Aziz Ansari and the Physics of Moving Forward

The allegation of sexual misconduct against Aziz Ansari, published in early 2018 on the now-defunct website Babe, doubled as a #MeToo Rorschach test. Some saw the woman in the story, “Grace,” as a victim of Ansari’s alleged sexual aggressions; some saw Ansari, just a guy doing guyish things, as a victim of shoddy journalism. And many others saw, in that sad story of the famous man and the pseudonymous woman, themselves: While other #MeToo stories implicated men of obvious monstrosity, the menace of Grace’s was its revealing banality. The allegation quickly transformed into an allegory: about consent and its gray areas, about sexual scripts that play out without dialogues, about disordered conceptions of empathy.

Ansari, after issuing in response to Grace’s claim, largely avoided discussing the matter in public—a fact that helped the story to trail off, its controversies punctuated with unsatisfying ellipses. And then, last year, Ansari launched a new tour (elliptical title: “”); the set begins, each time, with adiscussion of his feelings about the story. A version of that show, performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in mid-May, has now been converted, under the direction of Spike Jonze, into a Netflix special, which means that Ansari is