On January 14, 2018, Katie Way from Babe.net published a short but contentious article titled “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life.” Way interviewed a young woman under the pseudonym “Grace,” who recounted this date and accused Aziz Ansari of sexual assault, and Way labelled it as part of the #MeToo movement.
The story goes as follows: A young photographer (Grace) met Aziz Ansari at a party in Los Angeles. He became interested in how they both used the same type of film camera, they flirted a bit, and he asked for her phone number. He texted her and they arranged a date in Manhattan. She was “excited for their date” and spent a long time chatting with her friends and deciding what to wear. They went out to an expensive restaurant, where Ansari ordered red wine even though Grace wanted white. Grace felt that Ansari rushed through the meal in order to get her back to his apartment.
When they got to Ansari’s apartment, Grace complimented his kitchen countertops, and he then asked her to sit on top of them. While kissing, Grace reported that Ansari repeatedly pulled her towards him and attempted sex; she said that she felt uncomfortable throughout and attempted, unsuccessfully, to voice her objections.
Grace said “no” for the first time during the night when Ansari suggested they have penetrative sex in front of a mirror. Ansari immediately stopped and replied, “Oh, of course; it’s only fun if we’re both having fun. How about we just chill, but this time with our clothes on?”
They put their clothes back on and watched Seinfeld on Ansari’s couch. Eventually, overcome with the feeling that she had been pressured for a hookup she didn’t want, Grace left, telling Ansari: “You guys are all the f***ing same,” and cried in the Uber on the ride home.
The next day, Ansari texted her, saying, “It was fun meeting you last night.”
She responded, “Last night might’ve been fun for you, but it wasn’t for me. You ignored clear nonverbal cues; you kept going with advances. You had to have noticed I was uncomfortable.”
Ansari responded to the story with a public apology: “In September of last year, I met a woman at a party. We exchanged numbers. We texted back and forth and eventually went on a date. We went out to dinner, and afterwards we ended up engaging in sexual activity, which by all indications was completely consensual.
“The next day, I got a text from her saying that although ‘it may have seemed okay,’ upon further reflection, she felt uncomfortable. It was true that everything did seem okay to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned. I took her words to heart and responded privately after taking the time to process what she had said.
“I continue to support the movement that is happening in our culture. It is necessary and long overdue.”
Some readers saw Ansari as unfairly persecuted, arguing that Grace’s account confused bumbled miscommunication with rape and the gross abuse of power. Aziz Ansari’s actions, they believed, should not be portrayed like those of Harvey Weinstein or Larry Nassar. Headline News anchor Ashleigh Banfield called Way’s article a “nuclear weapon that was wielded upon Ansari’s career.” Banfield defended Ansari, saying the conflation of his allegated behavior with the actions that brought down these other men trivializes what the #MeToo movement was meant to stand for.
Others believed it necessary to define Grace’s experience as sexual assault and argued that this story belongs under the umbrella of the #MeToo movement. In “The Necessary Story of Aziz Ansari,” James Hamblin from The Atlantic wrote: “To target only the most egregious ‘monsters’ is to treat only the severe symptoms; the goal is prevention. . . . The behavior of a Harvey Weinstein is simple to condemn. The harder work is ahead, in the more common and less clear-cut moments that leave people feeling somewhere between uncomfortable and trapped.”
Large numbers of young women have proclaimed their support for Grace via social media, saying that her experience was similar to demoralizing sexual experiences of their own. Some have also used the Ansari story to argue that men are socialized by our culture to persistently seek sex from women despite cues—both verbal and nonverbal—that these women do not want to have sex with them.
In an article from The Atlantic, “The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari,” Caitlin Flanagan wrote: “Depending on how readers were primed to see the ink blot, it can be taken as evidence that the ongoing cultural audit is exactly on track—getting more granular in challenging unhealthy sex-related power dynamics—or that it has gone off the rails, and innocent men are now suffering, and we are collectively on the brink of a sex panic.”
Bari Weiss of The New York Times characterized the exchange like this: “Put in other words: I am angry that you weren’t able to read my mind.”
Katie Way said, “[Grace] says she used verbal and nonverbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was. Whether Ansari didn’t notice Grace’s reticence or knowingly ignored, it is impossible for her to say.” She said that Grace claimed “he wouldn’t let her move away from him.”
Encoded in this statement—“he wouldn’t let her move away from him”—are, Bari Weiss argued in The Times, “new yet deeply retrograde ideas about what constitutes consent—and what constitutes sexual violence.”
Ansari stated in his apology that “by all indications,” what happened was “completely consensual.”
In my opinion, based on Katie Way’s original article, Ansari was the only one who acted with any agency. Grace did not verbally communicate that she was uncomfortable with the speed at which things were escalating, just as she did not voice her preference for red wine over white aloud at the restaurant (Weiss commented, “Yes, we are apparently meant to read the nonconsensual wine choice as foreboding”). The moment Grace uttered the word “no,” Ansari stopped—she charges Ansari with the crime of not inquiring her opinion during his every action, of trusting she was capable of agency.
It is a problem, many feminists argue, that men such as Ansari often act aggressively and selfishly (although they may present feminist public personas), that men are socialized to pursue sex even when women are not fully interested, that men are normalized to always make the first move, and that our culture expects women to be accommodating, self-sacrificing, and docile. The snapshot of our culture shown through Grace’s story epitomizes women’s socialization to place men’s desires over their own.
However, the solution cannot be to vilify men for failing to follow women’s “nonverbal cues.” Novelist Margaret Atwood wrote in a piece in The Globe and Mail: “My fundamental position is that women are human beings. Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions. If they were, we’re back to the 19th century, and women should not own property, have credit cards, have access to higher education, control their own reproduction or vote. There are powerful groups in North America pushing this agenda, but they are not usually considered feminists.” When women are presumed to have no agency, unable to verbalize their emotions, and exist merely acted upon, they are.
Grace’s story exemplifies a culture where a lack of female agency is considered normal. The feminist solution, instead of criminalizing awkward, bumbled, entitled sex, is to redefine antiquated gender roles and empower women to be louder, bolder, and more assertive about what they want.