If Aziz Ansari is reading all the thinkpieces about him, he must feel most ill-served by his allies. “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader” wrote Bari Weiss for the New York Times, exonerating Ansari in a singularly insulting way.
It’s unreasonable, Weiss and others write, to expect Ansari and other men to be able to know if they’re scaring or upsetting their one-night-stands. The solution isn’t for men to pay attention to women’s non-verbal cues, she writes, but for women to be much more aggressive in fending off men who make them feel uncomfortable or unsafe.
For all the worry about women defining themselves as snowflakes or victims, the defense offered to Ansari sounds much more cossetting than comforting.
What virtuous man would feel relieved to be told he is powerless to avoid harming the women he takes to bed?
You’re overlaying Catholic teaching with an extremely gynocentric view of sex. What are the rights of men and the duties of women toward them?
Would they not be very similar? Both men and women can consent to sex when it will do much damage to their psyche. How can you tell? You cannot really. You can get to know the person and not rush into sex. That would be a start. Yet it is hard to predict what will happen when you break up. The pain is often very serious but it is hard to know. A bit like Russian Roulette. The truth is humans don’t end sexual relationships easily.
The two solutions Catholicism proposes are celibacy and marriage. Both life long commitments that avoid ever having to deal with your partner go to bed with someone else.
Does the problem of sexual abandonment and betrayal really justify such a radical solution? It depends on how deeply sex touches us. Do you want it to bind your soul to another forever? It can even if you don’t want it to.
I would think they only be very similar if men and women were very similar, but the Church teaches that men and women are different and complementary.