Avedon directs our attention to  (imo) the best blogpost title of the year:

“No one expects the fannish admonition” 

Ha.  And what’s more, it’s a post describing Harlan Ellison behaving badly. Towards Connie Willis.  At this year’s Worldcon.  Woo-hoo; it just don’t get any better than this, kids!  I couldn’t bear to simply snip an excerpt or two; Here it is in it’s entirety:

No one expects the fannish admonition

In response to the news about Harlan Ellison’s boorish behavior (which many people would say isn’t really news), several people expressed a strong desire for Connie Willis to have retaliated: anything from verbal humiliation to kneeing him in the crotch.

One woman replied to the latter suggestion as follows:

I think there’s a thing in standard female socialisation in which women are taught to respond to verbal put-downs and encroachments on body space with smiles and attempts to lower the general aggression level instead of with anger.

So I’d have been surprised if she’d responded the way you suggest, and if she had I expect there would be a chorus of “Why did she do that when he was only…” and “Can’t she take a joke?”

And yet…

I’m reminded of an incident at a con a few years back, in which a woman writer got so fed up with a condescendingly sexist man (another pro) that she poured her soda over his head. Although she was embarrassed by her actions, the general reaction around fandom seemed to be that he got what he deserved…

Now, that may prove the point above — that the level of obnoxiousness necessary to make most women lose their cool is so far beyond the line that most people can agree he has it coming.

Rereading blog discussion about the earlier altercation, this comment by Graydon still seems relevant:

When a man suffers a public indignity, he has grounds to be upset.

When the news of the indignity is met with approval, glee, delight, and wistfulness at having missed personal witness thereof by very nearly every woman of even his passing acquaintance who should chance to hear of it, I should think that the man has grounds to consider the advisability of his habitual conduct, and perhaps even to engage in a degree of introspection, however potentially painful he might fear it should prove to be.

For Ellison’s sake, I’d think the same holds true when very nearly every woman wishes his actions resulted in indignity.

LINK

 

I have probably a half-dozen Harlan Ellison anecdotes from various run-ins with the little squirt at Worldcons and elsewhere over the past 35 years…

My favorite is the time somebody at a local alt-weekly (probably the Reader then) wrote a promo item about HE’s upcoming visit to the Cities and had the UNMITIGATED GALL to refer to Harlan Ellison as

“a Sci-Fi writer”. 

Just because I knew it would make Harlan apoplectic, I clipped the article and mailed it to him.  A few evenings later I got a call that went something like this:  

Me:  Hello?

HE:  This is Harlan Ellison.  Did you mail me this clip?

Me:  Uhhhh, hello Harlan! Yeah, I did.

HE:  Do you know this guy?  The guy who wrote this?

Me:  No. 

HE:  Well, call up the paper where this guy works and tell him that when I get to Minneapolis I’m gonna RIP HIS LUNGS OUT!

[BAM!!]  [HE hangs up by evidently slamming the receiver down and thus smashing it into smithereenies.]

What a laugh riot. What a tiny, widdle, eensy weensy, ittie bittie laugh riot.  

Not that she ever would –she being a rational adult and all — but still I would pay a very pretty penny to see Connie Willis clean HE’s clock.  In a world full of deserving putzes, there could be none more deserving, and none putzier.   

 

 

 

    

Posted: August 30th, 2006 under Being Female, General, Homunculi, Science Fiction.
Comments: 7