With the #MeToo reckoning digging deeper into the nuances of sexual coercion — especially after a recent article about Aziz Ansari’s alleged misconduct hit the internet — Samantha Bee found plenty to say about why the conversation is, despite some critics’ misgivings, so important.
Samantha Bee on sexual coercion, period: “It doesn’t have to be rape to ruin your life”
The Full Frontal host addressed the Aziz Ansari story and growing #MeToo divide.
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.
“It doesn’t have to be rape to ruin your life, and it doesn’t have to ruin your life to be worth speaking out about,” she said. “Any kind of sexual harassment or coercion is unacceptable!”
What Bee tackled with her January 17 Full Frontal segment is more complicated than the initial conversation that greeted the first Harvey Weinstein allegations back in October. Where that case felt largely cut-and-dried — Weinstein is alleged to have harassed and assaulted dozens of women over decades in Hollywood — Bee insisted that cases like Ansari’s, which focuses on a single night of blurring lines in what began as a consensual encounter, are still worth talking about.
“People like me had to wade through a sea of prehensile dicks to build the world we now enjoy, and part of enjoying that world is setting a higher standard for sex than just Not Rape,” said Bee. “And women get to talk about it if men don’t live up to those standards — especially if that man wrote a book about How to Sex Good,” she added, pointing to a picture of Ansari’s 2015 book, Modern Romance: An Investigation.
And to those contending that women are disingenuously lumping all sorts of sexual misconduct together as equally bad … well, Bee flat-out rejected that idea.
“We know the difference between a rapist, a workplace harasser, and an Aziz Ansari,” Bee insisted. “That doesn’t mean we have to be happy about any of them.”
In short: Bee and her writers — who, as a reminder, make up one of the more gender-diverse rooms in late-night comedy — had a simple message for anyone (especially any man) who might be confused on how to function in this rapidly evolving conversation.
“If you don’t want to tune in to your partner’s feelings throughout sex, maybe you shouldn’t be fucking a person at all,” Bee said with a shrug, adding, “Men: If you say you’re a feminist, then fuck like a feminist.”
Corrected Bee’s quote from “reprehensible dicks” to “prehensile dicks.”
By Anna North and Ezra Klein
