The perils of picking sides in the Aziz Ansari story

The first I heard of the sexual assault allegations against Aziz Ansari, whose show I flat-out love, wasn't the original story in Babe. It was Caitlan Flannagan's disapproving write-up of the story in The Atlantic. I have to admit, when I saw this article, I felt sickness and then relief within about two seconds. Here, at last, was the story I'd dreaded about someone I really admired being accused of sexual assault. Louis C.K. had been unsettling, but he was someone I merely considered wise and funny. Aziz Ansari's show had so much heart, it actually made me feel somewhat optimistic about life.

But wait! Flannagan's article wasn't saying he was a bad guy. It was saying that the whole accusation against him was a smear job! It was saying young women today, for all their grit to become CEOs, have become enfeebled when it comes to believing they have the ability to say no. It was saying that Ansari wasn't to blame for what happened on that date, that the woman's tale amounted to nothing more than miscommunication and questionable choices on both sides. Flannagan wondered how the woman got into consensual oral sex--both her to him and him to her-- at his apartment on a first date and then was surprised that Ansari wanted more.

It was so reassuring. Not only did it rescue me from having to think bad thoughts about Ansari almost before I even knew there was a story about him, it seemed to be that moment I've secretly been hoping for: the comeuppance of an overstepping social movement. The subtitle to Flannagan's article was: "Allegations against the comedian are proof that women are angry, temporarily powerful—and very, very dangerous." That hit the spot. 

I'm a sucker for this kind of writing. It's written by a liberal, but one who kind of shakes her head at the foibles of liberals, exhibiting a moderate conservative's sense of proportion. It lets me have it both ways, thinking I'm smarter than both liberals and conservatives. 

I posted a link to the article on my Facebook page and added a note to it that was triumphant, gleeful and condescending as fuck. I wrote, "As this movement goes forward, it's important to separate behavior we cannot allow from behavior we just don't like."

One thing I forgot to do was go back and read the original article from Babe. 

Oh, man, that sucked when I went back and finally read that the original article. It took someone posting on my Facebook that the Atlantic article was taking Ansari's side before I went and read the woman's side of it. (I really, really assumed I could just take The Atlantic at its word. That journal is so often my voice as a center-left know-it-all I really don't critique it as much as I should.) 

Her side is a lot more damning. I don't think it shows that Ansari committed sexual assault in a legal sense. Apparently, Netflix wasn't too bothered by the story, because 24 hours after it broke, they still had a congratulatory message to Ansari on their home page. But the woman's story is believable, and it really doesn't make Ansari sound too great. My take is that he met a woman who was star struck by him, thought she'd be easy sex, and took it for granted. Meanwhile, she thought it was a real date and was surprised he just wanted to hurry up and get to the sex. She was not as forceful or as clear as she could have been in saying no. That's not to blame the victim, it's just my take on how I think it went down. However, it's clear she tried several times to give him signs that things were going to fast. She apparently used both gentle verbal as well as non-verbal clues. I think she was still hoping this might turn out to be a real date/relationship, and didn't want to jump straight to "Get the fuck off of me." She was trying to be nice about it. 

By the end, she finally made it clear she wasn't interested and Ansari relented. She left in an Uber. But it took her many more rounds of saying no in various ways than it should have. The anecdote doesn't give me a great feeling that if the woman had been drunker, Ansari wouldn't have just had sex with her.

People are taking sides, and that's both understandable and dangerous

CNN pointed out the two main sides in the debate over the story. There are those who say he's only guilty of being a bad date or not being able to read her mind, and those who say this is something more and he needs to be held accountable for it. I'd wager the split is strongly gender-based. 

Flannagan invoked "Cat Person," the unexpectedly viral short story from The New Yorker last month, and the allusion couldn't be more appropriate. The public interpretation of the Ansari allegations seems to be splitting along much the same lines as the public perceptions of that story, in which a younger woman talks herself into an unwanted sexual encounter with an older man she hardly knows. I had my own take on it last month. I found the man in that story more guilty of a lack of awareness born of loneliness and hope than malicious. Some found a predator hiding in fat clothing. Again, I'd wager interpretations were strongly split along gender lines. The main similarity between Cat Person and the woman's account in Babe was that in both cases, there was a woman trying to be polite and ending up with sex she didn't want as a result. 

My own rush to pass judgment on the story is proof about how precarious it is when women feel they have no other recourse than to appeal to the court of public opinion. She evidently felt Ansari's behavior was bad enough to deserve public scorn, but not bad enough to press charges. A lot of women face this kind of thing where the actions in question are in a maddening gray area of being bad enough to cause emotional harm, but not bad enough to be criminal. But in taking it to the court of public opinion, in this case, the woman found she had some uphill climbing to do. I think this passage from Flannagan helps explain why people like me were so instinctively opposed to the story:

Twenty-four hours ago—this is the speed at which we are now operating—Aziz Ansari was a man whom many people admired and whose work, although very well paid, also performed a social good. He was the first exposure many young Americans had to a Muslim man who was aspirational, funny, immersed in the same culture that they are. Now he has been—in a professional sense—assassinated, on the basis of one woman’s anonymous account. Many of the college-educated white women who so vocally support this movement are entirely on her side. The feminist writer and speaker Jessica Valenti tweeted, “A lot of men will read that post about Aziz Ansari and see an everyday, reasonable sexual interaction. But part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture considers ‘normal’ sexual encounters are not working for us, and oftentimes harmful.”

I thought it would take a little longer for the hit squad of privileged young white women to open fire on brown-skinned men. I had assumed that on the basis of intersectionality and all that, they’d stay laser focused on college-educated white men for another few months. But we’re at warp speed now, and the revolution—in many ways so good and so important—is starting to sweep up all sorts of people into its conflagration: the monstrous, the cruel, and the simply unlucky. Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab, and who have spent a lot of time picking out pretty outfits for dates they hoped would be nights to remember. They’re angry and temporarily powerful, and last night they destroyed a man who didn’t deserve it.

There's a lot to unpack there, but the short of it is that Ansari represents a great hope. People like me have a lot invested in his success. And skeptics of the #metoo movement have been able, up to now, to dismiss it for its whiteness. So a couple of dearly held safe places are challenged by this story. 

I'm neither a lawyer nor a judge. It's dangerous to entrust people like me to adjudicate accusations correctly. When a woman feels the court of public opinion is her only recourse, I've got to do my best to be a responsible juror. But man, it is hard when I really, really, don't want to believe the damn story. It's hard when I feel that society needs to actually express the new sexual social compact before we can adjudicate cases correctly.

A good effort toward that new sexual social compact

I tried a few weeks ago to express my reservations about what #metoo means for the rules that have been in place since the sexual revolution. #Metoo felt to me like something of a counter-revolution, like it wasn't merely trying to stop sexual violence, but also trying to sneak in a rearguard assault of sexually free behavior. It felt like someone was trying to slip in conservative sexual mores in a liberal skin.

Elizabeth Bruenig's commentary in the Washington Post is the wisest article I've yet read on this whole mess, and it brings the Ansari debacle into the context of the larger social discussion to argue that what is needed now is a second sexual revolution. Bruenig states that in most social situations, it is rightly considered rude to outright call out the bad behavior of others. We don't tell our office mate we're bored by his story and need to get back to work, we look at our watches and shift nervously and hope he gets the point. Because the sexual revolution taught us that sex is no big deal, just another social transaction, we have applied this same level of politeness to it. We don't tell our date we're not interested, we say we've got to get up early or something like that. Bruenig argues, though, that:

The trouble is that sex is clearly different, as the lasting unhappiness of so many women attests. If acknowledging that endangers one of the achievements of the sexual revolution, so be it: What is the alternative? Telling women over and over that, when it comes to sex, they must abandon all of the normal rules of interacting with others in society hasn’t helped and seems transparently ridiculous. In every other domain of life, being patient and generous with outhers makes a person praiseworthy and well-liked; those mores are deeply instilled and hard to shake, especially for women. It doesn’t make any sense to keep insisting otherwise, and trying to destroy those norms — which are good for society in general — seems like a ruinous project.

Instead, we ought to appreciate that sex is a domain so intimate and personal that more harm can be done than in most social situations, and that given that heightened capacity for harm, we should expect people to operate with greater conscientiousness, concern and care in that domain than in others.... 

Demanding an expansion of empathy and responsibility when it comes to sex isn’t regressive; it’s a sexual revolution in its own right. It is silly to think we could have needed only one.

So how to rule in the public case against Ansari?

Here in the present, when we are still trying to establish this second revolution, how much do I blame Ansari for not demonstrating this greater conscientiousness, concern and care? It seems wrong to me  that he could face the same fate as Harvey Weinstein, when the scale of wrong is so different. If Ansari worked at Roto-Rooter, he wouldn't lose his job. 

But how can I watch Season Three of Master of None with the same joy now? The show relies on its sweetness, and that sweetness is now ruined. I suppose I could say that Ansari's character on the show, which is very much modeled on him personally, is not a perfect person. Real-life Ansari can make mistakes and learn from them as much as Dev, Ansari's on-screen alter ego. But I don't know. I guess I'll know if and when Netflix puts out the next season. 

Ansari did what most men have done. He kept pushing for sex without concern for what his partner wanted. This is common now; it has to stop being common. But what to do in the present, while the second revolution is still in process? Do we destroy the men who haven't adapted to the new rules yet? I think that's dangerous. Not every member of Men Going Their Own Way is a loser finding a fig leaf for the rejection that was going to happen anyway. 

You won't get your second sexual revolution until men can be honest about how they act now. You won't get men to be honest about how they act if honesty gets you self-destruction. You'll continue to get "I thought she was into it. She didn't say no." 

Ansari might live through this. The public will for him to live through this is awfully strong. I'm not the only person who will have a prejudice against admitting he did something wrong. But he did do something wrong, it seems. The only question is how wrong it was. 

The questions we should all ask ourselves

I hate how polarized this discussion is along gender lines. Men accuse women of being shrill, witch-hunting zealots, while women accuse men of cheering on rape culture. This is stupid discourse. This isn't easy, and the answers aren't easy. I've never yet heard an answer to the question of whether it's worse to be falsely convicted of rape or to be raped and not be believed. The answer to that question is that there is no good answer. It's a terrible question for a terrible problem. Society's endless tastes-great-less-filling shouting match over which is worse is keeping us from making both less common. 

For now, my lesson from this is nothing Earth-shattering. I have biases. Those biases affect my judgment. People you think highly of can act badly. Ansari acted badly. How badly, and what the result should be, I don't know. And it's okay not to know some things.