The Accusations Against Aziz Ansari Are Dividing The Internet — Here's What To Read
On Saturday, Babe.net, a relatively unknown digital publication geared towards young women, published a story accusing Aziz Ansari of "sexual assault." The anonymous accuser, known only as Grace, described a date with Ansari after meeting him at a party. The date ended with a drawn-out sexual encounter with Ansari, which Grace described as non-consensual. Ansari repeatedly attempted to have sex with Grace, and she attempted to rebuff him with non-verbal cues and some verbal cues like "let's chill."
The story, however, is complicated by the fact that Grace voluntarily engaged in multiple sexual acts with Ansari and didn't clearly say "no" or "stop."
Grace's account quickly spread across the web, but reactions have been highly polarized. The story has brought to light a rift in our society's differing definitions of consent. Here's what you should read to make sense of it all.
Aziz Ansari Highlights A Conversation That Needs To Be Had About Violating, But Not Criminal, Sex
Emma Gray writes about her own experiences with violating, but non-criminal (in her opinion) sexual encounters, and argues that sex like this falls into a "gray area" that needs to be talked about:
The sexual encounter Grace described falls into what I see as a gray area of violating, noncriminal sex ― the kind of sex that Rebecca Traister described in 2015 as "bad in ways that are worth talking about"; what Jessica Valenti described on Twitter as an interaction that the "culture considers 'normal,'" but is "oftentimes harmful."
This is a kind of sex that is not only worth talking about, but necessary to talk about. Behavior need not fall under the legal definition of sexual assault or rape to be wrong or violating or upsetting. And when nearly every woman I've spoken to about the Aziz Ansari story follows up our conversation with a similar story of her own, it's worth thinking about why that is.
[HuffPost]
The Story Shows The All-Too-Common Result Of Poor Sex Education Combined With Toxic Norms
Anna North writes in Vox that Ansari's behavior represents a combination of toxic norms and poor sex education in America.
Boys learn at a young age, from pop culture, their elders, and their peers, that it's normal to have to convince a woman to have sex, and that repeated small violations of her boundaries are an acceptable way to do so — perhaps even the only way…
Meanwhile, girls learn from an early age that it is rude to reject boys. They learn to "let them down easily" and never humiliate them. They learn to give other people what they want, and to put their own desires second — especially when it comes to sex. And few girls get any sex education, either at school or from the culture they consume, that encourages them to think about sex in terms of what they actually desire, as opposed to how they will be perceived by others.
[Vox]
The Harm Of The Execution May Have Outweighed The Benefit Of The Story
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd writes in Jezebel that Babe's sloppy execution of the story may have hurt its chances of being received seriously:
Because of the amateurish way the Babe report was handled (her wine choices; her outfit), and the way it was written with an almost prurient and unnecessarily macabre interest in the minute details of their interaction ("the claw"), it left the subject open to further attacks, the kind that are entirely, exhaustingly predictable…
At its core, Babe's piece about Grace is important, but the inexperience evident in the execution of the piece did a disservice to the topic—and it's a shame, because its execution obscures an extremely valuable, timely conversation at a time when it seems finally possible to have it in a public forum.
[Jezebel]
Is Aziz Ansari Being Unfairly Persecuted?
Caitlin Flanagan, exemplifying Jezebel's Julianne Escobedo Shepherd's concerns, writes in The Atlantic that the Babe story unfairly targets Ansari for what she believes was a non-criminal and non-consequential act:
Was Grace frozen, terrified, stuck? No. She tells us that she wanted something from Ansari and that she was trying to figure out how to get it. She wanted affection, kindness, attention. Perhaps she hoped to maybe even become the famous man's girlfriend. He wasn't interested. What she felt afterward — rejected yet another time, by yet another man — was regret. And what she and the writer who told her story created was 3,000 words of revenge porn. The clinical detail in which the story is told is intended not to validate her account as much as it is to hurt and humiliate Ansari. Together, the two women may have destroyed Ansari's career, which is now the punishment for every kind of male sexual misconduct, from the grotesque to the disappointing.
Some People Say The Story Represents A Movement That Rolls Back Female Agency
The New York Times Opinion Editor Bari Weiss writes that the Babe story represents a recent trend of certain feminists revoking their own agency.
Isn't it heartbreaking and depressing that men — especially ones who present themselves publicly as feminists — so often act this way in private? Shouldn't we try to change our broken sexual culture? And isn't it enraging that women are socialized to be docile and accommodating and to put men's desires before their own? Yes. Yes. Yes.
But the solution to these problems does not begin with women torching men for failing to understand their "nonverbal cues." It is for women to be more verbal. It's to say, "This is what turns me on." It's to say, "I don't want to do that." And, yes, sometimes it means saying goodbye.
The single most distressing thing to me about this story is that the only person with any agency in the story seems to be Aziz Ansari. The woman is merely acted upon.
The Backlash Against Babe Sounds Familiar
Sarah Jones, advocating for affirmative consent and pushing back against Flanagan and Weiss, argues in The New Republic that the backlash against Babe (and she claims against the #MeToo movement) falls into the same category as the backlash against increased sexual assault reports in the 1990s:
What is remarkable about these pieces isn't their bravery in the face of an overweening majority. Nor is it that the authors are older and thus carry their generation's views about sexual consent and political correctness to the debate (Weiss is a millennial). What's remarkable is the familiarity of their arguments: The #MeToo backlash is almost identical to the backlash that greeted the wave of sexual assault reports on campus colleges in the 1990s. It all has the feel of ritual now: One group of feminists will try to define sexual assault and another group will call them alarmists. The latter will say that the anecdotes are hysterical, the statistics are exaggerated, the demands are unreasonable, and the victims, in conclusion, are deliberately weak people.
Ansari Has Yet To Suffer Professional Consequences
In Slate, Osita Nwanevu argues that the idea that Ansari has been destroyed by an angry mob is false, as evidenced by the fact that Ansari has suffered no visible consequences to his career as of yet. Navigating these tricky questions and deciding how to handle them is the point of #MeToo, she says:
It is true that women are being made to reckon with the fact that most of the men in their lives, including many they like and love, have behaved badly by the standards of an emerging sexual culture. It is obvious they cannot all be thrown into exile. To argue that young women, speaking as broadly and generally as #MeToo critics have, are somehow incapable of understanding this and making fine distinctions is to argue that young women are droolingly stupid. It seems like its own kind of misogyny. It is likely, even probable, that misjudgments and miscalculations will be made in a few cases. There is a difference between suggesting caution about this and implying that this generation of young women has the characteristics of a rampaging mob.
It is by no means clear what we're all to do with a man like Ansari. But one thing is for certain: if #MeToo is to be a movement that merely indicts the worst of the worst, then we might as well start winding it down. It will never, then, be truly useful to the vast majority of women who have not been preyed upon by millionaire moguls promising them roles or bosses who can lock doors from their desks.
[Slate]
