What's missing from the Aziz / Grace story discussion (by an intelligent liberated woman who likes sex)

I do not think it is appropriate to lump this story in with #metoo stories, nor is it just for a hard-won carreer / personal life destroyed over what is essentially someone's sexual regret during a bad dating experience. Part of why there is so much backlash is that this story is ENTIRELY relatable as a very common sort of bad dating experience for heterosexual women, and since modern women have embraced their freedom and agency and take responsibility for their sexual decisions, it seems immediately unfair to anyone reading that this woman claims victim-status for something that we 99.9% of the time know we should just chalk up to a ‘disappointing and regrettable learning experience’ with a man who was not the way we thought he’d be and MOVE ON sans public humiliation.

THAT SAID…. Since the story IS out there and everyone is talking about it, I agree with a number of commentators that we ought to take this rare and needed opportunity to open up a frank conversation about sex and hookup culture as the story unfortunately does resonate as a very common experience for so many women.

I have read a LOT of articles about this story and there seem to be several camps forming, none of which are really addressing the reality of the story, perhaps because the subject, Grace herself, was not explicit about her wants, motivations, or reasons for doing things the way she did. I’d like to address what I think was going on in a more nuanced way.

It would seem to me that the facts are these: Grace was attracted to Aziz. She accepted a date with him. She had read his book (whether in the week after meeting him or before then, it doesn’t matter). She excitedly planned her outfit. She probably had hopes that if she played the date right she might be on the verge of dating a rich successful / celebrity boyfriend who could get her access to people she could photograph and work with to elevate her photography carreer. Regardless of her hopes for the date, she agreed to what was offered— she agreed to meet him at his place for a drink before dinner and then again agreed to go back there immediately following a cut-short dinner… probably not how she’d hoped the date would unfold but she was going along with it. From this I would surmise she was completely open to hooking up with him and expected things to unfold in a sexual way to some degree.

NOTE: IT is at this point in the story that a lot of commentators indicate that she “should have known” or “should not have gone” to his apartment. But I would point out that in today’s hookup culture, there is nothing abnormal or wrong with a woman who wants to get with a guy going to his place. She wanted to like him. She wanted it to go well. This, IMO, is clearly demonstrated by how game she was for the initial stuff: he got her up on the counter and went down on her after a breif bit of kissing and he takes their clothes off… then he mentions he’s gonna get a condom. She’s probably a bit overwhelmed as a 23 year old, thinking he’s moving really fast, and she tells him to hold on let’s chill… If she was put off by the fact that he wanted to have sex with her she could have left then, it’s true, but I suspect she was totally open to sex with Aziz, she just wanted to ENJOY THE EXPERIENCE. This is how most women find themselves in the middle of a hookup that feels unpleasant. They wanted to hook up, but they wanted it to feel good and unfold in a way that turns them on, respects their speed, their preferences. Which is entirely their right. Guess what actions would definitely have cut her off from getting what she wanted? Storming out in a huff. Slapping him across the face. Telling him “NO” in definite terms and ending the date.

I would contend that What She Wanted was not to end the experience, but to SHAPE it so it would be more pleasurable for her. You can see this unfolding as she struggles to vocalize her discomfort to him by pulling away, mumbling, taking her hand off his penis when he puts it there— she doesn’t want to reject him completely, she wants him to get in sync with her speed by noticing what she is and isn’t game for (yet or at all) as he makes these aggressive moves. This is the way hookups are when they’re good— the guy notices your responses to things- what you’re liking and what makes you go cold or still or pull away from. The issue here is that Aziz was, as is ALL TOO COMMON, just not interested in making adjustments to his own agenda for her comfort or pleasure. Which, surprise surprise, will end up with the woman being increasingly annoyed, frustrated and uncomfortable at how she’s being treated and ultimately she’ll give up on the hookup completely and end it (sooner or later). Women go through this all the time. You meet a guy, you like him, you want it to go well, you possibly want him to treat you in a romantic way (even if you know it might end up being a one night stand, the FUN of a good hookup is often the feeling of being WANTED and treated with affection, or at the very least you want him to try and please you sexually if only out of a respectful spirit of give and take)…

The reason why she tried for so long in this case to give him a chance to get things back on track was that she had high hopes for the date and REALLY wanted it to go well--either because she REALLY liked him or REALLY liked the idea of dating (or sleeping with) someone with his celebrity. She may have wanted a boyfriend or she may have just wanted a cool story about fucking Aziz, both of which are fine things for her to want. And it's fine for her to get disappointed when she didn't get what she wanted. My point is, stop shaming her for not leaving. She was mumbly and kept trying the nonverbal cues in hopes that he’d pick up on them, that he’d adjust his approach, give her more to work with and cut it out with “the Claw.” All of this is entirely forgivable. She gave him a real chance. She was still (it would seem from her account) very much considering fucking him anyway even up til when he put her in front of the mirror… she just didn’t want to go through with it because his lack of attentiveness to her signals was too much disrespect for her to handle and keep going. She didn’t like being treated like a sex doll. Who really does, ultimately?

Here’s where it gets complicated. Maybe Aziz is used to hooking up with groupies who don’t mind being treated this way in order to get that celebrity notch on their belt. And maybe there really are rare women out there who perversely enjoy being ‘used’ in this way with no regard for their comfort level or speed preferences and he was just really banking on the hope that she’d turn out to be one of them. MUCH MORE LIKELY, he is just one of the many men in our culture who have been conditioned through habitual pornography use to be concerned only with what turns him on, and furthermore, is conditioned to actually be turned on by treating a woman like a thing to be used. After all, that is how the vast majority of pornography depicts male-female relations: there is usually violence, degradation, humiliation, and general dehumanization of the woman as she is treated as nothing more than a sex object with various holes to fuck.

AGAIN: Him not picking up on her signals or refusing to adjust his ‘moves’ for her pleasure is NOT ASSAULT. If anything. He obviously respected her decision to stop and leave as soon as her wish was clear. I believe he actually does think of himself as a feminist, though hopefully he may be realizing he's a bad lover now. He trusted that she was an adult woman who might be horny and seemed hot for him and allows for her agency in taking or leaving the hookup on offer from him. He also stopped at various points as she requested. I’m not saying he did ANYTHING criminal. But there's something very important in this story that is making women around the country talk about it as it resonates with so much of our experience...

When she got so frustrated that she said “All you guys are the same” she was speaking for a lot of women about a very disturbing trend, WHICH IS WHAT WE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT. Women have been sexually liberated for a while now. They don’t owe you sex but they’re allowed to want it and are encouraged to take responsibility for obtaining their own pleasure as they see fit. They’re allowed to (and encouraged by men) to have casual sex without regret. What befuddles women so often is that casual sex is NOT fun or pleasurable when men treat them like garbage and have no skills or interest in developing skills in the bedroom.

Men today are satiated with pornography. They are conditioned by it. They surely have appetite for real encounters with women, but their behaviour in such encounters is largely informed by the fantasies that they have developed while viewing pornography that treats women like garbage. If things don’t go the way they want them to, men retreat from the challenge of making it work better. They don’t want to work to turn you on figure things out with you. They don’t want to engage with a woman’s messy needs, desires, speed comfort, etc. It’s just all too much for their ego, which has been distorted and made frail by a pornography habit.

I suspect she, like many women in similar situations, was struggling to indicate or articulate for him what would work for her because having to tell a man specifically what to do and not to do (verbally) to turn you on is often a turnoff in and of itself (for both men and women) so you give nonverbal cues and responses (sigh and make pleasure sounds to reinforce what feels good, pull away / go still / pull your hand back when something isn’t doing it for you) in hopes the man will figure something BETTER out through trial and error, rather than risk wounding his ego by sounding frustrated or unhappy and ruining her chances of a good date…

This sort of disregard for signals and selfish sexual gratification is extremely frustrating for a liberated woman who WANTS to have good casual sex with men one is attracted to. I have been off the dating scene for over a decade now since I'm married but I can only IMAGINE how much worse and more widespread this sort of experience has become as a whole generation of men has now grown up with culturally normalized internet porn usage since they were pre-pubescent. The combination of the normalized degradation if women in male-centered fantasies, the fragile ego and laziness in the bedroom, plus the commodification of partners via dating apps where you swipe through pictures of people seem to me to be a horrifying combination that could only spell out a very frustrating situation indeed for heterosexual women, be they women who seek sex for their own pleasure or women who want to find long term partners.

At 23, this woman has already had enough bad sexual experiences to conclude “You guys are all the same,” and has enough rage about this frustrating sexual culture to risk ruining someone’s carreer over it, despite the fact that it was a person she presumably respected enough to read a book by and want to date. Now, it may be that this Grace woman is a crazy bitch and has chosen to take a distorted victim-y attitude about things that happened here, and just doesn't have the character to take responsibility for her choices and quietly learn from her experience of regret and disappointment and move on, and that's unfortunate as I think AA's carreer (and not to mention his future fraught sex life) will most definitely be damaged by this publicity... but maybe there really is something for women to be getting publicly outraged about and she's just the random storyteller to get this conversation going. Let's all take this opportunity to focus on the real problem here.. It’s the CURRENT SEXUAL CULTURE that should be our topic, not Aziz Ansari’s actions on this particular date.

I'd love to hear from people on this topic, and please not just the usual back and forth about was it or wasn't it assault (or worthy of publication).