Of course, Ansari has not been assassinated or torched or fired from anything. His career is not ruined. He is being shamed, and in all likelihood humiliated, but readers are also being discerning and critical, skeptical of a journalistically flawed telling. To some, Ansari is indeed serving as a face of disrespectful behavior widely seen as coercive. But I will be surprised if he sees professional ruin. Many men have not seen significant repercussions, and the fundamental point of the movement is that, for centuries, right up to Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, men saw little to no consequences for coercive behavior.

It is unlikely that this will shift in a matter of months to a culture when men are overpunished. Some may be. The resignation of Al Franken springs to the forefront of debates. And unfair comparisons have been and will be made.

But relatively few people are actually calling for the professional ruin of any man who has heard Let’s slow things down and not immediately stood up and doffed his hat. Nor was Shitty Media Men intended to mean that every man on the list was on the same moral footing as a perpetrator of violent rape. Most have not lost their jobs. A man may be embarrassed that his colleagues know about the time he did a shitty thing, but they are able to continue to work with him, and to not expel him as a “sexual predator.” As my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote last week, “Targeted sexual harassment isn’t the same thing as a clumsy pass after too many vodka sodas have been consumed … [but] I have yet to find evidence of a single woman claiming that any of these things are equal. Most women do, unremarkably, know the difference between an incident where their personal safety (or their job security) is being threatened and an incident where it isn’t.”

To target only the most egregious “monsters” is to treat only the severe symptoms; the goal is prevention. It’s easy to recognize something is amiss when a person is called to a boss’s suite and asked to disrobe. The behavior of a Harvey Weinstein is simple to condemn. The harder work is ahead, in the more common and less clear-cut moments that leave people feeling somewhere between uncomfortable and trapped. The person who says she wants to hang out and drink wine and also does not want to have sex—and a man who hears, Okay, we’ll see what happens.

These are exactly the stories that people, particularly men, need to hear. The fact that people see so many sides—and in many cases, elements of themselves—in the Ansari story is the reason it needs to be told and discussed. The story resonated with many people who’ve had similar experiences, or who thought Ansari’s reported behavior was okay because it is normal.

Even Ansari, the semi-ironic expert who authored a book on interpersonal communication, claims to have not perceived Grace’s distress. He may have perceived “mixed signals,” but also that his advances were ultimately warranted. In a sort of internal ink-blot test within the story, Ansari was seeing something totally different from his date, Grace. This sort of human mating ritual always involves complex arrays of social cues.