Young journalists in ThePrint newsroom discuss the controversial Aziz Ansari incident after an anonymous woman wrote about the actor allegedly sexually assaulting her.
Nandita Singh: Soon after Aziz Ansari won a Golden Globe, an anonymous woman came out with an account of how a date with him turned into the worst night of her life. Was the incident non-consensual sex or just a bad date? We’ll take answers to this question in ThePrint newsroom.
Nishtha Jaiswal: I think what was wrong with his behaviour was that because he is a celebrity, he should have known that he was in that power dynamic and that he was in a position to influence her decisions, or be more persuasive than any other person.
Chahat Rana: His celebrity status seems like a classic case of sexual entitlement anyway. According to the account in Babe, it seemed like he was really insistent. She told him quite a few times, she gave verbal cues. She said that she wasn’t comfortable with this.
Vandana Menon: In his text response, he also said he misread what was happening. I think that’s the problem because if he is saying that he is misreading something, it means she is giving him certain cues to respond to in the first place.
Deeksha Bhardwaj: It’s internalised misogyny right, it’s about how men don’t factor in how women respond to what they’re doing. Consent culture is not about saying no, it’s about saying yes, whether it’s verbal, non-verbal, whether it’s communicated through body language. This is just male sexual entitlement that considers women as property that they can claim.
Nikhil Rampal: I think there is a clear distinction between a ‘no’ and a ‘yes’. If you feel like you’re not comfortable, then just say it, either it’s a yes or a no, there is no in-between. I think that she could have pushed him away. I mean Meghan Trainor made a song about it right, if you remember, she sung ‘No’ and that actually meant the same thing we are talking about today. She could’ve absolutely said no, or a clear yes.
Deeksha Bhardwaj: Except it’s not always about a binary, right? Sexual choices aren’t made in a vacuum. You have to factor in that he is a popular celebrity. He also has, maybe not direct influence over her career, but he does have influence over her.
Nikhil Rampal: Even if he had an influence over her, she has the right to say something. The point is that, why was it happening repeatedly?
Deeksha Bhardwaj: She did verbally and non-verbally show him.
Abhishek Krishnan: Along the same lines, this is not to condone what Aziz Ansari did. I personally think it was non-consensual, but there are certain things that someone can do that are within the realm of possibilities. I think that Uber should have been booked at least half an hour, or an hour earlier. Once they started kissing, she felt uncomfortable; the verbal cues should have come in immediately. Of course there were a bunch of non-verbal cues that came in, but an emphatic ‘no’ would have really helped.
Sanya Dhingra: Do you realise that there is a chance that when the person who is violating you is not the quintessential rapist you have grown up to visualise as the rapist? Not the man out there, not the man on the road, this is someone who she has seen talk about rape and consent. When you’re in that kind of position, it takes time for you to process that, ‘Okay, this man can also do this to me’. This is not the quintessential rapist I have grown up to think is a rapist, so it takes time. You need validation, which is why she speaks to different friends of hers. She needs validation at that point, “Am I playing the victim or is this actually happening to me?”
Vandana Menon: That’s an issue as well, because a lot of the times when someone is well-mannered, when someone buys you dinner, when someone dresses well or treats you nicely, I’m sure a part of her felt that she owed him something in response. There’s a systemic problem you have to address there.
Sanya Dhingra: It’s so much easier to call out rape when it’s violent, graphic and it’s sort of those things. It’s way harder to call this out, which is why people don’t call out marital rape. You’re dependent on your husband, you’re emotionally attached to your husband, so why do you not call it out, why don’t you call out your husband as a rapist?
Talha Ashraf: To answer that ‘yes’ or ‘no’ dichotomy, I personally feel when an act is being performed, a victim, is in a trance mode, where you’re still understanding what’s happening. Mostly what happens is that it takes time to understand, to grasp what’s happening, and then when you react, it’s unfortunately too late. So, I think to just say that a girl should have said no if she didn’t want an encounter is, I think—
Deeksha Bhardwaj: Asking for an emphatic ‘no’ is also essentially claiming that I have a right to your body, I have a right to have sex with you, and you have to say no. You have to say no to it, it’s not about how you want to have sex.
Abhishek Krishnan: If you read the article carefully, she also talks about how she chose her dress very carefully. This was an elaborate plan, it was a pre-planned date that she thought, and both of them consensually knew would end in Aziz Ansari’s house.
Deeksha Bhardwaj: That’s presumptuous right. You are being presumptuous when you say that this is going to end in his house. What happens in his house is a decision that has to be made in the house.
Nandita Singh: I think the only vocabulary we have right now is to talk about such sexual encounters with assault, especially in the climate that’s been given. Was it problematic? Yes, I agree. I agree that sex itself is inherently misogynistic. We are not talking about why do women have bad sex so frequently. Why are male climaxes preferred? Why is that the end of a sexual encounter? I am not saying everyone does that.
Nikhil Rampal: I think when he was trying to get his hand on her private parts, she actually was successful in moving it away and stopping him from doing that. So why couldn’t she stop him from doing it further? That why I am telling you, I mean, either it’s a yes or no. Blurred lines should remain inside the—
Deeksha Bhardwaj: She clearly said no. If she clearly pushes him off, then why does he come back? Isn’t that the important question to ask?
Kaveesha Kohli: I feel often as women we are made to please men. So, in a situation like that, you might think it’s awkward or that you might offend the other person by just saying no. So then you rely on non-verbal cues, which is exactly what she did. She couldn’t have said no, because there are so many factors that go into being able to say no.
Nandita Singh: Plus, I think consent is being viewed in super black and white terms. Either it is a strong yes or a no, but I have personally been in experiences where I am seemingly going along with things that I am not enjoying, and I ask myself ‘Why am I doing this’? But he seems to be liking it. Is now the time to stop? What we are not, I think, talking about or questioning is that sometimes it dehumanises the body even for the woman, for herself. And I think Aziz Ansari is an interesting segue into a larger conversation about the power dynamics inherent in sex. I wouldn’t call it assault because I wouldn’t blame the guy here. I would question the dynamic we exist within and why couldn’t I speak up?
Vandana Menon: But that’s not what happened. He insisted and persisted and that happens in a lot of encounters like this.
Divya Narayanan: It’s always on the woman. If you don’t want sex you have to say it, if you want sex you have to say it. But there is no emphasis on a man being sensitive enough to know what a woman wants. There is no conversation about “Hey, why don’t you stop for a second and ask the woman-are you comfortable in going ahead with this or not?”
Sanya Dhingra: The use of the word ‘revenge’, leave porn aside, is so loaded. If a woman speaks up, it’s just what you do, you demonise, and you say she has an ulterior motive. She must have done this to get back at him for something. This is something that we see across the board.
Vandana Menon: What she is actually trying to do is throw light in these grey areas of consent, or what that article was trying to instigate was just a conversation about this.
Sanya Dhingra: And what we are trying to say is: if a woman is facing a conflict in her head, what is consensual and what is not? Should she not speak up? Is social media, is society going to attack her the moment she admits that I faced some amount of conflict, I didn’t know if it was this or that. Are we going to penalise women for having some degree of conflict?
Nandita Singh: I agree to speaking out, but in that article, the way it was written, I stand by her, I am not questioning that, but I think it was predisposed, it was biased for you to assume that the question was answered, and that it was non-consensual sex. Whether or not getting into the nuance of what power differentials played out, even before yes or no was said, it didn’t explore that. It’s not on the woman to start writing an article with that in mind, that I am going to start a conversation about this, it’s only telling her story. But whoever told her story, I think could have done a better job, I think.
Abhishek Krishnan: I am just addressing the point you raised about how there is a clear distinction of class, I don’t particularly think it’s that because people like Harvey Weinstein and a bunch of people have been called out.
Deeksha Bhardwaj: Yeah, but how many women did it take?
Abhishek Krishnan: It’s not about duration. I am not talking about when it was called out. I am just talking about when it was called out, it was called rape, and when Harvey Weinstein and the likes were called out it was called rape.
Sanya Dhingra: Just imagine if there was a Harvey Weinstein; if there was one woman accusing Harvey Weinstein, then would the conversation have been the same? It took those many women to call him out.
Nandita Singh: This is an incident that is grey for a lot of people and rape is a loaded word. So the way that you talk about itself is ambiguous because people are ambiguous, whether or not this constitutes assault or not. So the minute you start using Aziz Ansari’s name with rape, I feel like you are forming certain dispositions in your mind and I do think that it’s a very important conversation that has been struck. Obviously, I wish it didn’t happen, but I want people to focus on this conversation but I do understand in this particular circumstance, why rape is not the right word.
Vandana Menon: I feel like this situation illustrates why this system that we live in is so problematic, and how there can be so many grey spaces.
Nikhil Rampal: I think we are using a very harsh term-‘rape’ for this phenomenon because, by definition, we can say that if one party did not give consent, then we can acknowledge the fact that it was rape but the point is when the content is actually blurry, would it be right here to say that it was a rape or not? The second thing I want to add is about the #MeToo campaign. Men, unfortunately, have been growing up the way they are. Let’s look at the other side. If a guy says no to a woman who is trying to seduce him, the kind of gossip which goes through in a chat is that this guy could not do something to me, even after my efforts, that may take a turn in which it is said that he might be gay. He wasn’t attracted to you because he will assume that all men just want to have sex.
Sanya Dhingra: It’s problematic to think that every man wants, that all men are sexual beings and that is all they want. It is problematic to think so, but the argument that you were making is the same as what if a Dalit sort of kills a Brahmin, will that Brahmin enjoy that kind of institutional backing that a Dalit would and that totally kind of discounts the historical—
Nikhil Rampal: The way the society perceives a man’s power and its dynamics—
Deeksha Bhardwaj: Male rapes are not reported often because we have a hyper-masculine culture…for which a man to pop out and say that I got raped is undermining all authority.
Sanya Dhingra: It has also been linked to the patriarchy.
Sabah Azaad: Even when you say it’s not rape, rape is also very much about power and you did acknowledge that this was something that has a huge power differential, so whether or not you are comfortable or not with calling it rape—this is something that there was a gross violation of a huge power differential. I wanted to quote a study called “Sex, Power and the Systems that Enable Men Like Harvey Weinstein”. It says that powerful men overestimate the sexual interest of others and erroneously believe that the people around them are more attracted to them than is actually the case. This is the same thing, this is the sort of culture that enabled Harvey Weinstein.