Well, if there was any doubt remaining
that what Harlan Ellison did was a sex-as-power domination ploy motivated by longstanding resentment of Connie Willis both as a Pack Rival and an Uppity Wench, (doubt remaining by main force, despite all the reports of Willis' anger and strained relationship of long duration) then this should finally disperse it, coming straight from the horse's ass as it does: [via Media bistro]
HARLAN ELLISON- Thursday, August 31 2006 21:21:38
...AND MARK:
Would you be slightly less self-righteous and chiding if I told you there was
NO grab...
there was
NO grope...
there was
NO fondle...
there was the slightest touch. A shtick, a gag between friends, absolutely NO sexual content.
Would you, and the ten thousand maggots who have blown this up into a cause celebre, be even the least bit abashed to know that I apologized WAY BEYOND what the "crime" required, on the off chance that I HAD offended? Let me ask you, Mark:
1) Were you there?
2) Did you see it?
3) Are you standing on your soapbox to chide me via 3rd/4th-hand reportage by OTHERS who weren't there?
4) Do you also buy the infinite number of other internet brouhahas that turned out to be misreported?
Here it is, Mark; and for any others who fit the shoe:
In the words of that great American philosopher, Tony Isabella,
"Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved."
Does not anyone READ WHAT I WROTE within fifteen minutes of learning of this? Does not anyone wonder why, if it was such a piggish thing I did, as one of those jerkwad blogs calls it, Connie Willis hasn't, after twenty-five years of "friendship," not returned my call on Monday ... or responded to the Fedex packet of my posting here on Monday, which Fedex advises me she received at 2:20 pm on Tuesday?
Can the voluble and charismatic Connie not even pick up a phone to tell the man whose work she "admires deeply" that he has gone a bridge too far? Is she so wracked by the Awfulness of it that she is incapable of saying to his face, you went too far? No one EVER asked her to "bell the cat." She decided that was her role toward me, long ago. And I've put up with it for years.
How about it, Mark: after playing straight man to Connie's very frequently demeaning public jackanapery toward me -- including treating me with considerable disrespect at the Grand Master Awards Weekend, where she put a chair down in front of her lectern as Master of Ceremonies, and made me sit there like a naughty child throughout her long "roast" of my life and career -- for more than 25 years, without once complaining, whaddays think, Mark, am I even a leetle bit entitled to think that Connie likes to play, and geez ain't it sad that as long as SHE sets the rules for play, and I'm the village idiot, she's cool ... but gawd forbid I change the rules and play MY way for a change ... whaddaya think, Mark, my friend, am I within the parameters of brutish pigginess to suggest if she WAS offended, then I apologize ... even if you and a garbage-scowload of asinine pathetic internet wanks get up on their "affront" and tell me how to behave?
I've sat here for four days, quietly, having done as much forelock-tugging and kneeling as I feel -- as I -- I -- not you -- not fan pinheads in far places who jumped and bayed and went after me in a second -- but I --who is responsible for my behavior -- as I feel is proper. And for four days I've waited for Deeply Outraged and Debased Connie Willis -- an avowed friend and admirer of my work for more than a quarter century --to get up off her political correctness and take her pal off the gibbet.
I spent more hours traveling this benighted country, for eight years, state after state after state, lecturing in defense of women's rights and passage of the ERA than any of you have spent mouthing your sophomoric remonstrances.
As the Great American Philosopher Tony Isabella has said, "Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved."
My last word on this clusterfuck. If Willis wants in, she knows where you all are. She knows where I am.All the rest is silence.
Harlan Ellison
P.S. Including Mark's post that precedes this one, I URGE YOU all to post this everywhichwhere, and let the poison drip where it will. Gloves come off now, onlookers.
Entitled much?
Now, some people are defending Ellison by saying that only Willis was the target of his misbehavior, and therefore only she has the right to be offended, (and since she isn't denouncing him in public, she must be okay with it) - and therefore none of the rest of us should say anything about it. (Which is, oddly enough, exactly Ellison's own view.
Well, no. If Samuel Delany had been the presenter, and Ellison had made some Limbaugh-like or Bennettesque racial slur, would anyone be insisting that it was a matter only between Ellison and Delany, or that none but Delany had the right to be outraged? If it had been some vile gay-bashing "joke" to George Takei on the podium, would it have been any less a matter for communal indignation than if he had made a bucktooth-slant-eyes face at him? Of course not. No one in SF would be - I hope - brushing it off with either a "that's just Harlan" or "Well, Sam didn't punch him" or "George should have smacked him," and it's between them and none of our business.
But women are different. We're common property. Our bodies are there to be used visually and tactilely by men, and our minds, our souls, are there to be used as props, to be receptive audiences, ego-strokers - and mocked and humiliated when we refuse to play along. And this is all the world over, not just SF, not just computer programming, not just sports, not just Big Business, not just academics, not just anything that says "This is a bar, Nice Girls don't belong in bars, if you don't want to be sexually-harassed (up to and including rape) you shouldn't have gone to a bar/gone to college/gone into journalism/entered the workforce/gone to a con/been on Slashdot-Usenet-the Internet with a cunt and all."
Ellison didn't just attack Willis - and yes, that was a deliberate attack, picking a social event is one of the OLDEST DAMNED TACTICS IN THE BOOK for emotional abuse, it's why weddings and holidays are so often hell, because abusers KNOW that they can get away with Parthian shots and hit-and-run attacks, because the victim knows that they are morally obligated to "not ruin the party for everyone else" - and so are in effect handcuffed as the abuser slaps them. Whether it's words, or inappropriate touching. It's all the same dynamic.
But when a woman "needs" to be put down, to be shown her place, the first and last weapon in the social arsenal is sex. Having tits and cunts makes us unpersons - just as in the future described in It Walks In Beauty" (our present!), the only way to avoid being mocked for that is to either embrace it and be as unthreatening, as passive, as nurturing, as "feminine" as possible - or to unsex ourselves and be "one of the boys", an honorary male. But neither really works, since what is unthreatening is something the aggressive fear-biter decides, not us, all that is feminine is Othered and disgusting, at bottom, to the macho, and trying to be not like those other icky women is as likely to trigger the "threat" sense of rivalry as it is to create protective coloration. We can't win.
--So once upon a time Ellison made a very dramatic gesture of support for the ERA. Big whoop. Those laurels are very dusty by now. And big dramatic gestures, just like fine words, mean nothing if they don't actually translate into a different way of treating actual, breathing human beings. People have called him the Bob Packwood of fandom, and then apologized for being too harsh. I'm not sure they were: if there is any truth to this story - and even if it really turns into a fantasy-wish-fulfillment halfway through, and what he really did is sheepishly stay on the carpet runner, go out meekly for a hamburger, get told to keep his hands to himself on the ride home, and this is just his "woulda-done" boasting revisionism - then he was always an abusive, petty monster to women. (And so much for the "defiant" nature of his shortlived Disney career, and his "revisionism" of Disney's soft-core sexism - we see it consisted of having Tinkerbelle suck off other characters and crotch shots of Minnie getting banged by male 'toons. Yeah, real egalitarian there.)
That story, btw, reminds me of nothing so much as the one that was in my Norton Anthology that we had to read in college Humanities class, the bit from iirc Rabelais, about how he got his own back on the woman who turned him down for a date, by catching and killing a dog in heat and grinding up its glands to sprinkle on her dress the next time he met her, so that all the male dogs would hump her legs and publically humiliate her - and how uncomfortable - hell, vile and violated that story made me feel, and how it - and especially the way it was taught, neutrally, literarily, and disliking it construed as prudish by the [male] teacher - contributed to my social phobia and PTSD and conviction that love, indeed, was nothing but sex misspelled, and that all men despised all women, some just hid their scorn and longing to see us all covered in dog excretions better...It's okay to relish the humiliation of Rabelais' not-girlfriend because she was a stuck-up bitch; it's okay to relish the humilation of "Brenda" too, because she was a Jewish-American Princess who worried about material things, nu? So good old fashioned misogyny is disguised as the uprising of the oppressed poor, with a dollop of racism for good measure (but it's okay, the rich Jews in the story look down on their colored help, see) - there's always an excuse. At least Joanna Russ apologized for putting in a scene of similarly "justified" sexual violence in 1973's "Soul of a Servant" because she was young and didn't know any better.
So first he claims that Willis is his "friend" - and then goes on to whinge and snarl about how SHE gets to be mean to HIM all the time and when he defends himself JUST ONCE then he's the Bad Guy all of the sudden. Spare me. The Caught Abuser's Lament is a drone of all one note, and I've heard it many times. (And why does his claimed friendship with Willis - who doesn't even want to deal with him, from what her friends and acquaintances and family acquaintances have said - sound so much like Lee "Blogofascists Made Me Sockpuppet!" Siegel insisting that 16 year old Uma Thurman had the hots for him when he was her tutor, based on her pretty face and friendliness, and was moreover deliberately acting provocative towards him by picking up her cat and petting it in front of him and his only mistake was not giving in to her "flirting"--?)
Yes, he abuses men too - at least those he thinks he can get away with, those who are too young or unimportant to matter, like camera operators or web comic creators. But there is a difference in the dominance posturing of a man towards other males, and towards females, and almost never do you find a man who is engaged in social rivalry with a woman who does not stoop to playing the cunt card. Because that's the endgame, the one thing that we can't fight against, because to do so would be to acknowlege that we have cunts, that we are Irreversibly Contaminated by being women, and so we can't make a scene about it - and if we do we're told we were imagining it, it was an accident, we're overreacting, etc etc etc - invalidated yet again. (There is the additional disingenuousness factor in him now being old enough to use his age as a shield to hide behind, knowing that few women, or men, really will deck a white-haired senior citizen.)
Even women use sex to put down other women - whether it's accusations of spinsterhood or lesbianism, accusations of prostitution, or just telling a man that it's okay to grope a rival. So well have we internalized our slave status. Even gay men may play the cunt card to get pack status, because it's still better to be a fag than a woman, and even the insufficiently-manly male (as our society deems it) can gain points by putting us in our subordinate, "natural" place. And we're not allowed to bite back, being utterly domesticated. [See also the "Last Vagina Standing" comment here.]
"Hey, gang!" I squeaked in my terrifically accurate Mickey voice. "Everybody ready to shoot the ultimate Disney flick? The film that rips the lid off the goody two-shoes hypocrisy that lies sweltering beneath the surface of G-rated true-life adventures? Okay, you guys, let's get that hand-held Arriflex right down there between Minnie's legs! I wanna see closeups of quivering labia!"
Ellison didn't just insult Willis - or the guests at Worldcon. (Nor even his apparently-okay-with-all-this-crap, presumably-traditional wife.) He insulted me, and every woman in the world - and every man, too. Because he assumed that this is how all of you who are XY think all of us who are XX should be treated, in assuming that he would be allowed to get away with it. Showing up the lie of "chivalry" for what it was, the big old joke, shooting at the half-breeds' feet to make them dance--and enlisting all the beta males as his backup dancers, minions to his bully-boy alpha.
He's no better than John Norman, only less honest.
HARLAN ELLISON- Thursday, August 31 2006 21:21:38
...AND MARK:
Would you be slightly less self-righteous and chiding if I told you there was
NO grab...
there was
NO grope...
there was
NO fondle...
there was the slightest touch. A shtick, a gag between friends, absolutely NO sexual content.
Would you, and the ten thousand maggots who have blown this up into a cause celebre, be even the least bit abashed to know that I apologized WAY BEYOND what the "crime" required, on the off chance that I HAD offended? Let me ask you, Mark:
1) Were you there?
2) Did you see it?
3) Are you standing on your soapbox to chide me via 3rd/4th-hand reportage by OTHERS who weren't there?
4) Do you also buy the infinite number of other internet brouhahas that turned out to be misreported?
Here it is, Mark; and for any others who fit the shoe:
In the words of that great American philosopher, Tony Isabella,
"Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved."
Does not anyone READ WHAT I WROTE within fifteen minutes of learning of this? Does not anyone wonder why, if it was such a piggish thing I did, as one of those jerkwad blogs calls it, Connie Willis hasn't, after twenty-five years of "friendship," not returned my call on Monday ... or responded to the Fedex packet of my posting here on Monday, which Fedex advises me she received at 2:20 pm on Tuesday?
Can the voluble and charismatic Connie not even pick up a phone to tell the man whose work she "admires deeply" that he has gone a bridge too far? Is she so wracked by the Awfulness of it that she is incapable of saying to his face, you went too far? No one EVER asked her to "bell the cat." She decided that was her role toward me, long ago. And I've put up with it for years.
How about it, Mark: after playing straight man to Connie's very frequently demeaning public jackanapery toward me -- including treating me with considerable disrespect at the Grand Master Awards Weekend, where she put a chair down in front of her lectern as Master of Ceremonies, and made me sit there like a naughty child throughout her long "roast" of my life and career -- for more than 25 years, without once complaining, whaddays think, Mark, am I even a leetle bit entitled to think that Connie likes to play, and geez ain't it sad that as long as SHE sets the rules for play, and I'm the village idiot, she's cool ... but gawd forbid I change the rules and play MY way for a change ... whaddaya think, Mark, my friend, am I within the parameters of brutish pigginess to suggest if she WAS offended, then I apologize ... even if you and a garbage-scowload of asinine pathetic internet wanks get up on their "affront" and tell me how to behave?
I've sat here for four days, quietly, having done as much forelock-tugging and kneeling as I feel -- as I -- I -- not you -- not fan pinheads in far places who jumped and bayed and went after me in a second -- but I --who is responsible for my behavior -- as I feel is proper. And for four days I've waited for Deeply Outraged and Debased Connie Willis -- an avowed friend and admirer of my work for more than a quarter century --to get up off her political correctness and take her pal off the gibbet.
I spent more hours traveling this benighted country, for eight years, state after state after state, lecturing in defense of women's rights and passage of the ERA than any of you have spent mouthing your sophomoric remonstrances.
As the Great American Philosopher Tony Isabella has said, "Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved."
My last word on this clusterfuck. If Willis wants in, she knows where you all are. She knows where I am.All the rest is silence.
Harlan Ellison
P.S. Including Mark's post that precedes this one, I URGE YOU all to post this everywhichwhere, and let the poison drip where it will. Gloves come off now, onlookers.
Entitled much?
Now, some people are defending Ellison by saying that only Willis was the target of his misbehavior, and therefore only she has the right to be offended, (and since she isn't denouncing him in public, she must be okay with it) - and therefore none of the rest of us should say anything about it. (Which is, oddly enough, exactly Ellison's own view.
Well, no. If Samuel Delany had been the presenter, and Ellison had made some Limbaugh-like or Bennettesque racial slur, would anyone be insisting that it was a matter only between Ellison and Delany, or that none but Delany had the right to be outraged? If it had been some vile gay-bashing "joke" to George Takei on the podium, would it have been any less a matter for communal indignation than if he had made a bucktooth-slant-eyes face at him? Of course not. No one in SF would be - I hope - brushing it off with either a "that's just Harlan" or "Well, Sam didn't punch him" or "George should have smacked him," and it's between them and none of our business.
But women are different. We're common property. Our bodies are there to be used visually and tactilely by men, and our minds, our souls, are there to be used as props, to be receptive audiences, ego-strokers - and mocked and humiliated when we refuse to play along. And this is all the world over, not just SF, not just computer programming, not just sports, not just Big Business, not just academics, not just anything that says "This is a bar, Nice Girls don't belong in bars, if you don't want to be sexually-harassed (up to and including rape) you shouldn't have gone to a bar/gone to college/gone into journalism/entered the workforce/gone to a con/been on Slashdot-Usenet-the Internet with a cunt and all."
Ellison didn't just attack Willis - and yes, that was a deliberate attack, picking a social event is one of the OLDEST DAMNED TACTICS IN THE BOOK for emotional abuse, it's why weddings and holidays are so often hell, because abusers KNOW that they can get away with Parthian shots and hit-and-run attacks, because the victim knows that they are morally obligated to "not ruin the party for everyone else" - and so are in effect handcuffed as the abuser slaps them. Whether it's words, or inappropriate touching. It's all the same dynamic.
But when a woman "needs" to be put down, to be shown her place, the first and last weapon in the social arsenal is sex. Having tits and cunts makes us unpersons - just as in the future described in It Walks In Beauty" (our present!), the only way to avoid being mocked for that is to either embrace it and be as unthreatening, as passive, as nurturing, as "feminine" as possible - or to unsex ourselves and be "one of the boys", an honorary male. But neither really works, since what is unthreatening is something the aggressive fear-biter decides, not us, all that is feminine is Othered and disgusting, at bottom, to the macho, and trying to be not like those other icky women is as likely to trigger the "threat" sense of rivalry as it is to create protective coloration. We can't win.
--So once upon a time Ellison made a very dramatic gesture of support for the ERA. Big whoop. Those laurels are very dusty by now. And big dramatic gestures, just like fine words, mean nothing if they don't actually translate into a different way of treating actual, breathing human beings. People have called him the Bob Packwood of fandom, and then apologized for being too harsh. I'm not sure they were: if there is any truth to this story - and even if it really turns into a fantasy-wish-fulfillment halfway through, and what he really did is sheepishly stay on the carpet runner, go out meekly for a hamburger, get told to keep his hands to himself on the ride home, and this is just his "woulda-done" boasting revisionism - then he was always an abusive, petty monster to women. (And so much for the "defiant" nature of his shortlived Disney career, and his "revisionism" of Disney's soft-core sexism - we see it consisted of having Tinkerbelle suck off other characters and crotch shots of Minnie getting banged by male 'toons. Yeah, real egalitarian there.)
That story, btw, reminds me of nothing so much as the one that was in my Norton Anthology that we had to read in college Humanities class, the bit from iirc Rabelais, about how he got his own back on the woman who turned him down for a date, by catching and killing a dog in heat and grinding up its glands to sprinkle on her dress the next time he met her, so that all the male dogs would hump her legs and publically humiliate her - and how uncomfortable - hell, vile and violated that story made me feel, and how it - and especially the way it was taught, neutrally, literarily, and disliking it construed as prudish by the [male] teacher - contributed to my social phobia and PTSD and conviction that love, indeed, was nothing but sex misspelled, and that all men despised all women, some just hid their scorn and longing to see us all covered in dog excretions better...It's okay to relish the humiliation of Rabelais' not-girlfriend because she was a stuck-up bitch; it's okay to relish the humilation of "Brenda" too, because she was a Jewish-American Princess who worried about material things, nu? So good old fashioned misogyny is disguised as the uprising of the oppressed poor, with a dollop of racism for good measure (but it's okay, the rich Jews in the story look down on their colored help, see) - there's always an excuse. At least Joanna Russ apologized for putting in a scene of similarly "justified" sexual violence in 1973's "Soul of a Servant" because she was young and didn't know any better.
So first he claims that Willis is his "friend" - and then goes on to whinge and snarl about how SHE gets to be mean to HIM all the time and when he defends himself JUST ONCE then he's the Bad Guy all of the sudden. Spare me. The Caught Abuser's Lament is a drone of all one note, and I've heard it many times. (And why does his claimed friendship with Willis - who doesn't even want to deal with him, from what her friends and acquaintances and family acquaintances have said - sound so much like Lee "Blogofascists Made Me Sockpuppet!" Siegel insisting that 16 year old Uma Thurman had the hots for him when he was her tutor, based on her pretty face and friendliness, and was moreover deliberately acting provocative towards him by picking up her cat and petting it in front of him and his only mistake was not giving in to her "flirting"--?)
Yes, he abuses men too - at least those he thinks he can get away with, those who are too young or unimportant to matter, like camera operators or web comic creators. But there is a difference in the dominance posturing of a man towards other males, and towards females, and almost never do you find a man who is engaged in social rivalry with a woman who does not stoop to playing the cunt card. Because that's the endgame, the one thing that we can't fight against, because to do so would be to acknowlege that we have cunts, that we are Irreversibly Contaminated by being women, and so we can't make a scene about it - and if we do we're told we were imagining it, it was an accident, we're overreacting, etc etc etc - invalidated yet again. (There is the additional disingenuousness factor in him now being old enough to use his age as a shield to hide behind, knowing that few women, or men, really will deck a white-haired senior citizen.)
Even women use sex to put down other women - whether it's accusations of spinsterhood or lesbianism, accusations of prostitution, or just telling a man that it's okay to grope a rival. So well have we internalized our slave status. Even gay men may play the cunt card to get pack status, because it's still better to be a fag than a woman, and even the insufficiently-manly male (as our society deems it) can gain points by putting us in our subordinate, "natural" place. And we're not allowed to bite back, being utterly domesticated. [See also the "Last Vagina Standing" comment here.]
"Hey, gang!" I squeaked in my terrifically accurate Mickey voice. "Everybody ready to shoot the ultimate Disney flick? The film that rips the lid off the goody two-shoes hypocrisy that lies sweltering beneath the surface of G-rated true-life adventures? Okay, you guys, let's get that hand-held Arriflex right down there between Minnie's legs! I wanna see closeups of quivering labia!"
Ellison didn't just insult Willis - or the guests at Worldcon. (Nor even his apparently-okay-with-all-this-crap, presumably-traditional wife.) He insulted me, and every woman in the world - and every man, too. Because he assumed that this is how all of you who are XY think all of us who are XX should be treated, in assuming that he would be allowed to get away with it. Showing up the lie of "chivalry" for what it was, the big old joke, shooting at the half-breeds' feet to make them dance--and enlisting all the beta males as his backup dancers, minions to his bully-boy alpha.
He's no better than John Norman, only less honest.