Aziz, We Tried to Warn You
In 1975, 42 years before the comedian Aziz Ansari reportedly brought a date home to his apartment
and repeatedly tried to initiate sex with her after she told him “next time” and “I don’t want to feel forced,” Susan Brownmiller published “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.”
“All rape is an exercise in power,” Brownmiller wrote in 1975, “but some rapists have an edge
that is more than physical.” Sometimes, the 1975 text suggests, rapists “operate within an emotional setting or within a dependent relationship that provides a hierarchical, authoritarian structure of its own that weakens a victim’s resistance, distorts her perspective and confounds her will.” “Against Our Will” has been available in American libraries since its publication, which was in 1975.
Ansari would have been 7 or 8 years old in 1991 when a feminist group at Antioch College fought to establish the school’s Sexual Offense Prevention Policy (informally the “Antioch rules” or, more commonly, the “infamous Antioch rules”) requiring affirmative and sustained consent throughout all sexual encounters, and he was 10 when “Saturday Night Live” mocked the Antioch rules in a sketch
that cast Shannen Doherty as a “Victimization Studies” major.
Like Ansari, I, too, was 8 in 1991, and I vividly recall my mother explaining sexual harassment to me in the living room of my childhood home: “For example, a man might say, ‘I have a big penis,
and I bet you’d like me to —’ well, you know.” She cut off, disgusted.
In the summer of 2014 (perhaps as Ansari was writing his own book), the California Legislature passed a bill requiring “affirmative, conscious,
and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity,” unleashing a debate on the efficacy of “yes means yes” that consumed the blogosphere for months.
: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape,” seven years before Ansari released his own
book, “Modern Romance: An Investigation,” in which he explores dating and sex in the digital age.
