The line between seduction and coercion has shifted, and shifted quickly, over the past few years (the past few months, even). When I was in my 20s, a decade ago, sex was something of a melee. 'No means no' was the only rule, and it was still solidly acceptable in mainstream social circles to bother…
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Lindy West
Lindy West (born March 9, 1982) is the feminism and popular culture contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and an author, feminist, fat acceptance movement activist, and film criticism editor. 2Career In 2009, West began working as the film editor for Seattle's alternative weekly newspaper, The Stranger. In 2011, she moved to Los Angeles, but continued to write for The Stranger until September 2012. She was a staff writer for Jezebel where she wrote on racism, sexism, and fat shaming. West's work has been published in The Daily Telegraph, GQ, the New York Daily News, Vulture.com, Deadspin, Cracked.com, MSNBC and The Guardian. In 2013 West won the Social Media Award from the Women's Media Center, presented by Jane Fonda in New York City. Accepting the award, West said, "I hear a lot these days about the lazy, aimless 'millennials' – about how all we want to do is sit around twerking our iPods and Tweedling our Kardashians – and I also hear people asking, 'Where is the next generation of the social justice movement? Where are all the young feminists and womanists and activists?' Dude, they're on the internet." On September 19, 2015, West co-founded Shout Your Abortion, a social media campaign on Twitter where women share their abortion experiences online without "sadness, shame or regret" for the purpose of "destigmatization, normalization, and putting an end to shame". The social media campaign was initiated in response to efforts by the United States House of Representatives to defund Planned Parenthood following the Planned Parenthood 2015 undercover videos controversy. In 2016, West won The Stranger's Genius Award in Literature for her book Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woma
There is a reflexive tendency, when grappling with stories of sexual misconduct like the accusations leveled at Ansari this past weekend — incidents that seem to exist in that vast gray area between assault and a skewed power dynamic — to point out that sexual norms have changed.
In 1975, 42 years before the comedian Aziz Ansari reportedly brought a date home to his apartment and repeatedly tried to initiate sex with her after she told him 'next time' and 'I don’t want to feel forced,' Susan Brownmiller published 'Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.'