For a long time James Franco has been rumored to be a Polanski-Woody type.

Women created a list of men in media who sexually harass and worse for other women. This became public and a thing.

Yesterday on twitter there was news that Harpers was going to run a piece in March exposing the originator of the list. Other contributers to Harpers started to pull their pieces and they were paid in full by a person who wanted to punish Harpers and reward the authors.

Today, Harpers was scooped by the originator herself. This is her story: https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/moira...-men-list.html

Views on the Catherine Deneuve letter from 100 Frenchwomen?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/m...-movement.html
https://www.afp.com/en/news/206/fren...men-doc-w392z1

My view:

Pretty sure sexual freedom doesn't Have to come with a price tag of being assaulted or harassed. Don't know tho. I mean I do. It doesn't at all.

It could be a straw man. Maybe. Just maybe. I mean it's not like extreme religion includes sexual harrasment and abuse and, oh, I don't know, support of those abusers as a feature.

But yeah, it is some words, I'll grant you that.

This idea that women are over-protected in the workplace is idiotic.

afternoon lads,

would you like to see a video of Harvey Weinstein getting slapped in the face and called a ****ing piece of **** by a guy in a restaurant? of course you would.



unfortunately the slapping is not very hard, but enjoyable all the same.

I guess the latest is Aziz Ansari.

Girl's version + Anti-Aziz article:
https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355

Aziz's response/denial
https://babe.net/2018/01/15/aziz-ansari-statement-28407

Pro-Aziz article in Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...ansari/550541/

Ansari is going to be an interesting case in the court of public opinion. He has a nice-guy, pro-feminist image and has a lot of female fans. Wonder if they will turn on him based on this account?

Part of what they are saying is that there are some lol Americans who talk about being asked on a date by a colleague in the same breath as being sexually assaulted, and they want those kept as separate categories.

A free market in products to buy comes with the price tag of our being harassed by company advertising though of course there are rules to keep that under control. Sexual harassment is of course a wide category and some of it is unacceptable, but where it just means showing interest in someone that's part of the price tag of being able to hook up.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting your post - could you give some examples of things that would be either side of the borderline of what is and isn't a suitable incident to make a metoo story about?

This is hard to read. Especially the comments on the atlantic article.

Ansari seems like a creep at the very least (wtf is that fingers in throat move?) and the encounter likely constituted assault. Nothing else I'm about to say should be construed to diminish that.

I feel like this is where prevailing ideology does women a disservice though. If someone tells me not to make eye contact with a crazy guy in a bar, and I do and get into a fight, it's not my fault. But if I say what is pretty obvious here, that this woman handled the encounter very poorly, it will immediately be construed as me saying I think she deserves blame, which is not the case. The answer will be "women shouldn't have to change their behaviour!". I "shouldn't have to" avoid walking through dangerous gang-controlled areas, but I would be pretty mad if nobody told me where they were on that basis. Crime shouldn't happen and that it does is on criminals, but that has no relevance to whether there are things I can do that will help avoid it happening to me. I understand that women getting advice on how to avoid sexual assault is, in the real world, frequently associated with victim-blaming, but I don't think it has to be that way.

There's an unfortunate ambiguity in the word "should" in English here. If I listen to a story about an argument you've had with someone and I say "I think you should apologise to them", without tone of voice or other context, it's not possible to tell whether I am saying 1) it's not your fault but **** it, just apologise to them anyway, things will work out better for you that way or 2) it is your fault and you have a moral responsibility to apologise. When I say that I should lock my door when I go out, I'm not asserting that I have a moral responsibility to do it. But if I say anything along the lines of "that woman should learn to be more assertive", it will be instantly assumed that moral responsibility is being assigned. The end result of a prohibition on talking about ways to be safer will be more women like this one being assaulted.

I don't see what conclusion this gets us. Assume it's true that the woman who wrote the story has some regrets about her own behavior. Note I do not know if this is true or not.

I don't see what we would conclude differently (e.g., Ansari sounds clueless/unpleasant/creepy). So what's the point in saying it? I think it goes without saying that, sure, women who operate to maximize self-preservation (e.g., they abstain from alcohol, don't go to a guy's apartment alone, don't seem overly flirtatious, whatever we're trying to lay at this woman's feet here) are less likely to encounter harms. And? Everything from that point forward *does* feel like victim blaming or at least a non-sequitur.

Without wading too deeply into the details of the Aziz Ansari story, it seems like the takeaway point -- already mentioned and worth repeating -- is that consent is a bad sex ethic. That is: "she has to say 'no' or be very forceful before I stop, otherwise I continue and persist'' might be a valid legal standard, but people can do a better.

So a bad ethic is "did the women consent, or withdraw consent" -- which appears to be a bright line we use here. The sexual experience seems consensual, sort of, and yet we have an aggrieved woman who is repulsed.

Better would be if we all agreed that we should have a clear indication that our sexual experiences are beneficial, fun, fulfilling, etc. for everyone involved. Yet again it seems we have a norms or expectations problem that romance and sex is supposed to not involve talking or communicating to be fun and thrilling. And I am sure for a subset of the population, male and female, this is true. But it's on us, all of us, to know that to before proceeding. Being a good and decent human requires it.

So put bluntly, if you're darting out of a restaurant to take your date back to your apartment to ****, worth making sure she's up for that before proceeding. Ansari seems guilty of assuming too much here, and so given the stakes and the emotions that can be involved with sex for some, decency and virtue probably requires you know, talking about that first.

I agree with 90% of that.

The point is that maybe we're failing at educating women about how to handle these situations. From her account, this woman seemed basically embarrassed and starstruck and not sure what to do in the face of this behaviour. Maybe sex ed needs to include education about what it's like to be in these situations and when it's appropriate to get really assertive. Again, I'm not saying it's this woman's responsibility to learn how to do this; it's Ansari's responsibility to modify his behaviour. I'm saying that given that Ansari failed in this duty, the woman could have saved the situation as a backup.

I have a memory from my childhood of a guy coming to school and giving us a talk about people touching our private areas and how we shouldn't allow it. Nobody went HANG ON A MINUTE, my child shouldn't have to modify their behaviour! It's the responsibility of adults not to touch their private areas! That would be an insane non-sequitur, because the education concerned how a child should react if an adult isn't playing by the rules. I understand that the difference is that there hasn't been decades of people saying "Well if your child didn't want to be molested, maybe they shouldn't have worn that low-cut dress" but I think we're in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater by simply categorising any attempt to educate women on how to deal with sexual misbehaviour as victim-blaming. That Ansari shoulders 100% of the moral blame for the encounter and that there are things the woman could have done to mitigate it are not mutually exclusive ideas. If I tell a woman "if a stranger grabs you and tries to drag you into a car, run away" I'm not saying she bears some responsibility if she doesn't do that.

These analogies are imperfect though. No child ever wants to be abused. No woman ever wants to be abducted. This is a different scenario from a potential sexual encounter between two people who are attracted to one another but one party is ambiguous about whether she wants to have sex. Sometimes women do want to have sex, so it doesn't follow the absolutism of the other scenarios.

I think the right takeaway from situations like the Aziz Ansari situation is that people/society need to advance communication about sex. Like, by orders of magnitude. The goal shouldn't be to provide men with a checklist of acceptable and unacceptable ways to persuade a woman to have sex. Clear communication between parties seems like the right objective. If this requires behaviour changes from both genders, so be it.

I will be the bad guy and say it..............it seemed like she was into it until she wasn't, but she wasn't clear enough with him. There is no sexual assault in that terribly written story.

I'd say not consenting to a guy giving you oral sex... and then not consenting to give that same guy oral sex... twice... is a good starting point to avoiding unpleasant sexual situations.

Sorry but it is not victim blaming to say to women, don't have consensual sex with a guy you don't actually want to have sex with. Even if he's famous, or if you are starstruck, or if you had a different notion of how he would act based on his public persona.

She didn't work for him. He wasn't holding her captive. By her own account she was giving extremely mixed messages, and not clearly communicating what she did and didn't want to do. She left when she wanted to. He called her an Uber.

Was he a perfect gentleman, obviously not. Had he acted differently she might have had a wonderful night. Maybe he's a complete a**hole - I don't know the guy. But that doesn't make him a sexual predator, at least not based on this story.

I think part of the problem is that we are in a cultural scenario where the social sanctions are binary. That means that either Anzari did nothing wrong or that we have to ruin his career and Netflix has to drop him.
That's an awful way of handling the situation, it just make us men very defensive about all our improper conducts and it stops the healthy talk that needs to happen.
The main problem the #metoo movement has ( and I agree with 75% of what they say btw but the other 25% has awful political consequences ) is that they tend to direct all their wrath against specific individuals instead of the sociocultural background that leads to guys like Anzari doing shady stuff.

So basically my position is that we should evaluate our educational system instead of turning this into a witch hunt against Anzari.

Of course some guys like Weinstein do deserve all the scorn they are getting but I'm afraid that putting the Anzaris in the same baskets as the Weinstein is basically a recipe for disaster in the long run, it will stop the conversation from happening, it will drive normal people away from feminist ideas and it will continue to enhance environments for people like Trump to be elected president.

And just to be clear , I'm saying that the way that #metoo is playing it's card right now is beneficial to right wing populism.

How about this, find me a some examples of a woman who got asked on a date by a colleague and wrote a #metoo story about it. If and when you do, let's run the math on how big of an issue it is that it is diminishing the validity of the conversation. Yeah, false accusations, exaggerations, attention seeking, revenge will always exist. They exist in the medical field, they exist in other types of crimes and accusations, they exist in lawsuits, they exist in procecutions by police and DAs, they exist between siblings, they exist in child welfare cases....gtfo with the witch hunt against poor, misunderstood bumbling men who just can't figure out when a woman they just met doesn't want to see their dick.

Further it is not up to me to draw a line about what another person wants to talk about in a movement. I don't see this simply as a chance to hold men's feet to the fire for past actions, it is to change attitudes. There is culpability to go around for men and women in terms how a healthier communication can be achieved on the "misunderstanding" front and it doesn't have to be a shield for obvious predators at the same time, even if it happens simultaneously.

Gonna hold off on giving Aziz the benefit of the doubt, for a couple months or so, to see if new accusers come forward because that's what happens every time.

So I have been mugged/jumped a few times. On a few occasions I missed a chance to escape because I didn't react quick enough by running when I was first scared and let myself get more isolated or the situation escalate.

The problem with what you are saying is that she should be treating a date like he is a mugger, instead of someone who deserves the benefit of the doubt that it was a misunderstanding and he could be taken at his word he would cool it. Nobody wants to make that kind of mistake, and she is hoping that it's not the case because it is altogether ****ty, a ****ty situation to deal with, a disappointment that it's not a great night she hoped for, etc. She was wrong, but when she goes through the signals she was getting, and eliminating the hindsight knowledge of how it turned out, at what point should she draw the line? If he had stopped any of the times he agreed to thisnwould have been a different story, one she was hoping for. By just bouncing at the first signs she would have been assuming that he was a creep before he proved it I guess. Who knows, maybe if he was better at seducing her she would have been okay with it. I guess that's her right also. It also would have been his right to tell her he felt he was getting mixed signals after she said no and it was not okay. He could have ended it on his own accord and that is a decision that it turns out would have been better for HIM in terms of consequences. This is the part that is new to the whole dynamic---now the consequences fall both ways.

The flip side of this is many women do send mixed signals for many reasons. The whole "I don't usually do this" interaction is true. Drinking to have an excuse is real. Expectations of men being "assertive" and making the first move etc...it's part of what needs to be discussed. If a woman says no and she really means yes, that is bad behavior. That should not be tolerated by men either. If we get to a point where it that behavior doesn't pay off because men are more concerned with not crossing the line (even out of self interest) that's a start. Even better will be where the women who do behave that way are seen as having some responsibility in perpetuating a dangerous situation for both men and women. It still will always depend on men being willing to pass up a chance to **** now and then and the incentive to do so is partly why this movement is important.

It all sounds so difficult when it's academic like this but loads of men never get themselves in these situations. I have been brushed off, cooled off etc. I just stopped. I have had mixed signals sent or signals so weak I probably missed chances to act on them. So what? Small price to pay.

Sometimes I think we forget simple human decency though. Why can't she righteously feel bad even assuming she's sent mixed signals, consented, wanted to engage in oral sex but not **** him, etc.? Or got cajoled into oral sex but wasn't really interested in it? If she simply thought the night would go differently?

Forget sex. People consent to things all the time they later regret. Since when are all regrets only justifiably felt if the thing was done with coercion? I've freely consented to all sorts of things that later I regretted, then was pissed about. That's a natural human emotion.

I mean assume a possible scenario: the girl was starstruck, thought she would be able to turn him into a long-term dating partner or boyfriend -- how fun to date a celebrity, someone notable, think about how good she'd feel about herself, etc. And Ansari sort of realized the same and thought he could use it to his advantage, to get some relatively low-effort sex and move along. Seems plausible given the reported story.

But then most of the way through the date, halfway through their sexual encounter, whatever, she'd determined he was simply going to use her for sex then send her home in a cab. Her hopes were dashed. She thought she was going to be able to go home and tell her friends they had a cute, fun date, and instead he just tried to rush back to his apartment to bang her quick and get back to watching Seinfeld repeats.

Isn't that something you could regret? Feel cheated and manipulated by? Hold against someone, rightfully?

Maybe her own naivete is to blame. And so? When people take advantage of my naivete, or I let my guard down and someone takes advantage (work, family, time, money, whatever), I get pissed and revenge is in the range of stuff I want to seek out. Why is this woman supposed to become dispassionate and cold and just be like "oh Aziz, you cad, well played sir, you got me."

I really have little sympathy for Aziz here. I obviously wasn't there, I have no idea, but assuming a likely scenario where he recognized she was infatuated with his celebrity persona, that could be manipulated for sex, and he intended simply to **** her and not really move beyond that -- treating people like that is going to lead to predictable outcomes. What does he expect to happen? This is what happens when you treat people like ****. Happens all the time outside of human sexual relations.

As I said in my last post: the Golden Rule would seem to solve a decent amount of sexual misconduct. Don't use people for selfish ends and only proceed trying to **** people if you're sure it's in their best interests. If you suspect they are expecting something more or different, or if you were trying to leverage whatever circumstances were available to you (your celebrity, your position at work, circumstances like inebriation, etc.) into plying sex out of someone -- expect regret. Expect heartache. Expect a harsh aftermath. Even if she consents.

Exactly what dvaut said, and that conversation can be had without deeps concerns that it is being equated to Harvey Weinstein or child molestation or that we can't have sexual freedom. Pretty easily in fact. The desire to conflate them is suspect.

Seems like half the posters have brushed past Aziz as a clearly bad actor and moved on to theorizing about women's sexual self defense strategies and the other half seemingly think he self evidently did nothing wrong and moved on to criticizing the woman's actions. Neither is a particularly great look for a conversation playing out entirely among men so far.

I have more posts that fall outside of those two camps than in them.

The Aziz thing has been really interesting for me to read and think about. Still not sure I've processed it enough to come to a firm conclusion about how I feel. I think his behavior is somewhere between assault and super creepy, assuming things went down exactly as described in the article, and leaning on the assault side of things. With that said, it sounds like the type of situation where I can imagine him having a different interpretation of how things went down, and it's conceivable that he didn't have any bad intent.

Overall, I guess it doesn't really matter if we define this as assault or something else, it still shouldn't have happened. The fact that encounters like his are so commonplace that there are lots of people describing it as a "bad date" is a pretty bad indicator for our society.