Loscon 45 Incident: What Happened, and the Committee’s Update

“New Masters of Science Fiction” panel at Loscon 45 with Mel Gilden, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Gregory Benford, and Brad Lyau. Photo by Kenn Bates.

Over Thanksgiving weekend at Loscon 45, code of conduct violations were alleged against Gregory Benford for a couple of statements he made on the “New Masters of Science Fiction” panel. Afterwards, a Loscon co-chair took the unprecedented step of removing Benford from the convention. However, this action bypassed Loscon’s incident process. The board of directors of LASFS, which owns Loscon, got involved. The issue was returned to the process so con Ops could gather information. Loscon later made an announcement that “the actions desired by the aggrieved parties have been either met or exceeded.” However, at the time Ops met with the party who reported the incident she was still under the impression that Benford had been removed, which was not the ultimate outcome. On November 28, the club posted as its final resolution a statement written by Benford himself which says the co-chair apologized and he accepted the apology.

What happened at the panel: On Saturday morning the “New Masters of Science Fiction” panelists — Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Mel Gilden, Brad Lyau, and Benford — were discussing the question: “We know the old SF masters — Heinlein, Asimov, Vogt, de Camp, McCaffrey, LeGuin — who are new masters?”

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Gregory Benford. Photo by Kenn Bates.

According to Kenn Bates, who was present, Benford said N.K. Jemisin should get her science right.  “He did qualify his comment by saying that he liked hard SF and he was sure that his opinion was biased by that. He also said that PSI powers to control the earth and earthquakes had already been done in the fifties.”

Benford later told readers of David Weber’s Facebook page specifically, “I said, not to anyone in the room, ‘If you write sf honey, gotta get the science right.’”

Isabel Schechter says, “In addition to the ‘honey’ comment, Greg also made another comment-when one of the panelists recommended a Latino author, Greg asked him to spell the name, and then asked again several times before giving up and saying that some or those ‘names have too many vowels.’ He made this comment several times.”

Schechter, who has been in fandom over 20 years and co-chaired the successful San Juan in 2017 NASFiC bid, asked to be called on and made several comments:

I said that we were supposed to be talking about new masters but instead were talking about old ones. I remember saying “old white men” at some point in that description of the old masters, but not about the panelists (two of whom are not White). I did say that there were not any women on the panel (there was one assigned, but she didn’t show up-which I didn’t know). My comment about the female authors was in reference to the contrast between the men being discussed.

I did tell Greg that his use of the word “honey” was “offensive.” He tried to interrupt me and I told him I was still speaking. Shortly thereafter, he declared, “This panel is over!” and left the room. The panel went on without him, with panelists answering several questions after that.

The process: Isabel Schechter says she contacted the committee about events at the panel, beginning with Program organizer Justine Reynolds. Other conversations followed with Loscon co-chairs Christian McGuire and Crys Pretzman, then head of con Ops Lee Almodovar, and Robbie Bourget.

After the panel, several people were talking to me about the panel and Greg’s behavior, and Justine Reynolds, the Program Chair happened to be just outside the room as we walked out. I told her what happened, as did the other people. She apologized and said she would look into it, or something along those lines. I then went about my business. At some point, maybe an hour later, I was told that Greg had been asked to not be on any more programming. I said thanks and thought that was the end of it.

Then maybe an hour later, someone (I don’t know who, but they looked like staff) told me the conchairs wanted to talk to me, and walked me over to them, where they apologized for Greg’s behavior. They said they didn’t want me to think that the convention found his behavior acceptable and that they would not allow that kind of thing there. I thanked them, and again thought that was the end of it.

What happened next is that Christian McGuire, accompanied by someone from the hotel, located Benford at his 1 p.m. signing in the dealer’s room. According to Brandy Grote, “My husband witnessed him being escorted away by Hotel Security during his autograph session.”

Ginjer Buchanan, who read about this on David Weber’s Facebook page, commented, “Short of someone physically assaulting someone else in public, I can’t think of any reason for tracking down a person, no matter who they are, and having them do a perp walk out of a con. This strikes me as a bridge too far…”

What’s more, this step was taken without going through Loscon’s process for handling code of conduct violations. In response to my question, LASFS’ Kristen Gorlitz explained, “We do have a process for dealing with violations, but in this case, the proper channels were bypassed in favor of haste. This was thereafter rectified and the proper channels were consulted. (This is why we have an Ops team).”

Hours after Benford was led out, the committee asked Isabel Schechter to make an official statement:

Later that evening, I was asked by someone (don’t remember who) if I could make an official statement to Ops, so I went to the Ops room and gave a statement to Lee Almodovar. While doing that, [Robbie] (an older blond woman) asked me for details because it turns out that the conchairs didn’t follow convention procedures/coordinate the process with Ops. She said the conchairs overreacted or were extreme or something, and that she preferred to talk to everyone involved to try and reach a resolution, but now that Greg had been kicked out, he might not be willing to talk. She asked me if I was satisfied with the outcome or if I wanted anything like an apology. I told her I would like an apology but didn’t think I would get one. Otherwise, I was fine with the resolution. After that, I again went on about my business.

What happened to Benford led to a retaliatory petition calling for Christian B. McGuire to be removed from the LASFS Board of Directors, signed by a number of LASFS members including Larry Niven, Harry Turtledove, Laura Frankos, and David Gerrold. The next meeting of the Board is in December.

What the public was told: Ops was still collecting information on Sunday morning when LASFS asked File 770 to post this announcement (which also went up on Facebook):

Please be aware that the Loscon committee and LASFS Board are aware of an issue which occurred yesterday during a panel and are conducting a full investigation to ensure that all parties have been heard and then making a final decision based on that investigation. We would request that if anyone believes they have information to approach Ops in the Board Room. We will have an official resolution within 24 hours.

Among the people who reacted to the Facebook request was Barbara Landsman, who had a different perspective.

I was at that panel and I was horrified. I actually stood up and told her that I did not want to hear her political agenda and that she should just stop. Gregory Benford caught my eye and I just made the cut it off sign to him and he just shrugged. He finally got so pissed off that he stormed out. I again made a comment to try to stop her from continuing on with her rant and she just wouldn’t give it up. So I left. If anyone wants my testimony I’ll be very happy to speak on this. She came into this panel with a notebook and made notes and took down names and she definitely had an agenda. She wanted to fight.

Two more fans said they’d been at the panel and had given statements to Ops, but they did not repeat them on Facebook.

On Monday morning, Kristen Gorlitz issued this update:

All parties have been spoken with either yesterday or today. The actions desired by the aggrieved parties have been either met or exceeded through the follow up actions by the Co-Chairs and Ops. We would like to remind everyone and also future Loscons of the importance of being fully aware of our Code of Conduct and how language can cause emotional and psychological harm.

The resolution: Convention committees usually keep confidential their internal deliberations about alleged code of conduct violations so, unsurprisingly, it remains unexplained why the Loscon leadership didn’t follow the process, or how LASFS decided the outcome. Nor does LASFS really show an understanding that it’s their process and they need to take ownership of the outcome, because at the end this what they distributed:

November 28, 2018

Greg Benford gave us permission to publish this statement, if you wish to update file770. Thanks!

Gregory Benford’s message to LASFS:

At the 2018 Loscon there was an incident at a panel where someone took exception to something I said in general—which that someone took to be about a third party, who was not there.  Things got heated.  I left the room, not wanting to continue.  Apparently that someone complained to the convention chairs and they over reacted. The chair has apologized to me and I accepted it gratefully. He and his co-chair were probably trying to do the right thing in these over-heated times.  We all are, I trust. I have been attending Loscon since it began, and my first LASFS meeting was in 1963. I respect these enormously.

People were upset by the way the chairs acted.  Many later came up to me to say they were disturbed over it.  They were more upset than I was.  Since then, I’ve received vastly many emails, calls, Facebook posts, the lot. It’s exhausting. Things are fine with me now.  I’m not upset.  And I hope people will keep cooler heads in the future.

I want to especially thank Craig Miller, John Hertz, Matthew Tepper, Harry Turtledove, Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, John DeChancie, Gordon van Gelder and Michelle Pincus for their help in dealing with this.

At risk of being too professorial, I recommend reading

https://quillette.com/2018/05/17/understanding-victimhood-culture-interview-bradley-campbell-jason-manning/?fbclid=IwAR0hPL1hJRW_ERe6hhokHE6QJL784V4qSojSR5zwLNLwMUcnoHzK08Lwkpg

This is probably the first time the subject of code of conduct allegations ever wrote up the determination for the con committee.

When Kristen Gorlitz answered my follow-up questions about the statement, I learned she was under the impression that Isabel Schechter and Gregory Benford had met and resolved things, which never happened. (Do any other LASFSians think that happened?) Schechter says —

They did not copy me on Greg’s statement. It would have been nice if they had, given that it concerned me.

As for me and Greg resolving things, I have no idea what they mean by that. I never spoke to Greg after the panel, or at any point during the convention, before or after the panel. He did not approach me, I did not approach him, no one put us together, and we had no interaction during the convention other than during the panel. I have no idea why Kristen would say this, and am at a loss for words to explain how confused I am by her comment.

Also, Greg’s statement, “someone took exception to something I said in general—which that someone took to be about a third party, who was not there,” is misleading at best-his comment was not “in general,” he specifically named N.K. Jemisin, I did not need to make up a third party.

After neutralizing effects of the co-chair’s startling decision to walk Benford out of his autograph session, and, so far as the statement shows, managing to keep his good will, it is probably unrealistic to expect LASFS to speak explicitly to the original complaint and say whether its code of conduct was violated by Benford’s comments about Jemisin’s sf, or the spelling of Hispanic names. However, since they are standing behind his statement, how that blank would be filled-in should be easy to guess.


Update 11/30/2018: Robbie Bourget of Loscon Ops forwarded this additional information about their role: “Ops was not involved until the day after the issues, although we did take a statement from Isobel in which she did say when specifically asked ‘what would you have wished to have happen’ she said ‘for Mr Benford to be spoken to about his use of language’ and when I asked if she wanted an apology she said it would be nice but did not expect it. Therefore, since Greg was spoken to, twice, about his language – the requests (actual) of all parties were met or exceeded, since he was excluded from panels that he was scheduled for from the point the Chairs first talked to him and from the floor from after the autograph session on Saturday until sometime Sunday when he was finally interviewed by Ops.”

196 thoughts on “Loscon 45 Incident: What Happened, and the Committee’s Update

  1. So… Loscon permitted Benford, who had — quelle surprise — publicly denigrated a female SFF author and Hispanic authors, to determine for them how this incident was handled?

    I think that this is an even more egregious abdication of responsibility than Sasquan permitting David Gerrold to determine the outcome of his harassment incident.

    WTF. Just seriously, WTF. 😐

  2. It sounds as if Isabel Schechter is the only person at Loscon connected to this that didn’t screw up.

    I admit to not clicking on Benford’s offered link. Perhaps I have grown cynical, but I strongly suspect something that talks about “victimhood culture” likely reflects the view that we’re being mean to Old White Guys who don’t want to be asked to treat People Not Like Them as actual, real people.

    God knows an awful lot of silly, clearly wrong “science” was blandly accepted in so-called hard sf, back in the Good Old Days that Benford opines for.

  3. I don’t get why these organizations can’t ever get out of their own way. I mean, handle it one way or another, but there seems to be this constant stream of cons reacting, over-reacting in the opposite direction, reacting back and forth till the whole thing is just an embarrassing mess.

  4. Wow. I’m 65 years old and I do remember the days when rarely seen women at conventions were called “femmefans” and politically incorrect comments by rowdy white male writers were de rigeur. I also remember a group that prided itself on being more “tolerant” of differences (including politically incorrect white males). I haven’t shown up at LosCon for years, though I would love to. I wonder if I would recognize the atmosphere.

  5. “Short of someone physically assaulting someone else in public, I can’t think of any reason for tracking down a person, no matter who they are, and having them do a perp walk out of a con.”

    Just in public?

    Physically assaulting someone in private wouldn’t be reason enough to keep someone from roaming loose at the con, able to do it again?

  6. Somtow Sucharitkul: I do remember the days when rarely seen women at conventions were called “femmefans” and politically incorrect comments by rowdy white male writers were de rigeur.

    You say that as though you think it was a good thing, and that it should still be considered perfectly acceptable behavior.

     
    Somtow Sucharitkul: I also remember a group that prided itself on being more “tolerant” of differences (including politically incorrect white males).

    I see, you mean that it was a group that prided itself on tolerating even the most appalling treatment of women, people of color, and LGBTQ.

  7. “Short of someone physically assaulting someone else in public, I can’t think of any reason for tracking down a person, no matter who they are, and having them do a perp walk out of a con.”

    I can find many reasons. Doing a Hitler salute. Getting drunk on panel, screaming that the trolls are here and doing a naked jig. Singing “Like A Bridge Over Troubled Water” at the top of ones lounges in the dealers hall and refusing to stop. Walking three feet behind someone for five hours and if they complain, waving your hand in feont of their faces, saying “the air is free”.

    Seriously, I’m getting tired of this kind of comments. There are lots of behaviours that just aren’t acceptable, even if they do not involve assault.

    Even here in 4437, we understand how ridiculous that kind of statement is.

  8. Hampus Eckerman: It’s not helpful to list a series of extreme examples pretending to contradict what is really a statement that being perp-walked out of a con is not an appropriate response to making patronizing remarks about N.K. Jemisin’s writing and (I’m not sure what adjective goes here) questionable remarks about the vowels in a person’s name.

  9. It is also not helpful to use an overreaction of a con to defend a lot more bad behaviours and say that they should be accepted.

    Words have meaning. If you say that everything up to assault should be accepted by a con, I tend to believe you.

    I react very much to this statement by Ginjer Buchanan, and not specifically to this case, because I’ve heard it so many times, defendiing from bad to worse actions. It was used to defend Truesdales pearlclutching. The homophobia of John C Wright. And so on.

    I understand you get pissed if you think a friend is treated unfairly. But it is arguing for a policy that would have really bad consequences.

  10. Physically expelling someone for ‘objectionable’ remarks seems like a massive over-reaction to me.

    To be honest though, I don’t find the remarks terribly offensive either. Jemisin doesn’t have to be everyone’s type of thing, and names in different orthographies can be difficult.

  11. I’ve never met a native english speaker who had managed to pronounce my name (or get his spelling) without at least a couple tries … And sometimes (after failing) they use these kind of (lame) excuses. But i didnt find it racist … in my country you would hear the same type of comments about english surnames.

  12. Pello on November 30, 2018 at 2:02 am said:
    I’ve never met a native english speaker who had managed to pronounce my name (or get his spelling) without at least a couple tries … And sometimes (after failing) they use these kind of (lame) excuses. But i didnt find it racist … in my country you would hear the same type of comments about english surnames.

    I live in a non-English speaking country and people struggle with my name. I can’t give my name as ‘Rob’ in Starbucks without the staff having problems. The individual sounds are fine, but it doesn’t compute as a name.

    That’s before we even get to my surname, which should have more syllables, apparently.

  13. As it happens, I was in the audience throughout this panel, having looked forward eagerly to it. (My wife Deirdre and I have both been LosCon regulars for decades.) I was seated about four rows back. Ms. Schechter was front row left, furiously writing notes, that she then consulted when she was the first audience member recognised for a ‘question’.

    A few comments:

    1. The notion that any of the four panelists’ comments transgressed the code of conduct seems quite strange to this observer. I’ve just re-read that CoC yet again. None of the actual remarks of Benford or anyone else seem to me to go anywhere near its prohibitions, least of all his saying that novels about psi powers affecting geological processes having already been done to death in the 1950s (very close paraphrase). That’s pretty obviously a perfectly legitimate if cranky hard-SF-author opinion, not something to cancel a program participant’s autograph session over. (I do not happen to agree with Dr. Benford’s opinion, having cheerfully ranked all three of Ms. Jemisin’s volumes first on my Hugo ballots, but going to war against his opinion seems frankly deranged.)

    (It’s possible that OGH would still have considered Benford’s comments about Jemison’s writing ‘patronising’ if he’d heard the actual remarks. I can’t speak to that, but patronising is not synonymous with CoC-violating — not that OGH so claimed. I would say acerbic at least, but then Benford is pretty much always acerbic. That’s what you expect when as Programming head you add him to any panel.)

    There were originally to be five panelists: Genny Dazzo’s name tent was there waiting for her, but she herself didn’t make it for some reason. (This made all the more odd Ms. Schechter’s complaint, that she made during her long litany of same, about the panel consisting only of white males, not to mention that Bradford Lyau was right in front of her when she said that.)

    2. Contrary to what is claimed in the first paragraph, Benford was not ‘removed from the convention’. To the best of my understanding, he was ordered to leave (and escorted out of) his autograph session in the dealers’ room in progress between 1 and 2 pm Saturday. The con didn’t, e.g., also yank his badge, nor require him to leave convention space at the LAX Marriott, or anything like that. He was fully in attendance, all through the rest of the con.

    3. What is perhaps not apparent from the account above is that Ms. Schechter didn’t merely make ‘several comments’ but rather kept up a long trail of complaints directed at Benford that I would estimate lasted at least 10 minutes, perhaps several more. Numerous members of the audience wearied of this, and started asking her to please let the panel and/or other audience members participate. One of them (who I take to be Ms. Landsman) pointedly said none of us had come to hear Ms. Schechter to the exclusion of the actual panel members and other audience members. Many other audience members loudly agreed with her. (I kept silent, but certainly concurred.)

    4. At the time, it astonished me that the panel moderator didn’t interject about two or three minutes into Ms. Schechter’s notably question-free speech and say ‘OK, but we need to move on to other comments from panel members and audience members’ and insist it was someone else’s turn. I asked panelist Bradford Lyau about this lapse later, on Saturday evening: He clarified that, sadly, there hadn’t been a moderator: LosCon Programming had advised panelists they’d e-mail again to suggest (assign, whatever) a panel moderator, but never did so, and the panelists then did without one. In consequence, one audience member’s (IMO disruptive) speech held up the panel for a long, long time, against pretty much everyone else’s wishes (as far as I cold tell from sentiments expressed).

    5. Contrary to the statement attributed to Ms. Schechter (above), Benford did not say (let alone ‘declare’) that ‘This panel is over!’ when he gave up further panel participation in the face of Ms. Schechter’s derailing of the panel and walked out of the room. I don’t remember precisely when he said, but it was something on the order of ‘I don’t care to continue participating with this sort of interaction’. His sentiment was to personally disengage, and certainly not to declare the panel ‘over’. Ironically, Ms. Schechter herself did declare, loudly and peremptorily, almost exactly those words at an immediately subsequent panel I also attended, ‘We Have Always Been Here: Women in Fandom’, 11:30am in a different room. I walked in a few minutes late and — hello, small world — Ms. Schechter was there again, this time as moderator. Genny Dazzo was also finally present, as another of the five panelists.

    As I walked in, Schechter was complaining at length about Benford in the prior panel, claiming (falsely) that he’d forbade women novelists from writing about psi any more, among other things. After my friend Leigh Ann Hildebrand (also a panelist) had told a frankly horrifying story about assault, Dazzo spoke up to say that if Hildebrand never was willing to identify the assailant, nobody could in any obvious way fix the problem. (Dazzo literally phrased it that extremely mild way, making no demand of any kind against Hildebrand.) Schechter at this point cut Dazzo off completely and refused to allow her to comment further, claiming she had no right to require obligations of assault victims and proclaiming ‘This discussion is over!’, literally shouting down panelist Dazzo and not letting her speak. This conduct was so eyebrow-raising in a panel moderator that I spoke to Dazzo that evening about it, and said I would be bringing this conduct’s utter inappropriateness to the Ops’s attention (and did so).

    I take as given that lots of folks will consider the above all just my opinion, and fair enough. OTOH, to my knowledge, I’m the only person on this thread who was actually present at the panel under discussion (or the subsequent one). Just to make sure I didn’t get events and statements wrong, before leaving the LAX Marriott, I double-checked my recollection with Kenn Bates (who was also in the audience), panelist Bradford Lyau, panelist Genny Dazzo, and briefly with panelist Gregory Benford. (Fair disclosure: All of those except Benford are friends of mine.)

  14. @rochrist:

    I don’t get why these organizations can’t ever get out of their own way.

    Quick but accurate and fair response by a convention, while that convention is ongoing, to a CoC complaint can be very tricky. (How exactly things went this time for LosCon’s Ops and co-chairs is unclear, but they have my sympathies over obviously good-faith efforts to deal with what was doubtless a difficult and sudden blow-up.)

    You’re suddenly faced with a statement from one or two people. Probably you madly try to find usable contact telephone numbers for other panelists, but do you even have the right numbers? And even if you do, cellular reception at the Marriott is pretty sketchy, especially in the ballroom level where all the function space is. Other onlookers to check with: Do you even have their names, let alone their current cellular contact numbers? Probably not. But you know that tempus fugit, and there’ll be intense perceived pressure to Do Something while everyone is still on-site. In these circumstances, best efforts even by experienced volunteer conrunners can go pretty badly wrong. (Or not, in which case you probably won’t hear about that outcome.)

  15. @rob_matic:

    To be honest though, I don’t find the remarks terribly offensive either. Jemisin doesn’t have to be everyone’s type of thing, and names in different orthographies can be difficult.

    You mean like the way you silly non-Scandinavians claim to find the name ‘Eyjafjallajökull’ unintuitive and difficult to pronounce? And how every time I tell Americans about my Uncle Reidar, all they can think about is some M*A*S*H character? And how no hotel reception clerk outside Ireland appears able to pronounce ‘Deirdre Saoirse Moen’ correctly? ;->

    I can’t remember which names Benford stumbled over and crankily said he found difficult, but it seems frankly weird to proclaim that a CoC-violating offence against anyone, let alone anyone specific. (While hearing Benford’s stumble and then grumble, I was actually thinking of what filker Steve Savitzky said: “Never anger a bard, for your name sounds funny and scans to many popular songs.’ Putting ‘Benford’ into a rhyming dictionary… hmm.)

  16. Rick Moen: There were originally to be five panelists: Genny Dazzo’s name tent was there waiting for her, but she herself didn’t make it for some reason. (This made all the more odd Ms. Schechter’s complaint, that she made during her long litany of same, about the panel consisting only of white males, not to mention that Bradford Lyau was right in front of her when she said that.)

    Dazzo must have been a very late addition to the panel; she was never listed in the Programming Guide online as being part of it.

    Which, you know, was a major Programming Fail on the part of Loscon (one they apparently realized at some late point), to put only 4 male panelists on a panel of this topic, and one of them being someone who is known for making sexist and denigrating remarks to, and about, women SFF writers. 😐

  17. @Rick,

    All very nice, but unfortunately Benford then goes to prove the complainers right by massively doubling down and linking to that ‘victimhood’ screed.

  18. Rick Moen on November 30, 2018 at 2:39 am said:
    Ms. Schechter was front row left, furiously writing notes

    I have seen multiple write-ups of the panel mention this, as though it in some way spoke ill of Ms. Schechter, and I admit I find myself puzzled. I, too, “furiously” write notes during panels; lots of fans do. It shows that I’m engaged in the material and interested in the subject at hand–and, yes, sometimes those notes are critical of or argumentative toward the panelists, but so what? That too is a form of engagement.

  19. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the earlier actions by the con, allowing Benford to write his own exoneration and then distributing it as such is such a shocking failure.

    It’s for the con to decide (or have decided) whether Benford or anyone else broke the CoC. However, as described he seems to have made patronising remarks specifically about Jemisin while being dismissive of the “new masters” he’d been invited to discuss. Then his statement tries to gloss over things by calling it a general remark. I doubt any of that rises to the level of a strict CoC violation, but none of it actually makes Benford look very good.

  20. Regarding the victimhood article, I’m still reading it (it’s very long, and I’m dipping into it while working). I wouldn’t call it a screed. It is of course broadly supportive of Benford’s position, else why would he link to it, and you may not agree with the authors’ points, but it’s worth reading nonetheless. It’s thoughtful, thought-provoking and nuanced. It doesn’t appear dishonest. Most commenters here are very familiar with notions of systemic bias, systemic oppression etc, but you could think of this as a description of ‘victimhood’ for people not familiar with (or not accepting of) those concepts, particularly for older people or those not close to current academic discourse on these matters. It’s not uncritical of victimhood, but neither is that culture condemned outright. And it does talk about how victimhood culture is in danger of being weaponized by the right:

    “We also see claims of victimhood becoming a key part of the campus conservative message. Conservatives should definitely complain about the suppression of free speech on campus. But sometimes this takes the form of engaging in intentionally offensive speech in order to get a reaction from the left that then becomes the basis of further complaints. This actually combines both of the dignity-rejecting strategies — the embrace of offensiveness and the embrace of victimhood. Conservative groups that have brought in the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, seem more interested in stirring up controversy and angering the left than in advancing conservative ideas.”

    I think we can all think remember recent examples of this in SF circles.

    The authors mention three cultural archetypes in this context. The first of the older two is honour culture, where people are quick to take insult, even if none was intended, and are expected to defend their honour personally;’ if they don’t, they lose their standing in society. The second is dignity culture, where people have and are given by society a high sense of worth, and so, the authors claim, are less quick to take insult, and when they do, feel less compelled to defend themselves and instead resort to some higher power (police, HR dept etc) to resolve disputes, without the shame in doing so someone primarily concerned with honour might feel. They claim that honour culture was dominant in Western society until the 1970s or so, when dignity culture took over (not my own experience growing up as a weak nerdy boy in a tough mining area of the north east of England). They coin victimhood culture as some amalgam of the two: people quick to take insult but seeking redress from authority rather than by themselves. I guess they’re stacking the deck here – they seem to think this is the worst of both worlds – but, you know, no harm in reading what honest people of differing opinions have to say. I think at the least it helps explain why people still caught up in the honour culture might find claims of vicimhood hard to swallow.

  21. This strikes me as a lot of smoke from a small fire, but I understand the concerns on both sides. I’d just like to point out that the “honey” comment came naturally to Dr. Benford, a southerner. In his youth it was used quite casually to perfect strangers, and I gather still is.

    On the more amusing item of weird names, even native-born Americans can have difficulty with “Chilson”. It rhymes with “Wilson” but there’s a tendency to make it “Child-son”. If so simple a name can be misconstrued, the rest of you haven’t a chance….

  22. “Those names have too many vowels” after hearing a name spelled repeatedly sounds like someone who isn’t trying, perhaps because they want to say something they think is funny. Otherwise, I’d expect them to give up and try to track it down later. People often have trouble spelling my name, and I’m used to saying things like “a lot of people have trouble with that.” But if someone asked me to go through “N, Z as in zebra, W, E, I, G as in green” three times and then told me it was too long, or had too many consonants or the wrong vowels, I would be annoyed and not amused.

    That’s with a name that some Americans may think of as odd or foreign, but not generally as “one of those names”: they don’t generally jump to assuming I’m a foreigner or recent immigrant.

    @Rob, it may come “naturally” for Benford to use “honey” casually, but not everything that “comes naturally” is respectful. Context matters, and this context is a broad/unspecific criticism of the person’s writing; “honey” there isn’t a friendly endearment, it’s a put-down, an assertion that he gets to judge her work because he’s older and more experienced, and maybe because he’s white and male. (I notice that you refer to him as “Dr. Benford” here, which emphasizes his status.)

  23. This is why you have polices and procedures, and FOLLOW THEM! I mean, you can still get in a heck of a mess that way, but almost every serious fail I’ve seen has been people deciding to wing it, and not following their own process. It is also why it’s useful to remember that most (but emphatically not all) violations of CoC are not emergencies, and do not require instant, thoughtless responses. They do require prompt and proportionate response, but that doesn’t usually happen on the instant. (There are emergencies. Treat them as such. But a kerfuffle on a panel is almost certainly not one.)

    Here’s the thing. Harassment and its attendant problems do not require crisis management, they require problem-solving. It’s a constant, long-standing, serious problem. If we treat each instance and a one-off crisis, we are failing to grapple with the endemic and systemic nature of the problem.

  24. Cliff, thank you for reading that article. It sounds interesting and I’ll check it out later. I’m always a bit instinctively wary when someone starts complaining about ‘victimhood culture’ because it’s such a dog whistle.

    As far as the actual incident, I think the panel itself sounds like both parties misunderstood something the other did. This is the kind of thing that should be resolved between reasonable adults.

    The con personnel ignoring their own procedures, first by their hasty overreaction and then by letting one party write their opinion for them, is far more concerning. That is a huge problem. The people running this con are apparently not professional or reliable enough to do the bare minimum of following their own procedures.

  25. @Cliff, wow. (Note that I’m addressing the ideas you’re summarizing, not you or your transcription.)

    The second is dignity culture, where people have and are given by society a high sense of worth, and so, the authors claim, are less quick to take insult, and when they do, feel less compelled to defend themselves and instead resort to some higher power

    Ask any person of color in the U.S. whether they ever participated in dignity culture as so defined, and whether they ever felt confident that a higher power would treat them justly. The whole idea that this was widespread in the 1970s, or any time afterward, is utter bullshit. The idea that dignified people resort to a higher power assumes that the higher powers must be on the side of the just applicant. Not many of us are fortunate enough to have had this experience. Certainly nobody who’s ever had to deal with HR would believe in that assumption ever afterward.

    edit: To prevent assumptions, no, I’m white; I listen to people of color when they talk about their experiences.

  26. @Madame Hardy – One of the reasons I like this forum (beyond the obvious cool news and discussion of SF) is the intelligent debates about these sorts of issues, and the fact that most people here are of a left-leaning/liberal persuasion. I like to think I am too. I also know I have a lot to learn still (I’m an old white guy), and reading these threads helps enormously with that. I don’t usually put my head above the parapet when these discussions come up: like a couple of others have said, I fear being accused of being racist or sexist (I am aware of my own biases on these fronts and do my best). Further, I often find my views evolving as the discussions here evolve.

    So, thanks for pointing this out. I must admit, the point you make was nagging at me, and I perhaps should have reflected further and addressed it in my post. But if you’re criticizing the article based on my paraphrase, I’d suggest you read it first. I may be doing it a disservice. (The authors of a book are being interviewed there, and they themselves are quoting a previous book for that particular 70s comment.) Or maybe they’re just clever apologists for kind of nasty ideas.

    (And, yeah, I agree that HR is the pseudo-cuddly part of the corporation whose real duty is to look after the corporation.)

  27. You’d be surprised, but a lot of people (even adults) make fun of a name like “Olav Rokne,” so I have some degree of sympathy for those who take umbrage at comments about “names that have too many vowels.”

    That being said, I’m not sure I’d support shouting down a panelist over such comments, and certainly wouldn’t see the value in sending security guards to escort them away from a subsequent event at the con.

    Let’s be real here. There’s a difference between questionable choices of words, and abusive language. Everything I’ve heard seems to indicate that this falls into the former category.

    It’s not kosher to call a someone “honey,” nor to speak condescendingly. But it’s completely different from outright insults, or from dehumanizing language.

  28. Olav, you are more correct than you may realise. And I get loads of trouble over my last name as well, from all sorts of groups of people.

  29. @Rick Moen, Thank you. Your comments fully reflect the information that was eventually available to Ops and which led to the final statement made about the incident. I will add that my report to the Board concluded with “there are no good guys in this matter” (more or less).

  30. Rick Moen: 2. Contrary to what is claimed in the first paragraph, Benford was not ‘removed from the convention’. To the best of my understanding, he was ordered to leave (and escorted out of) his autograph session in the dealers’ room in progress between 1 and 2 pm Saturday.

    I don’t accept your guess as a correction, since what the maker of the CoC complaint — Schechter — says she was told by Ops seems more relevant:

    She said the conchairs overreacted or were extreme or something, and that she preferred to talk to everyone involved to try and reach a resolution, but now that Greg had been kicked out, he might not be willing to talk.

    You are, however, correct that Benford continued to be around the convention. I didn’t include this in the post, but Schechter also says —

    Later that night, I was on the party floor and saw Greg wearing his badge and walking into a party room. I told the staff person in the hallway that Greg had been kicked out but was still wearing his badge and was at one of the parties. She said she would call her department head to take care of it, so again, I went about my business. The next morning, I saw him still wearing his badge and going into the dealers’ room. I told a staff person and they said that when they kicked him out the day before, they did not take the badge because he was wearing it and they didn’t want to “assault” him.

    Schechter was functioning under the impression of Benford’s status given her by Ops. What she was told wasn’t accurate. I’ve been told by LASFS’ lawyer even he doesn’t know what Benford’s status was after McGuire removed him from the autograph session. But I guess the facts speak for themselves — he hadn’t actually been banned from the con, just pulled off program. (He was scheduled for a Saturday 8 p.m. program “The Realities of an Apocalypse.” Whether or not he appeared for it would be useful to know.)

  31. @rob_matic : “names in different orthographies can be difficult”

    It takes a special kind of person to live, as Benford has, in Southern California for decades and still struggle with Latinx names.

  32. Rick Moen reported: ” Contrary to what is claimed in the first paragraph, Benford was not ‘removed from the convention’. To the best of my understanding, he was ordered to leave (and escorted out of) his autograph session in the dealers’ room in progress between 1 and 2 pm Saturday. The con didn’t, e.g., also yank his badge, nor require him to leave convention space at the LAX Marriott, or anything like that. He was fully in attendance, all through the rest of the con.”
    Not so. The con chair and hotel marshal said they had authority to ban me from all con-rented space, ie the bottom floor, for all the con. I went upstairs to my room, restaurants & 17th floor that night. Next morn came message to come to the Ops room where they interviewed me for an hour. Nobody took my badge. I left midday, before the con ended. I actually enjoyed the con, because my “ascerbic” sense of humor has dealt with UCI victim culture for decades, undergrad foibles and fashions, etc. The Ops head was aghast that the chairs did not abide by the CoC they cited. Their notion that it allowed them to “censor speech if we want to” as one remarked, was laughable.

  33. Gregory Benford: Thanks for that clarification. It makes sense of what had seemed conflicting perceptions.

  34. @Reuben – you’re right! If only I’d known about that link to that politically impartial website beforehand, I could have scrolled down to the second article: A Guide To Conservative Articles, which ones are trolling you, and which are simply bad.

    I’ll bookmark that so that in the future I never have to read any counter-left thought again.

  35. My impression at this remove:

    – the original complainant (Schechter) was an obnoxious person. Possibly to the point where she earned a complaint herself but as none was made this last is moot.
    – Benford’s comments were also annoying and possibly worthy of a complaint after the fact.
    – no panel discussion should ever go forward short a moderator.
    -the con screwed up multiple times in its handling, and not even in a consistent direction.
    -follow the CoC. Do not improvise on the spot for a standard complaint. Unusual measures require unusual circumstances.
    – being rude on a panel is not cause for an embarrassing and public removal from another session where nothing untoward is happening. It could have waited or at worst been accomplished my a discreet word. Nobody’s life would have been ruined by waiting or having someone come by and talk in his ear.

  36. Who said anything about impartiality? Quillette is a very bad website in part because of its pretenses towards impartiality; it pretends to be a bastion of free thought, but it’s astroturfing extremely mainstream right-wing ideas that you can find on any cable channel or White House press release, and claiming nobody else is brave enough to print this! At least with shit like the Daily Caller or whatever you know where they stand.

    Now that I think about it, there’s a real philosophical link between the sleight-of-hand performed by Quillette, and Benford’s insidious gatekeeping (which Annalee Flower Horne had some great thoughts on.) They both come from the same assumption of “where I stand is ground level, and where you stand is a deviation.”

  37. So I’m Justine and I was the head of programming for Loscon 45. I appreciated the summary that Mike put together, and some of the clarification from other folks here, but I did want to set the record straight on a couple of things:

    1. Genny Dazzo was supposed to be on the New Masters panel, and also wanted to be on the Women in Fandom panel, but was also the con committee person running Green Room, so could only be on one, and chose to be on the Women in Fandom. This was decided relatively late, and her table tent wasn’t pulled from the New Masters panel. At that late point in scheduling, it missed my attention that this made the panel all male – I usually try to avoid all gender panels, unless specifically called out, like for the women in fandom and women in STEM panels.

    2. Moderators were an issue, we had a lack of qualified volunteers for moderators this year. I’m recommending the next programming department head (I am taking time away from cons to complete my Masters) specifically recruit qualified moderators.

    3. The move to remove Greg Benford was an escalation, after he did not follow the suggestion of the chairs to not do any more panels and “take the rest of this year off” which was unfortunately unclear. During the discussion where Greg Benford was requested to stay off programming for the rest of the day, he used honey in reference to the co-chair, Crys Pretzman, and also used foul language toward the chairs. I was told at that point that he was not going to be on programming for the rest of the day; I did not get a chance to pull him officially from the schedule, as I was dealing with different programming related issues.

    The chairs thought that he understood that he wasn’t to be at his autographs session. When he went to the autographs session anyway, he escalated the situation according to the chairs, and at that point it was decided that asking him to leave the convention space was the best decision. That whole interaction went poorly, but he was not removed from the confloor for saying something questionable at a panel, but rather because he failed to follow the directions given by the con com.

    4. Asking a panelist who has behaved poorly not to be on panels any further that day is a reasonable action that we have taken with other speakers in the past, who also felt it was reasonable after discussion of their behavior. It’s also likely that once we had heard both sides, Isabel would have also been pulled from further panels for her behavior as well. We didn’t get a chance to do that, because the situation was escalated.

    5. All involved agree that Con Ops should have been engaged from the beginning – there’s no disagreement about that. I’m also working with ConOps to make sure the procedure for handling program participant related incidents is very clear for the next department head.

  38. @ambyr:

    I have absolutely no problem with either Ms. Schechter or any other convention-member badge sitting writing notes in the most prominent audience seat, closest to the panelists, and poised to, if possible, be recognised first. To people who do that: Hey, you do you.

    I happen to have observed Ms. Schechter doing that at multiple Worldcon panels and now at LosCon, and in every case (even when audience participation is supposed to be questions), what has followed when she (usually) gets picked first is a stemwinder, notably question-free critique of one or more of the panelists. One might be overly cynical for assuming she came hoping for, and prepared in the described fashion, for exactly such self-assigned zampolit duty, or maybe not. You be the judge.

    @Mike Glyer and others:

    Thanks for the clarification. I only knew (and said) that I kept seeing Benford around with badge, and in our brief conversation in the lobby Saturday evening said only that he’d been abruptly kicked out of his autograph session, not ‘removed from the convention’, so the latter claim seemed in conflict with what I kept seeing.

    @Olav Rokne (whose name doesn’t seem at all odd to me — go figure):

    Since you mention that, Benford didn’t call anyone honey, his remark being addressed to hypothetical non-hard-SF authors, not anyone specific. (I thought the implication that soft-SF authors are typically female rather not-good, but that’s a different matter.)

  39. @Rick: it’s not totally clear from the reporting here how much separation there was between Benford talking about Jemisin and his use of ‘honey’.

  40. I should add that the “all involved” in my last point was likely an overstatement, I didn’t catch it when I was editing

  41. @Rob —

    This strikes me as a lot of smoke from a small fire, but I understand the concerns on both sides. I’d just like to point out that the “honey” comment came naturally to Dr. Benford, a southerner. In his youth it was used quite casually to perfect strangers, and I gather still is.

    I can attest to the fact that words like “honey”, “sweetie”, “love”, “dear”, and so on are still very frequently used in the South, by both men and women, and are often applied to complete strangers, especially by folks in the service industries. I understand that words like that can seem quite condescending to non-Southerners, but down here (Tennessee for me), it all depends on context.

    I *also* agree that the context in which the term was used in this case sounds rather condescending — but not every condescension is a CoC violation, for heaven’s sake.

    Additionally — I’ll start taking grandiose complaints about authors not getting their science right just as soon as the complainers start condemning the widespread use of things like hyperdrives, transporters, and ansibles. Until then, a little handwaving can do marvelous things for a story!

  42. @justine I don’t have a dog in this fight and if anything, I’m predisposed to not have much use for Benford, but I don’t get the conflating of ‘panels’ with autograph sessions. And not allowing him to do a scheduled autograph session seems more punitive to his fans than to him frankly. Absent him actually being removed entirely from the convention, not being able to do the autograph session seems sketch.

  43. Jake on November 30, 2018 at 11:00 am said:

    It takes a special kind of person to live, as Benford has, in Southern California for decades and still struggle with Latinx names.

    I live in a non-Anglophone culture, speak the language to a decent extent and can still struggle.

    I’m probably one of those special kinds of person as well, I guess.

  44. If (as was described in this report) somebody dictated a Latinx name to me letter by letter, I could write it down. I could transcribe any name letter by letter unless it was in a non-Latin script or had special characters that the speaker couldn’t describe.

    I mispronounce a lot of people’s names, although I try. I can’t reproduce sounds, but I sure the heck can write letters down.

  45. @Contrarius– I think pretty much everyone here is aware of the use of “honey” in Southern culture, but we are also capable of understanding context, and when you call someone you are criticizing “honey”, it’s pretty much never just a common/harmless linguistic/cultural tic, and I think everyone here is also aware of the gender dynamics behind various uses of the word. It was clearly a gendered expression in this case and the implication behind it, which Mr. Benford cannot possibly be unaware of, is not nice.

  46. @Reuben – I was being sarcastic. The website you quoted, saying Quillette is bad, is itself clearly leftwing. Why should I assume one website is bad because another one with opposing political leanings says so?

    Anyway, I was less concerned about the politics of the website: I was more interested in the views of the authors of the book reviewed there. Have you read the book or the interview?

    Madame Hardy made a pretty telling criticism of it, or at least of my description of it. A point in the article that initially resonated with me was the notion of poor working class folk not being a victim group afforded the same level of concern as others by identity politicians. However, my wife was good enough to point me to an article demonstrating black kids from wealthy backgrounds were significantly more likely end up imprisoned than poor white kids. I didn’t expect that to be the case (I of course know it’s the case assuming equal socio-economic backgrounds), and it begins to make me doubt the intellectual of honesty of the authors after all.

  47. Okay, no doubt plenty of people will tell me I’m wrong, but Latino names aren’t spelled weirdly or much at odds from their pronunciation from a standpoint of normal American English. Yes, they are different from English names, but no one who grew up in or has lived in a section of the country with a large Latino population should be at all challenged when the names are spelled out for them.

    And yes, I know that people can be oddly resistant to correct spellings of quite simple names (“Elisabeth. With an s, not a z. No, E-l-i-S-a-b-e-t-h. Carey, C-a-r-e-y. No, not Kerry. Or Kerrey. Or Carrey. C-a-r-e-y.) Even when they are theoretically copying it down from the correctly spelled card I handed them.

    The thing is, though, I don’t regard that as proof that it’s unreasonable to expect them to listen, pay attention, and get my name right. I consider them to be willful idiots who just can’t accept that different spellings and unfamiliar names are a normal thing in a large and diverse country, and can’t be bothered to extend the courtesy of genuinely trying to get it right, and paying attention.

    This doesn’t mean I never spell people’s names wrong. It does mean that I make a real effort to get it right, apologize if I get it wrong, and when there’s a real communication fail, as can happen, I consider alternatives, such as asking the person to write it down for me (often a help in pronunciation, too), or whether getting the name written down can be deferred to a near-future point when the ambient noise level is lower.

    What I don’t do is make Clever Remarks about too many or too few vowels unless the person whose name it is has initiated that in a way designed to lower frustration rather than to express it.

    Privileged older white guy saying that someone’s name has the wrong number of vowels is always a bad look.

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