I’m reasonably certain that you don’t get to tell us what we’re allowed to discuss and the rights and wrongs of it, so please stop trying to bend the conversation to your control.
She seems to have eagerly courted him. She initiated the conversation, he initially ignored her and then they bonded over having the same hipster camera. She kept her eye on him through the night, gave him her phone number, flirted over text, went out on a date then came back to his place. Perhaps she had fantasied and pined for the possibility of her, a 22-year-old arriviste media person in the Big Apple having a relationship with a well-known actor and comedian with his own Netflix show. She may have been discombobulated by the fact that it was going to be a lot less romantic and social climbing than she expected and she was going to go from starstruck to just starfucked.
Again, not to take away from his pushiness and rudeness. HMS’s comment about some comedians revealing their lesser selves through their comedy is apt.
It is hesitation to proceed with a sexual act. Hesitation shows discomfort. A decent person would register hesitation and pull back, read the situation, gently ask for questions. Ansari didn’t do that, he kept playing cat-and-mouse when she was repeatedly expressing that she was hesitant or unsure. That’s bullshit.
It is so sad as a father that in a couple of years, I’ll have to look my daughter in the eyes and say “Even when a guy seems really nice and funny and considerate, and you really want to impress him, keep your keys handy and be ready to bring out your bitch at any time. Especially watch the nice boys, because everybody will believe them over you.”
Now I’m sorry I didn’t read the article completely, or any others. But this part clearly changes the game;
"She says he then resumed kissing her, briefly performed oral sex on her, and asked her to do the same thing to him. She did, but not for long."
Now we’re quite clearly out of “he assaulted me” territory and into simple remorse. If you were uncomfortable, why did you remove your pants and allow this to happen? At some point, personal responsibility enters the picture.
It’s also easy to say “why don’t you leave” when you already know how the movie ends. Nobody wants to go on a date thinking “Hey, this is nice, but keep the mace handy if he tries to steal 3rd base.” Nobody wants that kind of date, which is why it shocks women, which is why men keep doing it.
Telling women they can exercise their right to end a situation with a man that’s not to their liking where it’s reasonable isn’t teaching them “fearfulness and self blame”, it’s teaching them agency and if you don’t think that has any place in a conversation about consent then no offense, but perhaps you’re not qualified to lead those conversations. It’s just as offensive to women act as though they have no ability to voice their feelings in such circumstances as it is to make rape prevention solely their responsibility.
She hesitated to proceed with sexual intercourse, so she told him to slow down and he did. She willingly performed other sex acts with him. I’m not saying Aziz is a good guy in this situation because it’s highly questionable to want to have sex with anyone who is less than enthusiastic about having sex with you. So absolutely he deserves blame for not making sure there was no ambiguity about her willingness. But her refusal to be more direct about what she really wanted and continuing to engage in sex with him when she was free to stop and leave hurts her claim to victimhood.
I’m not an expert, I don’t really sleep around, and I’m not much of a lady’s man, but I’ve been on a couple of dates.
It is not uncommon for a woman to ask you to slow down. I’m a guy, and it takes me about 15 milliseconds to get in the mood, especially in my 20’s. It generally takes a bit longer for the woman to get into it, even if she is into you.
I’ve had sometimes when they asked me to slow down, and it ends up nothing happens that night, or any night thereafter, and I’ve had some women ask me to slow down, and they caught up with my level of excitement after a bit more time enjoying each other. I’ve also had a couple that said that they weren’t in the mood and left, never to be seen again. 
From her own description she was sending mixed signals. She later went to her friends and got them to “validate” her feelings that is was assault.
The concern that men have expressed on this board, and elsewhere, that normal dating miscues would be considered to be sexual assault, and they were assured that they were just being paranoid is what has been validated by this story, not her feelings of sexual assault. And as much as I resent the people that make up things like the red pill and the MRA, this will serve as the exact example that they are looking for. Her accusing him of assault when all it was was a bad date with mismatched expectations is fuel for their anti-woman rhetoric.
Grabbing someone’s hand and pulling it towards your genitals is sexual assault
How is this hard?
I can imagine cases where someone does this and it ends up leading to happy sex times. That doesn’t change the fact that it was sexual assault. Why do you think it does? In such a case, it just means it’s a sexual assault that happened not to end poorly. Still sexual assault. Still a thing that shouldn’t be done.
I can imagine cases where some kind of implicit consent is given to the grabbing and pulling. Not sexual assault in that case, sure. But because it is very easy to claim one believed they had implicit consent when no consent was given, we should err on the side of not granting implicit consent existed, when it is called into question. Why should this be a problem?
I am not sure what you’ve misread here, but I am describing, in a way that is open to dialogue and correction if you think I’m wrong, what the effects of conversations can be, and I am making a claim about what this implies as to what it is best and not best to talk about. I’m not trying to “control the conversation” I’m trying to have one, by offering arguments which everyone is free to offer counter-arguments to.
Meanwhile, you have not replied in the same way, but have instead simply requested that I stop saying what I’m saying. That seems like a bit of pot and kettle…
Seriously.
Hell, I have great confidence that my 16 year old is able to say a firm “No” in a manner that leaves no doubt and already has enough dating experience to not consent to something that she does not want to do because the male’s insistence made her feel “pressured”. Let’s be real, the amount of dating experience needed for that is nil. It merely requires not being a jellyfish.
Frylock, to you the important question is “how we will proceed with things in our futures”?
Okay. I am going to stay married and be even more committed to getting through any tough patches. I am also going to continue to be think that none of us, male, female, fluid, whatever, would do too well if every single interaction we had was put under a microscope and put out for the world to critique. And I will continue to appreciate that others have different sexual mores than I do. Some live in hook up worlds.
Ansari thought he was in a situation in which a pretty young woman had been pursuing him with mutual physical attraction and that the night was centered around going back to his place to have sex. That belief must have been reinforced when she did not object to fairly immediately getting out of their clothes when they got to his place, her not objecting to having oral sex performed on her and then her performing some on him.
This was not her understanding. She was expecting the semi-fictional character created by Ansari that shares his name and was shocked that instead she was on date with someone who was more interested in a hook up with her than in a relationship with her. Yeah, a bit slow on the uptake she was. The quick let’s get out of here and get back to my place, wasn’t enough to key her in, and saying let’s slow it down only occurred to her after they were both naked and had had a bit of mutual oral sex.
Of course at any point either party has the right to say no even if explicit (let alone merely understood) consent has been given earlier. But really this one is: “We got undressed and had a bit of oral sex, each giving and receiving. But then he asked for more of the same from me after I had asked to slow it down. And I willingly gave it to him. I’ve been violated!”
Is sticking your fingers down a woman’s throat a normal dating cue?
Is pulling a woman’s hand towards your genitals a normal dating cue?
Is thrusting your dick in her face after she has already stated you are making her uncomfortable a normal dating cue?
Come on dude.
I expressed myself poorly.
Let’s do the “what if it was my daughter” thing. With my daughter, with whom I have a relationship of deep trust, where she knows I have the best in mind for her, I will, on appropriate occasions, give her advice about what to do in a situation like this that includes firmly saying no and leaving.
ALSO, with my daughter, if it actually happens and she doesn’t firmly say no and leave, I will not, in a million years, say “you should have firmly said no and left.” I will say “what an ass, I’m glad you are okay, and I know those situations can be really hard to think through in the moment. Tell me more about it!”
That’s with my daughter. (Would you do any differently with yours?)
Why should we handle public incidents much differently than this? For the same reasons I would never in a million years, after the fact, focus on what my daughter should have done, should we not also never in a million years, after the fact, focus on what this woman should have done?
If I focused on that with my daughter, what message would she naturally take away? “Men are monsers, I fucked up, and I need to either just surrender and not complain next time, or avoid contact with men entirely.” (That’s an exaggeration but you see what I mean.) That’s the message of “fearfulness” etc I was talking about.
Okay, for the shitbird who sent an anonymous and vaguely threatening message to my private email, let’s review exactly what I said:
I did not “blame the victim”, defend a “probibilly rapeist [sic]”, or otherwise justify sexual assault or aggression. The account, if factual, likely meets the legal standard for physical and likely sexual assault; however, being published on a clickbait essayist site “for girls who don’t give a fuck,” which advertises itself as:*babe is into good news reporting, trash trends, personal stories, industry-leading analysis of fuckboys and the pettiest celebrity drama.*The site, by the way is owned by Tab Media Ltd, whose parent company is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, a news media company most famous in the journalism arena for publishing tabloids and Fox News, and whose attitude toward blatant character defamation is less “Get two or more sources and cross check between them,” and more, “Let them sue if that can’t take a libelous joke.”
As for the ‘article’ itself, the only fact checking indicated is having “spoke to the first friends she told about it, and reviewed the messages on her phone.” There is no indication that the editorial staff even did so much as to confirm that Ansari was even at the same event where the author claims to have met cute with him or city that the purported assault occurred in, much less any confirming details such as verifying the restaurant detail or Uber ride. This is basic journalism, and yes, you won’t find it being done on the “news” that you read on your niece’s Facebook page or by Alex Jones, which is the very reason you should take anything you read or hear from these sources not only with question but active skepticism if you haven’t seen it from a source with some vague history of credibility of any kind.
I don’t know the claimant or have any way to assess her credibility (although selling a story to a site which bundles salacious content for aggregators does not give any reason to assume that she skews toward ‘more ethical’ in her personal life) but if the behavior is as aggressive as reported then it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that the subject behaved in such a fashion, and we can expect a storm of #MeToo responses with corresponding details that can be crosschecked to see if they line up. To date, every famous personality who has been credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment in the past year has seen multiple allegations due to a pervasive pattern of abusive behavior which you’d expect of someone who uses power or celebrity to force themselves on others. So, if we see more women coming forward to claim that Ansari was abusive or took advantage of their supposed naïveté to force them into unwanted sex then we can assign some credibility to the story beyond what as some anonymous woman wrote on a sensationalistic clickbait site with no editorial review.
Stranger
Dseid what is your theory as to why she spent the car ride home crying?
Well let’s start by discarding the baseline assumption that women are not adults and have no personal responsibility for their own behavior. That seems to be the underlying, unspoken foundation of all defenses of her actions. She’s 22. Yes, she’s young and relatively inexperienced, but she is still an adult and responsible for her own actions. She and others don’t get to explain that away and then blame him for everything that happened.
That’s what she said? (Ducks and runs.)
But seriously, if I was single and on a date and at a point in a sexual encounter after having gotten undressed and after having performed oral sex on each other, I do not think the other person’s grabbing my hand and moving to where it was desired would be sexual assault. I think it would be sexual communication.
Context is key.
When a woman asks for you to slow down, do you keep putting her hand on your penis? When she asks to chill out do you sit on the couch with her and point to your dick and make her feel pressured to go down on you? Do you keep cutting off her path as she tries to move away from you? And then stick your fingers down her throat once you’ve cut off her path? I’m hoping and assuming not. From the article:
I don’t quite understand what mixed signals people are seeing, unless they are just saying that the mere fact that she didn’t run out of the apartment screaming is a signal that she wanted to have sex. I don’t have a huge dating history, but if I was with someone and they were pulling away and mumbling and kept moving away from me in my apartment, I wouldn’t read that a signal to keep trying. They did have oral sex quickly after getting in the apartment despite her being uncomfortable with how quickly things escalated, but just because some sexual activity happened doesn’t mean that all things are allowed now. I assume that if you got someone back to your place and you let them go down on you doesn’t mean you are also signing off immediately on them tying you up and sticking the Fist of Fury dildo up your ass on your first date. You can consent to one act without consenting to others.
Maybe her signals of “no I do not want this!” were not obvious enough (though it sounds to me like they were), but it definitely doesn’t sound like she was sending signals of “yes please I want to have sex with you.” Not really a case of mixed signals, more like paying attentions to the signals I want to see and ignoring the ones I don’t want to see.
Also from reading on Twitter, I’ve read a few comments on how there have been rumors about him. I hope there aren’t any more stories, because I don’t want there to have been any other women who went through similar experiences, I hope that he just had a one night time of wildly bad misjudgment. But if there are other stories I hope they come out and women feel safe sharing their experiences.
Is that supposed to be addressed to me? I ask because I don’t understand where you get tha assumption out of anything I wrote. I’ve said quite the opposite, for example, in my last post where I use the “what if it were my daughter” trope.
NM
It can be both…