The solution to the Harlan Ellison problem
Many people have been commenting on the fact that Harlan Ellison groped Connie Willis at the Hugos. PNH put it most eloquently:
Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis on stage at the Hugos wasn’t funny and it wasn’t okay. I understand (from third parties; I haven’t spoken to her about it) that Connie Willis’s position is that Ellison has done worse and she can handle him, but I really didn’t want to watch it and neither, I think, did a lot of other people in the audience. Up to then the comedic schtick aspects of the Hugo presentation had been genuinely funny. After that, I think, many of us just wanted it all to stop.
Just as with George W. Bush’s now-famous uninvited shoulder-rub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the basic message of Ellison’s tit-grab is this: “Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. If you are female, you’ll never be safe. You can be the political leader of the most powerful country in Europe. You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will.”
It’s not okay. It’s not funny. It wasn’t a blow against bourgeois pieties or political correctness. It was just pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn’t want to watch it. It’s another thing that’s going to stop.
The thing is, many of the people who are reading these blog posts and acting outraged are the very same people who play vital roles in working and scheduling the conventions. Might the proper punishment for Harlan be to not invite him as any kind of guest-of-honor to any future conventions? If he wants to come to a convention, he can pay the fee just like any other fan and come in like anyone else. The reason he gets away with this shit is because he considers himself a star among SF fandom, and he’s let it get to his head for far too long.
It might not be a huge loss for the convention planners, since as far as I’ve read, he’s an asshole to the fans anyway. So not only do you get to punish Harlan for the groping, but you also improve the convention experience for fans.
Just a thought.
UPDATE: Harlan has since apologized. It’s up to you to decide how sincere of an apology it is.
Sadly, I’ve read that he already says he’s about to stop going to cons anyway. But I think your idea is a sound one, anyway, and should be applied to every. single. person. who makes the SF community suck to be a part of for others, no matter what they’ve written. So, thumbs up to your notion.
Random
I have a hard time believing that he’s willing to give up his star power by no longer attending conventions. I bet he just says that in the hope that his fans will weep because they’ll no longer get to see him again.
It’s been over 30 years since I last *bought* one of Harlan’s books - though I’ve read most of his stuff as library books over the years. I’ve never understood why his fans gush so much. Most of his work felt like homework assignments; to be read because one *has* to for some reason. To date, I’ve enjoyed two (and only two) of his books, and those both had co-authors. I can’t recall anyone ever saying anything nice about him, other than fan-gush about what a “great writer” he is. I can’t recall ever hearing him say anything nice about anyone else, either. So, mark me down as one of those unenlightened masses of SF readers that just doesn’t (and never did) get the appeal.
Dan
I think most of the appeal goes towards his short fiction. I’ve only read a few of his short stories, I really liked “Repent Harlequin, said the tick tock man,” but I heard his novels are just awful.
When I was an angry young man, I thought Harlan’s stuff was the shizzle, particularly his essays of criticism. He had a more than casually formative effect on making me who I am today.
That being said, going back and re-reading it, much of it seems pretentious, overblown, and affected, the work of an angry young man who just *knows* he has all the answers. When in reality he’s just to inexperienced to see the entire picture.
Still, a great deal of his work may be justifiably considered “classic.” Simply because someone has an over-inflated opinion of their greatness doesn’t mean that their work still isn’t great. It just makes them all the more insufferable.
Although groping Connie Willis’ breast was monumentally dumb.
Yeah, I recently read his “I have no mouth and yet I must scream,” after the whole fiasco happened, and the story is damn brilliant.
After being in it up to my eyeballs for several years, I’m taking a vacation from conrunning, but should I ever get back into it, I would support such an across-the-board action.
Ellison has posted a follow-up on his site:
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.
Hmm, he’s not handling this well at all. The blogosphere is going to have a field day with that one.
jeezus christ. wait, seriously? he’s citing the fact that she’s no longer speaking to him as proof that HE is in the right? like she OWED him something?
anyway, yah, “angry young man” sums it up, and i had liked his essays better as well (when i was an angry young girl), altho’ a couple of his stories are O.K., i guess. thing is, instead of evolving or growing out of it or even mellowing, he just fossilized into a -very- angry old man. and angry about pretty much the same damn things in the same damn way: stuck. sort of similar i think to what happened with Woody Allen. not pretty.
and unfortunately Allen disproves that what i was about to say wrt Ellison might have made any difference at all; i.e. something along the lines of, dude. THERAPY, stat.
but, yeah, “maggots,” nice. that contempt has always been there. i still have several of the essay collections; i particularly like the one called “Tyranny of the Weak,” wherein he takes a woman fan-friend to task for (as he saw it) guilt-tripping him at some concert or something; she’d wanted him to pick her up, i guess? and he didn’t understand how upset she was, because she hadn’t communicated it at the time, something.
which, fine, but turning this into a column called “Tyranny of the Weak” -and- PRINTING HER REAL NAME was, well, classic assholery.
I’ve watched the snippet of said incident on Google, and, let me tell you, you guys are acting like a bunch of kiddies who caught mommy kissing Santa Claus (or, in this case, Harlan Ellison mockingly tit-touching Mrs. Willis) and mistook it for rape in the first degree.
Yes, children, it was Harlan acting like a bad little school boy, gingerly, mockingly taking his hand and touching it to the breast of aforementioned seemingly schoolmarmish but brilliant SF writer Willis. So the fuck what? It was all an ACT, even if Willis wasn’t in on it, which makes it even more hilarious. Did you not see or hear them exchange quips before the actual faux pas—the faux pas that was a slapsticky albeit raunchy riposte not only to remarks made by Willis at the convention but to longstanding jibes over the YEARS?
It was interesting to read people’s description of “the incident” before actually viewing the clip myself: the contrast is hallucinogenic. If Ellison is guilty of anything, he’s guilty of being irreverent, Rabelaisian, over the top, and, yes, chauvinistic, but his chauvinism, at least in this instance, was self-deprecatory—vaudevillian. But your little minds can’t get around it, can they? Instead of being discerning adults, you want not only to project your issues onto Willis vs. Ellison, you want to skewer the man personally. If paperclips were jammed in his pupils, if he were sodomized—anally impaled with copies of The Feminine Mystique with the aid of farming equipment—it would not sate your distorted bloodlust. If you think Ellison’s humor is distorted—and it’s your right to think so—it’s certainly not your right to mandate your distorted brand of punishment. I think Nietzsche and Jesus have both said enough about people of your inclination.
You guys make me chuckle. You and your generation—our generation, I’m only 33—is the reason why this country is so fucked to hell. You see, but you don’t observe. You hear, but you don’t listen. You’re more bovine than your parents’ parents, which is exactly against whose generational grain Ellison has been sawing for almost half a century. You are worse than your parent’s parents because your second- and third-rate college educations have given you the illusion that you’re allowed—that it’s democratic—that it’s your divine right—to pontificate your opinion just because you have a pie hole. Unless you’re an adult—a real adult—with real life experience and a balanced sense of being, don’t go to the Hugos. Stay at home, read your Nicholas Sparks, watch Fox News, or whatever is you do: But stay the fuck out of the world of literati. However, if you do decide to go, at least leave your bullshit baggage at the door. And, always, remember to bring your spell-checkers.
I dare you to post this in its entirety, Beee-otches.
w.w.
Cork it pal. Ellison’s become the Jack Thompson of Sci-Fi. He sues people at the drop of a hat and his behavior sure places him within the nutzo ring with Thompson. Thing is, I don’t think there’s a Bar Association for Sci-Fi.
Then again, maybe William Gibson and Larry Niven’ll clock him one day for us.