CONSENT CULTURE

Aziz Ansari: What We Missed About the 2018 Accusation

In addition to avoiding rape, we have the responsibility to treat potential intimate partners with a basic level of human consideration

Photo by Milo Bauman on Unsplash

In the age of the internet, news stories whiz by like hummingbirds: here one moment, gone the next. The #MeToo movement hovered for a few years. But to the entire history of sexual violence, a few years is a moment. We hardly had time to put our glasses on.

I’m not here to talk about Aziz Ansari, per se. For our purposes, it doesn’t even matter whether the story about Ansari (originally on babe.net) is true. The thing that most shocked me at the time, and pains me now, is that the actions described in the story were widely considered to be acceptable on the grounds of normalcy. We were gung-ho to criticize hyper-privileged men who did shocking things, but once the movement began to touch ordinary people, doing things that did not shock us, it was done for.

In my mind, this aversion is understandable — but convoluted. As a whole, the #MeToo movement asserted that a certain level of sexual violence is normal — that we must confront the myth that sexual violence is a rare, freak occurrence done by some piercing-laden dude who had…