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

You move the line a lot.

The surest way to improve sexual culture and dating is to tell women not to drink in unsafe settings - unsafe being broadly defined - and for women to be tough on men about having sex on the first date. These pieces of advice are viewed as overly conservative and uncool and treating women like children so we have knockdown drag out rhetorical arguments over language and enthusiasm and continual consent and all the rest of it.

 

Am I really that out of touch that when he goes down on her (and she willingly receives) and then she goes down on him (again willingly), that shouldn't be an indication to him of where the night will go?

 

She still has the power to stop things at any point, as does he. She keeps trying to slow things down. He isn't having it. She says that she pulled her hand away from his dick five to seven times, only to have him keep attempting to move it there again. She says she doesn't want to have sex until the second date. He pours a glass of wine, immediately, and says, "Can this be our second date?"

 

Apparently so.

 

Yeah. The pulling hand to his dick thing -- that's uncomfortable for sure. It's a little odd though that such a horrible night for her ended with cuddling on the couch and watching Seinfeld, though, right? The "can this be our second date?" is just a guy wanting sex and trying (verbally) to get some. That's hardly new. Sometimes (oftentimes?) it works, and again, in this particular case we're talking about a woman who was blowing him 30 minutes earlier.

After watching more of the reactions, I don't think this is going to ruin Aziz. I think it's going to damage the #MeToo movement.

 

I get what you are saying, but I think it is dangerous to think one action is tacit approval for another. But in my younger and more swinging days, that's exactly what I would have thought it meant.

 

I wonder if it was exactly 6 times.

 

It's not new and it's not criminal. But it definitely indicates, when you read it in context with the rest of the piece, a guy who wasn't taking "no" for an answer re: sex.

 

Since they didn't have sex, and the night did not end with him pulling a knife, this would be an improper reading.

 

No absolutely means no, but most guys are going to ask the question at least twice. Especially when there's been two sessions of oral sex and she apparently suggested that they would have sex on a second date. It's not like he stalked her down the street. She's just blown him in his kitchen. Of course he's going to ask again.

The gulf between this account and Weinstein's behaviour is so wide, it shouldn't even be on the same spectrum. That's not to say Ansari didn't act badly here. I am saying, or at least I think I am, that it doesn't belong as part of the wider #MeToo movement, and that I absolutely believe the media are now acting irresponsibly with these stories, trading ethics for clicks and conversation.

 

Right. He did, eventually, take no for an answer.

And the argument that women do things out of fear for their lives holds water in a lot of cases, but Aziz Ansari isn't murdering a girl in his apartment.

 

Not much, other than Louis CK getting away with it multiple times and being kinda creepy whereas Aziz has done something kinda similar once (that we know of) and is on the adorable side of creepy.