But that’s a long way from saying you should only show deference to vulnerability when you care about the other person. The whole point was someone, quite obviously not participating in a consensual competition, being in some way vulnerable and unable to express it. And the contention that it was fine to exploit that as long as you don’t care about said person.
There seems to be room now and then for specific stories where it makes sense to ask why didn’t she simply leave. Or at least try direct verbal cues.
Oh there have been plenty of times I was feeling uncomfortable, and sometimes emotionally vulnerable. Your response?
Nature vs. nurture. I suspect some things are inimical to gender and some things are learned.
Yeah this is part of the problem. Has there ever been a “bad” sexual encounter that didn’t end with these kinds of sayings: what was she wearing, what was she doing there, why didn’t she leave, how come she didn’t say anything, why did she wait so long, why didn’t she use her real name. is she even pretty enough to rape, oh wait it’s her, that whore. I mean there have been remarks about women being pretty enough to sexually assault… as if less attractive women don’t’ get assaulted, they do… even with #MeToo it seems unlikely those voices will be heard. It is still scary to tell your story, and everyone is waiting for a backlash, like asking for it.
I thought it would come in the form of a lie, like a story that turns out not to be true at all, not a story like this which so far has actually held up. The interpretation of it is where the conflict is at.
The line for a woman where only in recent history is she allowed to be even sexual on her own from shifting from a a good girl, modern woman to cock tease and whore is so… thin and blurred.
I’m sorry to hear that. I’m not the judge of whether you should feel violated by being vulnerable and not having had your concerns listened to – only you can decide that.
So if I decide I was, does that mean the other person is automatically in the wrong?
Yes. Your partner should treat you like a human being and be conscious of what’s going on with you. Even with short-term relationships or even non-existent ones a considerate lover should be the standard, not the exception.
No, of course you should not exploit the vulnerable. But that doesn’t mean you need to show deference or special care.
In other words, if Ansari had responded to the woman’s confusion by saying, “This is BS, GTFO” then he would not have been particularly caring. But he wouldn’t necessarily have been wrong.
Gotta agree with this.
Does it always and in every situation need to be “in the wrong” vs. “in the right?” Can it be “step up and be better” instead?
Sometimes, like the case with Aziz, it’s a totally legitimate question though. Hell, you know what? It’s ALWAYS a legitimate question. There are often totally legitimate answers too.
But this idea that inquiring about a situation to establish facts is somehow bad is straight up bullshit. Judgement should be made upon a logical analysis of a situation, not feels.
There seems to be this suggestion that Grace felt bad afterwards, and so that implies Aziz did something wrong. No dude. That’s not how it works. That’s not logically sound.
I’m pretty sure a large segment of Twitter thinks logic is a tool of the patriarchy. That’s the deeper struggle underneath these surface issues.
Of course not. In this particular example it appears to me that both parties made mistakes and exercised poor judgement.
This is the way social media works. Stories that divide people get amplified and discussed endlessly. Stories that everyone agrees on tend to die a quick death. This is why Michael Brown’s killing by police made a much bigger splash than Eric Garner’s.
One thing about the Aziz story which is interestingly ignored, is the fact that no one seems to care at all that Grace came out and started talking trash about him.
Like, imagine for a moment, if the roles were reversed, and Aziz actually put out an article talking about how she was a ditz who couldn’t make up her mind about what she wanted, and gave terrible blowjobs.
That would be bad, right? Because it would be humiliating to her.
But somehow, no one seems to be questioning her doing that to him.
I dunno, I think lots of people are talking about it, and it’s probably the big reason her story isn’t really gaining much traction. It seems somewhat obvious that this is really just someone trying to assassinate a celebrity’s character/career rather than someone who was legitimately assaulted.
I agree that a judgement should be based on logic. Inquiring about a situation to establish fact, in order to pass said judgement, is not bad; rather it is quite necessary as you point out.
But you know what, none of us here can answer why she did what she did. (It seems reasonable to assume that Grace is not here on this board). So asking the question here isn’t really inquiring about the situation to establish fact, it’s speculating about what may or may not have happened, based on our own preconceptions and biases and expectations. Based, I would say, much more on feels than on facts.
So yeah, I still think that armchair speculation about what a woman in such a situation should’ve done or not done in order to qualify as a proper victim / avoid the situation is very far from this fact-finding mission that you describe.
Does that mean that you don’t think it’s wrong to cause someone to feel bad? I would say that the actions can still be wrong even if they were unintentional. Even if their effect was delayed until after the encounter.
There has to be a space where we can chose not to pass judgement on either Aziz or Grace, but still acknowledge that actions were taken that ended up hurting someone. Where we can look at what those actions were, look at the consequences, and learn something about how we want to interact, or not interact, with others based on that.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I think the real value of #metoo and the like isn’t the naming and shaming of individuals, but the exposing of patterns of interaction in our society that we may have been blind to. If we choose to listen, and if we choose to learn.
I don’t think this is the dynamic you’re looking for. As an example, sports team A defeats sports team B, and all the players on sports team B feel bad. Sports team A did nothing wrong, despite knowing their actions would lead to sports team B feeling bad.
On the other hand, school bully A picks on small kid B, and small kid B feels bad. School bully A most certainly did do something wrong.
In other words, resultant feelings aren’t the arbiter of what’s right or wrong. There always has to be more to consider. I think that’s all Timex has been trying to get across.
Did this happen after the article? What I read is they tracked her down to get the story, not the other way around. Grace didn’t seek to get her story published, but she gave an interview and then they went and validated with others.
Yeah here it is:
The circumstances surrounding the story remain unclear. Herrmann said Babe.net “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.”
I think that speculation is totally legitimate, when deciding whether to pass judgement on a guy based on only her story. Discussing whether her actions were reasonable, or how we might interpret those actions, is reasonable.
If you do something to intentionally hurt someone, that’s bad. If you do something which unintentionally hurts someone’s feelings, that may be unfortunate, but it’s not necessarily wrong. Sometimes as humans, we feel bad about stuff, and those feelings are not because someone did something wrong. Sometimes they stem from our own misperceptions or a failure for reality to live up to our desires. Maybe Grace thought this was going to lead to some wonderful long term relationship and Aziz was only interested in a hookup. That might result in her feeling bad, but it wouldn’t be due to Aziz doing anything WRONG.
Sure, but I think we’re seeing a lot of passing judgement Aziz… and to your point here, no one seems to be considering that Grace’s actions in publishing this article themselves likely hurt Aziz. He’s a person too, and I can imagine that this whole ordeal is humiliating for HIM.
Now see, I find this to be much worse than had “Grace” been the one seeking to get her story published. This looks like the editors at Babe sat around a table, made a list of celebrities who won awards at the Golden Globes and were wearing “Times Up” pins, and then said, “let’s see if we can’t dig some dirt on one of these guys!”
I’m not buying the whole “we heard about this through personal networks” bullshit. This is a borderline tabloid publication with “reporters” who likely scoured the internet for any links buried deep in search results that matched up a list of names they had with keywords they deemed promising. Somewhere they found someone talking on social media or a message board about her friend who had a bad date with Aziz Ansari…and the hunt was on.
It’s fucking gross. What Babe and their story are doing to Aziz Ansari is far far worse than what Aziz may have done to “Grace”. She fully admits that she was uncertain if her experience really counted as any sort of assault or was just a bad date, but his treatment by Babe is nothing short of character assassination, and is an obvious and disgusting attempt to cash in on the #metoo movement.