Aziz Ansari should try taking responsibility for actions that left a woman feeling violated

In our weekly arts column, Alexandra Pollard explores Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix special, and the way ‘feminist’ male comedians respond to allegations of sexual misconduct

In ‘Right Now’ the comic addresses allegations that nearly derailed his career (Getty)

What do you do when you’ve made a career out of railing against toxic masculinity, only to find yourself accused of mistreating women? When your professed feminism means that you should be the first to own up to your own bad behaviour, but that you also have more to lose by doing so? Answer: don’t do what Aziz Ansari did. And certainly don’t take advice from Louis CK.

It is only a few minutes into Ansari’s new Netflix stand-up special, Right Now, that he addresses the allegations that nearly derailed his career. The 36-year-old – who rose to fame in Parks and Recreation, created and starred in Master of None (one episode of which involved a TV celebrity being accused of sexual misconduct), and wrote a book about modern dating – had, until the start of 2019, embodied a more modern type of masculinity. He was a sensitive, self-aware kind of guy – the kind who asked talk show audiences to clap if they considered themselves a feminist, and chastised the ones who didn’t.

And then came the babe.net article. The one headlined: “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turns into the worst night of my life.” The piece claimed that Ansari had gone on a date with a woman and repeatedly pressured her into sexual activity with him. “It was 30 minutes of me getting up and moving and him following and sticking his fingers down my throat again,” said the woman, who also alleged that he ignored her when she told him she didn’t want to feel “forced”. She then recalled leaving Ansari’s flat feeling “violated”, and crying the whole Uber drive home.

It took Ansari just 31 hours to issue his first response, saying he was “surprised and concerned” by the account, but insisting that the interaction was “by all indications completely consensual”. It took a year and a half for his second – which arrives in Right Now. The hour-long show is filmed in strange, uncomfortable close-up by Spike Jonze, and Ansari says the same thing – word for word – that he said when I saw him perform in London three months ago. Then, he saved it for the end. Now, he gets it out of the way immediately. “I’ve felt so many things this past year,” he says in hushed tones. “There are times I felt very scared, there are times I felt embarrassed, there are times I felt humiliated. But most of all, I felt terrible this person felt this way. But you know, after a year, how I feel about it is, I hope it was a step forward. It made me think about a lot, and I hope I’ve become a better person.”

As “apologies” go, I’ve heard worse (see, Kevin Hart apologising for his homophobic past by just repeatedly saying, “I’ve already apologised”). But it isn’t great. Firstly, “I felt terrible this person felt this way” is the classic, responsibility-shifting non-apology. What’s more, there is no mention of the specific ways in which his alleged behaviour was toxic, uncomfortable and coercive, or of how he must have made the woman feel – only a rumination on how sad and scared he felt about the accusation itself. The word “I” crops up nine times, but it is never once used to take accountability.

Still, he’s done a better job than Louis CK – another comedian who has built a following around saying things like this onstage: “How do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat! To women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We’re the worst thing that ever happens to them.” He gets it, we thought. It turned out he was the threat.

In November 2017, CK admitted to various incidents of sexual misconduct, including masturbating in front of several female comics. “These stories are true,” he said in a statement. “At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true.” (Note that he is making an excuse here, while claiming not to be.) “But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.” CK was dropped by his manager, and his feature film, I Love You, Daddy, was not released. “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” he added. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”

Apparently, “a long time” means six months. By August, he was making unannounced appearance onstage in New York. By December, he had started unleashing strange, bitter diatribes on those stages. Of young, non-binary people, for example, he said: “They’re like royalty! They tell you what to call them. ‘You should address me as they/them, because I identify as gender neutral.’ Oh, OK. You should address me as ‘there’ because I identify as a location. And the location is your mother’s c**t.” The minute he was no longer welcome among a large majority of his previous audience, CK transformed himself into someone else entirely, someone who rails against progress and political correctness and empathy. As soon as he wasn’t making any money out of it, the mask of liberalism fell.

Of course, once you’ve behaved in the way these men allegedly have, it’s too late to do the “right” thing. The damage has been done. The right thing would have been not to behave that way in the first place. But it isn’t too late to own up to your behaviour and apologise. Dan Harmon, the actor, writer, and creator of Community and Rick and Morty, did a better job than most.

When Harmon was accused by former Community writer Megan Ganz of sexually harassing her when she worked on the show, Harmon addressed it in great detail on his podcast, Harmontown. I urge you to listen to the full thing, but here are a few excerpts: “The trick is if you lie to yourself, you can lie to everybody. It’s really easy. And so that’s what I continued to do: telling myself and anybody threatened to confront me with it that, if you thought what I was doing was creepy or flirty or unprofessional, then it was because you were the sexist, you were jealous. ‘I was supporting this person, I’m a mentor, I’m a feminist. It’s your problem, not mine, you’re the one that actually is seeing things through that lens.’” By admitting to using his feminism as a shield, Harmon has already gone a step further than Ansari and CK were willing to go.

He continued, “I crushed on her and resented her for not reciprocating it and the entire time I was the one writing her paychecks and in control of whether she stayed or went and whether she felt good about herself or not, and said horrible things. Just treated her cruelly, pointedly, things I would never, ever would have done if she had been male and if I had never had those feelings for her.”

It didn’t end there. Harmon didn’t attempt to make excuses, didn’t insist that he remembered things differently, paint himself as the victim, or limit his response to how the whole thing made him feel. He owned up to his behaviour, in all its ugly, unpleasant detail. And Ganz was grateful for it. “Yes, I only listened because I expected an apology,” she said on Twitter. “But what I didn’t expect was the relief I’d feel just hearing him say these things actually happened. I didn’t dream it. I’m not crazy. Ironic that the only person who could give me that comfort is the one person I’d never ask.”

I doubt Ansari’s accuser felt the same.