Fucking in The Hellscape of Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance

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Feb 1 · 16 min read
Fucking in the Hellscape of Aziz Ansari’s

Modern Romance
robotorgy.tumblr.com
This weekend, The Week published a piece deservedly ricocheting

around my feminist media bubble. I myself have managed to �nd any
and every occasion to send it to friends and they, in turn, can’t stop
sending it to me. Like Cat Person, this essay plainly speaks to a
widespread pain that so rarely gets recognized that when it’s faithfully
1 di 17 01/03/18, 23:39
appreciated as fuckery in an article like this, we all lose our shit.
In all the media shock surrounding allegations of Aziz Ansari’s sexual

miscondcut, Lili Loofbourow reminds us that we mere common people
are in danger of forgetting just how normalized women’s sexual pain
really is in everyday heterosexual encounters. Citing some pretty
gruesome statistics, she shows how medical researchers are singularly
preoccupied with studying men’s erectile dysfunction to a point where
you’d think keeping dicks hard is on par with curing skin cancer. But
alarmingly, there’s hardly a fraction of that funding going towards the
seeming pandemic of vaginal pain.
If you’ve ever found yourself lying awake at night, crying, frantically

googling your vaginal symptoms in the dark as your oblivious partner
snores next to you, then you probably already know all signs always
point to vulvodynia: a chronic condition that makes all sex
excruciatingly painful and CAN NEVER BE CURED.
It’s like the worst game on the internet for women. Step right up, tell
the computer box where it hurts and learn how it means you’re going to
die alone!
Once you quickly exhaust the maybe four medically reputable sites that
describe vulvodynia, you’ll keep going down the list of google results
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until you hit the wasteland of health forums where desperate women
describe their symptoms in excruciating detail to internet strangers
begging for a miracle cure because no doctor on this planet seems to
understand how vaginas work and nothing modern science has devised
ever seems to help.
Does it sound like I’ve been there? Because I’ve been there.
Loofbourow’s connection from Aziz to Vulvodynia screamed so true to
me. Because like many other sexually active women of childbearing
age, I ran out to get an IUD the second Trump was elected. And because
my body basically rejected it from day one, I spent most of 2017 hating
myself as the copper rod delivered months of agonizing vaginal pain,
blood and infections that no fewer than three separate doctors
dismissed as normal and par for the course.
“Just stop having sex for a few months and see if that �xes things.”
Christ, why didn’t I think of that!?!
Spoiler alert: I did not stop having sex.
Instead, I was a fucking idiot, falling in love with a guy and didn’t want
to jeopardize a nascent relationship by insisting that we could no
longer bang for an inde�nite period of time. So rather than do the
“correct” thing, I kept having painful sex, completely hating myself all
the while for being the kind of woman who would keep having painful
sex because she’s terri�ed, believing that to own up to having an
interminably broken vagina would—no matter what her well-
meaning, a�ectionate partner said to the contrary—translate to
abandonment. Because what else is Brooklyn if not a wonderland of
vaginas way better and more functional than mine?
A fun place to be, let me tell you!
And at the same time all of this was happening, I was ironically
�nalizing a dissertation that investigates how modern dating makes
young, heterosexual women feel valueless, disposable and
interchangeable. And I did so mostly with an icepack between my legs
because I, too, felt valueless, disposable and interchangeable.
A fun place to be!

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Ages ago, back when I still gave a shit about tenure, I wrote a book
proposal for this dissertation for academic press. Expected in any
proposal is a brief editorial analysis of how your project compares to
similar books currently available on the market. Weirdly enough, the
number one book most like my study of heterosexual singlehood was
Modern Romance, a book on contemporary dating culture written by—
yes—Aziz Ansari and fellow Sociologist Eric Klinenberg.
This is what I summed up about the book and its relationship to mine:
… Klinenberg supports Ansari’s comic observations with focus group and

statistical insight. The book is well-received by a market of readers who are
clearly hungry for accessible research into the experience of modern
dating. But like many books in its genre, it focuses on guiding individual
strategies, and thus does little to theorize dating as a social problem.
I look back on this and laugh. Aziz Ansari literally wrote the fucking
book on modern dating and still allegedly pressured a woman within
hours of a meeting her into oral sex and saw nothing wrong with that
because despite spending at least a year researching the subject of
modern dating, he learned nothing at all about how women feel about
the the hell of dating the modern man.
… fun place to be.
. . .
Does anyone paying for outrage really want to talk about how it is that
women keep ending up in sexual scenarios where they come away
feeling genuinely violated like this? Because if that’s the case, these
takes seem narrowly sighted. They seem to concern themselves almost
exclusively with determining whether or not Aziz did anything
technically wrong that night, but technicality isn’t what this story is
about.
It’s obvious in my reading of that story that Aziz didn’t actually see his
date as a human being. Aziz spent years carefully cultivating a public
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persona of the guy in comedy who gets it. He stood on stage after stage
proclaiming himself a feminist who gets it. He wrote a book about
dating, positioning himself as an expert who by virtue of authoring a
book on the subject supposedly gets it. But then when he gets a woman
alone, he nevertheless makes her feel dehumanized, objecti�ed, like
she’s nothing more than an assemblage of warm, moist ori�ces—less a
living person than a sexual vending machine.
I wish this story didn’t keep happening but the truth is male feminists
seem to have an uncanny ability to keep hurting women in exactly this
way. They gain our trust by adorning themselves with patches and pins
bearing feminist slogans and dropping Audre Lorde references into
brunch conversation. Exhausted from dating men whose commitment
to gender equality seems to have ended with the credit reel of
Bridesmaids, these rare birds excite us. We get giddy granting them
exception to the rule that all men are trash. We let down our guard.
We invite them in.
And like with vampires, that’s when we get fucked.
The �rst and only time I ever invited a new guy back home to my place
after a �rst date, I was 25. And true to form, I did so with the earnest
intentions of getting stoned and playing Guitar Hero.
At the time, I loved Guitar Hero. I was having drinks with a guy I met
o� OkCupid. He seemed nice enough. He was several years older than
me, working on his doctorate in literature at the same grad school that
I was. And best of all, in that moment, he seemed as equally eager as I
was to get stoned and play Guitar Hero. What’s the worst that could
happen? I asked myself, three drinks stupid. I was just thankful that
this nice, smart guy was willing to walk me home at a time in my life
when I still felt uneasy walking alone late at night through a city, three
drinks stupid.
Well, needless to say, the worst happened.
To say that I came away from the experience forever changed would be
an understatement. There are few nights in my life as vividly
remembered as the one when a guy I barely knew forced his dick into
my mouth. You relive that night over and over again, from every angle,
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in painful slow motion. You’ll never forget how the only thing that
made him stop was screaming that you’re not on birth control.
I would say that I’m still not ok.
And that I’m probably never going to really enjoy giving blowjobs
again.
But has my telling this story through fat, sloppy tears with mascara
running down my face ever stopped my feminist partners from asking
for them?
Nah.
And did I ever stop giving them?
Nah.
Which brings us back to this fun place women �nd themselves dating
today.
. . .
rainn.org
. . .
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The overwhelming success of the self-help genre keeps the otherwise

irrational business model of book publishing solvent. Soft pink
paperbacks promise to help women get over all kinds of man-shaped
problems, ranging from child molestation to in�delity to domestic
violence.
Dating books are no di�erent. I’ve read now dozens. They range from
regressive tutorials teaching women how to eat shit to the relatively
kinder entreaties for women to scale back on their shit-eating.
But most dating books strive—like the Democratic Party —for

something in between, encouraging and even celebrating moderate
shit consumption across pages of useless platitudes that distract you
from the striking absence of substance. These books—quite like
experts employed by the Democratic Party—help reinforce an immoral
imbalance of power by reminding you that your options aren’t so bad
and that, besides, have you stopped to consider that what you’re asking
for is too much? Maybe it’s not capitalism, imperialism or masculinity
that are wrong. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe it’s you,
stupid?
Have you even seen all the movies written and directed by men about
men in their relentless pursuit to impress other men? I bet you haven’t
seen half of them. Maybe if you took more of an interest in the things
men like, you wouldn’t be single, alone, crying into your co�ee at this
Barnes and Noble again. Find more abuse like this in Stop Being Such a
Weepy Pig: A Man’s Inside Scoop on What’s Wrong With Single Women
Today, $21.99/$22.99 in Canada
The other imperative these books give women is to “put yourself out
there.” Honestly, is there any advice more vacuous? You’ll never meet a
guy holing up in your apartment. Go outside, you lazy bean burrito.
Find this tip and not much else more in How To Land the Man of Your
Dreams in 30 Days Or Less, $13.99/$15.99 in Canada.
While we’re putting ourselves in the “out there,” we’re told to give all
dudes a chance as if none of us has a frightful backstory bearing
evidence as to why this isn’t a good idea. Even my therapist is guilty of
pushing me too hard to give more men in New York the bene�t of the
doubt. You’d think he of all people would know better since it’s his job
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to listen to me describe every week the luck I’ve had so far with giving
men the bene�t of the doubt.
At some point, I think a lot of women get the idea that nothing you
have to say about your own dating experience really matters. The
message sinks in slowly, over years, that women’s dating pain isn’t
really a subject that the experts seem to care about. Obviously, if
modern dating culture tortures the female heart, their answer is to just
keep doing it.
Or just stop forever, I guess. Die alone. See if anyone cares.
Look, do women ever get to admit that dating is not a fun place to be?
. . .
. . .
“Why do young women have sex with men they don’t want to have?” is a
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question that begs another question: “How has men telling their female
peers for the �rst decade of their adult lives that they aren’t ready for
commitment a�ected women’s self-worth and thus their ability to set
sexual boundaries with men?”
This is the crux of my argument here. There’s a clear line connecting

modern dating to the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct. But in order
for me to walk that line, I have to dispense with a some requisite
caveats:
First: obviously consent is important. At no point should this debate

ever regress back to a point where we’re relitigating the morality of
rape. If a woman says no (or is too incapacitated to speak) and you
keep pushing her for sex, you are rapist scum and you should see about
getting your dick kicked in by a horse.
Second: lots of women do actually adore casual sex. Plenty of women

out there are eager to beaver on the �rst date, no strings attached, no
last names needed. They are out to say yes to the undress. God bless
them.
Third: there are lots of men who want relationships and, too, feel
alienated by the shallow, transactional character of modern dating.
Satis�ed? Feel recognized? Great. Moving on.
Erica Jong is widely cited for her neologism of the “zipless fuck,” the
classic example given of casual sex where, satis�ed with the carnal
embrace, partners require nothing further from each other.
It’s cited so often in sex lit because it describes what many think of
when they think of casual sex. Two people meet, copulate, and take o�
in opposite directions. Their lifelines don’t knot together into an
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emotional mess for six months of “are we or aren’t we?” It’s hermetic,
modern and mess-free like McDonald’s apple slices sealed in a tiny
plastic bag.
If modern sexual interaction can be this simple, then modernity

apparently demands that it should always be this simple. Giddily
implied in our age of Bumble and Tinder is that we’re all DTF—dating
to fuck. Ask a married man over 50 how millennials date these days
and you’ll likely be absolutely disgusted.
But ask a bunch of millennial women (those who are now between the
ages of 25 and 35) honestly what they want from their dating lives and
it turns out most don’t want anything approximating the zipless fuck.
When you ask a bunch of women for an honest account of their sexual
history, most will tell you that such episodes are infrequent and rare.
Most leading relationship experts �nd that straight women most often
prefer to feel emotional connection and safety with their partner before
they can feel the desire for sex. This bore out in my research, as well.
Most single women rejected the prospects of one-night stands and
anonymous sex entirely. More than two-thirds said they generally avoid
having casual sex; nearly four out of �ve said that at this time in their
lives, they would prefer to be having sex in the context of a committed
partnership.
But—disturbingly—not wanting to have casual sex isn’t the same

thing as not actually having casual sex.
In a chapter I called “Fucking Hell,” I wracked my brain trying to

explain how it is that so many single women who said they did not
really want to be having sex outside of relationships so often did. Now,
the vast majority of these sexual encounters were consensual. The
problem was they happened in a context women weren’t thrilled to �nd
themselves in. What I tried to make space for in this chapter was a
frank exploration of the emotional distress women experience when
navigating sexuality in the ambiguous gray area of dating, when
relationship status is still a question waiting for an answer.
If mutual enthusiastic consent is the endgoal of this conversation, then

it’s important to note that rarely do women feel an opportunity to
express explicit consent to the sexual arrangement between partners
10 di 17 01/03/18, 23:39
while dating. The context is implicitly casual, non-commital, no strings

until the subject of strings is broached, most likely by the man.
Because woe be to she who would try to make contextual consent

explicit with: “So—where is this going?”
Apparently, a good number of women think that any talk of their

feelings, desires and expectations are subjects best left unsaid while
dating. Broaching them too soon, many believed, would risk being read
as a hysterical stereotype, a woman incapable of playing it cool while
our young male hero makes up his mind about whether or not he’s
actually into you.
It’s not that women don’t want to talk about what they want. It’s that
they feel they can’t.
And in this way, dating for many women quickly stops feeling like a fun
place to be and quickly starts feeling like interminable probation. Date
nights start feeling like a series of auditions for the role of girlfriend,
performed for the bene�t of a judge who ultimately determines
whether or not his commitment is on the table.
Until then, the implicit terms of dating are that it’s supposed to be
casual, implicitly a fun place to be, even if it’s not in reality.
So this is how we end up with an absurd etiquette of heterosexual

dating where lots of incredibly smart women navigate sexuality with
this unshakable idea that what they want from dating is an
afterthought, second in importance to keeping things casual. Because
more important than sharing how you really feel is pretending that you
don’t.
And unfortunately, when she reaches a point when she can no longer
stay in character, when the implicit demands of the role become
straining, she asks the director where this thing is going, and too often
walks out in tears. But not before she’s implicitly consented to several
weeks of ambiguously contextualized sex on his casting couch in an
interminably long audition for a part in his personal rendition of I Have
No Idea What I Want Right Now.
And weirdly enough, this is seen as the natural order of things. That
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this is an observable pattern where women suppress their own needs

and desires to keep up the expected pretense of casual insouciance
seems almost irrelevant. That women should experience such
predictable pains while dating is seen as par for the course.
After all, you don’t want to scare the guy, do you?
Keep putting yourself out there.
That’s just how it is.
. . .
At what point do you ever get to admit that you aren’t having fun?
Everywhere, people are caught in man-made nets of bad ideas. White

Supremacy? Terrible idea. Capitalism? Tosh. Fascism. No.
So Patriarchy? Can we not yet all agree that it’s been quite a shitty time
for women for some time now?
And so if you start from that premise, might you then ask how
patriarchy being a bit of a shit time for women might a�ect their
experience of sexuality?
Or are we going to keep pretending that sexual relations between men

and women have somehow been equalized in the celebrated era of the
zipless fuck?
One of the most obvious ways patriarchy constrains women’s sexuality

is the subconscious belief espoused by virtually everyone that what
single women want out of sex, dating and love doesn’t really matter, or
least matters less than other things. When society deems our needs and
desires inconvenient, they’re so readily dismissed as the aftere�ects of
Disney brainwashing or daddy issues or reproductive drives or
evolutionary psychology or whatever it is these days that powerful men
yell down from dude mountain to explain us to ourselves lately. The
sum of it serves to remind us that what we want isn’t a priority.
If our desires diverge from factory settings, then we’re entitled

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princesses too precious to live in this world—a world, the last time I
checked, is still very much made in man’s image; I don’t recall being
asked for input in how this sausage factory runs.
I suspect men reading this are now at the point where they want to
chime in with their own experiences and opinions on the power
dynamics of coupling, especially where they contradict my account.
They want, desperately, to have their side of their story told, too. And
to be honest, all of that does have a place in the conversation. I
interviewed men, too. It’s not like I didn’t think at all about how the
casualization of intimacy can break the male heart, too.
But I didn’t feel like writing about men right now. Does that matter? It’s
my fucking blog, after all.
Besides, the reason I’m writing this at all is because I read through a lot
of men’s responses to the Aziz Ansari story. I came away feeling like the
pat takeaway for many was the idea of contractual consent = good,
rape = bad. Many men framed sexual consent as a private negotiation,
a contract negotiated by two parties a�orded equal rights and
privileges. I saw men pitching phone apps that would lock in a
partner’s consent so as to leave a legally binding papertrail. Men were
literally congratulating themselves on gaming the moral and ethical
concept of consent, their eyes getting twinkly with the batshit idea that
this is the million-dollar idea they were born to develop.
All of this is so far from getting it that if getting it were the moon, this
trajectory has us crash landing into the sea.
Why is it so hard for men to acknowledge that sexual liberation never

actually freed women? That our sexuality remains bound still by so
many other man-made knots that it will take a great deal more e�ort
than the o�er of a zipless fuck to untangle us?
No small part of the reason why dating sucks for women is that we’re
paradoxically expected to be both defensive and open, hopeful but
guarded, grounded but optimistic. We’re told by books, magazines and
movies that men don’t want what we want so in order to �nd what we
want, we have to jettison our expectations and lower our standards, the
sooner the better. Because you’re not getting any younger. Geez, you
sel�sh git. Why didn’t you just leave? Give every guy a chance. God, go
13 di 17 01/03/18, 23:39
put yourself out there.
And then if we’re confused by how any of this is liberation, then it’s
because we’re not as liberated as men think we should be by now.
It stopped being surprising to me that this story keeps happening. I

defended my dissertation with the conclusion that the modern
etiquette of heterosexual dating demands that single women seeking
partnership, intimacy and, yes, marriage and family, must �rst willingly
navigate sexual conditions tilted far from their favor. That bad things
might happen in this space is then viewed as normal, seen as par for the
course.
It’s all our fault anyway, isn’t it? Is it not our national pasttime to
ascertain exactly how women are personally responsible for all the
man-shaped unpleasantness that should ever darken their doorstep?
I’m sure there’s a book to help you get over it. Maybe you’ll meet a guy
at the library who can help you reach it!
But in the absence of our everyday nightmares being heard, we make

pieces about a bad fuck buddies and vulvodynia into viral sensations.
We share pieces about other women’s pain as the proxy for our own, as
if to whisper behind our private screens: “me, too.”
Which, I’ve decided and at this point maybe you have, too: this is not a
fun place to be.
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Fucking in the Hellscape of Aziz Ansari’s Modern... https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/fucking-in-th...

Fucking in the Hellscape of Aziz Ansari’s

This weekend, The Week published a piece deservedly ricocheting

appreciated as fuckery in an article like this, we all lose our shit.

In all the media shock surrounding allegations of Aziz Ansari’s sexual

If you’ve ever found yourself lying awake at night, crying, frantically

Christ, why didn’t I think of that!?!

Spoiler alert: I did not stop having sex.

A fun place to be, let me tell you!

A fun place to be!

… Klinenberg supports Ansari’s comic observations with focus group and

… fun place to be.

We invite them in.

And like with vampires, that’s when we get fucked.

Well, needless to say, the worst happened.

I would say that I’m still not ok.

And did I ever stop giving them?

The overwhelming success of the self-help genre keeps the otherwise

But most dating books strive—like the Democratic Party —for

Or just stop forever, I guess. Die alone. See if anyone cares.

This is the crux of my argument here. There’s a clear line connecting

First: obviously consent is important. At no point should this debate

Second: lots of women do actually adore casual sex. Plenty of women

Satis�ed? Feel recognized? Great. Moving on.

If modern sexual interaction can be this simple, then modernity

But—disturbingly—not wanting to have casual sex isn’t the same

In a chapter I called “Fucking Hell,” I wracked my brain trying to

If mutual enthusiastic consent is the endgoal of this conversation, then

while dating. The context is implicitly casual, non-commital, no strings

Because woe be to she who would try to make contextual consent

Apparently, a good number of women think that any talk of their

So this is how we end up with an absurd etiquette of heterosexual

this is an observable pattern where women suppress their own needs

After all, you don’t want to scare the guy, do you?

Keep putting yourself out there.

That’s just how it is.

Everywhere, people are caught in man-made nets of bad ideas. White

Or are we going to keep pretending that sexual relations between men

One of the most obvious ways patriarchy constrains women’s sexuality

If our desires diverge from factory settings, then we’re entitled

Why is it so hard for men to acknowledge that sexual liberation never

put yourself out there.

It stopped being surprising to me that this story keeps happening. I

But in the absence of our everyday nightmares being heard, we make

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