The vast and growing #MeToo movement has long since moved from exposing the people pretty much everyone knew were creepy abusers (your Harvey Weinsteins of the world) and has moved on to exposing people that are a bit more surprising (Al Franken comes to mind), though at this point, we probably shouldn't be surprised by any man being outed as an abuser or harasser, save maybe a Fred Rogers or Tom Hanks.
Recently we've seen a prime example of someone I think most people were surprised got called out in the person of Aziz Ansari, whose generally-thoughtful writing and comedy around gender relations and whose position as a relatively-outspoken feminist made him seem like one of the least likely to be called out. But called out he was, by an anonymous woman's account of a really shitty date they had where she felt pressured to perform sexual acts she didn't want to.
There's a lot to unpack in this story, but the angle I find most interesting is where this fits in the larger #MeToo movement. One thing those opposed to this movement toward some justice for women (or at least an acknowledgement of the difficulties they face) have focussed on relentlessly is the concept of nuance -- that is, are all men who have been accused of bad behavior to be all lumped together? For instance, as was constantly heard throughout the Franken affair, sure he shouldn't have done what he did, but that didn't make him Weinstein. And shouldn't that matter? Shouldn't we talk about that difference?
Predictably, this crowd has jumped all over the Ansari story as proof that those crazy feminists have gone too far again. The New York Times said Ansari is guilty only of "Not being a mind reader" while WaPo has deemed this "A gift to anyone who wants to derail the #MeToo movement" (which I assume means them, because that's exactly what they're doing). Anyway, you can find a million more hot takes on this line of thinking, where the regressive forces of people who are so concerned that in the middle of the thousands and thousands of women coming forward to tell their tales of abuse, assault, and harassment, a man might be inconvenienced have finally found their hallelujah moment.
Except...this story is really what these people have been calling for all along, a nuanced portrayal that recognizes it's not a white/black dichotomy of good and bad, that consent is not always a completely straight-forward matter, and that there are degrees to this kind of thing. If you actually read her story, you'll see she presents a pretty nuanced understanding of what happened, and indeed, it was only after parsing through the nuance that she came to see it as a sexual assault. Why, it's almost as if she did exactly what all these people so concerned about nuance and not getting carried away say they want, and yet it's still not good enough.
Because the bigger point is that sexual consent is not simply a yes/no matter, and is impacted by all sorts of things (remember, I bet very few people explicitly said "no" to Weinstein or Cosby, yet we don't forgive them their crimes for that). As this great piece points out, consent is just the baseline, not a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it's not ridiculous to expect men, (all men, but especially men who make a big public deal out of what a feminist they are) to conceptualize consent beyond a simple yes/no. It's not a terribly difficult or onerous task to recognize that gendered power imbalances exist and then take the incredibly minuscule effort required to address that. Whether it be the fact that women are socialized since birth to prioritize the feelings of others (especially men) over their own, to try to navigate an impossible Madonna/Whore complex, and of course, to fear for their safety should they dare explicitly say "no" to a man, it's clear that it's not as simple as saying no and walking away, as the incredibly offensive NYT opinion piece linked to above claims.
But what that horribly offensive NYT piece (seriously, don't read it unless you've taken your blood pressure meds this morning) misses is that, no, Ansari didn't need to be a mind reader to know she wasn't comfortable. You know what magical powers he did need? The ability to have a conversation at an adult level. For instance, maybe after the third or fourth time he forced her hand onto his penis and she clearly wasn't into it, maybe he could have been a grown up and spoken to her? Remember, this isn't a 15 year old kid figuring out what all this stuff is, this is a grown man who literally wrote a book on romance and relationships. But instead of actually seeking out her consent (her active consent, if you will), it seems that Ansari took the fact that she wasn't screaming "RAPE!" at the top of her lungs to mean she must be into it, right? I mean, who has ever heard of a woman going through with a sex act she didn't want to simply because she felt like she had no other choice?
Gee, if only there were a handy hashtag one could use to quickly find literally thousands of such stories.
In that way, this reaction to the Aziz Ansari story seems to be like a modified version of Lewis' Law ("the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism") -- something like "the reaction to any particular #MeToo story justifies the need for the #MeToo movement."
Because the real impact of the #MeToo movement is not that we're outing famous abusers (though it's great that's happening), it's bringing to light all of the many much smaller ways women are harassed, intimidated, and abused on a daily basis that don't rise to the level of the explicit legal definition of rape. It's about recognizing how the personhood of women is so easily discarded by men whenever it's convenient to them. Or, to put it a much more nuanced way, it's about recognizing that just because someone didn't do what Harvey Weinstein did doesn't mean they're incapable of being shitty to women.
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