THE NEW REVENGE PORN
I just heard about Aziz Ansari. I worry you won't read the victim's words and just assume this case to be like most of the others. It is not. Here we have consensual sex recorded in text and made public as a novel, pseudo-journalistic version of revenge porn. I encourage you to read it and think critically about the case, her account, the writer's involvement, and the effects of all this.
Reading it I hope you'll sense that this is actually far worse than mere old-school revenge porn. Notice how, in this case, instead of a single person acting badly, posting something they have no business posting, we now have individuals with a team of accomplices (writers and editors, roommates and friends) labouring for a week or more at the manufacture and publication of this thing. And then they didn't merely publish it but pushing it out far and wide on social media for maximum impact. I hope you'll consider that, while we have federal laws to protect against and provide recourse for things like revenge porn, as a form of violence tantamount to cyber-bullying that can land a person in jail, there is no such protection in this case or others like it. Now also notice that there's no human on Earth who couldn't be attacked in just such a way; you, for example.
I hope you'll also appreciate how the victim and author note, only upon reflection, that she issued “clear non-verbal cues” that she was unhappy. She does so all while admitting ,several times, how none of her non-verbal communication appeared to transmit never mind be appropriately translated on the other end. Then please acknowledge how both victim and reporter curiously ignore all of the very explicit verbal and non-verbal consent that continued throughout. Note how, by the victim's own accounting, Ansari obeyed her words all along. Then notice that they still report all of this while also sharing Ansari's various and continual private and public assertions that there were no such non-verbal cues and that if there were any they were so subtle as to be non-existent. The whole thing is an amazing piece of work.
After reading it I hope you're also left wondering if at dinner instead of white wine the victim had been offered red, her preference, or if they'd watched Black Mirror or Ozark instead of Seinfeld, which she tells us she'd never seen before, any of the above would have come out. For why else were such details included in a serious account of sexual assault? Is it all there to highlight further evidence of the victim's sociopathic inability to ask for what she wants or refuse what she doesn't, and her clear expectation that for her own ease and pleasure others should have the capacity to read minds?
As Margaret Atwood wrote of other cases, what we have here are witch trials but without the trials. In this case Ansari is duly convicted, sans trial, and not by a jury of his peers but by random strangers (who were not there and many of whom have not even read the piece) and in the court of Twitter. And all of this not so much for any real crime but largely for his inability to read minds, for enjoying sex, and, apparently, for having a penis.
Most troublingly, is there any doubt that the real victim is neither Ansari nor his date but instead Feminism? If in the long run this case doesn't do real work undermining the labours of a whole generation of activists it will surely be a miracle. Nothing of this sort ever ushers in a better world and, worse, tends toward pushing us all backward. If the argument for this stuff, this pseudo-journalistic revenge porn (or what I'm now calling “cyberstoning”), is that our justice system is broken and that women aren't taken seriously, can't get a fair trial, and aren't treated equally I would argue that this is not the remedy you seek. I mean, if you see nothing wrong with this then you can't make a coherent argument against revenge porn. (Though I encourage you to try.) I would suggest that, there can be little doubt, however our justice system is repaired among the fixes that come you will find trials, the presumption of innocence, and evidence – not their total absence (and certainly not analog or digital stonings.) As Atwood said “I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote.” And I would summarize all this with "women's rights are human rights."
