By David Futrelle
The famously and rather ludicrously prolific science fiction and popular science writer Isaac Asimov — who claimed to have written or edited some 500 books — was born a century ago this month, and the occasion has inspired tributes in a variety of languages.
But there’s an uneasy tone to some of these tributes, because this longtime sci fi hero, who died in 1992, had a dark side hidden in plain sight — he was known not only as a tireless prose machine but also as a man who regularly, and enthusiastically groped women and sometimes tried to force them to kiss him.
Donald Trump bragged about grabbing women by the pussy; Asimov liked to grab and pinch women’s asses. Indeed, as Stephanie Zwan has documented, he was so well-known for this behavior that he was once asked to deliver a speech at a science fiction convention on “The Positive Power of Posterior Pinching.” While Asimov declined, partly because of the hassle of finding women who would consent to appear on stage with him so he could demonstrate his technique on them, he did suggest that he might change his mind “if the posteriors in question were of particularly compelling interest.”
Normally, of course, Asimov didn’t ask permission before pinching, or doing anything else; as he once joked to fellow science fiction luminary Frederick Pohl that, using his particular technique, “you get slapped a lot, but you get laid a lot, too.”
Within the science fiction community Asimov’s behavior was treated (at least by men) as little more than a sort of side effect of his affable personality — like a tendency to make bad puns, which might occasion both groans and laughs. Indeed, it was his reputation as a basically harmless lech that allowed him to get away with routine sexual harassment and assault for decades.
As biographer Alec Nevala-Lee has noted, Asimov’s
reputation as a groper became a running joke among science fiction fans. The writer and editor Judith Merril recalled that Asimov was known in the 1940s as “the man with a hundred hands,” and that he “apparently felt obliged to leer, ogle, pat, and proposition as an act of sociability.” …
It was all framed as nothing but good fun, as were his interactions with women once his success as an author allowed him to proceed with greater impunity. He writes in his memoirs of his custom of “hugging all the young ladies” at his publisher’s office, which was viewed indulgently by such editors as Timothy Seldes of Doubleday, who said, “All you want to do is kiss the girls and make collect calls. You’re welcome to that, Asimov.” In reality, his attentions were often unwanted, and women found excuses to be away from the building whenever he was scheduled to appear.
After his celebrity increased, his behavior at conventions became more egregious, as the editor Edward L. Ferman reminisced of a fan gathering in the late 1950s: “Asimov … instead of shaking my date’s hand, shook her left breast.”
Another Great Man who turns out to have been a massive shit.
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@Weird Eddie
Yeah, I don’t think I worded the second part of my comment very well. My point was that it’s so common for famous/powerful people to have their misogynistic behavior swept under the rug (especially back in the days when the idea of women having bodily autonomy was even less accepted than it is now). Given that, it seems that Asimov’s behavior must have been especially egregious, even by the standards of the day.
@WWTH
Hoping the best for Darrow. Good to know he doesn’t have cancer.
Y’know, I can’t stop hearing moregeekthan’s name being shouted by the Beastie Boys:
MORE GEEK THAN HARA
Yeah, Asimov was a bit of an arrogant asshat and a self-declared dirty old man. (When you have someone who is on record as saying that he’d only ever met two people he considered more intelligent than him, I think ‘arrogant’ is the least of the adjectives that could be used.)
He knew what he did was wrong, but he also considered it ‘all in good fun’, had been able to do it with impunity so far, and he had more than his share of enablers willing to make sure his ‘good fun’ wasn’t affected.
None of this is news to people who have been around the SF fan community for a while. But, sadly, xkcd’s ‘today’s lucky ten thousand’ works for bad news as well.
Re cool SF writers: one of faves, who unfortunately doesn’t get a lot of coverage these days, is Joanna Russ. Student of Tiptree, incredibly skilled and incredibly militant writer, and much harder-eyed and less forgiving than Le Guin. Plus her SF worldbuilding is just wonderfully gonzo in the best tradition of 60s and 70s space opera. Some of her views are pretty dated but she’s still very worth reading IMO.
Sadly most of her books are out of print, but you can still find copies of some of them on eBay, and a few have been scanned and uploaded to the Internet Archive.
@Kat
Belated thank you for that link, I’m sharing it with various friends and acquaintances. 🙂
There’s a reason I’ve tried to cut books written by men out of my literary diet as much as possible. When there are so many better writers out there and so little time to read, there’s no reason for the works of men to be anything more than a guilty pleasure. It’s just easier that way.
At least, that’s my take on it.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
As for Asimov getting worst with time even though social consciousness about sexual harrasment was groing, there are two important things to remember. The first one is that as second wave feminism was decrying behavior like that of Asimov and so many others and the general perception of women in culture, relationship and sexuality, Asimov probably didn’t felt concerned by those critiques and warning. Let’s take an example.
If people do X and one day people start protesting X, even if they present excellent arguments, even if a person doing X hears them, the very first thing they will learn in 90% of cases is not stopping doing X. They will learn that doing X is wrong EXCEPT when its them doing it because they aren’t quite like the others doing X and they don’t do it with bad intention/in the same way/they are better at it or any other specious excuses. Most people will not change their behavior when they are told a behavior is wrong. Most people find excuses to continue, justify or carve themselves exceptions. That’s a fundamental and common human weakness who is compounded by privilege and popularity.
The second is linked to education and more specifically moral reasonning skills. If you have been raised in the mist of a culture that legitimise sexual objectification of women and a general disregard of women or even people’s feeling, the type of culture in which Asimov grew up in, you simply don’t develop good empathic skills. Without good empathic skills, it’s extremely difficult to crb bad behaviors that affect others. How can you be less offensive when you struggle to identify when people are offended in the first place? Even if you accept the idea that being offensive is wrong, you will remain offensive and refuse to aknowledge it because your senses, dulled and missused, are telling you everything is fine.
What Asimov did was bad. It’s a horrendous behavior to have and it harmed many women. Calling him out right now, almost 30 years after his death might have some cathartic effect for his numerous victims who should never have endured that, but its otherwise completely pointless. But Asimov behavior was just the symptome of a diseased culture. I think that in many cases of sexual harrasment or assault there is often too much focus on the perpetrator, the tree, instead of the culture that molded them, the forest, especially when the perpetrator is a dead man.
A third possible factor for Asimov getting worst with time is age. Many people grow more bold with age as they become less less likely to face backlash, but also with the loss of cognitive function essential for things like restrain. It’s not rare for young libidinous men to become molestor as they age; your archetypical “pervy old man”. Popularity, power, poor empathic skills and a misogynist culture are the perfect ingredients to produce harrassers and rapists and it did.
Yeah, that’s exactly the point. It’s not that he didn’t know better. It’s that he did know better and kept doing it.
No it’s not. By calling out great men (or women for that matter, speaking of Tiptree) even if they’re dead, we spread the message that greatness and privilege do not justify abusive behavior. We warn future great men that predatory behavior will not be tolerated just because they’re great.
It’s not about cancelling Asimov to the extent that you’re considered a horrible person if you read his books. It’s about making the future better and safer.
True, and that’s exactly why we should call out harassment and rape instead of defending harassers and rapists.
@epronovost
It’s not pointless. In addition to what WWTH said, it demonstrates that such behavior is wrong and helps us see the problem and work to address it. You’re right that Asimov is dead, but the society that created him is very much around. We can use him as a case study in rape culture to begin to end it.
That’s still not an excuse. Yes, old men sometimes have reduced inhibitions and can assault people, but many old men somehow manage not to be molesters. My great-grandfather was 90 when he died and he never raped anyone, for example.
@ epronvost
I would have to disagree. I’ll try to articulate why; I hope I don’t make too much of a mess of it.
It’s related to the idea that we don’t excuse behaviour because “it was different back then“.
I think social pressure, including shame, can be a great tool for modifying behaviour.
So the fact that even years after the fact we condemn behaviour can have an effect on people now.
They are aware, consciously or otherwise, that there’s no sort of societal ‘statute of limitations’ or olly olly oxen free after a certain time has elapsed.
So even if they are engaging in behaviour that does get a pass by contemporary popular standards; they know that one day, even if it is after their death, their memory will be tarnished. Any good works they may have done or significant achievements will be nullified.
At one end of the scale you have thing like my particular hobby horse with the animal stuff. I think it assists the cause if people are aware that their descendants will be as embarrassed by them as we would be about bear bating ancestors today. But It’s also why we prosecute concentration camp guards in their 90s. That has a direct effect on them of course; but even if they escape justice by dying, the societal refusal to give them a pass because “it’s all history now” may, I think, have at least some deterrent effect on people today.
I hope that makes some sense; someone cleverer than me can no doubt put it better.
ETA: Yeah; like WWTH and Naglfar just did.
I probably didn’t express it correctly, but what I found pointless is talking about Asimov case and staying at it; a sort of “that’s a terrible thing to do and he was shit head for doing so” repeated ad nauseam. Cases like Asimov should serve to illustrate and bring the debate to the level of society and not be “marred” in epidermic reactions about Asimov personnal morality.
I fear reactionnaries thrive on this sort of thing. As long as they can keep the discussion centered on a specific person they can preserve the source of it all from the worst of the scrutiny. Any person who does or excuse that sort of behavior will simply say: I’m “not as bad as Asimov; women actually like it when I do it cuz I’m super alpha” or some other shitty excuses or twisty logic.
Reactionnary can also appeal to the dead person’s legacy to attack feminism as some sort of joyless movement hellbent to destroying all the people you admire and love, a “no fun brigate” and a new form of moral and sexual puritan. Yes, pointing out Asimov flaws is important, but staying laser focus on an individual case like this can be harmful. I guess David missed an opportunity to segway into the broader issue of which Asimov is only part off which would have made for a more interesting entry.
A friend of my mother’s died of AIDS in the early ’90s. It was pretty bad towards the end. The last time I saw him, he looked like a skeleton with skin from a piece of chicken that had been out of the fridge too long pulled over it. He died in a hospice, blind, delirious with fever and pain and crying for a mother who hadn’t spoken to him since she caught him kissing another boy from high school in the late 1950s.
God bless that blood donor, whoever they were. Sometimes there is justice in this world.
All the filth saying “he was a product of his time”, either out of intellectual dishonesty or sheer ignorance, have it backwards.
His time was a product of men who thought and felt and behaved as he did. And those times WILL come again if we don’t punish men like him wherever they’re found.
???
Moggie:
Of course he did. My father filled my head with a ton of this stuff. Women PRETEND to dislike being leered at or pinched or whatever, but that’s just a public display to defend their honor. They really take it as a compliment, and as we all know, women get even madder at you if you don’t stare at them!
He also had this wonderful defense of slavery!
Yeah, I’m deprogramming myself a little at a time.
People are complicated. It’s worth remembering that Asimov also had female protagonists when few other sci-fi authors did (Susan Calvin being the most famous) and wrote defenses of feminism. That doesn’t excuse his behaviors, of course.
@Suttkus
“I’m deprogramming myself a little at a time”?
You sound like you think this is a process that has an end point. Doesn’t work like that. You’re always going to have impulses you inherited from him. Your first instinct is always going to be to see certain people in a way that is damaging to them. Always, until the day you die. People aren’t that changeable.
If you really want to be a better person you need to live every day with discipline. What not to do, what not to think, what not to consume and above all how to defer to those your body and brain scream at you to dominate.
Good luck. You’ll need it.
Speaking of literature, diversity, and Chuck Tingle, I’m sure people here will appreciate the current Romance Writers of America homepage.
Worth checking out for a laugh, though I am ignorant of the events surrounding it.
Famous/”successful” people being abusers is the rule rather than the exception. Good people don’t seek fame or wealth. They just want to settle down with family and friends.
@gijoel
Regarding your link, that’s also a shame since I enjoyed reading one or two of Roald Dahl’s books. Granted, I was a child and I had to read fiction daily at school until secondary. The teachers either didn’t know or care and just cared more that children were reading. The teachers did take a racist incident seriously one time though, when someone called another person by a certain remark (not a slur but by referring to their skin color). The author thing just went unnoticed by them.
Sorry to all if my previous post came across as implying Correia was a good person that was led astray or anything like that. I intended to say that I was just surprised by how terrible he turned out to be because his attitudes didn’t really come through in his novel, or at least not to me in my initial readthrough. It seems I didn’t communicate that as clearly as I thought.
@Definitely not Steve, I guess you mean romancewritersofamerica.com, rather than their real site. Chuck Tingle strikes again!
Claire Ryan documents the story so far here.
Thanks Moggie, that’s the one! I haven’t figured out a way to post links here without my posts being lost to the void.
@Definitely Not Steve
Well, it seems Chuck knows a thing or two about the void judging by his websites, so maybe he can help you.
@Naglfar – the void crabs, at least 😛
@Definitely not steve – You should see a link button above the comment box (third button on the top). Select the text you want to link and cut and paste the URL into the pop-up box.
I think the catch for this link function is that you need “http” not “https”. But if there’s a https and you change it to http, it’ll work, at least in my experience. You could also just cut and paste the whole link into the comment box.
Grain of salt: this is coming from a non-techy user and on your side there may be issues with platforms, plug-ins and other things I don’t understand!
This is usually true, but not always. Some websites are not set up to automatically redirect from http to https. But for most websites this does work.
That said, I am pretty sure I’ve been able to link to https addresses before without issues. It’s not always easy to tell what will inadvertently trigger the spam filter, unfortunately.