I spent a lot of years in a court system trying to define whether there was consent or not to see if there were grounds for charges, convictions. So I do appreciate the complexity of issues dealing with sexual behaviour and consent. However without belittling the woman, for me the Ansari episode she has spoken of misunderstands or trivializes and dettracts from the crime of sexual assault and the discussion on what constitutes consensual sex.
Women are engaging in a debate as to how to deal with men in regards to sexual communications given the lack of intimacy attached to many sexual acts these days. Its like a market correction on the stock exchange if I can use that term. The pendelum has swung from repressed sexual expressions to anything goes and now the pendelum is swinging back in the direction of regulating or limiting unlimited boundaries of sexual expression.
This debate or discussion or behavioural correction is discussing an issue of how we as individuals wish to control and be the one in charge of our own physical bodies and in the case of women how, when and why they have a say over their bodies.
Signals as to how we should behave remain confused. Whether this "market correction" leads to new rules and understanding, or swings back to a puritanical model of behaviour remains to be seen.
Like any social movement that challenges, people join the movement, then it literally becomes so large it either ceases to exist as it achieves what it set out to do in changing the status quo, or it implodes because of trivialization rendering it meaningless or a passing or spent fad. Given the attention span and trendiness of the celebrities embracing it, I fear it will soon be passe and they will move on to another cause celebre or trendy political issue.
The very term "me too" is a red flag to me because if the sexual behaviour issues we discuss are to be rsolved ultimately they will have to be resolved one on one not in groups. Tyhe "me too" or peer group phenomena we now are seeing might be creating a false sense of security and short circuiting or circumventing or preventing properly processing such issues on an individual level where the individual learns and develops their own personal insights as to how they wish to handle or manage a situation with another individual.
The power of the group can be harnessed to usher change yes-but groups or gangs or collectives unfortunately have the same effect on your frontal lobe as does alcohol. That is to say the pressure pr phenomena of the group enforcing a collective thought as to how to behave loosens inhibitions including what would otherwise be self-limiting behaviour in regards to anger, fear,violence-in fact it does the opposite of empowering when it does this, it weakens people as individuals and leads them to believe they must join a group to be responsible for and get directions for how they behave as an individual.
I am form the school of thought that believe body control issues, body politics so to speak, like any human behaviour issue, to be managed in a healthy, adaptive, effective and meaningful manner, have to evolve and be created one on one by and between individuals and by individuals taking responsibility on an individual level for their behaviour and in developing insights as to how our behaviour as individuals and in groups negatively and positively impacts on others either collectively or individually.
I would also think most of us men know in anything we do, we must show civility and decency in how we behave which means, the stronger and more comfortable we feel with our masculinity the less likely we need to express it forcefully. Maybe we need to take some men and sit them down and explain to them to pay attention again to a woman's posture, eyes, non verbal language. Maybe...but I don't think its that simple.
I personally have been in groups I gave facilitated as a therapist (not as a lawyer in that role as I was in other cases) with violent men convicted of domestic violence and the most violent and ignorant of them knew what they were doing was non consensual. They know it lacked consensuality. The issue was they could not physically control themselves.
I can tell you if its a control issue, the remedies and solutions are a lot different than telling someone to be sensitive and learn to read signals. "There are usually deeply entrenched underlying negative behaviour patterns that have evolved over many years or what we call maladaptive behaviour as opposed to positive adaptive behaviour. So there is no magic pill or cure.
At best rught now the legal system may quarrantine violent individuals but ironically it does so by placing them in institutions full of violence and ironically where sexual assault is a daily occurrence.
I wish I had easy answers for people. There are not any. This issue of how society regulates its primal instincts and urges has been going on as long as we existed. We are after all homo sapiens-a primal animal, a primate-an ape with primal urges. We learn to repress some of those urges to enable societies of cooperation to evolve or we let those urges loose with no controls.
We created religions basically to try control or negative primal behaviours. Sexual behaviour is but one component of those primal urges that can destroy or build a society depending on how we choose to express them.