Aziz, I'm Sorry
Not being inside your home for the “date hashed 'round the world,” I can’t say for sure whether the aggrieved account posted (anonymously) by a 23-year-old woman referred to as “Grace” is accurate, fabulized or somewhere in between. I do know I don’t really care.
What I do care about is the extraordinary violation of your privacy and personhood this entirely unvetted takedown unleashed, and its destructive perversion of the important conversation around sexual assault and harassment of women, especially in the workplace.
Apparently your workplace — and professional reputation — is of no matter to either the instigator or author of this article, which purports to be a serious entry in the #MeToo discussion, even if under the credibility-busting imprimatur of a website called “babe.net”.
How did we go from exhaustively reported stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker and other reputable publications, focused on legitimately newsworthy and culturally important issues of sexual assault and denial of professional opportunity, to vindictive screeds about who went down on who, in what order, and under what “signals” in the privacy of one's own apartment during a mutually agreed upon social encounter?
I have no idea. But the Times alone has run no less than four op-ed pieces about your date, with dozens more references in other opinion pieces and news articles — just one measure of the weeks-long orgy of international coverage that shows no sign of letting up.
Columnists, essayists, letter writers, Facebook posters and others are taking it upon themselves to adamantly judge your behavior based on “Grace’s” entirely one-sided and deeply problematic account, without bothering to question why they take this anonymous “testimony” at face value, or why it’s any of our business to begin with.
All at the instigation of “Babe.net,” self-proclaimed online forum of, as its home page loudly proclaims, “girls who don't give a fuck.” As I write this, its articles include:
"This woman who used a dildo to measure the snow is a modern-day hero."
"Titty tees are so on-trend right now — here's where to find the cutest ones."
"You're about to become an absolute sex demon next week — and you can blame it all on the moon."
The site’s archives are also replete with such “how to” posts as:
"Here’s what your very specific taste in porn says about you."
"Trust me on this: Teasing his balls will get YOU a better orgasm."
"An extremely detailed but super simple guide to giving life-changing blow jobs."
There is absolutely nothing inherently wrong in any of this, and I’m all for women having a safe, empowering space to be themselves and own their sexuality. But a site that celebrates "sluttiness" and promotes “glitter tonguing” as a strategy for giving “magical blow jobs” has a pretty warped perspective on the relationship between sex, gender, equality, and treating women with respect and deference on a first date.
Yet this very site has commandeered online and offline media all over the world with a crybaby account of a young woman drawn directly to Ansari’s celebrity (they met at a post-Emmy party where she approached him, flirted throughout the night, and exchanged cell phone numbers on her way out, despite "Grace" being on a date herself), who then exploits that celebrity to get 15 minutes of anonymous fame over feeling “uneasy” about what the two of them got up to.
It started when he served wine without offering her a choice (he handed her white, even though she (silently, by her own admission) prefers "red." In painstaking detail, she itemizes her subsequent (and relentless) grievances in the 3,100-word article: he put his V-shaped fingers into her mouth, throat and vagina; kissed her; pulled her hand toward his penis “multiple times throughout the night”; got up and moved before sticking his fingers down her throat again (“It was really repetitive”). She claims to have given off physical cues that she wasn’t interested, yet has the audacity to acknowledge: “I don’t think that was noticed at all, or if it was, it was ignored.” It appears this went on for hours.
She had a second glass of wine (white again, we suppose), went to the bathroom, came back out, sat on the floor, went down on Aziz again, got on the couch, made out with him some more, went to a different part of the apartment, stood in front of a mirror, endured his pantomime of anal intercourse, bent over, got dressed, sat back on the couch, “chilled,” watched Seinfeld, kissed him again, had his fingers in her throat again, suffered a few more “aggressive” kisses, then finally got up and announced she wanted to call an Uber. (Aziz called one for her.)
If all this is as described, here was a woman of age and agency participating in a drawn-out sexual encounter, professing all the while to being neither interested, turned on, nor happy with any of it. Yet with each passing minute, she exercised her choice to stay. And stay. And stay some more. To participate, participate, and participate some more. Not because Ansari had any "power" over her — this was a date, not a job interview or work session — but because the two shared a mutual attraction and made mutual decisions to go out on this date.
And we’re supposed to believe “Grace” is somehow a “victim” of Aziz Ansari?
It’s pretty clear to me who the victims are in this tawdry tale. First above all is Aziz Ansari, who never signed up for this. What a nightmare this man has been living. Like so many other celebrities now "labeled" as alleged perpetrators of "sexual misconduct" that could be anything from clumsy sex to assault, a hand on a waist to battery, Aziz has been tarred, feathered and flogged in the public square.
Next are the victims of actual sexual assault and harassment, who are having their important movement cheapened and exploited by “Grace,” babe.net, and the demonstrably anti-feminist writer Katie Way. (Incredibly, this "journalist" launched a rude and sexist tirade against Ashley Banfield — calling her a “burgundy lipstick bad highlights second-wave feminist has-been” after the veteran reporter had the audacity to question the merits of Way's article. What more evidence is needed, beyond the article itself, that she is a rank amateur without an iota of maturity or understanding of what she's doing.
Lastly are the rest of us, who had this story force-fed into our consciousness by media outlets supposedly far more serious than babe.net, with editors who apparently never stopped to ask why they were repeatedly feasting on the brutalized carcass of Aziz Ansari’s soul.
Bill Maher had it right when he labeled the whole thing “Me-Carthyism.” From Matt Damon and Al Franken to Ashley Banfield and Aziz Ansari — to lesser known victims like WNYC’s Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz, septuagenarians and long-time public radio fixtures summarily removed from their microphones for alleged non-physical “misconduct” that has yet to be explained to angry and disaffected fans — the story is rapidly shifting away from the despicable behavior of the Harvey Weinsteins and Kevin Spaceys of the world, to the reckless and self-serving abuses of the “Graces” and Katie Ways. And that's to say nothing of the media's failure to exercise reasonable judgment and restraint as they willingly participate in character and career assassinations.
Nobody is safe until we stand up and speak out against this runaway scourge. And for that, Aziz, I’m very sorry indeed.
