Lessons from the viral shaming of Aziz Ansari

In the wake of #MeToo, there is a correction of power in process — and it’s taking place online. On Sunday,

34-year-old comedian Aziz Ansari was accused by a Brooklyn-based female photographer of sexual assault, which is alleged to have taken place during a date in September, when she was 22. She spoke to Babe, an online magazine aimed at women in their early twenties, telling a reporter about her meet-cute with Ansari at an Emmy after-party.

The site has called her “Grace”, and by her account, she pursued Ansari on the evening and they ultimately arranged a date. But the date itself soured: Grace says that after dinner he rushed her back to his apartment and she “remembers feeling uncomfortable at how quickly things escalated”. There was a hurried sequence of sexual acts; over the evening she says she used “verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was”. She ultimately left, crying in a cab and texting friends to tell them about “the worst experience with a man I’ve ever had”.

The next day she contacted Ansari to tell him she felt he had violated her. He responded: “Clearly, I misread things in the moment and I’m truly sorry.” He has since issued a statement saying that he believed the encounter to be consensual.

The story enters a growing canon of similar tales. But the tale has proved divisive — while there’s been plenty of backlash against the comedian, others believe its publication was ill-judged, saying the story has blown up a bad date and labelled it sexual assault. An Atlantic article headlined “The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari”, in which the writer confesses she’s baffled by the accusations, has gone viral.

In the loud back-and-forth between the two camps, there are lessons about the post-#MeToo world order.

Young women are in the driving seat

The internet is a potent weapon and young women are digital natives. Babe has more than a million followers on Facebook — as soon as Grace’s tale broke the online army mobilised, impassioned in its support for her. This meant that by Monday morning a story that had been shared on a website with an audience of three million women in their early twenties, mostly in the UK and US, was on the homepages of global news sites.

There is a new form of justice online

Public exposure is the new and expedient form of justice for this generation. In the showdown between he-said, she-said, guilt is determined by whose camp can shout the loudest. While this may be a useful way to redress the historic imbalance between men and women, it also denies nuance to situations which are by definition nuanced.

It’s a generational thing

The Ansari story has resonated with young women. They agree that Aziz’s behaviour constitutes assault. But older people do not. In her viral Atlantic piece, and responding to the straight-to-oral-sex sequence of events, writer Caitlin Flanagan, who is in her fifties, quips, “here the older reader’s eyes widen, because this was hardly the first move in the ‘one-night stands’ of yesteryear”. She doesn’t recognise the context.

More seriously, she observes that, “what Grace and the writer who told her story created was 3,000 words of revenge porn”.

Hypocrisy will not be tolerated

Grace says she felt impelled to talk to Babe after Ansari won a Golden Globe last week for Master of None, a TV show he co-created, in which he sends up the codes of modern dating. He has written a best-selling book on the same theme, Modern Love. Last week, when he accepted his Golden Globe, he was wearing a Time’s Up pin, indicating his support for Hollywood’s anti-sexual-harassment movement. In other words he was an ally.

Grace admired his work: while it was undeniably the sexual encounter that left her reeling, buried in that narrative is also her disappointment. “This was not what I expected,” she told Babe. “I was not expecting a bad night at all, much less a violating night and a painful one”. She texted a friend on the way home from Ansari’s house: “I hate men.”

Explanations are over

Ansari’s statement pledges his commitment to the “movement that is happening in our culture”. But the fallout means that there is nothing he can say to redeem himself. We have entered into a new age of silence.