Quote:
Originally Posted by nol
I guess I should have specified in an actual court of law rather than the court of public opinion. As someone else mentioned, nobody's trying to say what he did is as egregious as what Weinstein did. The vast majority of the piece is just her explaining what happened and the only mention of sexual assault is:
which indicates that it was very borderline to her and not something that should result in Ansari being kicked out of Hollywood or whatever. Obviously it is basically he said/she said and would never result in a conviction of anything, but that's kind of the point.
This is a guy whose stand-up schtick is basically "I thought I was being saucy because I messaged 'heyy' instead of 'hey' on a dating app but it turns out there are guys who send girls unsolicited pictures of their genitals!" Within that context, he comes off in the story as someone who is acutely aware of what the standard for "real world sexual assault" is and exploits that by repeatedly walking right up to that line with no concern about how his date actually responds to his repeated overtures. So that does seem newsworthy due to being in stark contrast to his "woke male feminist" persona.
On top of that, even if the consensus is that it was just a "shitty date" and not "real world sexual assault," it's probably a conversation worth having that when I try to think of what I'd consider a shitty date, I think of the conversation being dull or the girl not being as attractive as she seemed in pictures. Getting groped against my will or worse is not even on the radar.
|
It wasn't borderline at all. It is in no way a sexual assault. Maybe Aziz is a pervert or sleazy. Maybe he's just really bad at sex. Maybe it goes against what he says in his stand-up specials and you should stop watching them.
That has nothing to do with sexual assault or the current #MeToo movement. There was no sexual assault that took place. No power dynamic he held over her career. It was just a bad date by two incompatible people.
If you want to turn this into a "conversation", the lesson should be that you are free to leave someone's apartment if you don't like how they are acting toward you. You are free to say "this date sucks" and call an Uber. Heck, even taking the more puritanical view of "a date shouldn't make a move on the first date" is fine. But this is just a sad way to latch on to an actual movement removing actual predators from society.