Career assassination or #metoo moment?

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This article was published 20/01/2018 (3096 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last weekend, the website Babe published the account of an anonymous 23-year-old woman under the headline: “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life.”

The story, predictably, went viral. Here’s a comedian and co-creator of the hit Netflix series Master of None, who is often celebrated for being a feminist ally being accused of sexual misconduct. But more than that, the woman’s story has become incredibly polarizing.

Some people have written off the comedian, filing him away with all the other garbage men who have been exposed as of late. Others accused the woman, known as Grace, of being reckless, irresponsible and hurting the #MeToo movement.

How the story was reported also raised questions of journalistic integrity. As many critics have noted, the tone of the piece jarringly bounces between gossip column and reported feature. It was a one-source story; Ansari was only given a few hours to respond to the allegation before publication. Grace did not work for or with Ansari, making it unlike many of the other stories we’ve heard in the aftermath of allegations against Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein. The piece did not establish a pattern of predatory behaviour or abuse.

Many women reading Grace’s account didn’t know how to react to it, myself included. I found Ansari’s behaviour, as described in the story, entitled, pushy and disappointing. But I stopped short of calling what Grace experienced sexual assault.

“This sounds like it was just a really bad date,” I commented to a friend after I read the Babe story on Sunday.

But wait, hold up: just a bad date? Upon reflection, and through further conversations with many of my female friends this week, a clear theme emerged: we’ve all been on a version of this date.

And that made me profoundly sad.

Is this experience so common that we’ve become inured to it?

If there’s a positive upshot to the publication of Grace’s story, it’s that it has opened up a desperately needed conversation about bad sex and why so many of us are having it. A meaningful discussion about the power dynamics of sex is not an “overreach” of #MeToo, nor does it “water down” the movement. It’s the logical extension of it. Over the past several months, we’ve taken a serious look at workplace harassment and the power imbalances in the boardroom. Perhaps it’s time to examine the imbalances that exist in the bedroom.

After all, as writer Rebecca Traister noted in her landmark 2015 New York Magazine piece on this very subject, consensual sex can still be bad. It can still be harmful and damaging.

Indeed, the broader culture surrounding heterosexual sex is a Gordian knot of sexism and conditioning, shaped by forces both puritanical and pornographic.

From the enduring idea that sex, for women, is a chore and obligation that she must just get through — lie back and think of England — to the expectation that be on-demand sex dolls programmed with 50 ways to please their man, female pleasure doesn’t always top the priority list.

And as Jill Filipovic wrote this week at the Guardian, “When we haven’t yet agreed that female pleasure and clear enthusiasm are prerequisites for a sexual encounter, we lack the ability to peel back the layers of sexual experience and we end up with two bad options: accept sexual inequity as just how sex is (or just how men are) or wedge truly bad sexual experiences into the category of sexual assault.”

I believe Ansari when he says, “everything did seem OK to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned.”

That response is telling. There are a lot of decidedly not OK behaviours that, because they aren’t full-on violent assault, have become normalized in our culture.

Here’s the good news, though: despite what some pundits might have you believe this week, being a mind reader of women is not actually a requirement to have good sex with them. Men who are horrified by the idea that Ansari’s behaviour might be considered sexual assault could use this opportunity to reflect on their own sexual behaviour.

Do you ask your partner questions such as, “Is this OK?” “Does this feel good?” “Are we moving too fast?”

Do you understand that, for many women, saying, “No,” “I don’t like that,” or “stop” can be difficult due to literal generations of social conditioning to be nice and prioritize the comfort of others?

When you do hear “no” or “stop,” do you?

Are you attuned enough to someone else’s needs that you’d be able to pick up on non-verbal cues, such as silence, turning away or stiffening?

Our goal should be sex that’s mutually pleasurable, not merely consensual. Only then will we have a hope in hell of making stories like Grace’s the exception, not the rule.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @JenZoratti