I’m still scrambling to catch up with everything after last week’s book release. Huge thanks to everyone who supported, signal-boosted, posted reviews, came to the events, and so on.

A lot has been happening, and I don’t know that I’ll be able to talk about everything I want to, but I’ll try…starting with the sexual harassment/assault accusation against George Takei.

We’ve seen a lot of these stories coming out recently. It feels like the Weinstein revelations helped to break the dam of silence, and we’re beginning to hear from victims who have been suppressed for decades.

In the case of Takei, model Scott Brunton accused Takei of groping his genitals while he was unconscious. There’s also a suggestion that Takei might have drugged him. This allegedly happened at Takei’s house in 1981.

Takei has denied the accusation, saying he has no memory of ever knowing Brunton.

However, a radio interview with Howard Stern a month earlier included the following exchange:

Stern asked Takei if he had ever grabbed a man’s genitals against his will.

Takei paused, said “uh oh” and laughed. Stern repeated the question and Takei said: “Some people are kind of skittish, or maybe, um, uh, afraid, and you’re trying to persuade.”

Stern’s co-host, Robin Quivers, asked if Takei did “this grabbing at work”. Takei said: “Oh, no, no, no, it wasn’t at work. It was either in my home. They came to my home … it didn’t involve power over the other.”

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Like many others, I’ve admired and respected George Takei for ages. I recognize that I very much don’t want to believe Takei did this.

I also know false accusations, while they do happen, are rare. And while Takei’s interview says nothing about drugging people, he does admit to grabbing men’s genitals against their will, which he justifies as “trying to persuade.”

As I said on a friend’s FB post, I’m still processing. But I’m seeing a lot of reactions that are troubling as hell.

1. “I’ve met George Takei and he’s always been a gentleman” and “I’m friends with Takei and don’t believe he could do this.”

Harassers don’t go around wearing signs that say “I drug and grope people against their will.” They don’t greet everyone they meet with a hearty handshake to the genitals. Abusers tend to be very good at maintaining a pleasant, friendly public persona. The fact that you’ve never seen someone behave inappropriately doesn’t mean it’s never happened.

And yes, Takei has been outspoken against harassment and abuse and such. Unfortunately, there are predators even among anti-rape, anti-harassment circles.

2. “Why would Brunton wait all these years before saying anything?”

This is the same criticism being thrown at accusers against Moore, Spacey, Weinstein, and so many others. There are too many real, valid reasons to list here, but some of them include:

• Fear of the consequences of speaking out
• Shock and confusion over what happened
• A desire to “get on with your life” and not relive the assault
• Believing you’re alone
• The power difference between you and your harasser

3. “This whole thing is turning into a witch hunt” and “It’s McCarthyism all over again!”

Why? Because there are so many accusations and revelations coming out?

We as a society have spent decades silencing victims of sexual harassment. What the hell did you expect it to look like when the dam finally began to crumble?

Victims of harassment — particularly women — have been saying for ages that this is a huge problem. Most of the stories we’re seeing involve multiple victims coming forward, and most of their accounts are corroborated by others. The Takei accusation feels like an outlier in some respects, since to the best of my knowledge, Brunton is the only one to have spoken out against him.

What pisses me off the most about this deflection is that when people try to defend Takei by calling it a witch hunt, they’re undermining everyone who’s been speaking out about their harassment. They’re suggesting all of these victims are lying, caught up in hysteria and publicity.

If you want to say you don’t believe a particular allegation, that’s one thing. If you say it’s all a witch hunt, then intentionally or not, you’re joining everyone else who’s silenced victims and helped to perpetuate this harassment and abuse for so many decades.

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Like I said, I love George Takei and his work. I don’t want the accusation to be true. But Takei’s interview is troubling as hell. And so are some of the knee-jerk defenses I’m seeing from others who simply don’t want to believe.

There’s no such thing as a Nice Guy.

Not because all guys are monstrous, evil, puppy-kicking scum, but because we’re all human. We have moments of kindness and generosity, and we also have asshole moments. The ratio varies from one person to the next, but the mixture’s there in all of us.

I bring this up because it’s relevant to the ongoing conversation about sexual harassment in Hollywood, in SF/F, and pretty much everywhere. More than a million people spoke up this week with the #MeToo hashtag, talking about their own experiences being harassed. According to a 2011 United Nations report:

• Between 40 and 50 percent of women in European Union countries experience unwanted sexual advancements, physical contact or other forms of sexual harassment at their workplace.
• In the United States, 83 percent of girls aged 12 to 16 experience some for of sexual harassment in public schools.

It would be a lot easier if the harassers were all mustache-twirling villains, heartless evildoers with zero redeeming qualities.

You know. Bad Guys.

The trouble is, most harassers and rapists and abusers are just…people. They’re friends and family members and coworkers and colleagues. A lot of the time, they’re perfectly pleasant. Maybe they have a great sense of humor. Maybe they always shovel their neighbor’s driveway after it snows. Maybe they donate money to animal rescue every month.

This is the first part of the Nice Guy problem. Because when someone speaks out and names their harasser, we look at them and think, How can he be a harasser? He’s such a nice guy. Nice guys don’t harass people. Ergo, this so-called victim must be lying or exaggerating or overreacting or misunderstanding or whatever. Because logic!

I remember the first time I sat in, learning how to facilitate a domestic violence intervention group. The man to my right had been sentenced to participate after a conviction for abusing his wife. He was friendly and charismatic. It would have been easy to like him. There was almost nothing to distinguish him from anyone else.*

Nice Guys™ can harass others. Nice Guys™ can be stalkers. Nice Guys™ can be rapists and abusers. Our belief in that false Nice Guy/Bad Guy dichotomy helps those abusers. It provides another shield against accusations, a first line of defense against any consequences for their actions.

Some of these guys know exactly how to play up that defense, using it to protect themselves and punish any accusers. Some abusers deliberately craft a Nice Guy persona in order to better harass their victims.

And we let them. We see someone crossing the line, but we rationalize it in our heads because we know they’re a Nice Guy. We hear the stories, but refuse to accept them. We allow the behavior to continue.

Just like the Myth of the Nice Guy makes us likely to excuse other people’s problematic behavior, it also gets in the way of us recognizing and being accountable for our own.

I believe harassers and abusers can learn to change their behavior. (Though many choose not to.) Better yet would be for them to have recognized the harm they were causing and learned to do better before it reached the point of chronic harassment or assault or abuse.

It’s hard to step back and realize you’ve done something abusive. It’s harder if you’ve built yourself up in your head as a Nice Guy. It’s called cognitive dissonance. Someone points out that you’ve been being creepy and inappropriate. That contradicts your self-image as a Nice Guy. So your mind searches for a way to safely resolve the contradiction: She’s wrong. She’s lying. She’s misremembering.

Even if you bring yourself to acknowledge you did something wrong, you recount the story in a way that preserves you as the Nice Guy. You minimize your actions. You obfuscate the details. You mention reasons the accuser might not be giving a fully truthful or reliable account. And you stress what a nice person you are, how you’d never intentionally hurt anyone, how the guilt is tearing you apart, and so on.

What you don’t do — what we don’t do — is own our shit. We don’t dig deep to look at where our own behaviors come from.

We grew up in a society that treats women as lesser. That teaches men to be “strong” and to take what we want. We learn about the “friend zone” and the idea that women owe us sex and companionship. We hear our peers boasting about groping a girl between classes. We see them passing around nude pics of their girlfriends, because girls are things to be shared and used.

You can’t grow up like that without some of it rubbing off.** It takes active, conscious work to change those attitudes, and to do better. And you can’t do better if you’re so fixated on being a Nice Guy that you won’t even acknowledge your shit.

And now, a few disclaimers…

• I’ve referred to men as harassers and women as victims in this post, because that’s the most common dynamic. But it’s absolutely not the only dynamic. People of all genders can be victims, and people of all genders can be harassers.
• “But what if she’s lying?” Why is that the first response from so many people — almost always guys? Yeah, false accusations are a thing. A rare thing. You know what’s a hell of a lot more common? Sexual harassment. Sexual assault.
• I believe there are good people out there. I believe there are assholes out there. But nobody is 100% lawful good or chaotic evil.

We need to stop letting predators off the hook because they’re Nice Guys. We need to stop excusing ourselves, too. The goal isn’t to be a mythical Nice Guy. The goal is to be accountable for our behavior, and to strive to do better.

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*I say “almost” because I did pick up an undertone of attempted manipulation from him a few times. It was subtle, but it was there. That said, I don’t know if I would have caught it if I hadn’t been looking for it.

**Yes, I’m including myself here. I’ve spent decades trying to uproot the messed-up assumptions I grew up with. I’m still working on it. I suspect I always will be.