I am not an Aziz Ansari fan. I’ve never watched his standup, I’ve never watched Master of None, and – brace yourself – I have only seen a handful of episodes of Parks and Recreation. But on Sunday, while absentmindedly scrolling through Twitter, I clicked on a headline from Babe.net titled “I Went On a Date With Aziz Ansari. It Turned Into the Worst Night of My Life.”

In the article, an anonymous photographer going by the name of “Grace” details an encounter with Ansari in which she went back to his apartment after a date. According to her account, he repeatedly made clumsy physical advances and propositioned her for sex despite her resistant body language and verbal requests to “slow down” and just hang out. After taking a long time to process the events, “Grace” came to the conclusion that what she experienced was sexual assault, and her story has been making rounds on social media with the #MeToo tag attached.

I read the article all the way through. I felt uneasy but not for the reason I expected. When I eventually gathered my thoughts and decided to put them into a thread, many people stopped reading after the first tweet or two:

My takeaway from this whole Aziz Ansari thing: it's disheartening that a productive movement condemning assault and harassment has deteriorated into an excuse to call out any aggressively horny asshole you've ever had an awkward encounter with. — Tiffany (@riptiff) January 14, 2018

Both behaviors are wrong and probably symptomatic of the same culture, but they are in no way equivalent, and using the same language to address them does a disservice to an important conversation. It's frustrating. — Tiffany (@riptiff) January 14, 2018

I was called a victim blamer and a rape apologist. I was told I don’t understand assault.

I do. This summer, I fell asleep in a man’s bed after telling him I didn’t want to have sex, and woke up to him inside of me. A few months before that, after I passed out at a college party, a stranger stuck his fingers inside my unconscious body and used my limp hand to get himself off. Some time during the aftermath of those two events, my now-former boss (who had 57 years to my 21) kept me after work, grabbed my waist and tried to kiss me.

These are my experiences, and they provide the lens through which I view all discussions of sexual assault. They are the reasons that when I read the Ansari article and the discussion surrounding it, something felt off. Because I have also experienced the kind of situations Grace described. And while they can be distressing, and confusing, and humiliating, they are not assault.

It is important to talk openly about all the various, subtle ways in which misogyny manifests itself, but using assault as a catch-all term feels reductive because it overlooks the nuances of an incredibly complex issue. While I don’t think such encounters should be excluded from the #MeToo narrative, I think we need to avoid discussing them in overly simplistic, binary terms like “nice guy” versus “rapist” and “good sex” versus “assault.” One-size-fits-all characterizations like these are unhelpful because they fail to recognize the fact that most men and most sexual encounters fall somewhere in between.

Maybe this is callous to say, but labeling every unpleasant sexual encounter an assault infantilizes women. I've been a victim, I understand how coercion and power dynamics work, but I also believe in female agency, and I feel insulted by the direction this discussion has taken. — Tiffany (@riptiff) January 14, 2018

For example, in the months following Harvey Weinstein’s fall, I have seen many well-meaning people echo the supposedly feminist rule that consent can only be given when sober, never while intoxicated. I am well aware that alcohol can be a form of coercion and a contributor to assault, and that people who are too drunk to know what they’re doing shouldn’t be taken advantage of. “I’ve been assaulted while drunk, [but] I’ve also had drunk sex I fully agreed to,” I said in the thread. “Feminism means allowing women the agency to tell the difference,” instead of treating them like children who need to be coddled with arbitrary standards for acceptable intimacy.

People have asked me, “if you’re all about women’s agency, isn’t it enough that this woman felt assaulted?” Unfortunately, no – not when it becomes a matter of public accusation. Assault is not a feeling. Discomfort is a feeling, embarrassment and hurt and anger are all feelings, but assault has to have an objective definition because of the legal and social ramifications that come with it. When we act as though disrespect, harassment, assault and rape are all different words for the same thing, the conversation starts to lose its legitimacy.

Declaring a new celebrity "cancelled" every week like the #MeToo movement is some kind of twisted bingo card does nothing to change the underlying culture in which ordinary men either don't understand boundaries and consent or knowingly disregard them. — Tiffany (@riptiff) January 14, 2018

After the tweets above, people accused me of excusing such actions as acceptable because they are common, but my point is precisely the opposite. Grace’s descriptions of Ansari’s behavior made headlines because he is a household name, but it isn’t limited to powerful, famous men – these things happen all the time and are indicative of a broader social problem which hinders proper communication between men and women.

“I’m not defending Ansari,” I wrote. “I’m concerned with the eagerness to call every man who’s ever made a woman feel uncomfortable an abuser, instead of trying to understand/dismantle the larger structures which play into men’s inability to sense discomfort and women’s inability to say no.” And then added:

People are rarely "good" or "bad." Similarly, men are not so easily separated into categories of "allies" and "abusers." Most of them are capable of misreading cues and overstepping boundaries and writing them off as irredeemable while writing women off as helpless is regressive. — Tiffany (@riptiff) January 14, 2018

Some of the most candid and insightful points I’ve seen about this story have come from women who have argued that, for a lot of men, sexual aggression is something that has been ingrained in them from a young age. They are socialized through the examples of other men, not just those around them but in TV, movies and music. Heterosexual sex has long been portrayed as a kind of cat-and-mouse game in which the woman is expected to play coy and the man is expected to wear her down until she gives in. This is an unhealthy and dangerous dynamic, and it needs to change – but if our main approach is assigning facile labels to individuals rather than frankly examining root causes, it never will.

Framing this as an Aziz Ansari problem instead of a culture problem gives men the opportunity to distance themselves from it instead of reflecting upon their own attitudes and beliefs.

As a woman and a survivor, I have a stake in the way we talk about sexual assault.

Proper language and communication are critical not only in these discussions, but in the heat of the moment. While there are many clear-cut cases of men deliberately disregarding women’s boundaries, there are others where neither person clearly expresses what’s going on in their head, and both are left trying to fill in the blanks. It is not anti-feminist to recognize that sometimes, human relationships are messy, signals feel mixed, and misunderstandings occur. And it is not victim blaming to say that we need to work harder to empower women to firmly say “no” when men are acting entitled, as well as teaching those men to look for nonverbal cues and ask their partner explicitly how they’re feeling before proceeding.

I understand what it’s like to freeze in the moment. I am familiar with the feeling of panic. When I woke up to a man whose name I didn’t know on top of me, I kept my eyes closed and my body still instead of fighting back. My experience is valid regardless of my inability to find my voice. And I believe Grace when she says she felt upset and violated. I believe she probably felt pressured, and she has a right to resent Ansari and the larger culture that pressures men to pressure women. But her account reveals a grave need for us as a society to emphasize the importance of clear consent to both men and women, so that we all have the tools to express when a situation doesn’t feel right to us.

The situation Grace described may not be assault, but it’s important to recognize that there is a middle ground that can also be bad. We need to hold men to a higher standard without resorting to speaking in absolutes.

I write about this because as a woman and a survivor, I have a stake in the way we talk about sexual assault.

As the subject matter continues to broaden, more than ever we need precise yet nuanced language in order to talk about different kinds of unacceptable behavior. I realize I am guilty of occasional oversimplification like anyone else. Had I known my Twitter thread would get so much attention, I would have been more delicate about the words I selected. Calling Grace’s story an “awkward experience” with an “aggressively horny asshole” may be just as reductive as calling it an assault, a realization I came to after listening to the voices of other women who processed my thoughts and shared their own.

It’s easy to talk about these things like they are black and white, but some of the most productive discussion comes from acknowledging the gray area.