Uncomfortable, disappointing, and disgusting are all adjectives I could use to describe the exposé of Aziz Ansari published on the digital magazine Babe last weekend. The article was told from the perspective of “Grace,” a woman who met Ansari at an award show after party in 2017. She claims to have been awestricken by him and his celebrity, and they proceeded to have a night full of light flirtation that ended with an exchanging of phone numbers. Ansari was apparently smitten, as Grace received a prompt text from him the following morning requesting to meet. A date with a successful, funny, attractive guy you meet at a star studded party sounds like some sort of modern day fairytale, right? Wrong. The night ended with Grace going home in tears, feeling violated and confused about the way that Ansari had treated her.
I will leave out the disturbing details that are very explicitly described in the article. What I will say, however, is that the night can be described as a very uncomfortable game of cat and mouse. Grace says that she would physically move away from him out of discomfort, and he would follow, continuing to be sexually aggressive and unresponsive to her very apparent cues. Grace describes him as being “very much in the moment”, and that even when she verbally expressed her desire to stop what was going on, he would only meet her with more advances. As a reader, I couldn’t help but feel a burning frustration simmer in my cheeks while I watched a painfully common narrative unfold on my screen.
It’s like we’re in an apocalypse of truth. Every time we check Twitter, there’s another public figure that we are forced to lose respect for, and immediately associate with, for lack of a better word, ickiness. Sometimes you can look at their face plastered on the headline photo and say to yourself, “oh yeah, I could’ve called that,” if they looked slimy to begin with or had been caught creepily ogling female interviewers on the red carpet. But, what might be most upsetting about what we know about Ansari is that it wasn’t expected, at least for me.
Ansari has been a self-identifying feminist for a while now, and a proud one at that. In an interview with David Letterman in 2014, Ansari practically shouted over the rooftops about his passion for feminism, and that his girlfriend at the time had inspired him to think more deeply about gender issues. From the looks of it, Ansari was “woke”. However, this is just another reminder of how social media makes it easy to mimic #woke rhetoric, but not genuinely practice it.
I decided to do some snooping myself, besides the Babe article, to see how other people were responding to all of this. It seems like the internet is going ‘round and ‘round about whether or not we should be talking about Ansari’s behavior the way that we are. Articles have been published left and right pushing back on Grace and her story, asking their readers if it was really wrong, if Grace’s discomfort was really valid, or if it was just a painfully awkward date with a guy who simply couldn’t take a hint. After all, she chose to go to his house, and chose get on the kitchen counter, and chose to stay, even after things started to feel totally yuck. All of these things are true, but it doesn’t make this woman’s feelings about an uncomfortable sexual encounter invalid. The fact that we can’t collectively come to a consensus on the ethics of Ansari’s behavior shows that we view sex, and romantic relationships in general, in a disturbing way.
I know we all love to roll our eyes at the self-help books our moms have lying around on their nightstands, but there’s one thing they have to say that’s worth remembering. Relationships should be centered around communication. Sure, Grace didn’t call foul and leave the minute things got weird, but we’re not reacting in the same way to Ansari, who ignored Grace’s verbal cues and continued on. Oftentimes men are taught to have sex imperiously and aggressively, and if they don’t they face backlash within their social groups by having their masculinity challenged. Women are taught to take this behavior and accept it as the way things are or face the petrifying calamity of hurting someone’s feelings. It’s a vicious cycle, one that has normalized stories such as this one, to the point that people are questioning whether this behavior is okay.
We all need to take a step back and examine the way we view and maneuver sexual relationships in this day and age. It’s an institutional problem that can’t be corrected until we stop making decisions out of fear of backlash or worry about meeting an expectation and focus more on the desires of our partners and ourselves. Aziz Ansari’s behavior in this instance is disheartening and inexcusable, but it’s something we can use as a springboard for conversations in the future that could lead to correcting the issue.