Dormant in Babe’s story regarding Grace and Aziz Ansari is the question of youthful (in)experience. Grace was 22 at the time of the event, presumably relatively fresh out of college. She plotted with her friends beforehand on how to impress her date, and when the night went badly, she took an Uber home rather than a cab. Babe, too, is young, having spun off from The Tab just two years ago (The Tab itself a magazine targeted at/written by college students). The article is quintessentially millennial, filled with anecdotal references in praxis of body positivity (“She settled on a ‘tank top dress and jeans’. She showed me a picture, it was a good outfit”) and opposition to male solipsism even in offertory gestures (“I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red- but it was white wine”).

 
In these off-hand statements, Katie Way, the writer, implies three times more than she writes. This is how our generation learns – every symbol we see everyday embodies three times more than it shows. At the top, somebody with knowledge makes something that gets handed down, mutated by every agent it passes through until it resembles a meme, both in Dawkins’s definition and in our present-day understanding. There is no explaining a meme, as they are strongly relational and referential. Either you get it or you don’t. Way, raised on these communication methods of the early 2010s, writes in a style that is obtuse as a byproduct. Her anecdotes are puzzling to the old guard of journalism, but to Way, either you get it or you’re not the desired target audience. Millennial youth lay at the center of this story, because both Grace and Way were either unable or unwilling to present themselves as comprehending that night outside of the way our generation has been trained. Put simply, Aziz’s actions were atrocious and typical, Grace did absolutely nothing wrong, and sexual persistence/coercion deserves to be dragged into the spotlight. At least, it seemed simple.

 
Bari Weiss and Caitlin Flanagan, writers for the New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively, both wrote pieces shortly after that condemned Grace, questioning her interpretation of that night, her intentions for coming to Babe, and her sense of agency. On that night, Grace experienced crossing of boundaries, refused her pursuer’s sexual advances, and performed actions/had actions performed upon her that she made clear she was not comfortable with, all on multiple occasions. Weiss wrote: “There is a useful term for what this woman experienced on her night with Mr. Ansari. It’s called ‘bad sex,’” which she continues to describe as encompassing “awkward, gross, and entitled sex.”

 
“Bad sex”, when first uttered, conjures remembrances of offensive body odor, starfishing, and corny porn talk. Much like bad kissing, “bad sex” is committed by a body somehow lacking multiple kinds of awareness (self, spatial, cultural, etc.); something that may be awkward to bring up because the amount of discomfort it would bring would outweigh the displeasure experienced by the receiver. Though the act has technically been achieved, someone leaves dissatisfied. In multiple instances, Grace was unable to overcome the discomfort of passing judgment or demanding accountability until the next day, when she realized that her displeasure had actually heavily outweighed the discomfort. This pedestrian definition of “bad sex” was no longer in the picture; a right was violated. One end of the contract had not been upheld.

 
Weiss’s iteration of “bad sex” is much broader than the common fumbling fingers over a bra strap definition, encompassing all sexual encounters that leaves at least one party feeling… feeling what? Disappointed? Unfulfilled? The broadest emotion is inappropriate, yet Weiss demands the broadest. The solution to bad sex is presumably simple: just say no, put your clothes back on, and go home. Indeed, no meant no for the instances in which Grace said no. Dutifully, Aziz did not physically force her head onto his penis. In the instances in which Grace did not say no, she found herself with his fingers down both her throat and pants. To Weiss, any unplesantries that Grace experienced fell within the grayscale realm of consensuality, painting an almost picture perfect portrait of why “no means no” has rightfully been replaced by “yes means yes” – the role of the constant, consistent denier is neither pleasant nor sustainable nor empowering. This was not “bad” sex. This was hardly even sex, an act whose ontological legitimacy, as with many activities between separate parties, desperately depends on the willful engagement and equal knowledge of all those involved. Persistent pursuance does not leave much room or time for willful engagement, or as Katie Anthony puts it: “He behaved like a sexual bully who hurt and humiliated a woman while he acted out a fantasy that was his and his alone. He treated her like a prop. And if you don’t understand why that’s shitty, ask yourself how much your hand enjoys jerking you off.”

 
Weiss’s rhetorical mask is that she wants all women to have full agency in how they engage in daily activities, especially within sexual encounters – in any reasonable world (ours excluded), it should not be a radical idea that women’s rights are inviolable. She writes that “the insidious attempt by some women to criminalize awkward, gross and entitled sex takes women back to the days of smelling salts and fainting couches.” Those days of female helplessness are days that Weiss violently does not want to return. Similar to Sheryl Sandberg, who suggests that professional success for women can be achieved by training themselves out of socially learned behavior and mindsets, Weiss makes the argument that an individual woman, if correctly ideologically armed, can and should always fend for herself. Dissimilar to Sandberg, however, Weiss’s theory is prescriptive and judgmental – the fear being that our generation of women, in their blissful enjoyment of rights that previous generations worked hard for, have forgotten the past-eternal struggle for them to be treated legitimately. Indeed, in a follow up interview, Weiss states: “Many older feminists I know are sitting there saying ‘How dare you look at me — me who has kicked open the door of every room you occupy, who had to beg for the paid maternity leave you now enjoy, who endured the alienation of being the only woman at the table so that now you get to sit at its head — and tell me I’m not self-aware enough to understand my own life?’” Babe has taken both Grace and itself too seriously, it seems.

 
Flanagan takes the opportunity to outrightly mock Grace and her peers: “I thought it would take a little longer for the hit squad of privileged young white women to open fire on brown-skinned men. I had assumed that on the basis of intersectionality and all that they’d stay laser focused on college-educated white men for another few months.” She goes on to write: “Apparently, there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab, and who have spent a lot of time picking out pretty outfits for dates they hoped would be nights to remember. They’re angry and temporarily powerful, and last night they destroyed a man who didn’t deserve it.”
It is easy to sense a distrust and contempt for the rising generation of women. They are flippant and predictable, championing causes like “intersectionality and all that” only until it assumedly fails them. They are emotionally unstable, seeking petty revenge for petty crime. They are somehow “white,”, despite Flanagan’s own whiteness (the most telling of her projections). Crucially: they are “young women” – they are ungrateful, they are stupid, and they are wrong. Weiss’s straw-damsel is Flanagan’s structured world-view. How did this issue of youth come to center in a story that, by all initial indications, should have stayed strictly within the confines of heterosexual gender relations? Have millennials ruined sexual assault, too?

 

———
It’s easy to sense a distrust and contempt for the rising generation of women – yet herein lies the confusion. What did Grace do that was wrong? Even if we take Weiss at good faith, that this is an experience that Grace should have merely shouldered; was Aziz not primarily in the wrong? Is being a woman in America to walk around with your rights constantly infringed upon? Why in the world should women then change their own behavior if it is the world they inhabit that needs to change? Ironically, the parts of #MeToo that mimic Lean In, focusing on the internal rather than the structural, seems to have missed Weiss. Like Grace, Weiss realizes that Aziz’s actions were ‘gross’; unlike Grace, Weiss believes that the burden should be transferred onto the woman, revealing the familiar cynicism of the Randist radical individual. Through the self anything can be achieved; men simply will cavernously desire sex, women will simply deny them, and life continues, rational agents bouncing around in space until they collide.
Later that week, HLN’s Ashleigh Banfield ripped into Grace on-air for “chiseling away at the movement” that Banfield claims she and her fellow professional women had been ‘dreaming of for decades.’. Banfield is speaking of the #metoo movement, which needs no introduction. Banfield, more than Weiss and Flanagan, struck me for her display of pure, vitriolic contempt and disdain for Grace, a woman who has had, by any reasonable account, a traumatic experience. In her initial broadcast, Banfield states:

 
“Here is where I am going to claim victim…You have chiseled away at a movement that I along with all of my sisters in the workplace have been dreaming of for decades…What you have done in my opinion is appalling… You had an unpleasant date and you did not leave. That is on you… As you grow in your photography career, I hope you remember what you did to someone else’s career because of that bad date that was not sexual assault or sexual harassment by your description.”

 
According to Banfield, Grace is not only wrong, but she is also a bad woman. Banfield fashions herself the authority on legitimacy, a dictatorial claim to subjective experience, and her logic is inscrutable. Banfield further tells Grace: “Go ahead and tell your friends to avoid this guy; he’s gross.” What is the difference between telling her friends and telling the world? Why tell anyone at all?

 
Way wrote a response to what is presumably a request to come on the show, copied in full below:

 
“It’s an unequivocal no from me. The way your colleague Ashleigh (?), someone I’m certain no one under the age of 45 has ever heard of, by the way, ripped into my source directly was one of the lowest, most despicable things I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Shame on her. Shame on HLN. Ashleigh could have “talked” to me. She could have “talked” to my editor or my publication. But instead, she targeted a 23-year-old woman in one of the most vulnerable moments of her life, someone she’s never fucking met before, for a little attention. I hope the ratings were worth it! I hope the ~500 RTs on the single news write-up made that burgundy lipstick bad highlights second-wave feminist has-been feel really relevant for a little while. She DISGUSTS me, and I hope when she has more distance from the moment she has enough of a conscience left to feel remotely ashamed — doubt it, but still. Must be nice to piggyback off of the fact that another woman was brave enough to speak up and add another dimension to the societal conversation about sexual assault. Grace wouldn’t know how that feels, because she struck out into this alone, because she’s the bravest person I’ve ever met. I would NEVER go on your network. I would never even watch your network. No woman my age would ever watch your network. I will remember this for the rest of my career — I’m 22 and so far, not too shabby! And I will laugh the day you fold. If you could let Ashleigh know I said this, and that she is no-holds-barred the reason, it’d be a real treat for me.
Thanks,
Katie”

 
Way’s response has the same indications of our generation that her article shimmered glimpses of. Again, those anecdotal jabs, packed with decades of reference inscrutable to those outside of the mode; that strong moral sense of Newton’s third law; and the keen loyalty to and protection of women our age. Way brings to question the ways in which Banfield has adopted typical signifiers not of aging itself but more the loss of youth – burgundy, a subdued office appropriate color, and her chunky highlights, popular in the 90s. Way’s response is absolutely a drag on Banfield’s appearance. But it is mostly about the respectability politics of Banfield’s brand of presentation and an indictment of the way years of performativity has built the woman Banfield is today; a woman whose ideology is not representative of the next generation of women, and whose cry to relevance to progress is sustained only by those same insistent, self-assured cries to relevance.

 
In Banfield’s broadcast response to Way’s e-mail, she snarkily states: “I was brown-haired for a while when I was a war correspondent, interviewing Yasser Arafat, and in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gaza and the West Bank. Google those places.”- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjRYbR_-Dhw

 

Weiss states, in a separate interview:
“Many older feminists I know are sitting there saying ‘How dare you look at me — me who has kicked open the door of every room you occupy, who had to beg for the paid maternity leave you now enjoy, who endured the alienation of being the only woman at the table so that now you get to sit at its head — and tell me I’m not self-aware enough to understand my own life?’ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/us/the-metoo-moment-parsing-the-generational-divide.html

 
And Flanagan writes:
“The world in which it constituted an episode of sexual assault was so far from my own two experiences of near date rape (which took place, respectively, during the Carter and Reagan administrations, roughly between the kidnapping of the Iran hostages and the start of the Falklands War) that I just couldn’t pick up the tune.” https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-humiliation-of-aziz-ansari/550541/

Central to these women’s criticisms of Grace and Way is a territorial claim to a ‘real feminism,’, one that exists only in the past when tied to legitimating historical periods such as the Iraq War and the Reagan administration, and continues to exist today only when it mirrors the specific challenges that these women have faced in their lives. To these women, the buck stops here. This is not what their generation of women worked for, and our generation of women is ungrateful to realize how much better life is now than it was back in the old days of the Falklands War and the second intifada. In these contextualizing efforts, these women are endeavoring to put Way and Grace in their places, clueless to the growing idea that institution itself deserves to be questioned and they are quickly becoming the institution. Our generation is a postmodern one; one of reaction and revision, questioning commonly accepted forms of legitimacy, refusing to believe that legitimacy itself is reason enough for legitimacy.

 
This contextualization, too, reveals the efforts through which Banfield, Weiss, and Flanagan are struggling to reconcile with a realization that all ideology moves alongside with time, and they are no longer the youth leading the charge they once were; the ones they now find themselves bitterly fighting. Lying under all of this is that problematic, age-old assumption of the exchange of youth and sagacity. If Banfield has no added wisdom in exchange for her youth, then what does she have for all of those years? If youth is freedom and Banfield is no smarter for having given it up… then what’s the point of it all, anyway? In their unequivocal denial of Way’s rationality due to her age, Banfield, Weiss, and Flanagan reassure their place of belonging in this world while sweeping their own miscues of youth under the rug. Way’s email was in response to a condescending, self-important, craven plea for attention into the 24-hour ether at the expense of a shaken young woman. If we’re pointing fingers at all, then, well, they started it.