When I first came across the original article published by Babe magazine, I found it painful and difficult to read. Like many other women who have spoken out since its publication, I could recognize the narrative. I have had similar personal experiences, and have heard many similar stories from my interviewees during my research projects on violence, and my friends, and family members who have had experiences with men ‘misreading’ their signals.
I reflected on the story and what came after for the next few days. The explosion of opinions and comments was not surprising to me. The denial of sexual misconduct by Ansari; celebrity and non-celebrities’ rushing to make arguments pro or against Grace’s claims; people using their platforms to shame, attack or support this anonymous woman who had shared a very personal narrative on a very public space, the internet. I read comments that ranged widely between slut-shaming, mocking, and fully supporting Grace. There were even comments made about her choice of wine.
While the comments were mostly centered around whether Grace was in fact sexually assaulted or not, a more significant conversation was also taking place in the sub-text. This conversation about both men’s and women’s perceptions of proper gendered sexual conduct revealed important elements of our understanding of violence, including (i) there is not consent on what sexual violence is and our understandings of sexual consent vary widely; (ii) a lot of people (of all genders) believe that ‘misreading’ is possible, and gray areas exist; (iii) experiences of sexual misconduct are often looked at and evaluated with a lens based on individual experiences that one can[not] relate to, and much less on the power-related structural societal circumstances; (iv) rape culture and slut-shaming are prevalent in online forums.
Going through the comments on several articles about Grace’s story, it occurred to me that the fact that the average guy – that nice middle-class friend that you have coffee with every other week and talk about social issues, work and family – can commit sexual assault/violence/misconduct was perceived to be scarier than imagining a rich old white man in Hollywood luring women into his hotel room. It is unfortunate that all these incidents happen. The scariness of the images of these average men being in one way or the other complicit in, or perpetuating what is called ‘the rape culture’ is exactly why stories of gray areas of consent tell more about our social system within the #metoo campaign than the stories where boundaries of victim-perpetrator are clear to all. Because as long as we do not have the conversation about what ‘sexually harassed or assaulted’ in contemporary contexts means, then the solidarity aspect of the campaign is not so meaningful.
Statements of celebrities who used their channels and platforms to dismiss Grace’s story are in a way, hijacking the #metoo campaign. Because we do not know how many of the women who posted #metoo had similar stories like Grace. We do not know how many of them posted #metoo only because of having stories like Grace’s. I don’t think women who took part in the campaign or are inspired by it have ever had, or because of the scale of the campaign, could ever have had an extensive conversation about what counts as sexual assault or misconduct. So, how can anyone define sexual harassment or assault, and dismiss others claims?
I wonder how many of the women who had experiences like Grace’s will speak out after her experience, and how many feel othered. I am worried that without all these stories, we will not have a good understanding of all varieties of perceptions of consent and sexual misconduct.
The individualistic approach to these experiences dominated most of the discussions I came across online. The constant atomizing of the experience of sexual assault without recognizing that it is a broad cultural and structural matter was prevalent. It is one thing to tell women to be careful and to leave or avoid circumstances that they perceive as potentially risky, and it is another thing to define their experience for them after they had an experience that they felt was assault. It is not possible to ask the individual to take responsibility for something that is so deeply rooted in the socio-cultural system.
There were however comments by people who argued that Ansari’s skin-color had something to do with the allegations. They did look at this experience within the broader political discourses and orientalist ideas about non-white men. They used Ansari’s experience as an example of the orientalist approach that targets visibly non-white men as ‘sexually’ threatening to white women. Whether Grace is a white woman or not, and whether Ansari did something morally wrong or not, such views lack an intersectional approach to the resources of cultural power. A celebrity rich man, an artist-comedian with a great number of fans is hardly only a brown man. While this does not in any way categorize him as a potential perpetrator, it does dismiss the singling out of ‘brownness’ as the reason for his victimhood.
Do gray areas exist? We might have very specific definitions of things, but our perceptions of morally sanctioned sexual behavior are not similar to one another. Most of us live in patriarchal societies and have difficulty recognizing where the power that comes with specific statuses affects [even] our [own] behavior in [our] personal relationships. We often see this when people – sometimes nice people who we like and respect otherwise – truly believe they are not sexist, racist, or homophobe while they act in sexist, racist, and homophobic ways. There are subtleties and complexities to moral stances that make it impossible for us to judge our own behavior, let alone those of others’. In theory, we can be very specific about what counts as sexual assault. But in reality, some of us acknowledge our own experiences of being victims/perpetrators of assault only after we learn that other people with similar experiences do.
I agree with Margaret Atwood’s recent article where she explained that ‘guilty because accused’ is not a good approach (and that it is not more feminist than its counterparts). A single-story cannot ‘prove’ somebody’s guilt (a single story is never a complete story, as we learn from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). While the #metoo and other social movements and activism by political and social groups such as feminists show that the legal system is broken, patriarchal, and ineffective in many contexts, the idea of ‘a due process’ must be respected. Atwood warns us about the dangers of bypassing that process:
The Internet offers a great possibility for everyone who has access to it (surprise! roughly half of the world population) to express their opinions on anything and everything. It allows a variety of good and bad things to happen, from solidarity practices like #metoo to internet trolling (and a lot more!). We all know that this is not going to change any time soon. But we might be able to extract a potential out of all these diverse voices, and create something good. Like Andrea Peto explained in her lecture ‘Right-wing and anti-gender movements in Europe: How gender became a pop-science’, name-calling – calling people racist, violent and sexist – is not going to be enough, or even effective in fighting such attitudes. Our anger can be mobilized for creating social initiatives that are based on a better understanding of how these attitudes [unfortunately] exist and persist in the first place. Let’s do that!
Published by Ladan Rahbari
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