Positive sexuality: the Aziz Ansari problem

“Bite my clitoris until it bleeds” she demanded.

“Erm…”

“Bite me hard. Fucking bite me”

In my head I heard that ‘beep beep’ noise emitted by reversing rubbish trucks, telling me to get away, not from the vagina so much, but from the relationship. That said, I withdrew physically so I could speak with her with a little more dignity.

“You know you can talk to me about anything” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean… like… if something awful had happened to you as a child or something, I do care about you. You can talk to me”.

At which point she went ballistic, screamed that nothing bad had ever happened to her, that if I wasn’t going to fuck her I could fuck off (she had forgotten she was in my apartment), and that if I ever ask about her childhood again, she’ll never speak to me. All of which left me feeling that something awful had happened to her as a child.

It's 1987. A teenage girl is on her sofa, feet curled under her, half watching one of the four available TV channels while chatting to her friend on the phone. A land line.

I remember her clearly because, that summer, I was desperately in love with her. But to her I was just one of the anonymous and inconvenient 11 and 12-year-olds who would come over to play with her little brother and his Zoids.

But Zoids were not on the agenda that day. We assembled in the boy’s room in nervous silence, like cult initiates before a grand master.

Our host unveiled a pornographic magazine. It was called “Club”.

Only he was allowed to turn the pages. A yet-older brother was away for the weekend and, like Indiana Jones, my friend had sought and found the hidden treasure. His principal interest was that there would be no tear, crease nor grubby, prepubescent thumbprint that would evidence this larceny and earn him a month of Chinese burns and dead arm knuckle punchings.

None of us said a thing, not wanting to betray our ignorance. Our interest and attention was complete, almost scientific. I remember thinking two things to myself.

“Oh, THAT’s where it is!”

And somewhat more self-consciously, “It’s really hairy!”

It was a learning experience.

High school sex education sought to be much less memorable, and it mostly achieved that goal. The only moment that stayed with me is the day we were told to present to the class on the subject of either a form of contraception or an illegal drug.

I have never known whether this conflation was an attempt to imprint sexual activity with a negative association, an efficient way of ticking some statutory curriculum boxes, or just the teacher’s desperation to minimise his embarrassment into as few sessions as possible.

Google didn’t exist, the internet didn’t exist at all for my purposes. In those days research was done in the reference section of public libraries. So I was relieved when my old friend was called before me. And even more relieved that he spent his time warning us of the dangers of injecting spliffs.

My time was spent explaining to people something I had uncovered that was completely unknown to them. The femidom. I had even drawn a picture, copied onto A3 in pencil from an encyclopaedia.

After the class, my teacher took me to one side and, while clearly not wanting to suppress my imagination, told me that it was both very rude of me to make things up in his class and that it showed a lack of respect for the seriousness of the subject matter and for him as my teacher.

“I love you”

“I love you too”. And I really did. She was 24 and beautiful. I was 19 and average (a quality that has stayed with me as I have aged). She was my first non-teenage partner.

“I really love you”, she said. “But there’s something I need to say”.

(“Oh fuck I’m being dumped. Why do girls tell you they love you before they dump you?!”)

“I’m not leaving you” (*relief)

“But we need to talk about sex”

(Pause)

(“Waaa?!”)

Despite four years of the most enthusiastic sexual activity, this was the first time I had spoken about sex. With a girl, I mean. And it turned out not to be a conversation, it was more of an evening school course.

Some bits were easier than others. Some required extensive practice. But I had a willing and engaged teacher, and three months later I had a sense of confidence and achievement. I also had a stomach-churning mortification over the number of people who had encountered me during my early years of ignorance, inexperience and ineptitude. I thought should apologise to them. That there ought to be some sort of Hallmark card tailored for the purpose.

Porn taught me about sexual biology in a more practical way than the countless diagrams outlining the location and function of Fallopian tubes. And this young woman taught me how to have casual sex in a more appropriate way. And although her teaching style may not have been replicable in a school setting, why was the content never addressed? So much of it was about respect and consideration.

“It’s alright if you’re gay”, my dad said to me once, without warning. “But if you are, remember to use a condom. You know… AIDS and everything”

(A moment of thought)

“Oh, and if you’re not gay, use a condom”

(Pause)

“Just use a condom”

(Pause)

“Do you want me to take you to get some condoms?”

A parental intervention in my sex life, carefully timed to be about three years too late to be useful.

Every piece of ignorance and every false notion about what girls want, what they like, how they work, just got amplified by an echo chamber filled with teenage boys, none of whom knew what the fuck they were talking about. If only we had had some actual, useful facts and an environment where we were encouraged to learn.

And girls are getting just as bad a start to their sexual education as boys. Maybe worse. But you would have to ask them about that.

All of this has been rolling around my head as I try to make sense of the behaviour of TV celebrity Aziz Ansari.

Boys learn about sex from schools, their parents, from pornography, from their sexual partners and from their peers. And from the media.

I’m not railing against how we idealise certain sorts of women, or denigrate others. Or how sexual dominance over women and violence against homosexuals is explicitly encouraged as a cultural ideal by some art forms. Not that this doesn’t deserve railing against, but where the fuck do you start?!

Try reading traditional fairytales as though they are an allegory of female virginity. Her job is to protect it, the boy’s job is to take it. But ultimately, the girl will always lose. And we’re encoding this attitude into children from the youngest age. Once you start looking, it’s hard to find a fairytale that isn’t designed to fuck up a kid’s sexual perspective.

This very weekend a friend was telling me how pleased she was that her sleazebag, unfaithful bosses only had daughters, so that they could live their lives in terror at their girls growing up to meet men like them.

I was dumbfounded. The entire premise was based on the idea that sex is a game that men win and women lose. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hymen!” is patriarchal bollocks. Sex isn’t a competitive sport that someone wins and someone else loses. At its best it’s an awesome, collaborative endeavour. Everyone’s a winner!

While schools and parents do everything to avoid teaching useful information about sex, pornography and peer ignorance fill that gap. And while schools and parents cloak any education they do provide in a cowl of negativity and danger, nothing they try to impart will have any credibility.

The young lady with the clitoral pain fetish might not have suffered abuse as a child. She might have learned that from pornography. She might have got into the habit of thinking that’s what men expected of her. I truly have no idea and I’m not asking her now.

Just as I had no idea what motivated the first girl to demand that I spank her, or those who have wanted their hair pulled, or those who want things put in their bottoms, or those who want to put things in my bottom. The truth is that none of us really know what we are doing when it comes to sex most of the time. And we haven’t the slightest clue why. So it’s no surprise that we get it wrong so often.

Harvey Weinstein’s a monster. He’s nothing like me. I can’t imagine how much I would have to despise myself to use money and power to force women into sexual submission. I have a tiny bit of fear of what money and power might turn me into if I did have any. But whatever it is, it would not be Harvey Weinstein.

But Aziz Ansari is like me. Without minimising his actions or his accountability for them, I know there are times when I have misconstrued, misunderstood or just been plain selfish. I hope nine out of ten of the women I have known would give me a LinkedIn endorsement for my efforts, but I also know that there are times when I have got it wrong.

I have a huge fear that some friends and people whose views I value will read this and decide they don’t want to know me anymore; that abuse is abuse and that by aligning myself with Ansari in some manner I am condoning abuse. But the Ansari debate is more important because it is about what we perceive as normal behaviour, rather than what we perceive as extreme.

I absolutely believe that Ansari’s behaviour was less bad than Weinstein’s. I’m clear on the criminal allegations against Weinstein, but for Ansari, if a complaint is made, I honestly don’t know. It would be for a Court to decide if his actions were criminal. And it’s for society and a legislature to debate and decide whether his actions should be illegal if they are not.

But the Law, normal behaviour and extreme behaviour are linked. There is a bell curve of attitudes where most people are in the middle and a few people are in the extreme. This doesn’t just go for attitudes to sex but for any theme of thought.

When normal society accepts normal people being casually and publicly racist or homophobic, then extreme people feel less inhibited from bigoted violence. When normal society accepts pay disparity between men and women, then extreme people think a little harmless groping at a charity fundraiser is OK, and even more extreme people feel less inhibited from more violent assaults and rapes.

Not only are we acting insufficiently against the monsters we demonise, but we’re doing nothing about moving normal attitudes to a place where monsters cannot thrive. We’re doing nothing about promoting sex positive attitudes and education and we’re leaving kids with pornography as their best source of information.

When my parents and school were failing to educate me about sex, when pornography was succeeding, and when my friends were my most enthusiastic and least knowledgable teachers in the subject, it was legal to rape your wife in Britain. Raping your wife was not an act so extreme that it was considered illegal.

This cannot be unrelated to the facts. That Britain is a nation where more than 80,000 women (and 12,000 men) are raped each year. Where there are more than 400,000 sexual assaults and 2 million incidences of domestic violence. And we’re not even what, in diplomatic circles, is known as a “shithole” country.

We cannot reduce sexual violence while we continue to think it’s nothing to do with our own, “normal” behaviour and attitudes and when we can safely comfort ourselves that we’re not depraved monsters.

We cannot provide effective sexual education to young people when we don’t recognise that our twisted “normal” attitudes provide the space for extreme behaviour.

We can’t counter the religious fundamentalists with their weird aversions to sex education if we can’t articulate why it’s so important to empower the positive sexuality of young women.

We can’t do anything unless we accept that what we call normal today is a problem. I am like Ansari. I am a sleazebag. I need to be better. Most men need to be better. And that won’t happen while we think “normal” is OK.