According to thisarticle.
Most of her discomfort seems to have been internal and when expressed, he backed down. Twitter-verse is, of course, crucifying him (feminists) and her (the usual trolls), and its certainly true that at times a reasonable person should “get” non-verbal clues.
But how much can you expect until you start expecting people to become mind readers?
There are probably more than a few women out there who would gleefully make baseless revenge accusations if they thought the guy had anything to lose, or if there was money in it for them.
Is there a shrewd of evidence that she has that motivation?
“I went on a date with a guy and he made passes at me!”
The horror… the horror. :rolleyes:
If I missed a part where he did actually physically assault her, than I apologize.
Awesome typo.
I found her account credible And a bit sad. But not particularly newsworthy.
I’m really not sure but this may be more of a case of different expectations and bad communication than sexual assault. When someone says they made “clear non-verbal signs” I’m reminded that people can overestimate how clear their non-verbal signs are. Feeling X very strongly in your own mind when you change your voice tone or make some other non-verbal sign doesn’t mean X is clear to others. To this, add that courtship and sexual signals are often purposefully ambiguous.
I would characterize it more as repeatedly and aggressively made passes after she communicated that she wanted them to stop.
That said, I agree with MichaelEmouse here. The story she told sounds like two people that need to mature and improve their communication skills around sex.
If you call these actions making passes, then we have very different definitions for what that means, and I’m very glad that I’ve never been on a date where men made passes like this to me:
This wasn’t that she went up to his apartment and he tried to kiss her or invite her to the bedroom and stopped when she said no and was upset. It went much further than that.
Also as the article pointed out, Ansari is known as being “woke”, as being sensitive and understanding what women go through and how crappy a lot of men are. It’s in his stand-up, it’s in his book, it’s in his TV show. He seems like one of the good men. So I can definitely understand her freezing up and also thinking through what she said and did and wondering if she’s sending signals or doing something wrong.
He does seem to have gone too fast. Repeatedly putting her hand on his genitals after she repeatedly took it away is also over the line.
Sounds like she didn’t say no. She should have said no or left as soon as he headed in a direction she didn’t like. And by her own admission she decided she was sexually assaulted after the fact.
In her narrative he sounds like a creep anyway, but I can’t assume her account is objective.
Ok, moving her hand towards his genitals is over the line. Doing it more than once puts him solidly in ‘Creep’ territory and I hope that it severely impacts his future dating options.
But there also comes a point where someone needs to scream in her face “OK LADY, WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STILL HERE?” Continuing to be there after repeated attempts at creepery crosses into mixed-messages territory and removes the ‘completely blameless’ from her side of the equation. At that point, he’s thinking “Well she’s not leaving…”
This is an “article” on a clickbait website for which the otheer headlined stories are “EXCLUSIVE: Justin Bieber’s monkey is still traumatized from living with him”, “Period-trapping is the only way to find out if you’re in a relationship or not”, and “Once you realize Bella Hadid and ‘handsome’ Squidward look identical, there’s no going back”. Once this story is reported by some media organization that achieves at least a minimal threshold of fact checking and has any history of honest journalistic integrity I’ll start to give some credence to the more salacious details of the story beyond, ‘I went on a bad date with a celebrity who didn’t live up to my expectations.’
Stranger
According to the article, the clues were not all non-verbal. She said, out loud, that he was making her uncomfortable. He said, out loud, that okay, he would stop, and suggested they just sit on the couch and watch TV.
And they sat. And the TV came on. And he proceeded again to “make passes” (as someone above ludicrously described it) by directing her face towards his dick.
This is not an awkward case of non-verbal communication misunderstood. This is a person continually violating another person’s express wishes.
The question of whether she should have left and when is actually immaterial to the more important question of how to characterize what he did and how to regard him after the fact. The latter is more important because our discussion of it here plausibly makes a difference in how we will proceed with things in our futures. The discussion of what she should or should have not done and when, on the other hand, is a pointless discussion for us, here to have. It has no implications for anything any of us might do in the future.
Shrew of evidence == stunning. 
My two cents: the entire false accusation crowd needs to get over itself.
It really appears that there is virtually no body going down that road. People who are coming forward even after decades to make accusations are people who’ve endured something awful and are willing to run the gauntlet as a result.
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Violating wishes by persisting in asking for sex and being a creep? Taking her narrative at face value, sure.
But while his behavior on this “date” as described was crude and rude (and I know not what is the expected etiquette of hook-ups in today’s single world or if Ansari gets “groupies”)
does not quite sound like a #metoo moment.
There are plenty of opportunities to misunderstand each other in “romantic” and sexual encounters and to experience the same event very differently.
But she was not his employee, and he did not have power over her in any way. This, as described, is not assault.
It sounds to me like Ansari pressed too hard, too fast, it caught her off guard. She changed her mind about wanting to get physical, but he thought he had consent and kept on pressuring her.
It’s interesting that in his first couple of shows he deals with this very situation, his take being: “Wow, people go straight to sex in the first minute of the first date like it’s normal. Modern dating is so crazy!” Now it sounds more like a fantasy than observational humor. And then we remember that Louis CK used his own show in the same way, using it to soft-peddle perversions that were already known on the whisper network (which he later admitted, let’s not forget). So anyway…
It sounds like he ran his game so fast that she was taken totally by surprise. Then she was trying to figure out whether she wanted to try and salvage the date, while he assumed he had permission to play cat-and-mouse for another half hour with someone who kept turning away from him.
I can see how he would be confused about consent, because she didn’t GTFO right up front. But I believe she was legit shellshocked. Ansari puts on a very public persona of being a nice and respectful guy, so of course she would be shocked. If there’s any confusion, Ansari is responsible for creating it by putting on the pressure so fast and so hard to skate past the consent and preliminaries. I put that all on him.
I couldn’t convict him in court but I hope he takes this as notice that he needs to cut the bullshit with the shock-and-awe approach.
Don’t forget that she was 22 at the time of the date.
I found myself (a 38 yo woman) thinking “why don’t you leave?!” as I was reading. I had to remind myself that she is 22. Yes she is an adult but when it comes to adult dating situations she is a baby.
No, it’s not immaterial or pointless. She wasn’t being held against her will, she was free to stop what was going on and leave. If you’re on a date with someone and they keep behaving in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, common sense dictates that you cut things short and leave. She stayed and went along with the proceedings without much protest. The onus shouldn’t be on him to read her mind. And she never told him to stop, she told him to slow down. That’s not the same thing as a flat out “no” or “stop”.
I also really wish people would stop infantilising adults who are in their twenties. Chances are she’s NOT a “baby” in dating situations, and if she is really that immature that she can’t properly communicate her intentions then she shouldn’t date at all until she gets that sorted out.
20-somethings may be lacking in life experience but that doesn’t mean they lack accountability for their actions.
You didn’t address the second part of my post that you bolded, even though that’s where I actually offer my reasoning for calling the matter immaterial or pointless.
Whether something is material, or has a point, in a conversation, is relative to what that conversation can accomplish.
By talking about whether she should have left and when, what do you imagine you are accomplishing?
By talking about whether what he did was assault, on some kind of spectrum approaching assault, or what, and talking about what kind of person we should think he is after the fact, I imagine we can help accomplish a general education of men concerning the role they have in these situations and what kind of person they should be–a role, and a person-type which has too often been ignored and accepted as natural in the past
That’s the material issue here. That’s the point of conversations like this.
Talking about whether she should have left and when, educates women into fearfulness and self-blame. I am not saying no one should ever talk about that–she is surely thinking about it, and people she trusts have every right to address the issue within that trust. But a stranger talking to a stranger about what some other woman should have done in a situation like this–that goes nowhere good.