Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 17, 2018 6:08 pm

SandTea wrote:Would you have acted as he did? If not, why? If it's just a personality issue? Do you consider that a bad thing? That exercise has helped me so I hope it might help others.

Absolutely not. But according to at least one member of TCS (whom I won't name but who I will point towards this post) that's irrelevant because I've never had sex. I presume the implication is that I just don't know how gosh danged difficult it is to tell if a human female is receptive.

Aquila89 wrote:But everybody is operating under the assumption that the events occurred exactly the way she describes them. Do we know that? We don't know that. Even if she strives to be accurate, memory is a tricky thing. It's subjective.

I am not, and I noted this in my first post. Memory is unreliable even under optimal conditions, which this is not.

However plenty of people are saying that even if things happened exactly as she describes it's not sexual assault, including the Atlantic article I linked and Grimstone.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby Grimstone » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:00 pm

cmsellers wrote:I presume the implication is that I just don't know how gosh danged difficult it is to tell if a human female is receptive.


Yeah, I'm sure after the first 30 minutes of consensual making-out and reciprocating oral sex on each other that surely you would have picked up on the fact that she just wasn't that interested in doing anything with you.

However plenty of people are saying that even if things happened exactly as she describes it's not sexual assault, including the Atlantic article I linked and Grimstone.


You're the nut calling this a RAPE.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:17 pm

Grimstone wrote:Yeah, I'm sure after the first 30 minutes of consensual making-out and reciprocating oral sex on each other that surely you would have picked up on the fact that she just wasn't that interested in doing anything with you.

I wouldn't have initiated oral sex without asking much less on a first date, so I wouldn't have been in that position in the first place.

Grimstone wrote:You're the nut calling this a RAPE.

Sorry, when did I call you a nut?
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby Ladki96 » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:27 pm

I don't think it was rape. Maybe sexual assault yes*, but not even Grace or the article called it rape, because it isn't

*but I can't honestly say I'm 100% confident about even that so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:29 pm

I called it rape (again, if her story is accurate) because I interpreted the account as him coercing her into having oral sex. Forcing someone to have oral sex is rape. If in fact she was happy to blow him then it wouldn't be rape, but from her account she did not want to but felt like she had to.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby Grimstone » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:31 pm

By her own account he asked(requested consent) her to perform oral and she did willingly. So I guess by your own standards you would be a rapist.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:33 pm

Grimstone wrote:By her own account he asked(requested consent) her to perform oral and she did willingly.

By her account he put her in a position where she didn't want to perform oral but was uncomfortable refusing.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby Grimstone » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:37 pm

cmsellers wrote:
Grimstone wrote:By her own account he asked(requested consent) her to perform oral and she did willingly.

By her account he put her in a position where she didn't want to perform oral but was uncomfortable refusing.


Except she demonstrably wasn't afraid of refusing him or leaving.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby Cpt._Funkotron » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:45 pm

If he did as described, what he did was creepy and inconsiderate, but I wouldn't qualify it as sexual assault or rape. For that t have been the case, he would have done one of the following:

1. Physically forced her.
2. Threaten to Physically force her.
3. Remove her reasonable ability to give or deny informed consent.
4. Threaten to remove her ability to give or deny informed consent.
5. Prevent her from leaving.
6. Threaten to prevent her from leaving.
7. Blackmail her.
8. Acted as he did in a position of power over her personal, social, professional, or family life.

According to her account, he persistently tried to persuade her to engage in sexual acts with him, sometimes successfully, other times not. If it happened as she described, than Aziz Ansari was an entitled dick and a shitty date, and did not act like people should act in that situation, especially outspoken feminists like Ansari claims to be. But he is not guilty of sexual assault or rape based on the account, as far as I can interpret. Persuading someone to do something they regret later is shitty, but it's not the same as forcing or coercing them.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:48 pm

Cpt._Funkotron wrote:5. Prevent her from leaving.

But my understanding is that that's what he did at one point. Whenever she tried to move away he'd kiss her.

Also, another time, when he asked her as question he kissed her without waiting for the answer, which seems like it might be impeding her ability to consent or not.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby Grimstone » Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:59 pm

He followed his date around in his own apartment kissing on her? And she kept going along with it without objection and even reciprocating? Sorry, but that's far from preventing a person from leaving or blocking them in. And again, she demonstrably was not afraid to say no to him or leave when she felt like leaving.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Wed Jan 17, 2018 9:12 pm

Aquila89 wrote:If the events occurred the way she described them, this cannot be true, because Ansari had to be aware then and there that she felt uncomfortable. Because she said so then, because she ended up saying: "you guys are all the fucking same".


I have to admit, I'm very conflicted about Grace's account, especially when I think about the texts they purportedly exchanged the next day. These are the messages Grace shared with Babe:

Ansari: Hey, it was fun meeting you last night. I just dropped my roll of film today. fingers crossed for some solid shots!

Grace: Hey Aziz nice meeting you too, I hope you have some good shots on the roll.

Last night might have been fun for you 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 behavior and how uneasy it made me. Really think back to last night. You may have said "it's okay, 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 dick continuously. It's like nothing changed even after I expressed that I'd like to slow it down.

It may have seemed okay. But I didn't feel good at all. All day I've been playing it over, I'm realizing how much it affected me. I want to make sure you're aware so maybe the next girl doesn't have to cry on the ride home. Good luck on your movie. Thanks for dinner.

Ansari: I'm so sad to hear this. All I can say is, it would never be my intention to make you or anyone feel the way you described. Clearly, I misread things in the moment, and I'm truly sorry.


If it's true that she chided him for his being like other (presumably piggish) men before leaving, then this is a confusing exchange to me. I'm not saying she's lying, but it just seems odd that a person would send such a seemingly oblivious message about having a good time if the other person allegedly left an indignant huff. Unless Ansari is just clueless or was intentionally ignoring what happened, shouldn't that have been his cue to contact her, ask how the night made her feel, and issue an apology? Maybe I'm just being naive here. I don't know.

Something else that troubled me is that Grace criticized Ansari for ignoring "clear non-verbal cues" but later says that while things may have seemed okay, she felt awful. As Aquila pointed out, these two assertions seem contradictory. He either recognized he was making her uncomfortable and continued anyway, or things seemed okay to him and he didn't realize they weren't. I'm just not so sure that the signals were as clear as the Babe article made them out to be. Also, reading the article made me feel very unconformable because of how the events were described, but the descriptions don't include things like whether smiles or laughter were exchanged during any of this. On one hand, it shouldn't matter because some people smile and laugh when they're nervous or scared. On the other had, if Grace also behaved in nonverbal ways that indicated pleasure or playfulness, that could have changed how Ansari saw the whole interaction.

None of that is to say that boorish behavior is okay on a date. It's not. If what was described is true and she gave clear indications of discomfort, then Ansari crossed some serious lines and needs to change. If nothing else, hopefully he will rely on explicit verbal cues and ask for affirmative consent from here on out. But it also occurs to me that Grace is recounting an event after she "realized" how it affected her and talked it over with many friends who helped her conclude that it was a sexual assault. That, along with anger over Ansari's award, may have drastically influenced how she now remembers and describes what happened. I partly get this impression after reading something that Marcuse also pointed out. Grace says in the article that she decided to speak out after seeing Ansari accept an award while wearing a Time's up pin:

Grace wrote:I think that started a new fire, and it kind of made it more real.”

She told babe: “I believe that I was taken advantage of by Aziz. I was not listened to and ignored. It was by far the worst experience with a man I’ve ever had.”


I don't want to pass judgment on this woman or on Ansari. But I'm very uneasy about taking Grace's account as the unaltered truth.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 17, 2018 9:32 pm

Fun With Mr. Fudge wrote:I'm very uneasy about taking Grace's account as the unaltered truth.

It almost certainly is not the unaltered truth. Even if it's exactly as she remembers things, human memory is ridiculously fallible under the best of circumstances, and she was drunk and having an emotionally charged experience. It would take a miracle for her account to be exactly accurate. However my point is that if things happened as she described it's rape, and if they're fairly close to how she described them they're sexual assault.

The fact that she talks about nonverbal cues in the text but gives repeated verbal cues in her story suggests to me that her story is embellished, intentionally or not. The fact that Ansari says she described the encounter as bad "in retrospect" when she was clear that it was bad then indicates that he's at best clueless and quite possibly a callous hypocrite. But if I had to guess, I'd say that at this point that the odds are that this was nothing more than a bad drunken hookup which was subsequently embellished.

However if things happened as she described, Ansari's behavior was inexcusable. If it happened as described, it was rape. So it annoys men when I see people saying "even if things happened as she described, by her own account it just was a bad drunken hookup."
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby Cpt._Funkotron » Wed Jan 17, 2018 9:41 pm

cmsellers wrote:
Cpt._Funkotron wrote:5. Prevent her from leaving.

But my understanding is that that's what he did at one point. Whenever she tried to move away he'd kiss her.

Also, another time, when he asked her as question he kissed her without waiting for the answer, which seems like it might be impeding her ability to consent or not.


I think one thing we can all agree on is that the article was terribly written. It's chock full of tangential and unnecessary details in the events surrounding what happened in the apartment, and the details of the actual events, what the reader actually cares about, are extremely vague as described. I suspect that the comment about being given white wine when she usually drinks red was an attempt to poison the well against the reader's perception of Ansari; nevermind that it was an upscale oyster bar and you're supposed to have white wine with oysters, so that readers who have experienced male dates ordering their meals for them will project that familiar chauvinism onto him.

The way she described it was that every time she "moved away" he would kiss her. Now, "move away" can mean a lot of different things. It can mean she angled her face away, which is perfectly normal to do when making out with someone and isn't a clear sign of discomfort, especially to a drunk horny Aziz Ansari. It can mean that she inched away or walked backwards while the kissing was happening, which again, consenting adults are known to sometimes do while they're getting hot and heavy, taking the love train between rooms as it were, and again is not an obvious sign of distress to a drunk and horny Aziz Ansari. It could mean that she gave him a good shove and walked away, only for a drunk and horny Aziz Ansari to follow, grab her, and kiss her again, which WOULD qualify as sexual assault, and should have been more explicitly described as such. It could mean that she hurled herself out of the window only for a drunk and horny Aziz Ansari to swing down from a rope like Quasimodo to catch her mid-fall, to whisk her back up to his apartment where he continues to paw at her like someone who's never been so close to an actual woman before, which incidentally is the premise of my next screenplay.

Consenting to go on a date with Aziz Ansari is NOT consent to going to Aziz Ansari's apartment.
Consenting to go to Aziz Ansari's apartment is NOT consent to make out with Aziz Ansari.
Consenting to make out with Aziz Ansari is NOT consent to give Aziz Ansari a blowjob.
Consenting to give Aziz Ansari a blowjob is NOT consent to have penetrative sex with Aziz Ansari.

However,

Consenting to go on a date with Aziz Ansari IS consent to BE ON a date with Aziz Ansari, until you decide that you want to end it and then tell him so. Deciding that you don't want to be on a date with someone partway through, but then not making this known to them because you don't want to be rude or hurt their feelings, or you're generally afraid that men react violently when you end dates halfway through dinner, is uncomfortable, undesirable, but not the same thing as the other person FORCING you to be on the date.

Consenting to go to Aziz Ansari's apartment IS consent to BE AT Aziz Ansari's apartment, until you decide you want to leave, and then make that clear. It isn't kidnapping when you decide you'd rather not be at someone's house, but instead of leaving or telling them you want to leave, you just sit by the door and wait for them to pick up on the "non-verbal cue".

Consenting to make out with Aziz Ansari IS consent to BE making out with Aziz Ansari, until you decide you want to stop, and then make that known to them. There's a lot of moving around when making out on your feet, especially if there's a height disparity and alchohol involved. And even if you can tell someone is uncomfortable from their movements or their facial expression, you could often reasonably interpret that NOT as them wanting to stop altogether, but to start making out differently, trying different approaches, positionings, or techniques. Discomfort can often read as awkwardness or jitters.

Consenting to give Aziz Ansari a blowjob IS consent to BE giving a Aziz Ansari a blowjob, until you simply stop doing it. If he were a head-pusher, that'd be assault. Persuading someone to give you a blowjob and then letting them is not assault.

The point is that subtle nonverbal cues are dogshit at communicating unless it's with a person you know well. If everything happened as described, I feel bad for her, and I respect Ansari less, but I do not consider him a perpetrator or her a victim of either Sexual Assault or Rape, as I understand her account.
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Re: Aziz Ansari Accused of Assaulting Anonymous Admirer

Postby Tesseracts » Wed Jan 17, 2018 9:53 pm

I haven't read this thread, but I did read the article. I feel like this account isn't 100% accurate. It won't surprise me if this is the only allegation to come out against Ansari. As Kate pointed it, it's suspicious that in her text she said she used non verbal cues, but in the article she said she explicitly stated she was uncomfortable.

If the account is accurate, it does qualify as assault. Unlike some instances of assault she could have ended things by being more assertive or leaving the room. I believe a lot of people would equate her compliance with consent. But it's not. If he said she was going to hate him if he had sex with here, there is no reasonable way he could interpret this as consent. A woman sitting next to you on the couch after threatening to hate you is not consent.

Many women need to learn how to stick up for themselves and be firm about their wishes. I find it very disturbing that in her text explaining how violated she was, she is still highly polite. It makes me wonder what other polite stuff she might have said which she forgot about when doing the article.
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