Anne Perkins: Being young is the time when you should be utopian in your views

Part of me wants to give “Grace” a really good shake. What did she expect, dating Aziz Ansari, a man 10 years older than herself and famous enough to have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, whatever his public reputation as a thoughtful and considerate person fully signed up to #MeToo. The message of his haste to leave the restaurant, the food barely finished, the wine untasted, and race her back to his apartment is so blatant it might have been written up in one of those neon bubbles.

Her failure to tell him where to go once things went pear-shaped when she was there is even more worrying. Sure, she indicated that it was not what she wanted. A genuinely thoughtful man of course would have responded appropriately. He didn’t. She should have left. That is level one in elementary social skills.

But I recognise that by blaming Grace’s response, I am also saying that on one level Ansari’s behaviour is OK. That’s what men do. It’s down to women to handle it. Get used to it.

And the point of telling stories like this is to say to other women, and men, it’s not you, it’s him. To say, check your ideas about consent. Consent is not the absence of rejection. It is not a tense silence. It is not passive. It should not be capable of being misread.

Utopian, perhaps. But what’s the point of being 23 if you don’t refuse to get used to stuff that’s wrong?

• Anne Perkins is a Guardian columnist

Iman Amrani: Bad experiences should not be lumped with serious assaults

There are three main things in my experience that can expose young women to exploitative or uncomfortable situations. First, money. Whether it’s keeping a job or a roof over your head, the need for it can push some women into circumstances that they wouldn’t freely choose. Second, ambition. Drive can lead to women feeling forced to put up with things that they know are unacceptable, in order to achieve a greater objective.

Both of these factors expose women to abuses of power as we have seen in many of the cases of workplace harassment, from Hollywood to Westminster to all the women contributing to the #MeToo movement. It’s this power struggle that adds weight to the stories about hands being placed on women’s knees or unwanted advances, and it’s important this movement continues.

The third trap is the desire to be liked. There is a societal pressure on women to be attractive, friendly, and grateful, felt most acutely in young women. Aziz Ansari’s accuser, “Grace”, and the narrator of Cat Person fall into this one. The latter might be fictional, but both accounts resonated widely with many young women. Both feature women in their early 20s, who found themselves in circumstances they didn’t want, but felt unable to fully vocalise that they had reached their comfort limits.

Part of dating and sex as a young person is finding our boundaries, learning to protect them and develop the confidence to tell people who overstep, in no uncertain terms, where they can go. Not many people are born with this confidence, and it isn’t something you can learn in a two-hour workshop on consent, but through making mistakes. Some of the situations that contribute to our experience may be unpleasant or regretful, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be grouped with assault, harassment or rape.

There has to be room for both men and women to make mistakes, to create a space where real dialogue can happen and where people can learn what is and isn’t OK. Lumping all these grey-area stories in the wider #MeToo debate about rape, assault and the abuse of power only serves to drown out the voices of women whose stories should be focusing on this week, such as Simone Biles, and the countless other women who are bravely speaking out.

• Iman Amrani is a Guardian multimedia journalist

Marie Le Conte: Men can no longer be seen as guided by their sweaty crotches

I had a conversation with an older feminist recently and she asked why women of my generation seem to hate men. We never stop criticising them, find endless examples of objectionable behaviour, and will gleefully turn on any man deemed not good enough by our precious standards.

She wasn’t entirely wrong – our expectations are undeniably higher than they used to be – but my response was that it was, at least from my viewpoint, the exact opposite.

We expect more from men because we want to have more faith in them.

I refuse to see them as foolish animals, clumsy and to be pitied because life isn’t easy when one simply cannot understand the complex and confusing women around them, choosing instead to be guided by their sweaty crotches.

This is why some of the responses to the claims about Aziz Ansari felt puzzling – sure, we could have an argument about why the woman didn’t leave, but why not talk about why he felt the need to keep trying it on?

Here’s why Aziz Ansari’s behaviour matters | Emily Reynolds Read more

Why can so many men feel so comfortable trying to sleep with women who don’t want to sleep with them? Why do so many men think they can plunge their tongue down a woman’s throat before making sure it’s wanted?

Incidents which to some feel too small to be scandalous actually reveal the way men see women, and if they have no trouble crossing women’s boundaries once or twice, where will they stop?

We’ve been raised to see men as the superior intellectual gender, so spare me the idea that they just don’t know what they’re doing.

If women can go through life without lunging at men, groping them, and treating their bodies as property, then surely we can expect men to do the same in return.

• Marie Le Conte is a French freelance journalist living in London

Rachel Shabi: Older women wondering why millennials don’t walk away have forgotten dark times

These stories have forced light into another area where it is sorely lacking: the stark lack of parity over sexual agency, expectation and desire. It’s there in harsh, excruciating detail: the distorting and damaging ways in which heterosexual men and women are socialised about sex.

This isn’t about a generational divide, despite some of the responses to such stories. Doubtless this terrain is thornier for younger women who, on top of the usual biases, are also navigating complications imposed by a certain kind of porn culture, and the image- and confidence-twisting burdens of social media.

But maybe the older women wondering why millennials don’t just walk away from horrible sexual encounters have forgotten the times when they also stayed, rather than dealing with the awkwardness, risk his angry response, or navigating the paralysing weight of confusing expectation. Because women are socialised to be polite and accommodating, and are under constant pressure to be passive pleasers in every way, to the extent that our own desires and ambitions are routinely subjugated.

Such is the pervasive social messaging around gender and sexuality, such are the ever-present biases, that a woman asserting her own will or expressing a preference risks being labelled as unpleasant, unattractive or aggressive – as it is in the boardroom, so it is in the bedroom. And that’s before we even get to the men in the equation, with all their socially conditioned expectations, damaging biases and toxic assumptions.

It’s messy and awkward and all tangled up, but if this #Metoo discussion is bringing us on to the question of what genuine equality in sex and relationships might look like, then good. In that spirit – as with all parts of this debate – we could do with less judgment and a lot more listening.

• Rachel Shabi is a freelance writer and commentator

Ash Sarkar: A divergence in perception between men and women must be addressed

There’s a truth to the Aziz Ansari story which extends beyond whether or not he behaved in the manner alleged; that all too many of us have had sexual encounters in which one person’s comfort is subordinated to the urgency of another’s desire.

Traditional feminist discourse – from Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will to more recent discussions prompted by the Harvey Weinstein revelations – has focused on a figure of the rapist as monstrous and malevolent. However, nearly one in three women have experienced sexual violence at the hands of an intimate partner – the archetypical perpetrator looks less like a grotesque outsider, and more like a familiar neighbour. We hold him in affection and esteem. We trust him. We might even desire him.

“Whatever we wear, wherever we go – yes means yes, and no means no!” The old Reclaim the Night slogan misled a generation of feminists into understanding consent as binary, and violation as self-evident. We’re supposed to announce our consent (or lack thereof) like we’re entering a plea at trial.

But “yes”, in a context of mutual respect, might be a joyful wordlessness; “no” might come in the guise of “not now”, “maybe later”, or even “well, OK then”. In a society where sex is often seen as something to be extracted from partners like a mineral or an ore, a “soft no” is just so much social sediment to be worn away.

Cat Person going viral shows how rare it is to explore women’s sex lives | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Read more

A rigidly legalistic model for understanding consent doesn’t encourage men to shift the parameters of how they understand sex. The Ansari allegations show us that the task isn’t to get men to see themselves as rapists, but to see their partner’s pace of desire as being of equal primacy to their own. There is no god-given right to orgasm: even a one-night stand requires patience, empathy and a capacity to interpret more complex cues than what is accepted in a court of law.

For what it’s worth, I believe “Grace” in her account of events. I also believe Ansari when he says: “It was true that everything did seem OK to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned.” It’s precisely this divergence of perception which men need to address. That starts with viewing consent as the beginning of a social process – not a verdict at the end of a long process of litigation.

• Ash Sarkar is a senior editor at Novara Media, and lectures in political theory at Anglia Ruskin and the Sandberg Instituut