If the swell of revelations and rage that followed #MeToo made you think cracks were appearing in patriarchy’s edifice, look no further than the case of Babe and comedian Aziz Ansari.

On Saturday, the website carried an article describing the experience of a 22-year-old woman who went on a date with Ansari last year. Ever since, think piece after think piece has lashed out at the 22-year-old for potentially destroying Ansari’s career over “a bad date”. Bucketloads of vile has been emptied upon her for expecting Ansari to be a mind-reader. All the while, that Ansari was blind and deaf to her saying she was uncomfortable with his sexual come-ons has been explained away as just a bad date.

We could hiss and spit at each other over the details or we could see the Babe article for what it really is: a badly-written article on a subject that needs to be discussed with maturity and nuance. The article can’t really be called a report because not only does it have just one point of view, it’s also full of editorial comments.

There’s no sense of context given in terms of the power dynamic that’s playing out during the date. The piece also violates a basic rule of journalism when it publishes allegations against Ansari but doesn’t let him present his side of the story (he was given five hours to respond, which is a ridiculously short window).

The style is clumsy and ham-handed, as a result of which the points that deserved emphasis are lost while the ungainly bits stick out. The fault isn’t entirely that of reporter Katie Way. An editor could and should have improved her article, by both smoothening out her awkward style and adding some much-needed perspective. Instead, Babe‘s editorial team decided to stick with sentences like these:

‘After arriving at his apartment in Manhattan on Monday evening, they exchanged small talk and drank wine. “It was white,” she said. “I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.”’

Obviously, Babe thought the wine was a great literary device to show Ansari doesn’t care about women’s opinions. Unfortunately, not only is this trivial and irrelevant, but it serves to paint the subject in a deeply unflattering light. Surely this woman, a 22-year-old in the 21st century, can speak up and voice her wine preference rather than later complain about not being sufficiently catered to?

This inept detailing is seen repeatedly in the Babe article. At one point, after the woman conveyed to Ansari that she isn’t comfortable with his advances, Ansari implies he’s going to back off but instead asks for a blow job. Here’s how Babe describes this moment:

‘When she sat down on the floor next to Ansari, who sat on the couch, she thought he might rub her back, or play with her hair – something to calm her down.

Ansari instructed her to turn around. “He sat back and pointed to his penis and motioned for me to go down on him. And I did. I think I just felt really pressured. It was literally the most unexpected thing I thought would happen at that moment because I told him I was uncomfortable.”’

This comment about expecting a back rub or playing with her hair has been mocked by many, and is deserving of all dramatic eye-rolls. It’s as red as a red herring can get because what we should be looking at is her allegation that despite her telling Ansari that she was feeling forced and him acknowledging her concern, his response was to point at his penis.

While it isn’t Babe‘s fault that so many want to dismiss Ansari’s behaviour as “normal”, the publication does need to take some responsibility for framing this story terribly. The way the article has been written and edited makes it easy for the unsympathetic reader to discredit the woman.

That said, the article (badly-written as it may be) does repeatedly say she felt uncomfortable with the sexual activity she was being subjected to and that she told her date as much only to be ignored. Yet all that any critic seems to be able to talk about is that she wanted red wine and a back rub. Imagine the scene with the roles reversed, with Ansari desperately evading the attentions of an aggressive female partner. How many would defend her behaviour and sexual appetite as normal? Patriarchy, ladies and gentlemen, is alive and kicking.

Babe chose to include those details because it wanted to garner sympathy for the woman and show Ansari to be self-centred and chauvinist. I can only speculate that they didn’t think her account of Ansari chasing her around the apartment and her trying to politely resist him was enough to make his behaviour seem objectionable.

This is the alarming aspect of all the criticisms levelled at the woman and the Babe article – that all of them suggest this sort of sexual “play” is normal. It’s essential we explore the framework within which romance works in our cultures. If what happened between Ansari and the woman is normal and “just a bad date”, then we’ve normalised a lack of consent and violation.

Courtship rituals – flirting, dating, etc – have traditionally been formulated around the idea of women being unaware of what they want and needing a man to show them how they feel. Women’s desires are unknown to themselves, we’re told, while men are always the dominant partners in romantic situations.

Internationally, our pop culture is filled with stories of women’s first response to a man being irritation and rage. She doesn’t know that she’s actually attracted to him and it isn’t until he forces himself upon her (just a little, because you know, he’s a gentleman and he knows what she wants) that she becomes aware of her desire for him. At which point, she’s overcome and collapses into a puddle of lust; as women are apparently wont to do.

Men are told that it falls upon them to be alpha because women are supposedly submissive by nature. A woman’s “no” is to be ignored because they don’t really mean it. How can they? They don’t know what they want and socially, their desires can only be unlocked, like a trophy in a video game, by a good man.

Television host Ashleigh Banfield wrote in an open letter to the woman who says Ansari pressured her, “By your own clear description, this wasn’t a rape, nor was it a sexual assault. Your sexual encounter was ‘unpleasant’ at best. It did not send you to the police. It did not affect your workplace, or your ability to get a job. So what exactly is your beef? That you had a bad date with Aziz Ansari?”

Underlying the sentiments of Banfield and those who agree with her is the assumption that a woman’s experience is only worth discussion if she has been assaulted or raped or been made to suffer in quantifiable terms.

These opinions wilfully turn a blind eye to what should be obvious: violation isn’t the first expression of gender bias. It’s one of the last stages in a process that begins small, at the level of disrespecting women in everyday life, like when on a date, a woman feels she needs to give a man more chances and a man thinks her protests are just lip service. When we treat situations like the one described in Babe as normal, we’re establishing a culture that feels it’s acceptable to disrespect women and that men don’t need to be alert to consent when it comes to sexual activity.

What Babe recounts isn’t an assault, but neither is it “revenge porn” as The Atlantic termed it. How we respond to it is important. Ignore the care with which the woman has framed her own account and describe it as an assault, and you give grounds to all those crying themselves hoarse about women “changing” their minds to back men into defensive corners. Dismiss Ansari’s behaviour and you normalise aggression as well as disrespecting women.

It’s worth looking at Ansari’s own statement to Babe. It’s an admission without any apology. When he says the sexual activity was “by all indications consensual”, he is placing the responsibility of articulating the lack of consent upon his partner and exonerating himself for not being able to read the cues he was provided.

His statement says nothing about examining either his own behaviour or what he didn’t understand in hers. And let’s not forget, judging from his writing in both Modern Romance and Masters of None, Ansari is one of the good guys. Yet that’s the dissonance that we’re seeing again and again. When “woke” men can’t be trusted to respect women in private spaces, it’s because there’s a clash between their evolved gender politics and the unevolved notions of masculinity that they consider normal.

What happened wasn’t “just a bad date”. A bad date is a meeting in which two people find they have nothing to say to each other or that they’re not attracted. It’s regrettable and forgettable, and you move on from it swiftly. A date that you spend trying to avoid the other person’s advances and then suffering them needs a descriptor more complex than “bad”.

In the woman’s behaviour – her hesitation, her unwillingness, her numb panic – and in Ansari’s, are gaps between the expectation and understanding of what makes a man manly, a woman feminine, and sex, consensual.

Yes, Grace should have walked out of Ansari’s apartment the moment she felt uncomfortable and arguably, she could have as well. Instead she stayed. Before judging her, keep in mind that women inherit thousands of years of socialisation that hammers into us that our best chance at self-protection lies in submission.

Society has changed thanks to feminism, but not quite so drastically that this inheritance can be discarded, and so our first instinct is usually to find ways to cooperate with those that scare or threaten us. Maybe the woman was hoping Ansari would read her mind the way romantic heroes do in rom-coms and paperback romances. Maybe she just didn’t want to kick up a big fuss and upset a celebrity. Maybe she thought it would all magically feel better if she just relaxed or if she gave him another chance. When things didn’t improve, she left and then she spoke up.

While the woman’s behaviour in Ansari’s apartment is just as vulnerable and acquiescent as is expected of conventional femininity, what she did afterwards isn’t. To be feminine is to be quiet, vulnerable, compassionate, obedient. She’s supposed to be mollified by Ansari saying he didn’t realise she wasn’t consenting to his advances. She’s supposed to accept the apology that Ansari texted her gratefully and empathise with him. She wasn’t supposed to speak up and point out that she had given him cues to which he turned a blind eye. Perhaps the harsh criticisms to the Babe article come from a point of confusion – if she was going to be submissive in the apartment, then can she claim the right to respond with outrage afterwards?

The reason the date with Ansari is a story worth publishing is because his performance of masculinity leaves him blind to the lack of consent. According to the article, the woman did voice her discomfort. It just didn’t register. Why? Because he was behaving the way men are expected to behave sexually and because he figured that he was entitled to because she’d agreed to come home with him.

The definitions of femininity are changing as are the power balances between genders. To be feminine is no longer to be effeminate, which means the meanings and representations of maleness will also have to change in response.

Around the world, our cultures are faced with the need to allow for shifts in perception that feminism and other social forces are bringing about. We need to create spaces in which women, their desires and their pleasures are treated with respect rather than belittled. If not anything else, even the bad dates will be better than what’s considered normal at present.