A Tale of Two Doofuses

The story of “Grace” and Aziz Ansari isn’t shocking. It’s dull.

Dominating the three-day news cycle (and beyond) is the story of an overgrown girl “Grace” who went on a date with a famous dude only to find out that he just wanted to have sex. The story is, to be honest, boring.

Older generations are expected to be scandalized by the behavior of the youth, but in this case what we hear from the Boomers and the X-era is contempt. We made our share of bad decisions, to be sure, but at least we didn’t air our laundry of disappointments in front of the whole country.

The interesting angle of the Ansari affair is that both the overgrown girl and the famous dude are big liberals (or leftists, or progressives, or whatever you call it).

Ansari, like Weinstein, is a celebrity male feminist. To be sure, it’s a bold generalization to mention both men in a single sentence, but what unites these entertainers is that both used women’s movement to further their careers. Yet it’s hard to see how someone like Ansari, someone presumably accustomed to chicks falling on his lap, can remain a feminist of the sex-positive 3rd wave variety. Maybe he once was one, but his reality is such that he should recuse himself from the issue.

Then we have the presumably grown-up professional feminists like Jessica Valenti who are siding with the overgrown girl and are trying to score points about “rape culture”. Likewise, I heard “lib-talkers” on Bay Area radio fuming about how we need dating guidelines that are not, like, the traditional dating guidelines. In other words, let’s reinvent the wheel, and make it a new and better wheel, modern and shiny.

This kind of opinion comes from the people who passionately believe that personal is political, that their most intimate choices define the course of history, and are, therefore, not merely individual triumphs or errors in judgment, but the blueprints for better tomorrow. If progressive activists can’t figure out such simple personal matter as first date, how can they be trusted with world peace?

Men and women desire each other.* Men pursue women. Women desire to be pursued. As our namesake here at Iron Ladies once quipped, the facts of life are conservative. To get a man to take her seriously, a woman is advised to play it slow. Waiting makes for better companionship and better sex.

But no, pundits had been advising the latest generations of young adults to make statements out of their love lives. We’d deconstructed the culture of dating (don’t open the door for her! Who needs flowers? So what if she invited him upstairs?) to the point where there is nothing left save for a slew of emojis and a hefty drinks bill.

When men advise “experimentation” to stick it up to bourgeoisie, it’s one thing. After all, fellows with little to offer aside from a vague bohemian aura have a lot to gain from destruction of sexual mores. When women recommend eschewing dating rules in the name of feminism, it’s something else. Even though a date can go terribly wrong (something every woman should anticipate), dating puts us in control. It’s up to us to decide how far we want to go and how fast. A feminist thing to do, or so it seems, is to warn girls that when they leap in bed with strangers they negate their power.

Unfortunately, to admit being in the wrong, and that multiple lives were negatively affected as a result, is to cede political territory. Therefore, the feminist vanguard is doing the opposite. Take, for instance, a recent twitter stormlet by Jessica Valenti:

No, convincing men to periodically re-ask permission during an intercourse is not hard. Men are simple: wave sex before them and they’ll come. It’s women who will find the easy sex with constant consent inquiries unfulfilling.

Pointing it out doesn’t make a woman a traitor to her sex. On the other hand, insisting on continued “experimentation” with promiscuity in the name of standing up to slut-shaming is a bit like FDR’s “experimentation” with he economy that needlessly prolonged the Great Depression. It’s not working, why do you keep doing it?

(I know it’s a big leap from a sorry sex incident to the Great Depression, but I keep hearing that their love lives are imbued with political significance, so I am merely following their cue.)

Furthermore, left-leaning feminists have agendas for our bodies. They, for instance, want to channel contraception payment, and therefore grant the control of it to, the medical establishment bureaucracy. But if they don’t know to stay out of a guy’s apartment when they don’t intend on sleeping with him, how, then, can they anticipate what may happen when a 10-bucks-a-month prescription becomes a pre-paid commodity?

Of course, personal is not political. “Grace” and Aziz Ansari are just two doofuses. That so many young women jump to “Grace’s” defense or argue that her experience teaches us something about “consent”, is telling.

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*Yes, this is a cis-centric post, or whatever the term de jour. Thank you for noticing.