In recent times, there has been a lot of debate over the question of consent between men and women in sexual encounters. How implicit can the consent that is given or taken be? Can holding hands be a sign of consent? Can a toss of the hair be considered an act of flirting? Feminists have emphasised for years that a ‘No means a No’. I completely agree with that, provided the ‘No’ is clearly uttered, loud and leaving no space for ambiguities. You cannot make it ‘implicit’ or ‘nonverbal’ and then claim you were sexually assaulted because the man was not able to ‘read the clear signs’. And that seems to have been exactly what happened in the sexual assault allegations levelled against award-winning comedian Aziz Ansari.
In the message that the so-called victim sent Ansari after the encounter, she writes: “Last night might have been fun for you but it wasn’t for me. When we got back to your place, you ignored clear non-verbal cues; you kept going with advances. You had to have noticed I was uncomfortable. I just want to take this moment to make you aware of this behaviour and how uneasy it made me. Really think back to last night. You may have said ‘it’s ok, only fun if we’re both enjoying it, let’s just chill’ but within moments of that your fingers were down my throat. You were putting my hand on your d*** continuously. It’s like nothing changed even after I expressed that I’d like to slow down…”
By this account, Ansari’s fault was not picking up ‘non-verbal cues’ and not listening to her wish that she’d ‘like to slow down’. Not once during her account of what happened did she tell Ansari that ‘No. I do not want to have sex with you.’ In other parts of the article, the words used by her are “physically giving off cues”, “pulling away and mumbling” and “feeling uncomfortable”.
At this point, let me just recount the many opportunities the girl, whose name has been changed to ‘Grace’ in the story published in the feminist magazine babe, had to say no to Ansari during the evening. After they have dinner and walk the two blocks to his apartment, she compliments him on his marble countertops and he asks her to “hop up and take a seat”. He then proceeds to kiss and start undressing her at which point she starts to feel uncomfortable at how quickly things had escalated. She could have upped and left right then.
After a lot more unwanted advances, Grace excuses herself to go to the bathroom. She comes back and tells him that she doesn’t want to feel forced because then she’ll hate him, and she’d rather not hate him. She tells the babe reporter that she counted this remark as adding a “verbal component to the cues she was trying to give him about her discomfort”. But this sentence, which one can’t really make head or tail of, can hardly be considered a verbal cue, can it?
Instead of leaving right then, she sits down on the floor, next to Ansari who’s sitting on the couch. He instructs her to turn around and go down on him. She did because “she felt really pressured”. Then he takes her to a mirror, bends her over and pantomimes having sex with her. That’s when she finally tells him that no, she isn’t ready to do this. Even after this, instead of leaving, she watches Seinfeld sitting on the couch next to him, while he again kisses her and sticks his fingers down her throat. Then she turns away and says: “You guys are all the same. You guys are all the f****** same.” He finally gets the message, orders her a cab and she leaves.
Yes, it was a bad sexual encounter but that was all it was. In a way, I empathise with what that girl went through. I can even understand the part where she says she “felt pressured” to let him do things to her that she didn’t want. Sometimes women do things not because they want to but because they’re expected to. Perhaps the fault for that lies in the grey and unspoken areas of our sexual culture. But I can’t forgive her for almost destroying a man’s career for the fault of not being a satisfactory sexual partner. Ansari’s only fault in this case seems to be that he’s terrible at reading signals. And at having sex.
