II Antipasto
The moment you discover your parents are real people is horrifying. It is bound to the realization that you, yourself, are a real person, and no moment will arrive after which everything will be okay and you’ll know what you’re doing. Getting a mortgage, learning what a 401k is, buying a car, all of these are processes and none of them really signal anything other than “I am prepared to do what the money people say is good for grownups.” Following all the steps to achieve the American dream is also no guarantee that you will be successful. “Successful” as used here is most unscientifically interchangeable with “the impression you give others that you have a clue as to what’s going on around you, why it’s happening, or what to do about it.”
As Jezebel pointed out, there are rules for reporting on sexual violence. They are straightforward: “[g]et the language right,” “respect a potential interviewee’s right to say no,” “ask yourself whether approaching someone risks compromising his or her safety and privacy.” Some rules are straightforward but much harder to get right if you haven’t been trained — “set good ground rules,” “don’t be surprised if accounts only make partial sense,” “never say you know how they feel — you don’t,” and “end the interview well.” From my limited experience on the interviewing side of things, I know that only experience and preparation can ensure you get it right. From my extensive experience in active and reflective listening to accounts of sexual harassment and assault, I know that it becomes extremely difficult, without experience or preparation, to take every single account seriously — let alone to prove that to a survivor-victim.
Like most people reading this, I once clicked on an article entitled “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life.” I was intrigued that the drama in the headline — the worst?! — was starring a short minority entertainer borne of an immigrant Muslim gastroenterologist father and strong-willed mother — me. I mean, Aziz Ansari. Someone who, like Mindy Kaling and Kumail Nanjiani, I had kept an eye on in case they were hiding clues to achieving success around Los Angeles.
“It was white,” she said. “I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.”
The story read brutally, the grammar and syntax violating almost every single one of the sensual rules of grammar most of us come to know. I didn’t want to take “Grace” seriously because the author clearly didn’t, despite speaking with the air of a close confidante, a true BFF. I knew this because she, like Grace, pointed out superfluous details of the evening that would be churlish for Ansari to deny, adding credibility to her accounting of detail. It’s the kind of detail that only makes sense for someone, like Grace, who would feel defensive about their story, to divulge, having experienced a trauma society treats like a privileged joke for lacking dramatic flair. There is a refuge constructed by those little details injecting the realism into their narrative, like all victim-survivors who come forward have to speak like J.D. Salinger wrote in order to be considered for a qualification for believed-status.
Perhaps our author found herself feeling pre-emptively defensive for a similar reason in choosing to pursue and write about such a trauma and it subsequently manifest in her written voice — like she was telling this story to friends who would find it titillating on top of it proving very informative about a Dangerous Man. Very Dangerous Men are a High Priority Topic in “our” conversations.
“Our,” as used here, is most unscientifically interchangeable with “women’s, men’s, queer, religious, or, any group that is hunted.” “Dangerous” is most unscientifically interchangeable with “highly emotionally intelligent,” “keenly observant,” or “in possession of the ability to make people feel uncomfortable.”
After I inappropriately and erroneously assumed that Grace had relayed this to a friend who worked at Babe and had probably gone public with the story of her own volition, a friend kindly informed me that Babe had pursued it from the beginning. Babe editor Joshi Herrmann stated in a CNN interview that “[someone on their staff] heard about this story through personal networks, and then had to speak to a lot of different people before we got to the source. Our reporter Katie Way approached her, not the other way round.”
Herrmann said that Babe would “…publish this again tomorrow.”
Ah, I think. I wish they would, then they could do some copyediting. (I am making lazy ad hominem jabs because of that silly assumption from earlier.)
“It’s newsworthy because of who he is and what he has said in his standup, what he has written in his book, what he has proclaimed on late night TV,” Herrmann said. “Her account is pointing out a striking tension between those things and the way she says he treated her in private.”
Is this the heart of the issue? They’re mad at him for not being an extra good guy that shows gratitude for their attention — instead of being a typical douchebag the same way that guys they “friend zone” usually turn out to be? Is it a race thing? Or is it because, while I ignored Master of None and other things that speak to my life, Ansari has become some sort of love guru? Did I miss whatever Herrmann is so cleverly hinting at labeling him without declaring it?
At this point, a few people have messaged me to talk about Ansari. They’re asking if he’s scum or not. People aren’t sure what to think. Some of us will realize that we neglected crucial details while talking about the story with our friends afterward. How did I forget that he shoved his fingers in her mouth out of nowhere? Now I imagine it, him shoving his fingers into a white face with a question mark cut and pasted over it. Ugh. Others will notice which articles their friends are choosing to share, like Caitlin Flanagan’s absolutely glorious The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari or Megan Farber’s Aziz Ansari and the Paradox of No. Both were published by The Atlantic and each one is being used to counter the other.
The people who shared the Flanagan piece are probably excited to show that there are limits to their liberal acceptance of all this stuff, but I bet they’re going to feel bad after someone explains just how wrong it is, carefully. People sharing the Farber piece, well, I agree with them so maybe I shouldn’t read into it right now.
Something exciting has come up that people 1) want to talk about and 2) will take a lot less work to understand than the thing with Trump and the porn star, the doctor that one of my friends was actually abused by and is campaigning against, and the thing Eliza Dushku is saying, because it happened when she was a kid and other people will definitely say what needs to be said about it. Those situations provoke pretty clearly-cut opinions.
The porn star thing doesn’t matter unless it proves that the President was paying off Russian mob bosses and honestly, maybe not even then; the doctor is going to get skewered alive and I’m too irritated that his last name is Nassar, like we really needed that right now; the Eliza Dushku thing was a crime against a child and I hope everyone who had anything to do with it gets destroyed by people with law degrees or certificates in life-destroying.
Perhaps it would be useful to write something that assists people in beginning the conversations all the think pieces are requesting — the nuanced one about power structures and how they can cause people to end up in non-consensual situations. “Non-consensual situations,” as used here, is most unscientifically interchangeable with “undesirable circumstances,” “an involuntary predicament,” or, “with someone who wants something from them but they lack enough information to determine and pursue the best mutual outcome.”
So, as with anything I do that is subject to the scrutiny of the highest court of judges (my friends), I research the conversation meticulously. I am reading every think piece I can until I can’t take it anymore — and you can too, from this Google doc where I am cataloguing them meticulously, along with their descriptions of the alpha incident, a selection of the author’s work, and a simple yes/no denoting whether or not the piece mentions “Cat Person.” Please do not request to be added to the document. Notifications make me sick.
The preponderance of think pieces — a genre title both accurate and pejorative — is impressive. So many women sharing how they feel, trying to bring an element of nuance to the larger conversation by focusing on something specific, or, being edgy by decrying the accuser and defending the aggressor. So many women with agendas, points of view, and purpose. Competing and collaborating, quoting one another’s work, connecting dots, raising calls to action, or mocking a person, notion, or culturally-embraced fallacy. People are eagerly drinking in their work for guidance on a subject both controversial yet relevant, because one misplaced word while expressing an opinion on it might be the equivalent of declaring yourself “target practice” at an anonymous meeting of assassins (also known as Twitter).
At this point, enough time has passed for the more specific and thorough pieces to start going viral, with two great examples: Jaclyn Friedman summarizes the failures of sex education and consent culture while Wagatwe Sara Wanjuki kindly provides four questions to ask yourself before joining the Aziz Ansari and consent debate. All of these writers are so damn fast and they have issued some very specific mandates for the conversation we need to have as a society.
I think the context is best set by Rebecca Traister’s now-famous piece The Game is Rigged, which makes an earnest request to re-orient society’s conversation from the particulars of any given situation to the power dynamics at play within it. I suggest that in this case, it is not the graphic details of Grace and Ansari’s encounter that matter — Ansari’s actions were unequivocally wrong, and anything beyond that is redundant — but the details about them as people, the phenomena governing their behavior, and the choices they made over time that resulted in this situation. Trying to understand their personal context and use that to further our understanding of our own can hopefully catalyze a re-examination of “consent” and how it is not precisely a thing, but a complex process.
