I learned about that gap in my knowledge via a 2012 post of Stephanie’s, We don’t do that anymore, which shares some pretty staggering information. She shares correspondence between Earl Kemp, chair of Chicon III, and Isaac Asimov, in 1961. Go read it: she has permission to post it and I don’t.
[pause while you read it]
Got that? Hahaha let’s do a thing about pinching women’s bums, with some women you can demonstrate on; hahaha yes let’s, I’ll “stiffen the manly fiber of every one in the audience” (because women don’t count as part of “everyone” even though they are there, in the audience).
That was how sexual harassment and assault was dealt with at the genre’s major convention back in 1961. Everybody knew, and not only was it not stopped, but it was encouraged. Tee-hee. Isn’t it funny. Let’s put the guy on stage to tell us all how to enjoy this wonderful thing. Because “us”, like the audience at the masquerade, excluded everyone who wasn’t male. Women weren’t considered at all.
Eeeesh. Things suck now but at least we do get the chance to speak up.
Things have gotten a little bit better since then. The general political situation outside fandom has changed enough that any conrunner has a good idea of the volume of protest that a “witty” speech on sexual assault would bring. The Harlan Ellison incident was met with a very loud outcry. (See the comments on that post for more about Asimov.)
So that’s why I caught up on the Harlan Ellison incident.
has–been
noun \ˈhaz-ˌbin, -ˌben, chiefly British -ˌbēn\
See also: Harlan Ellison (‘bitter has-been”)
When I was an undergrad, handsome Harlan had a following among some of the sci-fi club, until a few of them met him.
“Loud outcry”? Not loud enough. I resigned from SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) because they couldn’t seem to find it in themselves to denounce Ellison for his behavior. Not even that. Forget banning him from the next ten cons which would have been my idea of the beginning of an appropriate response.
(I met the man at an earlier con. He was carrying around the biggest case of Small Man Syndrome I’ve ever seen.)
Reading the comments on the posting about the Ellison incident, and remembering how the one Asimov incident I was involved in went down, it seems pretty obvious to me that the “Oh, he always does that tee hee” and “That’s Harlan” attitudes have something to do with why they’re like that?? Like, perhaps, that they have gotten away with it for decades?
Perhaps if I had been allowed to use Asimov as a punching-bag for just a moment, it would have spared unknown numbers of women similar experiences.
Because, these cowards learn from public enabling, and they also learn from public shaming. Honestly, a split lip would have done Ellison some good. Shermer, too, FFS. OMG I am starting to sound like The Pope.
Ugh. Feets of clay are so disgusting and repellent.
@ 3 Marcus Ranum
So the lesson you would wish to impart is that sexual assault is bad, but good ol’ regular assault is fine.
:-/
So the lesson you would wish to impart is that sexual assault is bad, but good ol’ regular assault is fine.
Not at all.
One thing that would have been interesting, though — suppose when Ellison grabbed Willis, what if she’d elbowed him in the face and split his lip. Want to bet there’d have been hue and cry?
I’m not saying 2 wrongs make a right. I’m not interested in trying to justify any of my actions morally. I was simply thinking out loud about behavior modification. Sometimes you “wrong” someone by punishing them or locking them up to stop them from doing more things later. Because rather obviously, expecting people to do the right thing, or asking them nicely to stop, doesn’t work. Otherwise you’re in this situation where you’ve utterly ceded the initiative to people who are perfectly happy to take advantage of that and go to the bank with it.
There is also a major difference between ‘defending one’s loved ones’ and ‘assault.
@ 6 Marcus Ranum
Of course, because sexual assault isn’t taken as seriously as a punch in the face, even though it should be.
Oh, come on. There’s a difference between judicially imposed fines or incarceration and knocking seven bells out of someone vigilante style to teach them a lesson.
Sorry to go all moralising on your ass but punitive violence in the interest of “behavior modification” is not something normally condoned on this blog (quite the opposite).
When I was at University (early 70s), I was a HUGE fan of Little Harley.
I read everything.
In his book where he’s playing at journalism and infiltrates a youth-gang,
he describes his rape of a 15 year-old girl.
That slowed me down.
@Silentbob #7:
Yes, there is. The difference is that a coercive state structure which governs not with the true consent of the governed but by virtue of force (seriously: unless you made a conscious, unconstrained choice to live in the precise legal jurisdiction in which you live, you haven’t really consented to your government and the laws that regulate your behavior; most governments assert authority simply by virtue of exercise of force over people who happen to be born in a particular area; I’m reasonably certain most of us don’t think that might makes right yet continue to implicitly claim such in the case of our existing governments) has rendered an alienated, decontextualized judgement in one case, and an actual person who is directly affected has done so in another. You can’t seriously be considering defending the courts (and, really, it doesn’t matter which ones) as just, can you? When, say, cops and White guys are routinely gunning down unarmed Black people all over the USA without any punishment? When political corruption is given a thumbs-up?
There absolutely are practical reasons to try to minimize the amount of vigilante violence in a society (for example, to be able to wander around without needing to worry about getting punched by a random stranger who doesn’t like how you dress or something – though, again, at present this kind of safety is actually a privilege of men who don’t have to constantly fear sexual assault of some kind; White people who don’t have to fear random police – or, ironically, vigilante – violence; cisgendered people for whom, say, a trip to the bathroom doesn’t risk violent reprisal for using the “wrong” bathroom; etc.), but that doesn’t make it necessarily unjustified in any particular case. Even if one believes violence is always inherently wrong, that doesn’t imply a pacifist ethic without invoking some kind of utopian fallacy, where one wrongly thinks that a perfect solution in which there is no wrong is always possible. Sometimes violence is wrong, but avoiding violence is even more wrong becasue it predictably, perhaps inevitably, results in even worse violence inflicted upon those even less able to cope with it. In the event that a smack in the face would have prevented Asimov from assaulting countless others in the future, punching him would indeed have been the most moral course.
Sorry to go all moralising on your ass but punitive violence in the interest of “behavior modification” is not something normally condoned on this blog (quite the opposite).
What, we don’t condone self-defense here?
Seriously, an elbow and a punch would have been a perfectly appropriate response to Ellison’s assault. And yes, it would, in all likelihood, have at least reduced the number of such assaults he would have committed afterword, if not stopped them altogether.
Well, perfectly appropriate in one sense, but not at all in others. You can see from the video just how impossible it would have been – Willis was clearly trying to “manage” Ellison’s way of carrying on from the outset, in a jokey manner so that she wouldn’t come across as a Bossy Bitch, because you just know that’s how it would have gone if she’d been serious with him. But it backfired, because he acted like an excited toddler and she had nowhere to go. She obviously wanted to smack his hand off her breast but she couldn’t do that without disrupting things, so she scrunched down to force his hand off instead and then hastily introduced him and left.
Sorry to go all moralising on your ass but punitive violence in the interest of “behavior modification” is not something normally condoned on this blog (quite the opposite).
Self defense.
If she’d split his lip, I’d have cheered loudly. If someone else had split his lip, I’d have cheered, too, maybe a bit less loudly.
I said clearly before that I’m not making a moral argument. From a practical standpoint, if someone had given Asimov or Ellison a black eye back around, say, 1974 their subsequent behaviors might have been modified and fewer people might have undergone their assaults. Of course, we can’t know, that’s the problem. But anyone who’s raised a dog, or trained a horse, or probably a child can tell you that positive reinforcement does not always produce the desired results. I raised one horse on only positive reinforcement and he’s a dangerous brat who doesn’t always do what he’s asked even when it’s for his own safety.
Trying to imply a moral equivalency between a illegitimate state* inflicting violence on citizens and someone bopping an asshole who assaulted them .. that’s a hell of a stretch.
(*I am with Paul Wolff; I regard all states as illegitimate, though some may be necessary and all are facts)
Who cares if it was inappropriate? If someone’s acting inappropriately toward you, repay them in kind. I’m not saying “two wrongs make a right” but more like “oh, see how you like it?”
Wasn’t face-slapping the approved ‘cute’ response back in the day? The Doris Day/Rock Hudson trope?
The most uncomfortable thought is how utterly normalized that kind of loutishness was, and IS.
Let me remind you what happened when a woman was violently groped from behind and she reacted by slamming her elbow back into her unseen assailant. He turned out to be a police officer, and, even though she had horrific bruising on her breast and he couldn’t remember on the witness stand which eye he’d supposedly been elbowed in, SHE was sentenced to 3 months in jail and 5 years of probation:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/06/cecily_mcmillan_found_guilty_of_elbowing_officer_grantley_bovell_at_an_occupy.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/19/cecily-mcmillan_n_5349501.html
This was just last year. You think it would have gone better for a woman reacting similarly in years past??
@1 Marcus: My poem “Convention Memories” includes a paired stanza that goes something like this:
These panels with authors are popular programs
Three panels show promise for each that’s a bore
Some of them are peaceable pun-loving praisefests
In others, take cover from flak from the war
One screamingly featured three female authors
Along with the pig who wrote “Slave Girls of Gor”
I used to pretend I had read Harlan Ellison
Now that I’ve met him, I’ll have read him no more