Also, if you missed the “Open Source Boob Project” mess, count yourself lucky. If you want to blame “puritanism” for not liking being felt up in power plays by total strangers, well, I doubt very much that you have ever been on the receiving end of it, and I wonder if you are male, or just very, very, VERY sheltered? Most of us can tell quite easily what’s “just” friendly nonsexual touching, and what’s skeezy sexual power-plays like having your boss try to feel whether or not you’re wearing a bra, as has happened to me in the past six months at my job - repeatedly. (And no, he doesn’t rub up and down the back of the male coworker, either.)

Either way, your comment (”sad commentary”) reeks of patriarchal privilege, and I hope someday you learn what it’s like to be without it.

Moreover, I know plenty of isolated types - I myself am one of them - and plenty of writers, only some of whom are reclusive. Yet nevertheless, we recluses and writers mostly manage not to sexually abuse and humiliate people in public. So your justification with the “Great Lonely Artist-Man” theory doesn’t hold water.

“Oh, that’s just so-and-so. You just have to get used to hir.”

Well, actually: no.

It’s like: sweetheart. Being an asshole is not, last I checked, one of those inherited and immutable conditions. If you KNOW you’re an asshole then you can try to STOP being -quite- so much of an asshole, at least, can’t you?

and for other people: if you KNOW sie’s an asshole, then why do you act like it’s some sort of Act of God or something? Yeah, this especially comes up wrt sexist harassment and worse (O, boyz will be boyz, tee-hee!), but it’s not limited to it. Whatever the rationale: it bites. Never too late for socialization is what i say; and if it is, well, never too late to firmly escort the asshole off the premises, no matter how lionized sie is.

My partner, who’s that “really great guy” who works with me, does slip up sometimes. I agree with you - it happens to all of us and I certainly wouldn’t kick him to the curb for it.

I didn’t mean to come off too harsh on the commenters here or too easy on Ellison, so if I did, that’s just my own failure to communicate.

However, I get the impression you’re not so much concerned with Ellison as an individual, as the fact that we’re focusing on an individual person at all. I do see your point; however, just because we’re criticizing the wider social forces at work here doesn’t mean that the person who committed the specific wrong gets off the hook. We all make the choice to either comply with or reject social conditioning; the fact that sexism is so pervasive and powerful just means that the choice is difficult, though not impossible. I sympathize with people who are in this struggle, but that doesn’t mean anyone gets a free pass for taking the easy path. There are still people who have been harmed by Ellison’s action - maybe Willis (I don’t know how exactly she’s handling it), but definitely a lot of female SFF fans who feel less trusting of fannish spaces. He’s not responsible for all of the sexism of SFF, but he’s definitely contributed to it, and he deserves to get called out for it.

If Ellison had some sort of condition that absolved him of responsibility, then yes, I would lay off him. But that would be an exceptional circumstance, and I’m going by the default that people are culpable for their actions. As it stands, he made a choice; he wasn’t swept along unwittingly by sexist forces outside his control.

Here’s my thing: if we found out that Ellison had a tumor the size of an Audi in his head that made him act the way he did, would these comments seem appropriate, or would they seem suddenly cruel? If the latter, then there’s something wrong: we’re picking on a person, not a social problem.

I wonder where you’re finding the responses that fixate on Ellison, and what groups they’re part of - if, for instance, there’s a difference between how geek and non-geek bloggers are reacting. Geek feminists are well aware of the problems of sexism in fan spaces; perhaps non-geeks, being less familiar with the community, are just pointing to Ellison himself as the object of attention.

You’re right, though, that what matters is how we deal with our slip-ups. When I do something in class, it gives me a great opportunity to talk about how these mostly unconscious behaviors structure gender relations — I can’t just shrug it off. In the rest of my life, it’s a wake-up call, a notice to have a look at my assumptions about “x”. Ellison has definitely dropped the ball there, or at least decided it was better for his image, and maybe better fun, to act as if he had (I’m not sure anyone is interested in a sweet, gentle curmudgeon, and curmudeonity is Ellison’s public persona). But like I said, this isn’t about Ellison, it’s about all the men who read this and other blogs and feel very aware and are still likely to make the same kind of gaffe Ellison made — and all the men and women who do the same with regard to working class folk or sex workers or non-white folk or immigrants or…