October 7th, 2006
by
Yonmei
Update, 8th October: Harlan Ellison’s latest justification for his assault on Connie Willis at the Hugos: that he “discovered and encouraged” Octavia E. Butler, in return for which, he asserts, he “ought to be permitted to fondle and squeeze human and alien tit till the return of the f*cking Ice Age”. Thanks to Jonny LaRue for pointing out this latest spew from Ellison (see comments).
(originally posted 19th September)
Bellatrys on the Thing I Will Not Name (TIWNN) but still frequently have to link to because so much of fandom is still on it, wrote a series of posts about Harlan Ellison, proving the point that claims that it his sexual harassment/attempted humiliation of a woman (who has now won more Hugos than he himself has – and how that must burn for a sexist arsehole like Harlan!) were “out of character” are just wrong, and claims that this has to be “seen in context” are right – in context, Harlan Ellison’s repellant behaviour at Worldcon was in character and perfectly in context with the rest of his life and works. Michael Moorcock and Steven Brust are just being, well, guys about this. Men who think women make a lot of fuss about nothing, and who think that a man who hates women as much as Harlan Ellison does can still be a real nice guy. Male privilege, it’s a wonderful thing.
Now in three parts, Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man, or Yes, Harlan Ellison has always been a sexist arsehole: defending him makes you look, at best, like an oblivious arsehole.
Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man, I
Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man, II
Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man, III.
Yes, male chivalry was always a myth.
Harlan Ellison should obviously never be invited to a convention again – and if he attends uninvited, the con committee should have two very large gophers standing next to him all the time he’s on convention territory, who will explain to him that the rules for him are he isn’t allowed near other people without a bodyguard to protect other people. Abusive language will lead to him being confined to his room: abusive behaviour will lead to him being expelled from the con.
But how to react to the Michael Moorcocks and Steven Brusts of fandom who seem to think that Harlan Ellison’s consistent pattern of sexist and abusive behaviour towards women didn’t really ever happen because they were never aware of it – until, that is, it happened on stage at a Hugo award ceremony to a woman who had just won her ninth Hugo and whom, therefore, 8.5 Hugos Harlan just had to try and take down? What can we do to men in fandom who just don’t see women being sexually harassed or humiliated – that’s just normal behaviour to them – and who therefore don’t condemn men who do it?
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- More blogging by
Yonmei at
http://yonmei.insanejournal.com
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Today: Sixth Carnival of Feminist SF
Filed under Cons & Community, feminism | Comments (33)
I am continually taken aback when I try to talk to the men in my life about feeling that women are over-sexualised in the media and they look at me in faint shock and go “What? Why do you say that?” They don’t notice it because they’ve not been affected by it. When I try and give them examples where men are sexualised, the only images I can come up with are typically of “ethnic” men – latinos, for example – which they can’t really identify with. And I find *those* images just as disturbing.
Over on Finding Avalon, Willow is having a similar conversation where she talks about how the images of women in comics, when you change them into images of men, take on a really disturbing tone… and one that, in reading outloud to my slightly-clueless boyfriend, he finally managed to figure out *why* I find those images so disturbing. Because once the gender is flipped around, the image of a man in tight-tight shorts bending over a tub, soaking wet, made him feel disturbed. It made me feel sickened, frankly, and I think that’s because I’ve become very numb to sexualised images of women in Fandom. (I’m troubleinchina over there.)
I think so much of what the problem in expressing what our concerns are is that it’s so … everywhere, really. I can’t pick up a book without noticing that there are sexualised images of women over more than half of the ones in the store – but none of men. And men like those defending Harlan Ellison just *don’t* *see* *anything* – because it’s not affecting them, is it?
Thanks for the link to “Finding Avalon” – that’s a very interesting article.
Using the regender tool, I’ve sometimes switched around slash stories (I’m a slash fan) and some of the slash stories come up really, really disturbing – like the comic books Willow imagines and describes.
I have to say I found Batman and Superman most disturbing/funny, but that’s because I’m not much of a comics fan, and those are the two I know best – not counting Morpheus, and does anyone know Morpheus? Then again, switch genders in the Sandman universe, and it actually doesn’t make a lot of difference: Desire is already male-female. The only switches I can imagine making any difference are Despair and Destruction, and even them…
That’s actually quite remarkable, how well the gender flip works on Sandman… normally when I try to regender something mentally, I end up tripping on all of the little gender stereotype defaults. But for Gaiman’s Endless it just WORKS. Really well. Wow.
Anyway, what I was going originally going to say was, has anybody looked at the wikipedia entry on Ellison lately? There’s definitely a preferred narrative in evidence.
*looks at wikipedia*
Goodness, yes, there is, isn’t there.
What’s needed to change the preferred narrative on wikipedia is links to authoritive sources that show an alternate view. And a bunch of wiki editors who are willing to keep making the reverts when pro-Harlaners show up to edit everything.
Well, I boldly edited the Harlan Ellison page (and added the link to Ellison’s own account of sexually assaulting “Brenda” in 1962, though like Bellatrys, I suspect Ellison is telling a story of what he wished he’d done after Brenda kicked him out rather than actually confessing to a sexual assault.
But, one thing’s for sure: it won’t stay up for long.
Well, Wikipedia has it set up so you can get the history edits in your feedreader, and tell immediately when they do that.
If any one is looking for sexualized images of men, just do a search on gay publications.
Of course there’s always the French rugby team whose calendar sold out so quickly but now has a DVD.
And (yes I know, shameless plug) I have at least one sexualized male superhero on my site now (under the free link). I think he’s the hero in a yaoi story I’ve had floating around.
Ragnell: Well, Wikipedia has it set up so you can get the history edits in your feedreader, and tell immediately when they do that.
Yes, I know. But the way Wikipedia works means that the majority wins.
Thought so.
I’ve just used up my 3 reverts on the article correcting the same guy’s “correction” of Ellison’s self-incriminating account of assaulting a woman in 1962. So, is anyone else registered with wikipedia and care to step in and correct this guy’s “corrections” of the Connie Willis incident? I can’t touch Harlan Ellison again till Tuesday… but then, neither can he.
So, in the course of banning several long-time members of his bulletin board last week, Harlan returned yet again to Connie Willis, among other things, stating:
“No one babbling about the Great Boorish Mammary Mangling of the Hugo ceremony bothered to mention that a) I was gulled into going to the LACon in the first place, after advising them I didn’t want to attend — and Susan was used as the dupe to suck me in — but I did it to accomodate them; b) that I was requested by Silverberg to come far earlier in the day than I’d planned (so that I had to get up at 5 am to make the drive to Anaheim) so I could sit on the 1950s SF panel with him; c) that I did a 2-hour “presentation” that was, with the exceptions of the masquerade and the Hugo ceremony, the single BEST ATTENDED, STANDING ROOM ONLY, JAMMED TRIPLE-SPACE-BALLROOM item on the entire convention menu; d) that I then sat for FOUR FUCKING HOURS without even a potty-break, to sign every last magazine, pamphlet, programme book, poster and SFBC edition put in front of me (and, yes, we made money selling our books — y’wanna defenestrate me for THAT greedy excess, too?). No one cares to mention that. Not on the web, not in blogs, not via any of the onlookers who couldn’t wait a foaming, frothing moment to have a go at me yet one more time, demonstrating a degree of arrogance and petty self-importance with their I’M AFFRONTED opinions … from the back-fence yenta snitch Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who couldn’t wait to rush to his laptop to “break the story” to every johnny-come-lately who knew nothing of my credentials — not the least of which includes the discovering and encouraging of Octavia Estelle Butler, for which miracle I ought to be permitted to fondle and squeeze human and alien tit till the return of the fucking Ice Age, or at least till my “friend” Connie Willis opens her mouth and ends this miserable lynching. None of the above mattered. And anyone who pointed out this was all tabloid bullshit, was attacked as rabidly as was I … up to and including Neil Gaiman, who wasn’t there, knew nothing about it, and was assailed for being complicit in my perfidious behavior because he hadn’t pilloried me!”
A bit further on, Ellison notes “I was given a special plaque for FIFTY GODDAM YEARS of taking this crap, and was given a kiss by no less than Connie Willis, who I’m roundly accused of having traumatized! Nobody suggests that Connie invaded MY MOTHERFUCKIN’ SPACE by kissing me!”
Huzzah. The whole Ellisonian message, which also includes Ellison telling the one female banned from the board that “Paula, I want to come and horsewhip you. Ah, but no, a man isn’t allowed to demonstrate his misogyny by wantging [sic] to kick the crap out of a squamous little bitch like you, just to prove he loves his wife.”
All the fun can be viewed at this page [Yonmei: Edited to HTML link and to link directly to the page with Harlan Ellison's rant about the assault he committed at the Hugos]
It really, really doesn’t occur to HE, ever, that when you do something appalling you need to apologize – promptly? A real apology, not a prancing fake oh-no-I’m-so-bad tee hee?
I’m sorry, a real person can not be thinking something so insane in this day and age, even with the history we’ve been linked to. He must have some sort of computer program set to ancient Viking social mores maintaining his website for him.
How dare he drag OEB’s name into this! And he’s still blaming Connie. There are no words for what a worm he is.
And he sure makes being called a back-fence yenta snitch a badge of honor.
The only time I met Harlan Ellison, at a signing in New York City, he took the time to have a genuine personal conversation with everyone on line as the store employees kept pushing him to hurry things up. He was gregarious but stubborn and arrogant. He was everything I’d imagined Harlan Ellison to be.
This was the Harlan I’d seen described in various forwards by Isaac Asimov. This was the Harlan extrapolated from his Dangerous Visions introductions. I was fascinated and charmed by him.
I recognize the other side of the coin. He can be nasty and he’s certainly sexist- as most men of his generation are to some degree. He’s not a mensch, and he should be criticized for what he did at the Hugo Ceremony.
But to be perfectly fair, he DID apologize. “I stand naked and defenseless before your absolutely correct chiding.” And if I were an embattled science fiction writer who found that offering an apology for a poorly thought out joke wasn’t enough to call off the internet hell-hounds, I don’t know what I’d do. At this point, all bets are off with regards to Harlan’s behavior. He’s given apology a shot and now he’s going to go back to just being Harlan. He’s made many enemies over the years doing just that, and he’s made a number of friends that way as well. I don’t think he sees it mattering much either way at this point.
But to be perfectly fair, he DID apologize. “I stand naked and defenseless before your absolutely correct chiding.”
But to be perfectly accurate, there is no word of apology in the sentence you quote, and what he wrote in full on Tuesday, August 29 was certainly not an apology. The context around that sentence is:
That isn’t an apology. It’s gleeful capering. It’s a fake apology. An “apology” is “I was wrong to do it, and I’m sorry I did it” – or words to that effect. Had Ellison made a straightforward apology, it would have killed a lot of criticism.
He followed his mock “apology” two days later by a howl of outrage that the criticism of his assault hadn’t died:
You can read both posts he made about this in full on his discussionboard. That one line you quote does not give their full meaning.
Aaron, HE has used his podium to blame, accuse, and make demands upon Connie Willis, adding insult to the injury he did her. There are even plenty of sexists who would see something wrong with that behavior. How on earth can you stand up for that unless you consider him a more valuable human being than Connie Willis–and if you do, what the heck are you doing posting on this board?
When I don’t know what else to say, I write a verse:
See the Aging Hipster.
No, the word “hipster” has nothing to do with hip replacements.
(He is not due for surgery until next month.)
See how he walks.
Hip-twist, creak, tip-toe.
Hip-twist, creak, tip-toe.
It’s hard to walk like a young John Travolta
When you’re older than John Travolta.
See the Aging Hipster visit the doctor.
Cough, cough, cough.
The doctor says:
“No more smoking.”
“No more staying up late.”
“No hard drinking.”
“Not too much coffee.”
The doctor wonders why the Aging Hipster
has a cigarette in his mouth.
“I told you to stop smoking.”
The Aging Hipster says:
“I never light up, man.
I just keep it in my mouth.”
It’s hard to live like an Angry Young Man
When you’re only pretend-smoking.
See the Aging Hipster at the award ceremony!
See him sulk.
Sulk, sulk, sulk.
He has to present a prize
to some younger woman.
She’s stealing his thunder.
He misses the time when he was talk of the town.
But the Aging Hipster knows what to do.
He shouts at the staff
and calls them “You ****ing ****s!”
and grabs the woman’s butt on stage.
People get really mad at him.
And suddenly everyone is talking about the Aging Hipster again.
He feels twenty… well, *ten* years younger.
“I’ve still got it!” thinks the Aging Hipster.
Except he can’t quite remember
what “it” was.
(From “A.R.Yngve’s Reading Book”, Chapter 14)
Ugh. This whole thing makes me feel sick to my stomach. I used to enjoy his writing very much, but I can’t look past this. I just can’t. “Trust the art, not the artist” only carries so far.
Ass.
You know, I really’ve always hated “oh, that’s just so and so” in response to bad behavior. like, so and so is one of those immutable facts of like, like muggy weather, or something.
I used to like his stuff–essays more than fic, for the most part. i kind of feel like i outgrew him a while ago, tho’.
sadly, he seems to have gotten further and further toward the “angry” side of the angry-funny continuum over the years. much like Woody Allen, in some ways. some people don’t really evolve so much as ossify (the celebrity thing probably doesn’t help in that regard). and “Angry Old Man” is somehow not nearly as charming to nearly as many people as “Angry Young Man.”
must suck to be a septagenarian who never really outgrew the “wunderkind” stage, really.
anyway, he’s already so put-upon. sucks to be him, really.
>“No one babbling about the Great Boorish Mammary Mangling of the Hugo ceremony bothered to mention that a) I was gulled into going to the LACon in the first place, after advising them I didn’t want to attend — and Susan was used as the dupe to suck me in — but I did it to accomodate them…
blah blah blah GINGER
Someone called “Mike” posted a spam comment, which I have deleted. (Mike, if you thought it wasn’t spam, e-mail the mods. It was certainly irrelevant to this thread, and, I feel, to this blog.)
belledame222, I know what you mean about “outgrowing” him. I really liked The Glass Teat when I was a teenager, and I don’t despair of myself because I did, but a lot of the stuff he acted terribly pleased with himself about then – and I concurred – I now think of as, well, teenage.
Maggie, yes. (Though for me, it was Orson Scott Card that I finally stopped being able to read because of his politics. With Ellison, I feel I just outgrew him, as Belle says.)
A.R.Yngve, thank you. That sums it up.
“proving the point that claims that it his sexual harassment/attempted humiliation of a woman … has to be ‘seen in context’”
Seeing it in context basically amounts to “Let it go, it’s Harlan Ellison” – the defence that sufficiently legendary people should get away with more – but surely legendary should go both ways. If “Let is go, it’s Harlan Ellison” is a valid comment, then so it “You don’t do that to Connie Willis.”
Sexism doesn’t work that way. Individual personality may serve as an excuse, but individual status isn’t what grants someone immunity. Class status does that.
Well, yes, I agree. I just mean that “defence” doesn’t even work on its own terms.
what are Card’s politics? i know he is Mormon.
Ellison is supposed to be very liberal.
…Though I remember when i read an intro
to a (Samual)Chip Delany story in ‘Dangerous Visions’
in which he(Ellison) disses Gays-
Sadly, and ironically,
Delany was (then)an in the closet Gay writer!
Unbeknownst to Ellison, apparently….
And i don’t think these things are generational neccessarily-
Ray Bradbury wrote 2 pieces which were VERY Queer-friendly
a long, LONG time ago.
(Re Willis):
What a shame.
This all could have been defused(probably) by a few sincere words!
Too bad!
Good to see that people are TALKING about issues, though.
That’s how i found this blog.
Sad that some people who value freedom of speech for themselves
seem to have a pretty hard time of it when it ‘s someone ELSE…
That’s why the Net works(opinions)
(as Bill Moyers was recently pointing out…)
-Foxglove
ugh.
just found (via google) the O.S.Card “essay” on Gay marrige.
(Doesn’t make me ever want to read HIS books again.
ecch.)
It had the same effect on me when I read it.
I did a four-part in-depth rebuttal, which vanished when Livejournal suspended my account, but which I could put up online here.
But really… I knew he was homophobic, but that essay was something else. It was worse than homophobic: it was dishonest.
Re/ Card:
His work was very… violent-
and i often found it stomach-wrenching.
HE reminds me of H.E.-
(“anger is an energy”-PIL.)
……. these homophobes seem positivly psychotic
in their weird fear of LBGT people.makes you wonder.
(am not saying H.E. is a Homophobe……)
But Card freaks me out.
I did a four-part in-depth rebuttal, which vanished when Livejournal suspended my account, but which I could put up online here.
Please do! I read it on LJ, and it was absolutely wonderful. I’d love to see it again on this great blog.
It’s archived on ljarchive, along with all my other posts/comments from livejournal: the problem is that copying it from ljarchive and re-HTML’ing it is going to be a long and tedious process. In theory one can export from ljarchive, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to select one post and export that: you end up (if it doesn’t crash my computer first) with what must be a truly massive file that would take some handling in itself.
I will do it, though, it will just take some time. :-(
There must be a plugin … ?
The export at http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml lets you select one month — I could help you process a file if you need.
Thank you, Laura! I thought it might not work for me because my journal is suspended, but it does – whee!. Now let me see if I can post it – if I need help, I’ll let you know. Thanks again.
And there it is. I’ll put the posts up daily for the next five days, if that’s okay with the blog collective. (I could put them all up at once, I suppose. Express a preference.)