If you haven’t heard by now, Babe.com recently published a very detailed account of a young woman’s experience of being sexually harassed while on a date with Aziz Ansari. The allegations caused a ton of shock throughout the Internet, but more than that, like with any other serious accusation, the details resulted in controversy. The woman, who the website calls ‘Grace,’ gave a painfully specific narrative of what occurred between her and Ansari that night. It is less about the fact that Ansari continued to push sexual boundaries and had obvious difficulty reading nonverbal communication signs, but rather that, despite Grace’s repeated rejections, he refused to accept no as an answer. The issue at hand has become more about how visual discomfort is not enough, saying no is apparently not enough, and how men like Ansari continue to disempower young women in an effort to get what they want.
It’s enough that this scandal is triggering, upsetting, and overall, pretty gross. Any person that understands the level of discomfort that occurs when they are being pressured into performing sexual acts can attest to such ugliness. Perhaps the worst part of this scandal is that, along with Ansari’s actions being so heavily debated, people are having difficulty understanding what he did wrong in the first place. The claims that Grace should have been more assertive about declining his advances are understandable, but that doesn’t – and will never – justify the fact that Ansari refused to take no as an answer on multiple accounts.
Instead of continuing to give Ansari attention that he doesn’t deserve, perhaps it’s better to use this incident as a conversation starter as to what should’ve been done in the moment. Maybe Grace should have been more aggressive when vocalizing her discomfort, but at the end of the day, Ansari still should have picked up on her rejection. In general, just because someone says no the first time, it doesn’t mean they’ll say yes in 10 minutes, in 20, or even in an hour.
Pressuring someone to perform any type of sexual act that they’re visibly uncomfortable with will never be acceptable, regardless of the circumstances. Consent is not a particularly difficult subject to understand; in fact, it comes down to a simple yes or no answer (and if you do have an issue understanding it, then maybe you shouldn’t be having sex at all). What Ansari should’ve assumed is that when someone says no, it truly, absolutely means no. It doesn’t become a game, or some funny cat-and-mouse scenario — when they say no, they mean it. And you leave them alone.