Feb 1, 2018
The Ansari Incident and “Cat Person” Just Prove that Dating Is a FUCKING MESS
Saturday Night Live had a hilarious sketch last episode that referred to that Aziz Ansari incident — we all know about Ansari and the Babe story by now, right? In the skit, a mixed gender group is at a dinner party that turns sweaty and awkward when the Ansari incident is brought up. No one is able to completely articulate their opinions, because no matter what they say, they’re stepping onto a minefield, met with interjections from the others hushing them up.
Although many of us may be tongue tied like the characters on SNL, the Ansari date, the #MeToo movement..the seemingly unending parade of celebrity rapists and serial harassers committing sexual assault left and right...is forcing us to have a much-needed and long delayed discussion about male/female power, dating, and sexual dynamics. What the fuck is going on here, you may ask? Personally, I’m wondering if we’re experiencing some sort of “extinction burst” in the jungle that is modern dating at the moment. (Note: an “extinction burst” is an incident where the shit really hits the fan and things get ugly, right before major, positive, changes are made.)
I’m a 50 year old woman. I’m effectively “officially” single, although I’m regularly seeing a much younger man. He wants kids some day, though, so we aren’t really monogamous. I met him on OKCupid over 2 years ago but had been totally off dating websites until just recently. Frankly, I got tired of dealing with so many damaged people (I’ve written about my experiences here on Medium). I’m back online now, but only on Bumble, that site that purports to put the power back in women’s hands. So far it just seems like a Tinder rip-off where the men have to wait for the women to contact them.
Which I GUESS is empowering..but it doesn’t stop men from replying in inappropriate ways. At least on OKCupid, I could block someone right away from the first message if they got creeptastic. Now, sometimes, I have to waste half an hour or more messaging a guy to then find out all he wants are my naked pics.
I’m always complaining that technology has basically RUINED dating. People focus too much on how all these dating sites give us so many more CHOICES. As if that’s such a great thing. Personally, I think it makes us have short attention spans and think the grass is always greener elsewhere. As behavioral scientists have pointed out, too much choice can be a bad thing. The Economist’s article “The Tyranny of Choice” explains this perfectly.
I’ve been divorced since my late 30s. I’ve been in several longterm relationships in the meantime that tended to be dysfunctional unions with people I wasn’t very compatible with — there was the much younger alcoholic-in-denial I was off and on with for 4 years. The verbally abusive sociopathic narcissist I wasted a year on. The pathological liar who couldn’t care less about my needs whatsoever and expected me to be his maid when we lived together..etc.
You know that saying, “once bitten, twice shy”? Well, how do you deal, when the bites approach the double digits?
There’s a New Yorker story that’s gone viral and earned the writer a million-dollar book contract — much of life’s success stories have everything to do with timing, and I think she was lucky enough to write a dating horror story exploring notions of consent that many women can relate to in these #MeToo times, without explicitly making it about rape or assault.
“Cat Person” is a somewhat frightening essay about self-deception and the deflated expectations surrounding modern dating. Margot is a young woman who works at a theater and is asked out on a date by a customer who’s a little older than her. They seem to have an enjoyable date. She gets a bit tipsy and goes back to his place. Once he removes his clothes, she has second thoughts about fucking him but goes through with it anyway.
After this awkward, fumbling copulation, he thinks they are in the beginning of a budding relationship and won’t stop texting her. She basically ghosts him. When she randomly runs into him while out with her new boyfriend, he responds by sending her angry texts and calling her a whore.
When I read this, I cringed. Not because it’s a bad story — it’s very well written. But because I’ve been there. And I’ve heard that from many female friends who read it. #MeToo, “Cat Person”.
Maybe the story makes us so squirmy because so many of us have been socialized to be people pleasers, and, like the protagonist, we have gone along with sex even though we don’t want to, because we feel it’s cold to have “led the guy on” and bail.
I suspect Aziz Ansari’s date, “Grace,” felt the same way.
As a young college student, around the same age as Grace and Margot, I met a cute surfer guy from California. I can’t even remember how we met, but I brought him back to my dorm suite not long afterwards. I don’t remember where my suite mates were, but for some reason, we had the place to ourselves. He would not stop pressuring me for sex. I kept telling him that I was perfectly happy just making out with him on the couch, and that I wanted to get to know him better before we went there.
Before I knew it, he was lifting me up from the couch and carrying me into my bedroom. I remember him putting me down on the bed, then leaning into me, barreling on top of me. Next thing I knew, his hand was up my skirt.
At that point, I felt a little helpless. I think a part of me may have thought, “if I don’t go along with this, he might rape me. He’s already ignored my requests to slow down.” So I let him enter me.
Afterwards, I felt really strange. I knew I hadn’t been raped. After all, I didn’t push him off once he had started to pull my panties down. But I also knew what we did wasn’t 100 percent consensual. That was my first experience with a pattern of male behavior of engaging in pressure that doesn’t QUITE qualify as assault or rape, meant to get a woman to go from “no” to “yes”. Despite that fact that it’s not technically rape, it leaves a woman feeling violated, as “Grace” and I did, nonetheless.
When I made a post about the Ansari story on my Facebook wall a couple of weeks ago, the difference between male and female reactions and feedback to it was telling. Quite a few of my male friends thought that Ansari did not do anything wrong. If that’s not a symptom of exactly why we NEED to be discussing these issues, I don’t know what is.
For more background on one way that males are socialized to exert subtle and not-so-subtle pressure on women for sex, check out The Pop Culture Detectives’ YouTube channel. They do a great job of highlighting sexist, misogynist, and rape culture cheerleading in our movies and television shows. It’s interesting how many of us grew up watching portrayals of “likeable cads” who behaved like Aziz Ansari, in the media, without recognizing how problematic they were.
I’ve watched tons of Harrison Ford movies, for example, and never realized how rapey his characters can be. And I was highly disturbed when Pop Culture Detective pointed out that the carnival scene in “Revenge of the Nerds” — where Lewis “seduces” his rival’s girlfriend while dressed in her boyfriend’s costume, was basically rape. That’s how insidious media messages can be, that the impressionable young girl I was when I first saw this movie could look at that and buy into the filmmaker’s premise that this was “romance.”
My hope is that all this talk will lead to some action. It sure would be great if throughout the dating process, people would actually open up and communicate more about their sexual needs and boundaries. Both sexes could definitely benefit from that, as well as the whole fucked up modern dating process itself.
Copyright 2017 S. Wade
