Qwiss! wrote:
I'm really sick of the "well Weinstein was worse" defense. That doesn't make Aziz a good guy. It doesn't make him continuing to kiss and grope this woman after she said no acceptable. Ansari has a reputation for being "woke", he's had stories about sexual predators and how unsafe women can feel in his show. Yet it all seems like a facade in light if this. This story deserved to be told.
It's just so cliché. Stories aren't as powerful as the media want you to believe, they peddle them so they make it seem like they are what's really changing the world. It won't really help shape the general consciousness for the better, it'll just feed the jackals. Evidence (recounting events is a part of that, for sure), removal from power, prosecution, and the jailing of sexual abusers and the dismantling of systems that validate and support them is what should be the focus here. This story does nothing at all to advance this, because it doesn't have anything to do with it.
I'm not big fan of Aziz Ansari. Can't manage to watch his show, and I'm not really defending him, gross as he seems to be in the sack (or wherever people are having sex). I'm much angrier at the article and its publishers, which reads more like erotic fan fiction than journalism. It's a scummy way to get some attention and make a quick buck, all the while throwing people into pointless arguments that distract from what I think are the more important issues. I'm sorry that he treated her poorly, he's an asshole for being gross, and I'm sorry that she felt so bad afterward, but I struggle to consider it particularly harrowing in the face of what else is going on, so frankly, I'm not that sorry.
@ Claud, I take a bit of umbrage at the idea that sexual abuse is only being fought against at the level of celebrity, and that it is somehow abstract to everyone else. It isn't abstract to me, or people I know well. Indeed, I'm sure it's not abstract to you, either. Me Too is over a decade old, it's not some new thing, and Hollywood now is just an explosion of what has been simmering under the surface; the result of years of hard work by people like Tarana Burke, and also by good people at every level that have put their careers on the line to make sure that people who commit such heinous acts are at least removed from power and brought to court. I myself have supported a number of friends and colleagues in their fights to be recognized, and of course, in the hopes that we'd see justice served when men abused them from positions of power (that hope is all too often in vain). I've also supported follow-up fights to enact policies that would prevent against such abuses in the future, also too often in vain. So don't say it's abstract to the factory workers and such, because it isn't. In fact, Hollywood is doing its usual bit to abstract it for us, to turn it into the realm of celebrity, to glitz it up a bit, but also to let the paint run a little so we can't quite see the shape of it properly anymore.
It's part of what was always going to happen, but the fight we need is on the ground, and it's as nose on the plane of Ann's face...or however it goes.
