‘Bad sex’ or sexual violence?
As I was researching and writing about consent for my doctorate study, it was late 2017/early 2018, and the #MeToo movement was well and truly underway. At times it felt like every day a new story/stories of sexual violence was being told, whereby the victim had for a long time remained silent, and was now powerfully sharing her (sometimes his, but mostly her) story with the world.
Many of the stories were easily categorised as sexual violence. There was one #MeToo story though that was particularly disturbing, not so much because of its content (there were far more disturbing stories shared), but because it was difficult to categorise as sexual violence - very similar to the stories I was being told by my own research participants.
The story involved actor and director Aziz Ansari, famous for his role in the comedy sitcom Parks and Recreation, and more recently as creator and star of Netflix series Master of None. Ansari has described himself as a feminist, and his championing of women in writing and directing roles on Master of None and his (arguably) diverse casting choices has earnt him a progressive persona among Hollywood stars. In early 2018, Ansari became the latest Hollywood star to be publicly accused of sexual misconduct:
‘A 23-year-old photographer, under the pseudonym Grace, described being groped, harassed and pressured into sex during a date with Ansari following the 2017 Emmys’, online publication Babe reported.
The story went like this: Grace and Ansari met at the Emmys after-party, they flirted a little and exchanged numbers and a week later went out for dinner on a date. Grace shared having been ‘excited’ for their date. After a ‘rushed’ dinner they went back to Ansari’s apartment and online publication babe.net has published a very detailed account of the sexual encounter that followed.
In brief though, Grace reports things having escalated very fast: ‘In a second, his hand was on my breast…It was really quick. Everything was pretty much touched and done within ten minutes of hooking up, except for actual sex’. According to Grace, that evening, Ansari ignored a number of her verbal and non-verbal attempts to either slow or stop their sexual encounter. She reports having been coerced into sexual behaviour that she did not desire, nor felt comfortable with. After a number of failed attempts to defuse the situation, eventually, Grace left and caught an Uber home.
She told Babe.net: ‘I cried the whole ride home. At that point I felt violated. That last hour was so out of my hand’.
The following day Grace responded to a text from Ansari. She let him know that she had not been comfortable and had felt that her attempts to express that at the time had been ignored by him. Ansari apologised via text, explaining that he had ‘misread things in the moment’. In response to the original article published by Babe, Ansari issued a statement confirming his encounter with Grace and restating his support for the #MeToo movement.
In the article on Babe.net, Grace explains: ‘It took a really long time for me to validate this as sexual assault… I was debating if this was an awkward sexual experience or sexual assault. And that’s why I confronted so many of my friends and listened to what they had to say, because I wanted validation that it was actually bad’.
Unlike other #MeToo accusations, there was a lot of backlash regarding Grace’s story. Some of the backlash to the Ansari accusations came from women declaring that Grace’s experience is simply a ‘regrettable hook-up’and that ‘it doesn’t fit with the other [#MeToo] accusations’, which centre on power dynamics. For example, Weinstein blocking the careers of actresses who turned down his sexual advances. Journalist Karol Markowicz declared that ‘no such power dynamic existed in this [Ansari] situation’. She argued that to see it as part of the #MeToo movement has the effect of diluting the whole movement and minimizing ‘actual sexual assault stories’.
Another article similarly declared Grace’s experience as ‘just bad sex’, and that lumping her experience in with the other #MeToo stories ‘trivializes what #MeToo first stood for’. The final line of Markowicz’s particularly damning article goes like this: ‘Let's believe women, let's listen to victims, but let's be clear about separating bad sex from violence and inept lovers from predators’.
At Learning Consent, we would argue, that is easier said than done.
The stories young people have shared with me don’t often lend themselves to a clear separation of ‘bad sex’ from ‘violence’. Similarly so, Grace’s story and the subsequent backlash speaks to the conceptual deficiencies that exist in conversations around consent.
The yes/no dichotomous model of consent forces young people to have to decide whether they we were active or passive: Consent is framed as the active option, and rape as the passive option. Young people are given two narratives to choose to from – that they were ‘up for it’ and consented, or that they were attacked and were a victim. For many young people, neither of those outcomes are adequate to explain what transpired.
We need a model of consent which accommodates the multitude of narratives representing young people’s lived experiences of sex, and that affords exploration of ambiguous sexual encounters. As Laurie Penny argues, ‘we need a new language of consent’.
Keen to read more on this divisive #MeToo story? Check out this article where ten women each offer their insights into whether Grace’s experience was ‘just bad sex’ or sexual violence.
