#AzizAnsari 6: It Didn’t Count

Bonus material accompanying #AzizAnsari 6: Denying Female Agency

(Or, Common Reasons Some Rapes/Sexual Assaults Don’t Count)

 

“It didn’t count because it wasn’t bad enough”

This one sometimes comes from people who have themselves been victims, or are ‘survivors’ (and no, I don’t intend to communicate disdain with those quotation marks, only to mark the word out as a term chosen and popularised by the feminist movement for a particular purpose. It’s a term I respect and often use, though there are equally feminist arguments against its use in at least some contexts).

Tiffany Wright, for instance, contrasts Grace’s story with experiences of her own that she would call assault: “This summer, I fell asleep in a man’s bed after telling him I didn’t want to have sex, and woke up to him inside of me. A few months before that, after I passed out at a college party, a stranger stuck his fingers inside my unconscious body and used my limp hand to get himself off. Some time during the aftermath of those two events, my now-former boss (who had 57 years to my 21) kept me after work, grabbed my waist and tried to kiss me.” She also claims to have “experienced the kind of situations Grace described. And while they can be distressing, and confusing, and humiliating, they are not assault.” I actually sympathise and agree with much of Wright’s thinking, but not the implication that assault only occurs when someone is unconscious, severely inebriated or an employee of the perpetrator. The degree of choice or constraint experienced by a person prior to or during an action or event that harms them does not fundamentally alter the labelling of that action or event: if you live in the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius erupts, destroying your home, you are a victim of a natural disaster whether or not you were free or not free to have gone to live elsewhere. The degree of choice you had may alter our perception of the severity of the harm, and how sorry we feel for you, but not the fact of the disaster or your status as victim of it. Neither do I agree with Wright’s position that our own experiences should dictate the terms of a debate: ‘these are my experiences, and they provide the lens through which I view all discussions of sexual assault.’

As I pointed out in my last post, ‘sexual assault’ can legally speaking cover a broad range of behaviours of very diverse severities. This desire (which Wright shares with my friend Anonymous 1) to protect the purity of a category to which we feel we belong is understandable, but perhaps not always entirely defensible, intellectually or ethically. And the notion that some assaults or rapes are ‘real’ while others are not is, I think, more dangerous to women than the legally justified application of these terms to a wide range of scenarios.

This proposition is also made by those (often but by no means exclusively men) who fear that behaviours they think are reasonable will be criminalised or condemned, that therefore their own sex lives may have to change, and sex might lose its fun. This is, essentially, a conservative attitude: one that doesn’t want our sexual culture to change too much. Kyle Smith, arguing that Grace simply regretted the evening and framed it as she did to get revenge, clearly falls into this category.

Then there are the many women who like Bari Weiss argue that ‘I too have had lousy romantic encounters, as has every adult woman I know’, and that the most ‘useful term for what [Grace] experienced’ is ‘“bad sex”’. These seem to fall somewhere between the Kyle Smith desire to conserve the culture of sex as it is, and the Tiffany Wright desire to protect the purity of the victim/survivor category. I suspect that Bari Weiss falls closer to the conservative end of the spectrum; her arguments are actually very similar to Kyle Smith’s. But for others it seems to be less conservatism and more a reluctance to accept unpalatable ideas such as ‘many men don’t require their partner to want sex in order to enjoy having it’; they prefer to believe that men are simply a bit dim and women aren’t making themselves clear enough.

 

“It didn’t count because you should have expected it (and got out sooner)”

Bari Weiss: “If you are hanging out naked with a man, it’s safe to assume he is going to try to have sex with you.”

Compare Michael Portillo on BBC Radio 4 The Moral Maze episode ‘Moral Complicity’ 18.10.17: the culture of sexual harassment in Hollywood is “not just engendered by the people at the top: it’s understood by the people at the bottom, who have come to Hollywood, you know, they’re jolly good-looking, they come from the middle of Iowa, they have an amazing opportunity to make millions of pounds, and they’re entering a situation which maybe they understand.” He derides the suggestion that the women who accused Weinstein might not have known what they were getting themselves into: “you think they would have been – you know, having arrived in Hollywood, Tinsel Town, you think they’d be surprised by it – you think so?” Their foreknowledge, he argues, makes them more complicit than victims.

This proposition engages the idea of default consent: your going to his place, or to Hollywood, constituted consent because you should have known that going to his place/Hollywood meant there’d be sex. This argument serves to reduce the culpability of the alleged perpetrator by proving the complicity of the supposed victim, who is now no longer a victim because they were complicit.

 

“It didn’t count because you didn’t fight back (hard enough)”

Bari Weiss: “If he pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs and walk out his door.”

Compare Melanie Phillips at the How To Academy debate ‘The #MeToo Movement Has Gone Too Far’ arguing that if you are sexually harassed at work you should just punch your harasser in the face and/or leave the job because clearly it isn’t a working environment for you. Staying in the job and then speaking up about it is something she derides (with, apparently, no awareness at all of the fact that some people in this world experience financial constraints).

This argument also turns on default consent and is a close cousin of the above: your passivity constituted consent; only natural for him to have a go, and keep trying, if you didn’t yell ‘no’ in his face, punch him or leave. Again, this serves to mitigate the responsibility of the alleged perpetrator.