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Feminism’s Mixed #MeToo Messages
Over the weekend, feminist site “Babe” published what was meant as a takedown of comedian Aziz Ansari’s sexual offenses against a woman he went on a date with last year. Ansari just won a Golden Globe, and Babe reported,
We spoke to Grace [his accuser] last week. When we met, Ansari had just won Best Actor for his Netflix show “Master Of None” at the Golden Globes, where he declared his support for the fight against sexual assault and harassment by wearing a “Time’s Up” pin on the red carpet.
This was apparently enough hypocrisy to warrant Babe’s takedown of Ansari given his persona as a “witty, woke alternative to the stereotypical douchebag bro.” The Babe piece was apparently proof that despite his support of women against sexual assault and harassment, he himself was guilty of it.
Ansari does indeed come across as a pushy, tone-deaf jerk in the Babe piece, and admitted he acted inappropriately in a text message to the subject of the piece. But it sets a dangerous precedent: is Ansari really in the same league as other Hollywood stars at the center of similar pieces, like Kevin Spacey at BuzzFeed. There are plenty of actual rapists in entertainment; why write a story about a guy who behaved badly on a date? Because apparently, everything is rape now:
People are so quick to defend Aziz Ansari & so willing to doubt his accuser. One gets sympathy & the other antipathy. That's what rape culture is all about.
— Arjun Sethi (@arjunsethi81) January 14, 2018
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/952568652066443264
https://twitter.com/desi_bitch/status/952549979859636224
Aziz Ansari can wear a Times Up badge on stage because men don’t know what rape and sexual assault is, even when they’re doing it.
— Chimene Suleyman (@chimenesuleyman) January 14, 2018
If you think the story about Aziz Ansari is just a "bad date" then you literally don't understand how complex rape and sexual assault can be. If a person is repeatedly telling and giving you indications they do not want to have sex w/ you, then you should stop & not try anything
— Kayla Morosco (@catsaesthetics) January 14, 2018
This is what feminism has been reduced to: women have no agency, responsibility or obligation to stand up for themselves any longer. Strangely, a feminist superhero isn’t one who fights back at grabby men; it’s a damsel in distress incapable of picking up her purse and walking out. Ansari’s accuser could have done one simple thing to get away from the situation which made her feel uncomfortable: leave his apartment. She couldn’t even choose which kind of wine Ansari served her, and so she passively accepted what was offered, according to the piece:
After arriving at his apartment in Manhattan on Monday evening, they exchanged small talk and drank wine. “It was white,” she said. “I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.”
Women are apparently so infantilized in 2018 they can’t even request which kind of wine they’d like to drink, let alone decide if she should sleep with a man trying to push himself on them.
Bari Weiss, an opinion editor at the New York Times correctly remarked on Twitter:
It sounds like a terrible night. And I'm sorry she experienced it. The idea, though, that this is assault is quite terrifying. If this is assault, than I don't know a person–man or woman–that isn't a survivor.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) January 14, 2018
In order to combat so-called rape culture, feminists focus on fighting for the supposed rights women have to dress however they choose and go wherever they want regardless of risk instead of teaching young women strategies to keep them safer, like traveling in groups and watching their drinks at parties and bars. If Grace didn’t want to have sex with Ansari, going upstairs to his apartment was where the night first went wrong.
The story isn’t just a lesson for Grace and women like her though. Just as Grace should not have gone upstairs to Ansari’s apartment if she didn’t want to engage in intercourse, Ansari and men like him shouldn’t be inviting strange women upstairs who might then blab in a tell-all story about their supposed sexual assault. It’s pretty simple stuff: Don’t go to a guy’s apartment if you think he might sexually assault you, and don’t invite a girl into yours if she may accuse you of assault later. You don’t have to be a prude to acknowledge it’s probably best not to sleep with someone if you require a signed consent in order to do so.
Published in Entertainment
Watch the movie The Quiet Man and tell me we’ve “progressed.”
I cannot imagine being a young man today trying to find a mate or even just some convivial heterosexual friendship. Its an absolute horror show. My younger me would likely have become a monk.
How about houses?
This is the part of her account that confused me:
She goes into great detail on everything that happened later, but completely glosses over the initial sexual proposal and contact, which would seem the most likely time to understand the situation and remove herself from it. The things she described here don’t happen instantly and provide ample time for explicit refusal and leaving.
Every account like this, sadly, makes me think less of the women relaying them and the feminist movement in general: if women are so easily frozen by circumstances, so inept at successfully negotiating their way through the most basic kind of one-on-one encounter, how can they make the claim that they deserve more responsibility in every other sector of life?
I know that the answer to this is that most women are smart and capable and can extract themselves from unwanted bodily exchanges, so why doesn’t feminism want me to know this?
Something women might want to address: Their (general) relationship to famous men. Famous men have women throwing themselves at them constantly. Many women turn into complete sluts around stars. DJT famously uttered this truth, “if you’re famous they’ll let you (be inappropriately forward)”. I believe the exposition of this tabootruth is what animated most of the outrage, by the way. It’s amazing how almost no one talks about this openly.
So it’t not totally the fault of this famous comedian to expect the acceptance of the invite to his apartment pretty much a done deal. It sounds like he misread the lady’s expectations of ‘courtship’. She was comfortable at 65mph, he scared (or offended?) her going 95mph.
When will other women ever blame these gold diggers and these star[expletive]? I wonder if they don’t because they reserve at least the fantasy for themselves. Perhaps they are ashamed of their gender’s basic sexual psychology. I dunno, but it sure is something.
I did wonder: how much of the initial sexual contact in that scenario, which she described so vaguely, was she weighing the thrill of sex with a famous man against her negative inclinations? She did, after all, let him undress her and engaged in some of the acts he suggested before objecting.
Also, women, this may come as a shock, but to a man, “Hold on a sec” is not a refusal, but will be taken literally, and action resumed after precisely one second.
We millennials don’t have houses. We’re living in apartments, waiting for Boomers to die. Then we’ll be squatters.
Allow me to be the gadfly -but in the aftermath of the sexual revolution’s destruction of all sexual mores except “consent, broadly and vaguely defined,” should we not possibly consider that this is true?
If the account by “Grace” is true, then Aziz Ansari is certainly not a gentleman. But there is a substantial gulf between “not a gentleman” and rapist. A pushy salesman who is pressuring you to buy a car or a pair of shoes right this minute is obnoxious, but that’s not the same as a robber pulling out a weapon and demanding that you hand over your wallet.
I wonder how women who have literally been raped feel about situations like this being called rape by some?
He asked, she obliged. Why is this even an issue?
Its not like she didn’t get hers out of the deal either.
That’s what I suspected. I have my booby traps set.
Is this a relativist argument, e.g. It’s assault for 2018 America but not assault in 1910 America?
Or are you suggesting that it was assault either way, but the decline of all other sexual mores has allowed it to happen, when in 1910 it wouldn’t have in the first place?
I agree with you on essentials, but this is just silly. Since when is walking in the door of someone’s home automatic consent for intercourse? It sure as heck wasn’t when I was dating, which was not all that long ago….
What else would you do at somebody’s house after a date late at night?
Granted, it wasn’t automatic consent when I was last dating (which was almost 4 years ago now) but the expectation of that being what will happen of you go home with someone is so high that it needs to be explicitly stated if you don’t want that.
I meam, you know how in every movie after 1970, men and women talk late at night after a date about whether they want coffee? You know that’s just a polite way to ask for sex, right?
Calling everything “rape” does make it harder to identify and solve actual rape.
I had a girlfriend in college (40+ years ago) who was physically raped when she was a teenager (by a stranger, not “date rape”). That experience has had lifelong negative consequences for her, consequences that are materially different from what she has told me about needing to put various boyfriends in their place when they got a little forward with her. She was always very firm with dates and boyfriends about the limits beyond which they had better not go.
Calling every encounter you later regret “rape” trivializes the horrible experiences of those who have actually been raped.
I guess I’m an innocent. Or maybe these things just move at a slower pace where I live. When I was single there were a handful of times when a girl on the first or second date might invite me to her apartment or house and there was no expectation of sex.
We used to have rape. Now we have stranger rape, date rape, regret rape, recovered memory rape, icouldhavebeen rape, Facebook rape…
(Sigh)
Sometimes people neck for a while, without going further just yet. Or they still want to spend time together but don’t want to spend more money, so they head up to listen to music and have a drink. But good grief, whatever the expectations at extending the invitation, I would hope men know better than to assume any woman who crosses their threshold is automatically going to sleep with them.
Agreeing to post-date coffee is not actually the same as agreeing to sex, whatever winking and nodding assumptions society has created.
The latter. That casual sex of this type is a species of sexual assault (akin, maybe, to the sex by deception torts of the old days), and that while it might have happened in 1910, it happens a lot more now.
Most invitations I got weren’t for sex, even when the guy was romantically interested in me. Was there saltpeter in the water or something where I was, or is it really the case that those who believe entering their lair entitles them to sex are cads?
It doesn’t have to be stranger-rape to be not-I-regretted-it-after-the-fact-“rape”, though. Acquaintance rape is pretty common.
Fortunately, every other sector of life does not involve unexpected grabs of your genitalia, being cornered for sexual favors, etc. Don’t get me wrong, @dorrk, there was plenty wrong with this particular girl for staying around as long as she did – it wasn’t like he cornered her by the counter, then she got away as soon as she could. But virtually all middle-to-upper-class youths are trained to avoid violence, trained to use their words, and while this is usually a good thing for “every other sector of life”, it’s not a good thing if you expect women to stick up for themselves in sexually-escalating situations.
Because this is what a woman’s lizard brain wants to do in response to unwanted groping:
And yet, none of those things are acceptable for a woman to do to an acquaintance, no matter what boundaries he’s violating. They’re only socially acceptable to do, maybe, to a stranger, as self-defense. No wonder “freezing” is a risk – our most powerful self-protective drives come in direct conflict with how we’re otherwise socialized. “This man’s dick needs killing now” has to compete with “I’ll get sued if I do this”.
I figure the “answer” will require responsible actions by both men and women. Women need to be assertive and take care of themselves and men will need to re-learn what it means to be a gentleman. And even if this happens, there will still be “irresponsible” women and cads.
First, this woman is 23 years old? She says that she hates all men. It would be better off for everyone if she would just stay away from all men, because she is clearly totally incapable of dealing with them. In the old days, when I was young, the Catholic elders who instructed us told us flat out that many of the young men we dated would definitely want to have sex, it was to be expected, and it was on us to say no. So we just said no, and it wasn’t difficult at all; contrary to what some feminists say, the vast majority of men do take no for an answer, but you actually have to say it. This women never said no, she claims to be traumatized because her non verbal cues were not picked up on. Give me a break.
Second, while I agree that what this woman has done is ridiculous, I have a hard time feeling sympathy for a guy who wears a “time’s up” pin. If you are going to throw gasoline on the fire, don’t be surprised if you get burned.
Randy:
‘I guess I’m an innocent. Or maybe these things just move at a slower pace where I live. When I was single there were a handful of times when a girl on the first or second date might invite me to her apartment or house and there was no expectation of sex.”
I agree. Particularly on being invited to her apartment. I was invited in to many a young ladies apartments on most of my dates in my day, and I never thought such an invitation was an invitation for sex.
I have a twenty something attractive daughter. In that respect, from what I hear I don’t think things have changed all that much.
That said, Mr Ansari is a TV star. His situation is somewhat different for better or worse. Since I live in Hollywood, I have some experience with celebrity egos, and unfortunately many celebrity’s ego’s have grown so large that they have seriously lost sense of reality. As others have mentioned, he also may have been hit upon a lot, which is normally very unusual for a guy, further altering his expectations in the wrong direction.
It is hard to tell what is the truth here. However, if her story has any truth to it, it seems that his expectations are pretty far out of whack, even if she is some sort of celebrity hound who should have known not to have gone to a celebrity’s apartment alone. A gentlemen would not have acted as he did.
The female host of a podcast that I listen to has become pretty unhinged since the election. Today she went on a rant about how “oppressive” is it that women have to bear children. That wasn’t how she said it, but that was the essence of her complaint.
A few months ago a liberal young woman on another podcast said, only half-ironically, that she wished that sex would altogether disappear and that people could interact more like robots.
I’m picking up a theme in these kinds of comments, which is reinforced by some of these milder #metoo accusations: young women are no longer mentally equipped to deal with a) sex; b) reality; and c) the combination of a & b; and this seems to be a feature of progressivism rather than a bug.
Why not? Using words is one of the most effective ways to communicate. Say, “I’m not interested in any sex tonight. Please don’t touch me/kiss me/take off your clothes/take off my clothes.” Why do we need to re-engineer human communication so that women don’t later feel assaulted? I have more respect for women than to think that they are incapable of saying what they think when it matters.
I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that the young women you refer to are not a majority. They are, however, saying what liberals want them to say, and they will be rewarded for that. Young women who dissent will be punished, meaning very few young women will dissent. Most will just remain silent. It’s always been this way with women and feminism.
By the time women are in their early twenties, they should be capable of refusing unwanted sexual advances, but considering how few people of any age are willing to buck the system, I don’t think we can expect a woman of 23 to take on the liberal establishment by herself. A few brave souls may try to, and if they do should get our full support, but us old people need to be more involved in this. We cannot allow ourselves to cowed by the these shrieking shrinking violets.
Because they’re not raised to be assertive with their words to resolve conflict, they’re raised to be polite with words to avoid confict. As part of this, it was also mixed in somewhere that saying anything that could possibly hurt someone’s feelings is impolite, so many people are unconfortable expressing disapproval.
According to this way of thinking, the problem isn’t that Ansari wants sex and she doesn’t, it’s that she thinks a problem will start if she actually says that, and she doesn’t want to cause a problem. So, she splits the difference to be polite and his penis ends up in her mouth.
You don’t just see this in sex, but in the way this same cadre of people thinks of other areas where there are conflicts, like international diplomacy. The problem with North Korea isn’t that North Korea and the United States have diametrically opposed interests, it’s that they’re both talking mean. So, the United States should talk nice, and instead of destroying San Francisco, DPRK will just have a bunch of missiles that nobody else wants it to have.