Even The Wolf likely can't clean up Harvey Weinstein's pending troubles

You mean this Margaret Atwood?

Am I a bad feminist?

The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.

If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won't be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.

You're playing a noble side on this one, DW, and there's no question Ansari is a smug, manipulative creep, though watching his show could have clued one into that.

I can't pretend to know the code of how all these stories work, but this one ended up in Babe, and maybe this alt-way-left Web site was the first place "Grace" went with the story, but the NYT, Post and others have whole teams dedicated to this stuff now, and The Atlantic, which willingly posted that response within 24 hours of the Babe story, isn't exactly a bastion of anti-feminist conservatism. Maybe it's just the journalistic establishment saying "OK, now, what is the Web site? Which 23-year-old photographer with a vintage camera is getting into an after-Emmy's party unless they're not already a socialite?" Maybe it's that. But the piece is a yuckfest of lurid details that clearly shame Ansari. Maybe it's written that way to be raw and real, I don't know. But he strikes me more as a creep than a rapist.

This movement, FWIW, may mess more with "nice" guys than it will rotten ones. I think it's messed with a few "nice" guys on here. I've already had that conversation with "nice" guys. "Can you believe some of the shit these guys did for all those years???" And it's said with 87% disgust and 13% outrage that, for so long, they got away with it and that so many women let them get away with it. The tension is perhaps hardest for "nice" guys. All the encounters they didn't have, and didn't even think to have, and all the credit they didn't get (and falsely believe they deserve) for never doing those things, and now, after all of the assault and abuse, the attention is still, as always, in perpetuity, on the rotten men. There's something to all that - these shitty men who get to haunt a woman's past, dominate her present and perhaps define her future. That, instead of dating the 96 out of 100 34-year-old men who wouldn't have even presumed to stick their fingers down her throat on a first date, she dated one of the 4 who would, seemingly went along with some of it, stuck around when it was obvious the guy was a POS, then finally left, then, 5 months after the fact, unloaded all of it in Babe. This, on some level, is fairly stunning to most men. Who are these women? What is this world they live in? For that matter, who are these men? Are all my friends around secretly this guy while I'm over here, scuffling for a simple look from a woman?

I asked it around the time of Lauer: Would he do it differently? Sure, in a vacuum. But if you told Lauer "you have to choose between the experiences you've already had, the good and the bad, and just being ordinary, anonymous, because to take away your lows means we have to remove the part of your personality that created the highs" I wonder which he'd choose. I wonder which any of us would choose. The ordinary nice guy is still ordinary. Matt Lauer gets to be redeemed for all the shitty things he did, and I'm sure he will be, because that's what we do with horrible men who don't look like Harvey Weinstein. (Whose crimes include, among others, being ugly and fat, similar to Trump.)

This, in Christian parlance, is the "older brother" talking. The stiff, upright older brother. It is a sin of pride for anyone who falls into that thinking. And yet, on this issue, I think you'll see a lot of men fall into it one way or the other.

 

To be clear, @Alma, I don't think this story should have run in any newspaper or on any website in America. It's anonymous. She hasn't filed charges. She hasn't filed a civil suit. But it did run. And I think it rings pretty true as an account of a woman getting pressured for sex. And if Donald Trump grabbing pussies is obviously sexual assault, even when women "let" him do it, then we have to at least talk about whether Aziz Ansari trying to put a woman's hand on his dick "five to seven times" after she pulled it away constitutes sexual assault, as well, don't we?

 

My argument is that he acted pretty indefensibly, and may have done enough at times to technically deserve a low-degree sexual assault charge, if we take her account 100 percent at its word. Obviously that is not how any tribunal should operate.

 

People are talking about it.

But, in bringing Trump into the conversation, you make it a different one, because Trump's context is different. Donald Trump could be accused of eating well-done monkey hearts with Kraft Barbecue sauce, and I'm not sure I would dismiss it out of hand. Though nothing surprises me with any actor and sexual harassment/assault, Trump is his own category. Weinstein is closer. Probably, sad as I am to say, because of their looks.

 

The reason I bring up Trump is because the two acts are similar: Grabbing a woman's genitals vs. Trying to force a woman to grab your genitals by moving her hand.

@LongTimeListener notes that they were pretty far down the road sexually within minutes of getting back to the apartment. (The part about how quickly he wanted to pay the check and leave dinner was silly and melodramatic. I'm always in a hurry to pay the check and leave dinner, too. Both because I want a drink, usually, and won't drink when I'm driving and because I generally get antsy.) And that would explain him trying to move her hand once. I think it's a fair interpretation of where things are at for him to do that. But five or seven attempts? Whether it makes sense to him or not that she won't do that shouldn't matter. No means no.

 

I agree, but it's driving that conversation.

It's not the perfect story to serve as the instigation for the conversation, but it's where we are.

 

My code-reading of these stories isn't great, but I think the swiftness of The Atlantic's reaction and the fact that this story showed up in Babe is a clue to me. Maybe that's just the snob in me talking. I suspect almost all of it is very true, but I'm predisposed to thinking men do this kind of shit, and women consistently get in weird spots in which they're afraid/ashamed and don't know what to do.

I'd tell women not to drink on a date, or at a party, not now, not ever, but that, in itself, looks uncool. Young people get socially punished for not drinking. And lots of money's about the only thing that can reset the social penalty of not drinking, so young women do it, in part, to fit in. (As do young men.) When you remove all rules, ethics and morals, all's that left is cool, and the attendant pressures that go with a bunch of people trying to impose their emotional wills.

 

The only rule since 1955.

 

The reason you bring up Trump is it's a particular windmill at which you tilt.

But you already know why Trump got the treatment he did: Because he's Trump. Because people were predisposed to believe that his words may have been technically referring to consent, but he didn't get consent because he's Trump, and fuck him. You already know that's how the world works. You're free to try to impose an objective framework to the discussion, but we're emotional beings, in an era of emotional tyranny, so you're going to lose that argument. Tell it to Socrates.

Since he's only president because he's Trump, the trade-off seemed to work out OK for him.

 

Indulge me here.

If what Trump is alleged to have done is sexual assault - and I think most would agree that, without consent, it absolutely is - is what Ansari accused of (five to seven times) sexual assault? I can't manage a principled distinction. That paragraph alone saves the story from any accusation of irrelevancy.

 

Dude, did you really need to do that?

 

And if he were to tell his story, he would remember obvious signs of flirtation from her. Did they happen? Don't know. We're in Rashomon territory on that. But there's no percentage for him to tell that story.

However, and this could be because of when I grew up and the sexual mores of that time, the mutual oral and the cuddling -- and, notably, the NOT LEAVING -- strike me as odd.