On Monday, Mathilde Krim died. She was a biologist who spoke five languages; who contributed, in her 20s and 30s, to more than a dozen papers on cancer and virology; ran the interferon lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering; served on a team that developed a method for determining sex in utero; smuggled guns to opponents of British rule in Palestine; threw John F. Kennedy’s 45th-birthday party at her East Side townhouse; married twice, had a daughter and later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her historic work in AIDS research and advocacy. At the news of her death, the internet paid relatively little attention.

Instead, by the next morning, the leading conversation among women whose voices are prominent on social media revolved around the story of a young photographer who had a demoralizing sexual encounter with Aziz Ansari, after going out for lobster rolls with him a few months ago. The woman, who used the alias “Grace,” recalled the events of the evening, which began with drinks at Mr. Ansari’s downtown apartment and ended with recycled jokes and Uber and sorrow, to a writer for an online publication, Babe. We are meant to infer that the comedian’s self-regarding erotic misbehavior began the moment he gave his guest a glass of white wine when she wanted red — there’s no place for speculating that maybe he just ran out of Syrah.

Grace came to view what happened as assault, even if the facts she presents do not warrant the charge. Mr. Ansari, as he put it in a statement, believed that he had been given every indication that what had transpired between them was consensual. He continued, he said, to support the essential movement toward sexual equilibrium that was upending the old order, and the world appeared willing to let him do it — few people seeming to demand that his distasteful persistence leave him expelled from public life.