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I Believe What Louis C.K. Claims in His New Special—But It's Not Enough

There are a lot of people who want to forgive Louis C.K., but he's done little to earn it.

Over the weekend, Louis C.K. announced the surprise release of his new stand-up special, Sincerely Louis C.K. on his website.

*****TRIGGER WARNING: Depiction of sexual assault*****

He said it was for people "who need to laugh" amid the on-going coronavirus pandemic—though he's still charging money for it. Once upon a time, that news would have genuinely excited me. It would have been exactly what I needed to help me through a stressful, lonely stretch of time like this. Now, I doubt I'll ever see this new special—I'll just let my morbid curiosity drive me to keep reading about it.

He was my favorite comedian for years. Maybe my favorite artist, period. His comedy wasn't just hilarious—it was insightful and smart and managed to be somehow cheerful in a way that included all the sadness in the world. Most of all, it seemed to be informed by a strong capacity for self-criticism. He wasn't one of those toxic, egocentric comedians who targets other groups to mock. There were always some cringey exceptions when he showed his blind spots, but more often than not his jokes were at his own expense, or aimed at institutions of power that benefit straight white men. He seemed like someone who was operating from a strong moral foundation...

While a lot of other comics emulated his style, I didn't think any of them could match his skill. And there definitely wasn't another show like Louie at the time. It blended the surreal and the mundane in such a satisfying balance. It felt more like experimental cinema than just another sitcom. I thought that Louis C.K. was a genius. To be honest, I still do. But genius is not a free pass from accountability.

It was on a podcast with LA comedians that I first heard rumors about C.K. exposing himself to young female comics. I don't recall exactly what they said about it, just that they made it sound like common knowledge within the stand-up community that C.K. was kind of a creep. Still, it was all vague enough that I was able to watch Horace and Pete—his bizarre and compelling anti-Cheers play about the world's most depressing neighborhood bar—without getting too hung up on the thought that he might be a sexual predator. A few months later, in late 2017, the full story came out.

Here's what I learned: For years, Louis C.K. was seemingly in the habit of taking any occasion when he was alone with a young female admirer as an opportunity to masturbate. In the cases we know about, the women he targeted were comedians who wanted the chance to tell him how much they liked his work and to ask him for industry advice. Before they had a chance to do much of that, he would take advantage of the power dynamic between them to ask if he could masturbate in front of them.

Some of the women took that question—coming so out of the blue—as a joke, and laughingly agreed. C.K. was not joking. Once they consented (to the extent that term applies in this scenario), he would immediately get started. He would position himself between them and the door and stand there until he was finished. For years after these events took place—while they existed as rumors and unsubstantiated accusations—C.K. denied what he had done and discredited the women involved. That continued until a 2017 New York Times report compiled the stories of five women whose stories corroborated one another.

At that point, C.K. issued a public apology that acknowledged some of the hurt he had caused, but many people criticized it as downplaying the abusive nature of what he had done—"asking [women] to look at [his] dick"—and making the issue about himself and his regret rather than the women he had traumatized. In his new special, C.K. once again addresses the scandal while shirking much of the responsibility for his actions, saying, "Men are taught to make sure the woman is okay. The thing is, women know how to seem okay when they're not okay."

The struggle I have with all this is that, back when the story broke, I felt I had gotten to know C.K. through his work. It was like finding out a good friend had done something awful years ago, and I was ready to hear my friend's side of the story—to take his account of events seriously. So when C.K. says that he didn't realize how he was taking advantage of his power, and that he really thought the women involved were okay with it, I can believe that he was that blind. When he claims in his new special not to have realized that, even after someone consents, "you need to check in often," because "it's not always clear how people feel," I believe him.

I can believe that an unattractive and awkward man who grew up absorbing the twisted cultural messages of the U.S. in the '70s and '80s could have misunderstood consent that thoroughly. I can believe that he failed to imagine the pressure those women must have felt to go along with his outlandish request. I can believe that the way he positioned himself to block the doorway was unconscious. I can believe that he downplayed their discomfort in his own head to erase the lasting damage he was doing—that he may have even felt betrayed when some of those women told others what he had done. His behavior was much the same in the rare instances when he actually did have real consent. I may be wrong to give him this much benefit of the doubt—at least one of the women he victimized has said that she believes the fear C.K. caused those women was the point for him. But even if he was able to convince himself that it was all okay—that he wasn't hurting anyone—so what?

Failing to see that you're hurting someone does not erase your fault in hurting them—it just means that you have to address that blindness, as well as the hurt you've caused. By ascribing his failure to empathize to women's ability to "seem okay when they're not okay," C.K. is essentially blaming them for his crimes. He treated young women who admired him professionally not as equals or colleagues or even mentees, but as objects of lust whose autonomy was a minor barrier to be overcome before satisfying his sexual impulses—just blurt out the request as soon as you get a chance, and if they say "yes," then you're good to go.

Along with his apparent insights into the nuance of consent, C.K. made some jokes about his skill as a masturbator that further reveal his failure to empathize. They try to make light of the situation in a way that quickly becomes grotesque when you imagine any of the women he hurt hearing C.K. say, "I like company. I like to share. I'm good at it, too. If you're good at juggling, you wouldn't do it alone in the dark. You'd gather folks and amaze them."

Even worse, he still isn't acknowledging the way he covered up his crimes for years after he had supposedly learned his lesson and stopped traumatizing women like that. He lied to protect himself, and he undermined those women's careers in the process.

Maybe, if he finds a way to repay the women he hurt for the trauma he caused them and for the damage he did to their careers—if he takes enough real responsibility that they can forgive him—maybe it will be possible to enjoy Louis C.K.'s work again. Until then, his actions and his failure to take responsibility for them have undermined that sense of a moral core that once made his comedy so compelling, and those of us who want to forgive him have to come to terms with the fact that we were wrong—that despite his talent, he really is just another toxic, egocentric comedian.

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Revisiting Babe.net in Light of Aziz Ansari's "Right Now": A Kind-of Review

Right Now is Aziz Ansari's reckoning with himself.

Netflix

Like everyone else, the burning question on my mind going into Aziz Ansari's new Netflix special, Right Now, was whether or not he would address the Babe.net article.

He did––barely a minute into his set, in fact. Right off the bat, Aziz Ansari is more grounded, less hyper, so clearly transformed from the Aziz Ansari of yesteryear. The entirety of his monologue on the topic can be read here, but this was the most important part:

"There's times I've felt scared. There's times I've felt humiliated. There's times I've felt embarrassed. And ultimately, I just felt terrible that this person felt this way. And after a year or so, I just hope it was a step forward...I always think about a conversation I had with one of my friends where he was like, 'You know what, man? That whole thing made me think about every date I've ever been on.' And I thought, Wow. Well, that's pretty incredible. It's made not just me but other people be more thoughtful, and that's a good thing."

On his last point, Ansari was right. In many ways, the Babe.net article felt like a watershed moment in a movement already chock full of watershed moments. Up until that point, the #MeToo movement (at least in my limited perception as a straight, white dude) had been about speaking truth to power, exposing the many abuses that women faced at the hands of affluent men who felt they could get away with anything. Yes, the movement led many men to introspection, but for a lot of us, especially the "woke" ones, there was also a certain degree of detachment.

tom haverford NBC

The perpetrators of the most prominent #MeToo cases were men like Harvey Weinstein: true predators who intentionally wielded their substantial power and social clout to target and rape women. Even someone like Louis C.K., who wasn't outright raping or physically assaulting women, displayed consistent patterns of using his status to target and sexually harass women around him.

None of that applied to me. I already respected women in the first place. I had been in a committed relationship for nearly seven years, and I was 100% positive that I had never used my status (I'm another writer in Brooklyn; what status do I even have?) to pressure anyone into doing anything sexually that they didn't want to do. Of course I'd strive to empower the women around me. Of course I'd call out sexual abuse if I saw it in the workplace. Of course I supported the #MeToo movement wholeheartedly. But #MeToo wasn't about me.

Then the Babe.net article about Aziz Ansari came out. The piece followed "Grace," a girl who went on a date with the comedian after a chance encounter. Grace described how they went back to Ansari's place after dinner, he made it clear that he wanted to have sex, and she spurned his advances multiple times. They did engage in sexual contact (not sex, but he kept attempting), during which Grace signaled that she felt uncomfortable.

This excerpt from the article stood out to me:

"Most of my discomfort was expressed in me pulling away and mumbling. I know that my hand stopped moving at some points," she said. "I stopped moving my lips and turned cold."

Whether Ansari didn't notice Grace's reticence or knowingly ignored it is impossible for her to say. "I know I was physically giving off cues that I wasn't interested. I don't think that was noticed at all, or if it was, it was ignored."

Ultimately, Grace texted Ansari after the date, telling him that the encounter made her uncomfortable. Ansari apologized to her directly and later clarified in a public statement, "It was true that everything did seem okay to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned. I took her words to heart and responded privately after taking the time to process what she had said."

babe.net Tab Media

Journalistic issues with Babe.net aside, the whole situation sat poorly with me. Unlike all the other publicized #MeToo stories—wherein I could safely say that the perpetrator was, indeed, a remorseless, sexist predator who should never work again ("How is Max Landis even the same species as me?")—Ansari's case felt murkier.

I immediately recognized his behavior as uncouth. He was selfish and gross. If a friend came to me and told me that was how her date went down, I'd say something like, "That guy sounds like a massive a**hole, hope you never see him again." But I probably wouldn't say, "He sexually assaulted you, put him on blast."

Part of my hesitation came down to Grace's description that most of her cues were nonverbal. As a person on the high-end of the autism spectrum, nonverbal cues are a pain point for me in general––I have a very hard time reading and interpreting them, and I always ask people close to me to verbalize explicitly what they want from me, sexually or otherwise.

My point in bringing this up is that while nonverbal cues are practically imperceptible to me, they aren't necessarily natural to everyone else, either. Through that reasoning, it was easy for me to imagine a scenario wherein Ansari genuinely read the sexual encounter as fully consensual and Grace genuinely tried to stop it through nonverbal cues. In that situation, Ansari would be in the wrong, but it would still be hard for me to consider him a sexual predator, as opposed to it just being a really bad date.

But the situation at hand was even more complicated. Grace did verbally tell Ansari that she didn't want to have sex, and he still persisted in trying to move their encounter in that direction. I had the distinct thought that if it had been me in Ansari's shoes, I definitely would have stopped at that point, even if I hadn't picked up any of the nonverbal cues.

At the same time, I didn't understand why Grace wouldn't just leave his apartment––even in her recounting of the experience, she never seemed to feel unsafe. She was also in an entirely different industry, so there wasn't the same subtextual pressure that might have existed if she had been a budding stand-up comedian. Obviously, no one has the right to judge whether or not another person should feel unsafe in a given situation, but I wanted to fully empathize with the story, and I felt that my lack of understanding was preventing me from connecting. I couldn't wrap my mind around what kept her there, but I wanted to.

So I asked my girlfriend what her thoughts on the situation were, and she told me that she fully understood what Grace had felt. And I read articles on the topic written by women, most of whom fully understood what Grace had felt. Moreover, almost every other woman to whom I brought the subject up had a similar take––encounters like the one between Ansari and Grace are ridiculously common, and nobody really knows if it's "sexual assault" or not. But, at the very least, it's not a good thing.

— (@)

So maybe it's not useful to get bogged down in technicalities. Shouldn't we be holding our sexual encounters to a higher standard than "not technically sexual assault?" If so many women are leaving sexual encounters with men feeling like they were, at the very least, deeply uncomfortable, that means we need to do a whole lot better. Doesn't it?

Grace's story brought to light a deep rift in the way men and women are socially conditioned to communicate, especially in sexual scenarios. Men are taught to be aggressive. Women are taught to be demure and non-confrontational. This means that in uncomfortable sexual situations, a lot of women will respond physically through subtle physical cues to avoid making a scene, instead of shouting "NO" or outright leaving––and a lot of men aren't conditioned to pick up on those cues.

Again, this means we need to do better. Our sexual encounters should not be defined by whether or not the other person literally ran away.

And sure, it would be great if every woman felt comfortable enough to outright say "NO" when they didn't want things to move further, but women are also put in very precarious situations should men respond with violence––and the fact that most men would never react like that doesn't change the fact that some men do, and women don't know which until it's too late.

In the end, it doesn't matter if Aziz Ansari did or didn't technically sexually assault Grace. What matters is that she left the date crying because she felt violated and didn't feel comfortable enough to express that in the moment.

What's important is that men who feel uncomfortable with the story––especially the "woke" ones––take the opportunity to confront their own dating experiences, come to terms with how their own behavior might have made someone else feel that way, and hopefully use the reflection to grow into a better person.

aziz ansari right now Netflix

Incidentally, this seems like exactly what Aziz Ansari did. The frenetic, hyperactive Aziz Ansari who played Tom Haverford in Parks and Recreations is no more. While he still goofs on his cousin Harris after nearly a decade, his main point is deconstructing how jokes evolve, mature, and rarely age well with time. Aside from that, Ansari performs a sober set exploring the mortality of parents and the subtle racism that pervades modern, liberal white culture. Finally, Ansari concludes:

"That old Aziz who said, 'Oh, treat yo' self,' whatever, he's dead. But I'm glad, 'cause that guy was always looking forward to whatever was next: 'Oh, am I gonna do another tour? Am I gonna do another season of the show?' I don't think that way anymore. 'Cause I've realized it's all ephemeral. All that stuff, it can just go away like this. [Snaps fingers.] And all we really have is the moment we're in and the people we're with."

It's not the world's most hilarious stand-up special, but it isn't supposed to be. Right Now is Aziz Ansari's reckoning with himself.

Perhaps, if we truly want to be the "good guys" we claim to be, we should all aim to do the same.

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