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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
I’m not saying re-engineer human communication.
I’m saying when you’ve had no prior training in how to effectively express what can really be violent passions of revulsion when you’ve been, let’s say, sexually surprised, you can freeze. It can be disorienting, and if you’re not prepared, your mind can be filled with all sorts of unhelpful questions like,
“If put up a fight, will he perversely think I’m even more into it? Is that what turns him on?”
“Will he sue me if I deck him?”
“Will he think my saying ‘no’ is just part of the game?”
Especially if you are grabbed or pinned when you don’t expect it, your instincts can kick in in let’s say nonverbal ways. I’m not saying women shouldn’t practice saying “no” in front of the mirror – they should – or gaming out how they might have to say “no” ahead of time – they should.
I’m saying that, if you believe stuff like stage fright actually happens – that an actor can freeze and forget his lines, then it shouldn’t surprise you that freezing in surprise sexual situations can also occur, and while we should help young women prepare to minimize the odds of this freezing, treating it like it cannot happen to a regular, generally responsible human being, like it only happens to the absolutely infantalized, is not realistic.
Ok, but when an actor freezes on stage, no one accuses the director of assault. This woman is saying that she was sexually violated: she is accusing a man of sexual assault based on the fact that she froze and was unable to communicate. At best, she is being incredibly unfair. I can maybe understand being afraid of a man you don’t know very well, but that’s why women shouldn’t be alone with men they don’t know very well: that’s why, in the old days, at least, if you didn’t trust the man, you wouldn’t be alone with him.
Alright, but what would we call it if you unfortunately froze and didn’t react fast enough when someone surprised you by taking your wallet and refusing to give it back?
This woman’s behavior was foolish and inconsistent. She may have arguably “frozen” during the first encounter – I don’t know – but after that she had multiple opportunities to leave and didn’t. I am not defending this particular woman’s behavior, because after the first surprise, well, she couldn’t have continued to be surprised, now could she?
Is she actually pressing charges? Or is she just describing a really bad date in a way that happens to publicly embarrass a public figure?
Please note that, if she is not pressing charges, she is admitting what conservatives want – that merely “feeling violated” by someone isn’t enough grounds to accuse that person of a crime against you.
It doesn’t sound like she is pressing charges. Other women are calling it assault or rape, though.
When a man starts to initiate sex, and the woman does not object, that means that she is consenting. The man has no way of knowing that she has frozen and is too terrified to speak. What are men supposed to do? What is our society supposed to do about these fragile young women who are too scared to say no? We can’t wave a magic wand and turn all men into mind readers, so what are we supposed to do?
She says in the article that she went back and forth about whether this was sexual assault, or just an awkward sexual experience. After receiving validation from friends, she has decided that it was assault, but even if she wasn’t saying that, how would we feel about a man who went public about an awkward sexual experience with a woman? How would we feel if he told us about all the stupid and awkward things she did during their encounter? And could it be possible that the reason she is calling this assault but has yet to press charges (as far as we know) is because she knows that she would get nowhere in a court of law?
I remember several years ago Geraldo Rivera wrote a book where he bragged about various famous women he slept with. I thought he was a creep for doing so. I have no idea how much detail he went into, but just the fact that he was naming names made me think far less of him.
Is such a thing possible?
I guess that explains, then, why our local pervert liked to grope sleeping women, then? Because they weren’t objecting, so thus were “consenting”?
I’m not asking that men be mind-readers, or even suggesting that those unlucky enough to freeze ought to press charges. Mainly, if you read back through the thread, what I’ve suggested is that young women receive better training in “defensive womaning” (think defensive driving) – here’s something else I said today:
Apparently, women used to get that kind of explicit instruction. I didn’t. Apparently many in the generations near mine didn’t. Now, should we blame young women for not learning what they were never taught?
Groping a sleeping woman who hasn’t agreed in any way to any contact with you is obviously assault; groping a woman whom you have just been on a date with, who has agreed to go back to your apartment with you, who didn’t object when you kissed her, and who was, as far as you could tell, amenable to what was happening, is not assault.
Is it really that difficult to say “no” to behavior you don’t like? Maybe it is. Personally, if a guy was acting like a creep, or was trying to pressure me into something that I didn’t want, that would cause me to pretty much immediately stop liking him, to lose all interest in him, to stop caring at all whether he liked me or not. So, I never had a problem calling men out on behavior I didn’t want, but I might be weird that way. I can think of at least a few of my gen x friends who would continue to like a guy even after it became obvious he was a creep, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they engaged in behavior they didn’t want because they were torn between a guy they really liked and his behavior which they did not like: I am certain that the problem continues today, and our society probably hasn’t done a good enough job of addressing it. Some women care more about men’s feelings than others do: it has always been that way, and it always will be. But the only thing that society can do about this is support the right of women to say no. In what way are we not doing that? What should we do that we are not already doing?
Alright. Now what about cases in between, like “girl had no reason to consider the encounter a date”? Personally, when I was groped in a situation like that, I declined to press charges. But I do believe the groper was in the wrong, and was taking something from me without my permission, despite my discombobulation and at first not knowing what to make of a surprise groping.
Anyhow, there will inevitably be gray areas. The really predatory will try to use those gray areas to their advantage. The rest of us will muddle along, I suppose. I’m perfectly fine with not all predatory behavior being criminal: we cannot and should not criminalize all bad behavior. But pointing out a predatory behavior is predatory, even when it isn’t a crime, shouldn’t be beyond the pale, and I think in conservatives’ rush to say “is not” every time SJWs say “is so”, we are putting it beyond the pale, and wrongly so.
But in the case of this article, conservatives are far from the only people rushing in to say that what this woman describes is not assault; most if not all of the women on the View disagree with what this woman has done, and Ashley Bamfield read her the riot act.
Here’s some of what that woman described in her old-fashioned sex-ed that I never got,
(Indeed, I was officially taught it was not OK to fight when sexually threatened – that fighting was likely to just make it worse.)
Older, more experienced, people might look at the quoted advice and scoff, “Well, that’s just common sense!” Well, so is the two (or three) second rule for driving, but we still teach young, ignorant teens the explicit rule so they don’t have to learn it the hard way.
In pretty much every nonsexual situation, what youngsters must be taught is how not to make a scene. That good kids don’t make a scene is what the young and innocent know. If we expect them to know different for sex while still remaining innocent, “dumb” as it might sound, explicit instruction – the kind good girls apparently used to get – might help.
No, but we are the ones saying that Ansari’s alleged behavior was merely that of
No, the behavior alleged was worse than “pushy, tone-deaf jerk”, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say so, even if we think the woman’s alleging this behavior for the world to see was also wrong.
What I see here is us minimizing what’s pretty putrid behavior as really not so bad, as just over-eagerness, just tone-deafness. And we’re minimizing the behavior because some SJW is “maximizing” it. That the girl did not bug out sooner is gobsmackingly grotesque, but so was Ansari’s alleged behavior. We don’t have to normalize it just because the girl is also in the wrong, and yet, in our rush to condemn the girl, it is very hard not to.
I don’t believe that his behavior was worse than that of a pushy, tone deaf jerk, and I hesitate to even call him a jerk. What, exactly, was his offense? At best, her “non verbal cues”, combined with the fact that she didn’t leave and never even actually said no, sent a mixed message, if he even picked up on those non verbal cues at all: it’s likely that he didn’t, because pushy, tone deaf jerks are not known for their ability to pick up on non verbal cues.
Part of the education young women received in the old days was more of an understanding that men and women are different, that men are likely to want sex a lot more than women will, that some men will be pushy, tone deaf jerks, and that none of this is criminal or even a grey area.
It is amazing that some of the women raised under feminism are apparently too scared of men to voice their opinions around them. This is unfortunate, but is it the fault of conservatives? I don’t think so, and as much as I despise feminism, I am not prepared to blame feminists for this either. We should have a serious talk with young women, and sincerely apologize for our neglect in their instruction, but we cannot join them in this witch hunt that some of them have embarked on.
“Grotesque” and “putrid” are very strong words; I don’t think I am normalizing this behavior, it seems kind of normal to me. A lot of men are notoriously bad at picking up on “Non verbal cues”; if you want to get your point across, in some cases, you have to hit them with a two by four. The fact that they don’t pick up on non verbal cues, especially when it comes to sex, is not grotesque or putrid. It’s the way a lot of men are. It is incredibly unfair to expect men to operate the same way as women; it is wrong to accuse them of being grotesque and putrid when they don’t operate the same way as women.
Are you giving young women license, then, to commit mayhem on any man who touches them in a way they don’t like? Because if so, I am with you: if we are going to have this double-standard that presumes every gal ought to be an expert in interpreting nonverbal cues, and if she makes the slightest stumble, it is her fault, while young men are never responsible for interpreting nonverbal cues, then we should not hold women responsible for violently injuring or even killing* the young men who touch them in ways they don’t like. After all, how else will young men get the message? ;-P
And it’s a way young women are apparently not allowed to be.
And it’s incredibly unfair to use the fact that there are average differences in the social skills between young men and young women to excuse young men from any and all duties to interpret nonverbal cues, while blaming young women for whenever nonverbal miscommunications lead to an unfortunate outcome, and yet this seems to be what many conservatives are hellbent on doing.
I wonder what @bethany thinks of this.
* Since women are the physically weaker sex, but guns are the great equalizer, in places where carrying a gun is not a problem, it stands to reason that a young woman’s sexual self-defense may involve blowing the brains out of a young man who touches her wrong.
No, I am not. I think there are many options between engaging in behavior you don’t want, and blowing someone’s brains out. For instance, the first and most obvious way to deal with someone who is touching you in a way you don’t like is to say, “I don’t like that. Cut it out.” If the behavior doesn’t stop, then leave: if the man will not allow you to leave, then you are justified in pulling out your gun, pointing it at him, and informing him that you will shoot him if he doesn’t stop. If he still doesn’t stop, then sure, shoot him, although personally, even with a dangerous man, blowing his brains out might still be a bit extreme: I would try to shoot him in the leg, or something.
Yes, there are many options, but the reason I framed it so starkly was to get at whether “he threatened me sexually” would count as an acceptable reason for having done violence to a man. After all, our “nos” may not be believed (we’ve all met people who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer), and “no” simply means more if we won’t be blamed for doing violence to back up that “no”. You seem to agree that it is:
If, on the other hand, a woman having harmed a man were subject to the same second-guessing (“Are you sure you used your words well enough before kicking him in the nads?”, “Are you sure the guy deserved to be hit for what he tried to do?”, etc) as a woman who did not take effective action at the time, but later complained, would be, then we would be setting a very narrow band indeed for what’s socially acceptable to us as a means of rebuffing unwanted sexual contact.
99% of men will stop when they are asked to, or told to. The fact that the woman in this article never said “No” never said “Stop”, never left or even attempted to leave is huge. No woman needs to say her words well in order to say “No” or “Stop”: you don’t need to say anything at all in order to just get up and leave. A tiny minority of men are dangerous; this is why it is a bad idea to be alone with a man you hardly know. Leaving aside the whole issue of sex, what if this man is the next Ted Bundy? What if his intention is not even really sex at all, but murder? It’s just not wise to be alone with a man you hardly know, and for that matter, it isn’t wise for men to be alone with women they hardly know, either, for lots of reasons.
If the man is preventing you from leaving, and if it becomes clear that he is dangerous and means you harm, I am not sure if hitting him or kicking him is really the way to go; if you insist on being alone with men you hardly know, take a gun with you. It’s far more effective than hitting or kicking a man twice your size, but really, you shouldn’t be there anyway.
And yes, if you actually have to shoot a man, you will be subjected to a great deal of second guessing; men who shoot other men also face a great deal of second guessing. That is life. That is why we should all avoid being in situations where we might have to shoot people, such as, going home with a man whom you have only known for one day.
Murder’s just dying. You don’t have to live with it afterwards ;-P
On the one hand, traditionalists say slapping a man for being fresh ought to work. On the other hand, it may be that violence of any kind is not the way to go unless you’re fairly certain you can inflict a great deal of harm:
You see, this is the stuff it would have been nice to learn as a teen. Conservatives didn’t teach this to me as a teen, either: nobody did.
Insist? It would take a great deal of effort (especially for women in male-dominated fields) to go about one’s day while never being alone with men you don’t know terribly well.
While women should be aware of risks, I’m not sure how helpful it is to consider simple lack of company inherently sexual: it would seem to encourage the cads who see a woman who’s alone with them for any reason, no matter how nonsexual, fair game, while discouraging the actual decent bonds that can spring up between men and women. I realize your reply to this might simply be, “This is why women should be armed with guns at all times.” If so, that’s fair, but unfortunately out of reach for many women.
How often are women in male dominated fields required to go home with their male co workers and take their clothes off?
If a decent bond with a man is what you are after, going home with him after the first date is not the thing to do.
Going home and taking one’s clothes off with someone is far from the only way to be alone with him. There are tons of nonsexual contexts where one might be, in the most literal of senses, alone with some guy (working late, in the stacks at a library, the only two people in a given room, walking down the same lonely hallway, etc, etc).
Nowhere have I ever endorsed deliberately sending sexual cues to men you don’t know well. Nowhere. But accepting men as creatures who have basically no aptitude at interpreting social cues means accepting that men will see – and act on – sexual cues that aren’t there; moreover, that we, as women (even if we’re no great shakes ourselves at interpreting social cues) are responsible for men’s misinterpretations – if a man surprises us by acting on a fictive sexual cue before we could react, well, then, what did we expect? It was our job to prevent it, somehow, and we failed.
Then why are you conflating what Grace describes with all kinds of other hypothetical situations that bear no relation to what Grace describes? Nowhere did I say that women are responsible for preventing sexual assault. I said that what Grace describes in the article is not sexual assault.
If women want to remain free, then we must employ a certain amount of common sense; if large numbers of women are incapable of doing this, then sooner or later we will lose our freedom. This may not be fair, but life isn’t fair, and life is actually far more likely to be unfair to men than it is to women, in different ways.
I am not. I have repeatedly disparaged Grace’s behavior on this thread, and I agree that Grace did not experience a sexual assault:
I have, however, also mentioned surprise gropings that were by any reasonable measure, surprises, and, as far as I can tell, you have responded as if these scenarios weren’t any different from Grace’s, since you keep bringing Grace back up again when I was no longer talking about Grace. If that is not what you meant, I apologize for not better catching your meaning, but that is how it has looked to me.
That’s not what I meant :) Surprise gropings do happen, and they are always wrong: it doesn’t matter what the woman was wearing, or what unwise decisions she did or didn’t make. It’s always wrong, and more than that, it’s illegal.