If men are not entitled to sex, then women are not entitled to victimhood
I was at dinner with a few students at an all-women’s college on an American campus that had invited me to speak on women’s empowerment.
We got to talking about parties. I was curious to know how things had changed, or hadn’t.
Well, said one of the women, you go, you drink, you dance, a guy comes up behind you, he grinds.
Grinds?
He doesn’t ask?
No, she said.
And you’re okay with that? I was, to use an old-fashioned word, shocked. This was, after all, a college that was rightly proud of its record in training women to be future leaders. How was it that its students seemed to have so little agency over their own bodies?
If we complain, they’ll stop inviting us, she said.
Coincidentally, it so happened that I was also working on a story on sexual assault on United States' campuses. The Obama administration had released findings that one in five women on US campuses had been sexually assaulted. From Columbia to Harvard, Ivy League and non-Ivy League colleges were aflame with protest, and college presidents were scrambling to salvage their reputations.
“There’s an implication that if women don’t want to hook up, then they shouldn’t be at parties,” a student associated with a feminist campus society told me during the course of researching that story.
The dinner took place some three years ago but that encounter came back to me when I read about a woman’s date night-from-hell account on a website called Babe. Briefly, the unidentified woman, then 22 years old, runs into comedian Aziz Ansari, then 33 years old, at an after-party at the Emmys in 2017. A few flirtatious texts later, he invites her to dinner in New York. They meet at his apartment, go out to dinner, and then come back to his apartment where he initiates sex.
She says she made it clear through "verbal and non verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was". He says it was consensual. When she contradicts him in a text sent on his phone published by Babe, Ansari replies that he is "sad" to know that the night was not "fun" for her.
“Clearly I misread things in the moment and I’m truly sorry,” he says.
Perhaps Ansari should have looked a bit more closely at the pin he wore on the night that he was awarded Best Actor in a TV comedy at the Golden Globes this year, just before the incident went public. If it’s "Times Up" for sexually predatory behaviour, how come so many men haven’t still got the memo? How come so many remain clueless?
Before any further conversation, it’s crucial to ask a fundamental question: Is Ansari guilty of sexual assault? Is his yet another career that deserves to be taken down in the wake of the #MeToo movement?
To my mind, it is abundantly clear that you can accuse Ansari of many things — being clueless, entitled, an insensitive douchebag – but you cannot accuse him of sexual assault, in this case.
At no point does the woman in her recounting say she felt threatened. In fact, it seems evident by her own testimony, that she is free to leave at any point and that when she finally does, Ansari does not try to force her to stay.
Ansari is not yet another powerful man who is demanding sexual services in return for something. Nothing has been promised. In fact, nothing is being sought more than a follow up to a series of flirtatious text messages.
Yet, the Ansari episode raises questions about the nature of male-female interactions and to ask why fundamental signals between men and women are being misread and, more dangerously, not being received.
Why is it that so many men, even those claiming to be feminist like Ansari, still fail to read cues? What do we need to do to make ourselves heard? Club them on the head?
It is likely that a toxic cocktail of the cult of celebrity with its ingrained sense of sexual entitlement, rendered Ansari deaf and blind to the woman’s very clear cues.
And, yet if we’re going to demolish this sense of male entitlement, then we need to understand equally that if men are not hearing us say "no", it is possible that we need to learn to say that no differently.
Of course, since it’s complicated, this line of argument brings us perilously close to placing the onus of staying safe on women and the way we should behave. It’s the same argument we hear all the time in India to ensure that women do not go out late at night, or dress in a certain way, or step "out of line" by eating chow mein or owning mobile phones.
In an ideal world, a woman should be able to go out and have dinner with an older male celebrity without having to be pressured into having sex. In an ideal world, he should be able to pick on her cues.
Just how far away we are from that ideal world is clear from the Aziz Ansari revelations. It is world where men don’t wait for "yes" and don’t seem to hear "no".
And yet because we’re women and because we’re responsible for our own safety, perhaps we need to learn to negotiate the art of saying, "no thanks, I don't want sex", or "yeah, that would be great", or even, "I wanted it five minutes ago, but I've changed my mind now and I'm really sorry".
The problem transcends borders. We need to look hard at the way most of us continue to bring up our daughters all over the world. We still bring up our daughters to be "nice"; in India a key word to their upbringing still remains "adjust". Please adjust, we tell our daughters. Adjust to in-laws, to joint families, to husbands who must never be questioned, to religious practice and social norms that must never be shaken.
It’s easy for so many of us to ask in retrospect from the safety of our homes and offices: why didn’t the woman leave? After all, at no point in her own account did she feel threatened. In India, the over-turning of a previous rape conviction involving the filmmaker Mahmood Farooqui on the grounds that the woman’s "no" was far too feeble, led to an outcry of feminist protest, including mine. And, yet, that woman explains her apparent compliance: she was threatened by the very real danger of resistance — death as in the case of Jyoti “Nirbhaya” Pandey, the medical student who was gang-raped and left for dead on the night of December 16, 2012.
But this woman never feels threatened. Is it then so unreasonable to ask why she felt compelled to hang around, why she didn’t leave, and why she complied with sexual acts demanded by Ansari?
It’s a question that’s being asked in opinion pieces around the world, including by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic ("The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari") and Bari Weiss in The New York Times ("Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader"). Both pieces have kicked up a storm of comments. Clearly, this is an issue that strikes close home. So many women concede that they’ve been in sexual situations that they were uncomfortable with, forced to play along, because, who knows why.
Women have fought for the right to be sexually independent; free agents of our own sexuality and our own bodies. This is a geographically uneven battle because to put it in perspective, in most parts of the world, including India, women are still fighting for the right to education, for the right to work, for the right to not have their bodies mutilated through cutting, for the right to just be born.
And, yet, even in societies that give us some degree of freedom and sexual autonomy, it’s clear that the rules continue to be stacked against us. That you have a highly sexualised culture that pressures men to pressure women to play along with a toxic notion of masculinity.
There is something fundamentally wrong with a culture where wonderful, bright, engaged and empowered women on the cusp of a college degree cannot tell obnoxious frat boys at a party to back off. This is Patriarchy 101. This is men deciding the rules of sexual engagement, including hookups, that are very much in their favour.
Now is as good a time as any to recognise the nuance in this conversation instead of restricting it to black and white, with us/against us, terms. Saying that women need to assert their agency and take responsibility for their actions and decisions might be politically incorrect in this climate, but it should be said, and repeated and debated if necessary.
If men are not entitled to sex, then women are not entitled to victimhood either.