The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Maybe as an Old Chick I Don’t Get it’

Posted on | January 18, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Maybe as an Old Chick I Don’t Get it’

 

You’ve probably heard about the Aziz Ansari “scandal,” in which a 22-year-old photographer (“Grace”) had a bad date with the 36-year-old TV star. Darleen Click’s take on the story is excellent:

It’s a cringe-worthy endeavor to read, not just because Grace keeps remembering her interior dialogue of feeling uncomfortable accompanied with little girl astonishment that Ansari wasn’t a mindreader, but that she never takes any responsibility for her own part in active participation in sending signals that are easily interpreted as coyness, not reticence. She receives and gives oral sex. Indeed, after she told him she didn’t want intercourse that night, she remained naked and even consented to give him another round of oral sex.
Maybe as an old chick I don’t get it, but wandering around a guy’s apartment in the nude and giving him head when he asks usually is an indication I’m consenting to sexual behavior.
Now, I get that Ansari, if I’m to accept at face value everything Grace says, acted boorishly and too aggressively in trying to get her into bed. However, persistence isn’t assault. Being on the receiving end of wolfish or piggish behavior makes for a bad experience, but an adult chalks it up to a learning experience, not an excuse to engage in public character assassination and virtue-signalling.

“If you don’t want to race, stay off the track.” How hard can it be to understand this game? What did 22-year-old “Grace” expect when Ansari invited her to his TriBeCa apartment? Do we have to draw her a diagram? Does she need a Powerpoint presentation? The object of the game being well-known, the two basic questions are:

  1. Do you want to play at all?
    and
  2. Who do you want to play it with?

When a young woman accepts an invitation to the guy’s apartment, it’s like an audition: He plays his game, she plays her game and, if both players enjoy the game, there will be a future rematch. The story told by Grace is a classic of the emerging #MeToo “I’m-a-traumatized-victim” genre, although lacking the kinky LGBTQ thrills of the Melanie Martinez saga or the Eli Erlick story. As heterosexual hookup-gone-wrong tales go, it’s most interesting for its detail of the crudeness of Aziz’s technique. If you expected a 36-year-old millionaire celebrity bachelor to be smooth and tactful — perhaps even romantic — you’re going to be disappointed. As several critics have pointed out, however, “Grace” did a very bad job of communicating her own desires — or, as it were, her lack of desire:

In the Uber home from Ansari’s apartment, Grace texted a friend: “I hate men.” She continued: “I had to say no a lot. He wanted sex. He wanted to get me drunk and then f–k me.”

Male sexual desire is inherently wrong — this is feminism, 2018.

It was wrong for Aziz Ansari to want to have sex with “Grace,” because she is a feminist. She hates men because she hates sex.

Let us stipulate that Ansari’s technique was a huge problem. Darleen Click says he acted “entitled,” but technique is a matter of habit, and we may imagine that the millionaire show-biz celebrity is accustomed to dating women who don’t mind his “cut-to-the-chase” approach. Or maybe he’s used to hiring hookers, and doesn’t know how to deal with a 22-year-old amateur, an NYU student who expects . . . Well, what?

That’s the real mystery here. Did “Grace” think that her date with Ansari was going to be romantic, the beginning of a relationship? Did she therefore expect Ansari to proceed as tentatively as a college boy eager to impress her with his thoughtfulness and sensitivity? There was clearly a mismatch of expectations in this encounter, with Ansari flooring the accelerator, so to speak, going full-speed toward his intended destination from the moment they got back to his apartment after dinner.

Ansari is 36 years old, and he can’t read signals? That’s another baffling aspect of this story, how a grown man who had hitherto enjoyed a reputation as a progressive “woke” guy completely misread his date’s mood. Here’s a suggestion: He should have ended the date after dinner.

“Stick and move” — that’s the smart technique. Instead of moving so fast as to overwhelm her with a sexual blitzkrieg, leave her enough space to choose the next move. So she comes over to your place, you go out to dinner, and as you’re leaving the restaurant, you say something like, “Hey, I’m thinking I should probably just call you a cab.”

This puts the ball in her court, and requires her to respond with an expression of her own interest. It’s analogous to a “fork” in chess. You’re giving her a chance to bail out and, by taking the initiative to do so, you’re signaling that maybe you’re not really that interested.

She faces the dilemma: A guy who, on the one hand, is interested in her, but on the other hand, is willing to walk away — that’s the real power move young bachelors must master. In the age of “affirmative consent,” guys must learn to embrace the power of “no.”

There are 3.5 billion women in the world, and as much as you’d like to close the deal with this one tonight, you could just take a pass, chalk it up to bad luck and try again tomorrow night with some other girl. Or at least that’s message you convey when you offer to end the date early, at which point, it’s her dilemma: Did she fail to make a good impression? Did she say the wrong thing? Are her thighs too fat?

Every girl in the world has insecurities, see? When a guy conveys the message that he’s willing to walk away, she starts hearing that little voice inside her head telling her: “He doesn’t really like you. Nobody really likes you. Nobody’s ever going to like you. It’s the cellulite.”

While I don’t endorse emotional manipulation, an understanding of female psychology helps avoid the kind of disaster Aziz Ansari experienced. And let’s be clear: He is the victim of what has been called “3,000 words of revenge porn” — a bad date turned into a #MeToo story, inflicting permanent damage to his reputation, and giving feminists another excuse to lecture the world about “rape culture.”

 

Yes, the obnoxious Lindy West had to weigh in:

The notion of affirmative consent did not fall from space in October 2017 to confound well-meaning but bumbling men; it was built, loudly and painstakingly and in public, at great personal cost to its proponents, over decades. If you’re fretting about the perceived overreach of #MeToo, maybe start by examining the ways you’ve upheld the stigmatization of feminism. Nuanced conversations about consent and gendered socialization have been happening every single day that Aziz Ansari has spent as a living, sentient human on this earth. The reason they feel foreign to so many men is that so many men never felt like they needed to listen.

She speaks of “the stigmatization of feminism” as if it’s a bad thing, but let’s re-read those text messages “Grace” sent during her Uber ride home:

“I hate men. . . . He wanted sex.”

That’s the bottom line here. No feminist in 2018 approves of men wanting sex. It is wrong for men to want sex, according to feminism.

This is what Darleen Click means when she says “as an old chick I don’t get it.” Back in the day, women knew men wanted sex, but they were cool with it because women wanted sex, too. It may be difficult for young feminists to believe, but there used to be women who actually liked men. In fact, there still are women who like men, but none of those women are invited to write op-eds for the New York Times. In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, feminists have removed the mask of “equality.” Feminism is now an unapologetic anti-male hate movement.

“Men are the enemy. Heterosexual women are collaborators with the enemy. . . .
“We see heterosexuality as an institution of male domination, not a free expression of personal preference.”
— Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, 1981

Back in the day, the lesbian separatism of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists was an extreme fringe, but 21st-century feminism is about mainstreaming this radical anti-male/anti-heterosexual worldview.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

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