@Y Exactly. The "poor man" line of the story is dependent on an average interpretation, made somewhat invisible, of her decision to go back to Ansari's house as a clear signal she wanted sex with him.

I think things can get confusing sometimes, but "you're in my house, therefore I expect to sleep with you" is not really how it should work.

y va marquer wrote:

Burnwinter wrote:

The article claims you'd have to be a "mind reader" to pick up on a range of cues that someone didn't want to have sex with you. It gets some sympathy for the male protagonist of any heterosexual encounter on one level, but it does go both ways.

Men should read stories like this and recognise they should be asking for consent in a variety of more or less subtle ways. Whether or not a guy gets accused of anything afterwards—poor him!—if he's having sex with women and finding out afterwards they didn't really want to, he's doing it wrong.

Is it assumed that because she returned back to his that she was green lighting sex?
That going back to a guys house is a tacit acknowledgement of consent so whatever subsequently happens must involve a woman saying NO as the man is not responsible for asking how she feels or if she's comfortable with how things are going.
To my mind that is central to this sorry episide as it appears that it is exactly what Ansari believed.
It appears that not only did he feel he got the nod for sex but the nod to have it on his terms, his way, which did involved exerting power over her, pestering her, harassing her and degrading her.
The argument that she should have left almost as soon as she got there presumes that she had sound judgement and reflexes good enough to know that he wasn't interested in her for anything other than  sex and that signing off was not acceptable to him.

And yet when it became clear to him she would not consent he stopped and decided to chill instead. That she consented to oral sex, while not an indicator of consent to penetrative sex, is still an indicator of a certain degree of willingness. Seeing as she only says she displayed discomfort, and not rejection, I see no reason why he should be held accountable for "pestering her, harassing her and degrading her". 

Is the only way in the future for people to hook up is for consent to be obtained in a sterilised, inorganic manner? Sign a form on your date? Because without that any kind of advance can and will be interepreted in whatever way.

To me, any disclosure of past private affairs is low, unless it's to call out on something criminal or unethical. What the lady did was to ride the crest of a wave of sexual crime exposes to drag some fumbling guy who commited no such crime to be tarred with the same brush. I agree with Arsedoc that one would wish this happened in a different context, but this context is exactly the one the lady wanted to present her story.

banduan wrote:

Is the only way in the future for people to hook up is for consent to be obtained in a sterilised, inorganic manner? Sign a form on your date? Because without that any kind of advance can and will be interepreted in whatever way.

Yeah, but if you want to hook up in a more spontaneous, unscripted way (which is fair enough, perhaps) then the onus is on you to read all the non-verbal cues the article talks about much more closely.

If you're not capable of doing that, or think you shouldn't have to or that implicit come-ons should count, but implicit back-offs shouldn't count, then spontaneous unscripted hookups aren't particularly ethical for you.

The flip side is that ridiculous "consent app" doing the rounds at the moment, which immediately clearly shows a purely sterile, legalistic, contractual view of consent is seriously lacking as well.

I've only got a few mins so I'll expand on this later:

1. Describing Ansari as some fumbling guy ignores his position of power in the encounter - older, male, on his own territory
2. Red flag guys - consenting to oral sex is NOT an indicator of a certain degree of willingness to penatrative sex. Note that.
3. He did not stop and chill when she asked,he continued to harass and pester her, that is why she left his apartment.
   That she didn't leave immediately perhaps points to a certain naivete, a not knowing of what was "expected" of her in this situation.
4. That she feels degraded and violated to the extent that she exposed Ansari for what she perceives as his unwelcome, sexually aggressive behaviour and his hypocrisy, is a matter for concern in that it highlights just how confusing this is for younger women.
   Despite some more mature, more clued in women telling her she should "write it off as a bad date".
   That this type of encounter got exposed on the forum of #metoo was inevitable - it should not "dilute" the movement, it's part of the conversation.
   It should not result in Ansari losing his career and I don't think it will.
   That it is resulting in people attacking "Grace" from their news room pulpits is not helpful.
   Grace and women of her age and younger have grown up in a hyper sexualised world, porn sex is to some degree normalised and navigating what is "expected" of them is a troubling issue.

Y Va, these are very good points. I wish there were more women on the forum because it's helpful to get that perspective. I'm going to try to add some points to what you are saying. 3 things that immediately come to mind are A) why the media are underplaying this story, B) why she might be terrified when on the surface it might not seem like there should be reason for fear, and C) the role of non-verbals and how men may choose to interpret them.

A. I think it is important to view the current incarnation of #metoo as a media-led phenomenon. Coombs protested that a lot of good work has been done by this and similar movements. I think the media-led #metoo is more likely to be led by sensational stories - so something with Weinstein's Mosad agents threatening victims, doctors abusing dozens of gymnasts, or Lauer pushing buttons to trap and terrify women. In these stories, it is easy to process why the women are terrified, here it is not.

B. So why is she terrified? I assume she is if she did not leave. Perhaps it comes down to realities or perceptions of power - as per Y Va's point 1. I think Y Va's point 1 is important in so far as even though he is not her boss, gymanstics coach, etc., he still occupies power as a man in society. Think about a woman listening to the news the last 3 months (and her whole life before) and hearing about men reacting unpleasantly to unrequited advances. Perhaps (and this is conjecture) in the moment she is frightened. The reality is that gender-based violence is real, with WHO estimates at around one third of women having experienced sexual intimate partner violence.

C. She mentions that she makes several motions to him to indicate that she is not interested. Articles shared yesterday indicated that Ansari is guilty only of not being a mind reader. I am actually wondering if this is the issue that makes most men uncomfortable. Humans have developed an advanced non-verbal communication system over millions of years. We can read eyes, smiles, how the head is turned to read sexual interest or lack thereof. It appears she is saying that she gave him such signals that she was not interested, and he either did not receive them, or received them and ignored them.
On C, I think the story tends to linger on Grace and why she didn't leave etc, which are all legitimate questions, but this is the opportunity to engage men more and ask if we are always fully aware of all the non-verbals. A few women I talked to have said that they have been in the exact same situation, and have continued out of naivete, fear, etc. But they all say that they believe the men knew that the women were not enjoying the situation. And I asked is this assault? And they each said no, but they each felt that the men had abused power or overstepped, or some version of that.

Similar points being made in this article:

It was bound to happen. In the midst of women sharing stories of harassment and assault via the #MeToo movement, and a brewing backlash of hand-wringers wondering if women have perhaps gone too far, it was only a matter of time before a publication did us the disservice of publishing a sensational story of a badly behaved man who was nonetheless not a sexual assailant. The publication: Babe.net. The man: Aziz Ansari. The story: a coercive, dehumanizing sexual interaction.

It’s a shame. Not because these stories shouldn’t be told – if anything, we need to talk more about how pervasive power imbalances benefit men and make sex worse for women. But instead of telling this particular story with the care it called for, it was jammed into a pre-existing movement grounded in the language of assault and illegality.

It seems to have been reported only because there was a celebrity name attached, and not even because the celebrity broke the law or leveraged his power to do wrong, but because he was sexist and sexually entitled – while despicable, that’s shaky grounds for broadcasting an individual’s sexual play-by-play.

As a result, we’re arguing about whether Aziz Ansari is a sexual assailant, and missing the more relevant conversation about sex, male entitlement and misogyny in the bedroom.

Journalistic integrity aside, this story missed the boat in a much more important way. It was only a matter of time before the focus of the #MeToo movement turned to sexist sexual experiences more generally. And here is where there remains much feminist work to be done.

After centuries of feminist activism, it finally seems like most of society understands that sexual assault and harassment are wrong; we increasingly understand that it’s not just about sex, but about power, and that harassment in the workplace isn’t about sexual desire, but about women’s rights to participate in the workforce.

What we haven’t touched on nearly as thoroughly is heterosexual sex for women in a society that still sees sex as primarily about male pleasure; that continues to position women’s bodies as sexual objects, receptacles and stand-ins for sex itself; and that encourages sexual aggressiveness in men and congeniality and passivity in women (perhaps the best – and one of the few – pieces written on the sexist power dynamics within consensual sex was by Rebecca Traister in New York magazine, back in 2015).

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/16/aziz-ansari-story-missed-opportunity

That Fox News guy....

"Who will protect men?"
"Young people will not take the risk of actually talking to another person, asking them out for a date".
"So it'll just be robots?"
"Well I hope it'll be robots because robots are more attractive"

Yep as we discuss this the age of the sexbot is dawning - pesky real women with attitude, opinions and an unwillingness to submit to control can be replaced.
Bet Fox News guy has his order in.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/jordan-peterson-cathy-newman-interview-channel-4-news-security-consultant-university-of-toronto-a8169401.html

y va marquer wrote:

Yep as we discuss this the age of the sexbot is dawning - pesky real women with attitude, opinions and an unwillingness to submit to control can be replaced.

Cool, let in MGTOWs and Incels have their sexbots. The rest of us who like women can keep going as we are and Darwinism will sort out the rest.

My Fear friend likes to talk about one of the great paradoxes of being a woman: That no one is ever afraid of you. This is great in some situations (like if you’re Erin Brockovich trying to find incriminating documents) and horrible in others (most everything else). A woman can be so easily squashed, destroyed, silenced, ruined, and yet, we are mostly the ones who are afraid. As Dworkin famously said in a 1975 speech at Queens College: “By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element."

But with the Weinstein fallout, and the List, we saw men actually becoming afraid of what they did or did not do (and honestly, if they didn’t feel any fear, they were deluded). If there’s one thing to learn from the endless morass of emotions that has been the past few weeks it’s that it’s good to make men feel fear, and this is something women absolutely have the power to do, even if it has to come anonymously, and in aggregate. Many men wonder what to do with their entitled mouths and brains at moments like this and the answer is: shut up and go away. Fear, not common sense or respect, is the only thing that seems to drive some of them to silence. However fleeting this change may be, it is a distinct role reversal and, I hope, it is progress.

he quit 3 hours after the story dropped.

meanwhile, the cretin from missouri is still in office

Shocking that a man who cheated on his wife for decades and banged his own step-granddaughter (well before she was eighteen according to her friends) turns out to be a creep.