lightheartedly physical way up there on stage. Ellison stepped over the edge in a way that made the audience really uncomfortable. But you can't know whether something is honest-to-goodness sexual harrassment without knowing something of the attitudes & relationship of the people involved, and this chorus of outraged bloggers is operating on nothing but hearsay.

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Ah, Harlan. You can dress him up but you can't take him anywhere.

On the other hand, the debt I owe Ellison is incalculable. It's from Ellison's little footnotes or mentions in stories that I first heard the names Camus, Salinger, Pynchon, and Kafka, and was reminded that Nabokov wrote other books besides The Famous One. That's what launched me out of the SF sandbox and into the big world beyond. And his Glass Teat rants are indelibly stamped on my worldview. Too bad he can be such a clueless son of a bitch in real life.

How if only he would write more and recycle less. I don't need to buy another copy of "Jeffty is Five," thanks.

@%<

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I am told (again, I wasn't there, but this was posted to pnh's discussion thread by someone who was) that she began her interview the next morning by referring, angrily, to "Fucking Harlan Ellison."

The other thing going on here is that this is a man who has made a reputation out of being rude to people, often gratuitously. The point at which I concluded that he either is genuinely nasty, or wants everyone to think he is, was reading a story he was telling, seeming very pleased with himself, about his own life. He'd gone out with a woman, and then taken her home, to where she lived with her parents. She propositioned him, somewhat persistently. The persistence, by his description, was entirely verbal. Rather than saying "no, really, I'm not interested" and leaving, he pretended to accept, got her to take her clothes off, tied her up, and then left, thinking about her parents finding her there and her having to explain the situation.

In other words, this is someone who thinks--or thought long enough to put it into print in a book--that the appropriate response to unwanted sexual attention from a woman is to set her up for massive embarrassment, and either never thought about or didn't care that he was exposing her to potential physical danger, and who thought that the story would amuse his readers.

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I wasn't there either, but dieppe writes:

At the closing ceremony Connie said something like "If someone wants to start a petition for Harlan Ellison to keep his fucking hands off of me, I'd be willing to sign it!" Or something like that.

There are caveats that this is from memory, and may not be exact, but it doesn't sound as though Willis was happy about it.
http://lauriemann.livejournal.com/3470.html?thread=13454#t13454

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but there is also this:
http://matociquala.livejournal.com/881156.html?thread=13635076#t13635076

i think until i hear how she felt straight from connie willis's mouth (verbatim report is fine), i'll simply not know.

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yeah, that story was definitely the turning point for me, when i stopped adoring the writer harlan ellison, and created a mental space in which somebody can be a very nasty person which i must separate from zir writing (because the writing might still be important, but i might never want to interact with the person beyond the writing).

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I would agree if it were totally consensual, but from comment to pnh by people who were there, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Then, I can see reasons for being more upset about it than Connie Willis was. For one thing, it clearly made the audience uncomfortable--this is a bad thing for a person in a public ceremony to do. And she didn't grab his ass or whatever; he grabbed her boob. The audience has a right to be upset on its own behalf.

Second, even if she's too strong to be bothered, it makes sense to me for people to speak up on behalf of the next person, who might not be so strong. Personally, I could shrug off anti-fat comments, but I feel it's better to speak up in the service of everyone, including those who wouldn't speak up. It's better if the person who was subject to the act speaks up, but it makes sense to me if others speak up, for the same reason.

On the other hand, I do agree that a bigger deal is being made because it's Harlan Ellison. One can see this as justice or not, but it does seem to me to be a fact to take into consideration.

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One thing I keep thinking about is - I've been in situations where making a fuss/standing up for good behavior) then and there was not obviously a good choice (disruptive to other stuff that was important to me too), it can be hard to be coherent later about it. There can also be (as Lis Riba has pointed out elsewhere) a feeling that any reaction is going to be criticised, and that doing the thing that lets the event keep moving at least keeps things moving.

I'm not sure there's any answers there, except to remember it's a complex situation, and all that. And that first responses are not always the best ones, for all sorts of reasons, but that later ones (especially in something this public) can also be problematic.

Ellison was the guest of honor at Minicon last year, and was, by all accounts (I was at the con, and went to a few panels he was on, but for the topic, not for him, if you see the distinction) quite well behaved. This may partly be the general nature of Minicon these days: there's a fair bit of gentle community assumptions about how you treat people.

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