“Ask a man for his worst date story, and he’ll tell you something that will make you laugh,” a female friend said to me a few years ago. “Ask a woman, and she’ll tell you a story that will make you want to change the locks.”

For various reasons we’ll get to in a tick, this conversation has stayed with me. But it wasn’t until recently that I realised the man and the woman in these scenarios could be talking about the exact same date.

A few weeks ago, as by now everyone knows, a woman using the pseudonym Grace published an account of her date with US comedian Aziz Ansari, a date that he thought was “fun” with “completely consensual sexual activity”, and that she described as “the worst night of her life”, riddled with “assault”.

How, you may well wonder, can two people have such polar opposite takes on the same evening? Ask more than one person their opinion on this story, and you’ll probably get an idea. Ever since it was reported, I have spoken of little else with my friends, and those conversations have gone one of two ways: “This story is horrific – I can’t stop talking about it!” Or: “This story is such a nothing burger but, oh my God, I can’t stop talking about it.” Our outsider take is as divided as that of the insiders. It reminds me of a very different viral sensation: the great blue-or-gold dress controversy of 2015, in which two people could look at the same thing and see two totally different objects.

After Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, I thought a celebrity would have to be caught assaulting victims with barn animals to get people talking any more. And yet the reason the Aziz Ansari story caught the public’s attention was because it was so ordinary. Almost everyone can imagine an Ansari situation, because so many of us have been on one side or the other. “Bloody hell, I’ve been on worse dates than that!” was my initial snorted reaction, as though that wasn’t part of the problem.

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I was extraordinarily lucky during my long dating years, and by “lucky” I mean I was never raped, which apparently is the bar (“I mean, it’s not like he raped her,” has been one of the more telling defences of Ansari). There was the guy who put his hand around my throat and squeezed as we were making out on my sofa on our first date. “I can tell you like that,” he whispered, wrongly. And there was the man who begged to come up to my flat after giving me a lift home from a party, and I let him, because I was too embarrassed to argue about it in front of the cab driver. As the door shut behind us, he grabbed me between my legs as if he was squeezing an orange for juice.

Were these incidents assault? They certainly felt grim. But I’m sure to the men involved they seemed entirely consensual. Is the dress blue or gold? This is what happens when you enter the weird world of modern dating: on one side, you have people (men mainly, but women, too) increasingly getting their moves from internet porn; and on the other, too many people (women mainly, but also men) still thinking it is more important to be amenable than to be themselves. If dating is a job interview plus sex, and all your focus is on avoiding rejection, then desire and pleasure can quickly seem beside the point.

Ansari, who wrote an entire book about how hard dating is after a woman didn’t text him back, has often presented a decidedly narcissistic view of romance. On his Netflix series Master Of None, women are either unreadable Manic Pixie Dream Girls or inexplicable heartbreakers, while he is just a nice guy trying to find love in the big city. But only someone who sees women as generic objects can think it’s acceptable to put their hand around a woman’s neck or, as Grace alleged Ansari did, down her throat; only someone who thinks of sex as a solo pursuit can be so unaware of their partner’s reactions.

Is this really enough for a lot of men? I’d love to know, but public discussion of this saga has, predictably, been dominated by women, just as all conversations about harassment are – as though it’s up to women to fix this problem. Meanwhile, the men I’ve asked nervily insist that Ansari has been exploited by a woman who expected him to be “a mind reader”.

And, honestly, I understand why they feel this way. But dating involves more than one person, so instead of treating this story as a gladiatorial battle between snowflakes and people who enable rape culture, a more conducive approach would be to rethink the whole hook-up narrative: stop thinking of it as a game; get your head out of your libido when there’s someone else in the room; and when someone says no, they mean no, not, “Mmm, persuade me by sticking your hand down my throat.”

The Ansari story has shone a light on the awkward fault lines in modern dating – fault lines so common that many of us just took them for granted. It turns out that the dress is neither blue nor gold, but grey.