[DanaC]

I want to be clear: I do not believe that either of these encounters qualifies as sexual assault, nor do I think that the men involved were being intentionally thoughtless or harmful. But in both of these cases, I ended the night feeling gross and a bit violated. I wondered why I had let these men into my private space or entered theirs. I wondered why I hadn’t articulated my boundaries more clearly. I wondered why so little care or attention had been paid to my verbal and nonverbal cues of discomfort and disinterest. I wondered whether or not these men were rehashing these concerns, too.

I thought about the two encounters again when I read a 22-year-old photographer’s account of her date and subsequent sexual encounter with actor and comedian Aziz Ansari. The photographer, referred to only as “Grace,” described a night in which Ansari ― a famous man who makes woke TV and who wrote a whole book on modern dating ― repeatedly escalated a sexual situation, allegedly barreling past Grace’s verbal and nonverbal cues that signaled she felt uncomfortable. At one point she describes telling him, “I don’t want to feel forced [to have a sexual encounter with you] because then I’ll hate you, and I’d rather not hate you.” A few minutes later, she says he instructed her to turn around and go down on him. And she did.(Ansari has called the encounter “by all indications completely consensual.”)

It would be easy to look at the Aziz Ansari story and dismiss it as the #MeToo movement run amok. (Author Caitlin Flanagan has already written Grace’s feelings of violation off as mere “regret,” and described the published account of her experience as “3,000 words of revenge porn.”) The story is messier than most that we’ve heard since The Reckoning began in October. Ansari’s alleged misconduct is not the same as Harvey Weinstein’s ― or Matt Lauer’s or Charlie Rose’s or Kevin Spacey’s or Roy Moore’s or Louis C.K.’s. But ifthe #MeToo movement is going to amount to sustained culture change ― rather than simply a weeding out of the worst actors in a broken system ― we need to renegotiate the sexual narratives we’ve long accepted. And that involves having complicated conversations about sex that is violating but not criminal.

The sexual encounter Grace described falls into what I see as a gray area of violating, noncriminal sex ― the kind of sex that Rebecca Traister described in 2015 as “bad in ways that are worth talking about”; what Jessica Valenti described on Twitter as an interaction that the “culture considers ‘normal,’” but is “oftentimes harmful.”

This is a kind of sex that is not only worth talking about, but necessary to talk about. Behavior need not fall under the legal definition of sexual assault or rape to be wrong or violating or upsetting. And when nearly every woman I’ve spoken to about the Aziz Ansari story follows up our conversation with a similar story of her own, it’s worth thinking about why that is.

I believe that Ansari didn’t realize in the moment that he was ignoring Grace’s cues, nonverbal or otherwise. And that’s part of the problem. “When you have a sexually harmful behavior, we have the assumption that people view these behaviors in the same way,” Maia Christopher, executive director of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told HuffPost last year. But, oftentimes, we don’t. We step into interactions, sexual or otherwise, with different ideas of what constitutes a violation.

As our culture shifts to acknowledge the kinds of violations women have been too scared or discouraged to report, we need to not only make space for more discussion, but update our shared sexual scripts, as well. We need to introduce new language and ways of talking about gray areas that help us to make public the awkward and messy conversations we’ve been forced to have in private.

The language we currently use to talk about consent is, admittedly, complex.Research has shown that in their daily lives, both men and womenemploy verbal cues to indicate “no” that don’t explicitly contain the word “no.” For example, if someone extends a social invitation that you don’t want to accept, instead of saying “No, I don’t want to do that,” you might say, “That sounds great, but I think I made plans with a friend,” or “Not sure I’ll make it.” These same kind of communication tactics come up in sexual situations. Language like, “It’s getting late,” or “maybe later,” or “next time,” often serves as a stand-in for a hard “no.”

However, in a 1999 paper by Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith, the authors conclude that that “both men and women have a sophisticated ability to convey and to comprehend refusals, including refusals which do not include the word ‘no’,” positing that when men claim to not understand these types of refusals, they may actually be employing “self-interested justifications for coercive behavior.” A 2008 analysis reached a similar conclusion ― that “young men share the understanding that explicit verbal refusals of sex per se are unnecessary to effectively communicate the withholding of consent to sex.”

So, what’s going on here?

Women are socialized from a young age to cater to the comfort of those around them ― especially if those around them are men. As Christopher said, girls are simply “taught from a younger age to be more concerned about their environments, about potential threats.”Conversely, many men are taught that they are entitled to women’s time, attention and physical affection ― and that if those things are not readily offered to them, they should be aggressive and take it. This creates a dynamic where women often defer to men’s needs in an effort to avoid embarrassment, verbal conflict or physical violence, and where it may not even occur to men to check in with women’s needs.

Acknowledging this dynamic doesn’trequire us to label all men monsters or all women “helpless” weaklings in need of a fainting couch. It means that we’ve all grown up with a fucked-up sexual script ― governed by questions like “Did he/she/they say yes?”― that ultimately works for no one.

The article has a lot more to say and it's well worth a read