An anonymous expose on the site Babe.net against Netflix star Aziz Ansari for a night of creepy first-date sex brought a lot of leftists out in Ansari’s defense. This was not a sexual assault like the accusations against Harvey Weinstein.
The highest-profile attack on Ansari’s accuser came from HLN host Ashleigh Banfield, who lamented this woman seeking a “public conviction” with a “career-ending sentence.” That’s overwrought, since no one in the last few news cycles has noticed Netflix saying a word about canceling Ansari’s show Master of None.
The highest-profile rebuttal came Wednesday night from TBS comedian Samantha Bee, who played a clip of Banfield and shot back: “A lot of people are worried about Aziz’s career, which no one is trying to end, because again, we know the difference between a rapist, a workplace harasser, and an Aziz Ansari. That doesn’t mean we have to be happy about any of them!”
Bee crudely suggested that if men couldn't take women's feelings into consideration during sex, they should skip sex with other people and try a coin purse or a sandwich bag filled with grape jelly. Referring to the “Time’s Up” pin that many men, including Ansari, wore to the Golden Globes, Bee closed with, “Men, if you say you’re a feminist, then f— like a feminist. And if you don’t want to do that, take off your f—ing pin because we are not your accessories.”
Ashleigh Banfield wasn’t quite as dramatic in Ansari’s defense as Caitlin Flanagan at The Atlantic, who claimed Ansari was professionally “assassinated” by a “hit squad of privileged white women” opening fire on the brown-skinned Muslim:
Twenty-four hours ago—this is the speed at which we are now operating—Aziz Ansari was a man whom many people admired and whose work, although very well paid, also performed a social good. He was the first exposure many young Americans had to a Muslim man who was aspirational, funny, immersed in the same culture that they are. Now he has been—in a professional sense—assassinated, on the basis of one woman’s anonymous account. Many of the college-educated white women who so vocally support this movement are entirely on her side. The feminist writer and speaker Jessica Valenti tweeted, “A lot of men will read that post about Aziz Ansari and see an everyday, reasonable sexual interaction. But part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture considers ‘normal’ sexual encounters are not working for us, and oftentimes harmful.”
I thought it would take a little longer for the hit squad of privileged young white women to open fire on brown-skinned men. I had assumed that on the basis of intersectionality and all that, they’d stay laser focused on college-educated white men for another few months. But we’re at warp speed now, and the revolution—in many ways so good and so important—is starting to sweep up all sorts of people into its conflagration: the monstrous, the cruel, and the simply unlucky. Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab, and who have spent a lot of time picking out pretty outfits for dates they hoped would be nights to remember. They’re angry and temporarily powerful, and last night they destroyed a man who didn’t deserve it.
