Aziz Ansari Responds to Accusations • Page 8

Not Birdman. Someone who might have been more arrogant - FreshnessExpired

 

no, i'm pretty good with that. they can go back to their holes with their sad shitty views

 

lol it's definitely not birdman. i'll tell you when it's bman

 

Honestly, I'm going to start sending Venmo requests to everyone who feels the need to explain to me how my tone is the reason we're not seeing real societal change as though I'm new here.

 

BirdPerson's power: quotes someone with "that's birdman" ... and ... instaban.

 

You're conflating the idea of defending terry & his remarks with the idea of focusing on more meaningful debate & conversation. I am not defending Terry. He can truly go "fuck off" because of all the reasons you mentioned. Instead, I'm saying that all of us spending 6 pages of forum to call him out, pile on, and then hen peck at each other about it is a sad waste of time and probably exactly what he wanted. Until we wake up a bit & figure out a way to avoid getting hostile, we're going to continue to see threads get cut short ad nauseam just as they are now.

Maybe we just need to work out a system where someone volunteers to be the bouncer and says, "Don't worry guys, i got this one." and moves to strike on someone like Terry, while the rest of the people that want to carry on the discussion continue as if it didn't exist. I don't know. I'm just over here mourning the loss of the the conversation that was started on page 1 in favor of the tone and posts that took it over.

 

I would like to get back to Aziz Ansari.

The way he acted was selfish, it was boorish, he was in the wrong. However, rape and sexual assault are by definition violent crimes. What Mr. Ansari did was not violent. Let's look at the facts. By her own account, 'Grace' repeatedly consented to sexual intimacy short of intercourse, in a pretty typical progression. She pursued Ansari with stars in her eyes, went to his apartment, drank with him, dined with him (expensively), went back to his apartment, willingly kissed him, got naked, got oral in both directions. Was it awkward? Some of it. Was she pressured? At times, and not surprisingly: folks who've gotten naked and oral with each other often feel a strong urge to hook up.

Nonetheless, when she finally said no to intercourse, Ansari backed off immediately and suggested they put their clothes back on and hang out non-sexually. Even so, after that she says she was still wanting him to touch her, massage her, play with her hair.

I see this as a clunky date - we've all had them - with plenty of mixed messages and missed cues on both sides. Let's not act like this is on the same level of Weinstein, Spacey or Lauer.

 

The Reaction to the Aziz Ansari Allegations Shows #MeToo Is More Measured Than Its Critics Claim

The main concern of Weiss and the others is that we’ve crossed a new threshold, where men who engage in minor sexual misbehavior, however uncomfortable they may be, are publicly scorned and ostracized just like the obviously worse men who have been in the headlines since the fall. Lumping Ansari in “with the same movement that brought down men who ran movie studios and forced themselves on actresses, or the factory floor supervisors who demanded sex from women workers,” Weiss admonishes, “trivializes what #MeToo first stood for.” But Grace did nothing of the sort. While the piece makes clear that she considered Ansari assaultive, it says that Grace “compares Ansari’s sexual mannerisms to those of a horny, rough, entitled 18-year-old”— a disappointment, given Ansari’s public persona as a sensitive, empathetic voice on dating and gender relations. At no point does she suggest he’s a Weinstein—her behavior during the encounter can be read, really, as her trying desperately not to think the worst of him—and you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone, since the piece’s publication, who seriously has. A Vox article on Grace’s encounter argues it’s worthy of discussion precisely because it was “ordinary.” A piece at Bustle says that Ansari, like the titular character of the viral short story “Cat Person,” was not “a bad man,” but rather blind to or unwilling to acknowledge, in his eagerness, signs of discomfort.

People keep trying to make arguments about things no one is saying. No one said this was "the same level as Weinstein."

 

I've seen people on the internet comparing the two. So there are people making that argument. There haven't been any on this thread, so I probably should have left that part out.

 

Read this one too:

On Aziz Ansari And Sex That Feels Violating Even When It’s Not Criminal | HuffPost

The sexual encounter Grace described falls into what I see as a gray area of violating, noncriminal sex ― the kind of sex that Rebecca Traister described in 2015 as “bad in ways that are worth talking about”; what Jessica Valenti described on Twitter as an interaction that the “culture considers ‘normal,’” but is “oftentimes harmful.”

This is a kind of sex that is not only worth talking about, but necessary to talk about. Behavior need not fall under the legal definition of sexual assault or rape to be wrong or violating or upsetting. And when nearly every woman I’ve spoken to about the Aziz Ansari story follows up our conversation with a similar story of her own, it’s worth thinking about why that is.

 

I think you should have left basically everything out.

 

And then read this thread:

 

Once someone pointed out he was using Pick Up Artist tactics, this whole story clicked in my brain, and its just so frustrating watching people continue to give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't want another thinkpiece breaking down what she was thinking, Aziz was very consciously using manipulative moves to coerce and escalate the situation while ignoring signs he should stop. This isn't some misunderstanding where his intentions were good and it got into a grey area, his intentions were BAD, that's what matters. He's not an idiot, and he's probably done this before and will do it again.

 

I said in my original post that I believe Ansari was in the wrong. What he did was selfish and boorish. No doubt about it. He was being manipulative. We agree there. We also agree that 'Grace' saying "no" is not as black and white as it seems. Its hard for a woman to say "no." However, It's clear in the text messages provided by babe.net that Aziz was surprised when 'Grace' said she had felt uncomfortable. And he immediately apologized. Let's hope that he uses this experience to become more aware

 

Just because you apologize for bad behavior doesn’t make it okay though. On a positive note I think Aziz has absolutely learned his lesson. If not, god help him.

 

Do you think he'd have texted her back "oh yeah I knew you were uncomfortable but lol I kept going" - of course hes going to say he was surprised.

 

Of course it doesn't make it okay. But it shows that he realized that he was in the wrong.

 

Yeah that "surprise", totally not manufactured to control the situation. A guy who's written this much about dating, and communication, and understanding someone's feelings, suddenly forgets all of it and ends up surprised he was a piece of shit to someone. Harder to believe than him abusing his power and trying to deny responsibility.

 

Who are you to say that he wasn't surprised? You're not in his head. You may be correct, of course; I'm not in his head either. I have faith in humanity so I'm going to assume he genuinely was surprised. If he wasn't then he's got a really big problem.

 

If you’re surprised a girl doesn’t like fingers shoved down her throat after saying slow down .... you’re dumb or lying.

 

this thread mirrors my thoughts well!

 

That's a good point.

 

The second of self-awareness all of these Aziz defending posts need to consider

He's not dumb, if he was surprised he'd have to be dumb.

 

Even after she says "I don't want to go through with this tonight" or something to that effect, an explicit no, and he acknowledges it and suggests they chill "with clothes on this time" and start watching TV, he continues kissing her, putting his fingers in her throat, and attempting to take off her pants. Of course there are plenty of other instances in the account of aggressive assault and coercion, but it is legitimately baffling to me how much support I've seen for Aziz/pushback against Grace, because he very explicitly and clearly ignores her "no". Multiple times, but most explicitly in that final instance where she finally did physically leave (which also nullifies the "why didn't she just leave???" question because... she did).

She's not asking for his show to be canceled. She's not pressing criminal charges. I've seen so many people say "Yeah what Aziz did was gross but--"... But what? What he did was gross! It was disgusting and abhorrent and crossed so many lines and if this current movement isn't about holding men who behave disgustingly towards women, to whatever degree, accountable, and we agree that Aziz behaved disgustingly towards this woman, what the fuck is the issue?

 

That is an excellent point. Well said. I clearly said throughout my posts that he was in the wrong. I think "boorish" is the perfect word to describe Ansari's actions. He should be embarrassed and hopefully he learns from this situation.