On Aziz Ansari (Y'all Were Dying to know My Take, Right?)

This is going to be a super quick one because it is 9:00 pm which is bourbon and The Crown time. But I find the various hot takes about Aziz Ansari are spinning around through my brain and I feel compelled to add my two cents (because that's just what this debate is missing: another middle-aged white lady's opinion!).

When I first read the Babe article, my first inclination was to go "oh, come on! We've all been there, honey." And that's how rape culture works - we're all bred in an environment where male desire is coddled and privileged while female comfort is left standing outside the window, in the snow, tentatively waving like "can I come in for a second? Or is that too much of a bother? I'll just stand here a while longer." We're all steeped in "oh, he just did what men do" and "she needs to learn to manage the situation and her reaction to it."

That's not right. Right?

And then later I read another hot take all about how we're RUINING AZIZ ANSARI'S CAREER! And I was, "um, it's been two days. Are we really sure we're ready to bury Aziz Ansari's career? After two days?"

I read a tweet today by a twitterer called Wikipedia Brown (come on! is that the best twitter handle ever, or what?) in which she used the word "unlearning." We all have a lot to unlearn about the way sex and sexual politics and gender relations go.

I'll start: there are degrees of #MeToo. There's rape, there's gross abuse of power, there's groping and masturbating at, there's unsolicited dick pics, and, yeah, there's privileging your own orgasm over her comfort. Men have to unlearn their right to behave this way and women have to unlearn their inclination to accept it. I'm pretty proud of Grace for telling him the next day how he made her feel. When I was 22, I'd just have been ashamed of myself for going to his apartment without the expectation of having sex in exactly the way he wanted to.

I have a lot to unlearn.

Next: I'm not gonna avoid season three of Master of None. I looooooove Master of None. I think Aziz Ansari is brilliant and hilarious and thoughtful and, basically, a decent person who needs to unlearn some shit. In other words, I'm not studying on exiling Aziz Ansari off to the island of misfit men.

But I'm also not mad at the idea that he's going to have to spend an uncomfortable few days thinking about his sexual expectation and his behavior. My fondest hope from #MeToo, is, well, that there will be a lot less rape. That's really number one on the list. But right up there too, I hope that the men of the world (many of whom, I'm sure, are guilty of exactly Ansari's behavior) will spend some time thinking about the times they may have made a woman feel unsafe and violated and learn to start doing what women do all the fucking time: pay attention to how the person they're with is reacting and feeling.

It's not that hard. Women really do it all the time.

Quick Lil Bloggity

I'm doing a little work as I watch the Letterman Obama interview on Netflix. Sigh.

I liked President Barack Obama. This is no hagiography; dude made big mistakes. But at the very least, you got the feeling that he cared. That he set his rather substantial intellect to every task and gave a shit about the effects of the decisions he made.

It's tragic to have gone from someone so clearly thoughtful as president to someone so clearly thoughtless; to have gone from someone with clear moral compass, to someone clearly amoral; to have gone from someone brilliant to someone so fucking stupid.

But an even more baseline tragedy of having gone from Obama to Trump is the vision. Obama's vision of American exceptionalism hews equally pragmatic and optimistic. The promise of America, in Obama's worldview, is to continually strive to be more perfect. Not perfect (because that's impossible) but more perfect. Obama thinks we as a nation can keep getting better.

And the way that happens is by opening America up to the people who've been historically excluded from it - people of color, LGBTQA people, disabled people, women, etc.

So we bounced from a leader with a worldview of pragmatic optimism, who believed in the generosity and expansiveness of American culture to a leader who recklessly longs for the day when he and people just exactly like him were the only people America was for.

But, you know what? Fuck that. Fuck Donald Trump and his ugly racist, misogynist worldview. In a word:

First things first, we're all gonna get on the phone on Monday and call our MoC and tell them DREAMers get to stay. If you're lucky enough to be repped by a Dem, tell them "no continuing budget resolution without protection for DREAMers." If you're repped by a Republican tell them that if the government shuts down because they couldn't come to an agreement on keeping the DREAMers here, you'll hold them responsible and not the dems.

Why? Because those 800,000 Americans make America better.

Next things next, we're gonna do everything we can to rid Congress of the blight of Republicanism. That is no longer a functioning party. They are all of them, every single one, enabling the Racist-in-Chief and his doddery, reckless path to recreate an America that was terrible for the majority of people who lived in it.

Every last one of us is gonna walk out of the voting booth in November just like this: