Thread about the 'grey areas' of bad sexual encounters is required reading in the wake of Aziz Ansari allegations

Set aside your feelings about the slew of hot takes that have emerged after the publication of a report accusing Aziz Ansari of sexual misconduct, and please give this powerful Twitter thread your undivided attention.

Writer and radio host Ashley C. Ford shared an arresting anecdote about the grey areas of "bad sexual encounters," highlighting the need for specific language to facilitate difficult, but desperately-required conversations about these experiences.

Ford begins the Twitter thread with a story about an interaction she had with her roommate while at university. She wrote that one of her favourite aspects of college was the extent to which her friends wanted to talk about sex. "Like REALLY talk about sex. The good, the bad, the hilarious, and the downright confusing," she wrote.

She said that on one of those occasions, she spoke to her roommate about her sexual encounters with the man she was dating. But, her roommate's response left her speechless.

"Kind of like sleeping with anyone else. You just lay there and let them do it!" Ford's roommate said to her.

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Ford said that, at first, she tried to figure out if she'd "heard her correctly," but she eventually she asked her what she meant by that.

"You know like when you come home and you're drunk, or you're too tired, or you don't feel like it, but he's there and he wants to, so you just...kinda...let him," the roommate clarified.

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Ford then asked her roommate if she liked having sex that way. The roommate replied saying she liked "him" a lot. "I guess I think of it as something I do for him. Like a thank you, or a compromise," the roommate added.

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Ford asked her roommate a few more questions but the answers continued to worry her. "She didn't feel like she should expect mutual pleasure from her sexual encounters. I couldn't understand why she wouldn't expect--nay, DEMAND--mutual pleasure from sex with another person," said Ford.

But, the discussion between Ford and her roommate did not end on the day of this conversation. Her roommate came to her several months later and told her she'd looked back on those sexual encounters and "could barely remember them" because she'd "go somewhere else in her mind."

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"I started to wonder if I could do to them what they were doing to me. If I could have sex with them while they just laid there. And just the thought of it made me so sad. I just...how do they keep going?" the roommate told Ford.

In the thread, Ford points out that despite the fact that her roommate had "technically" not been sexually assaulted, she had "absolutely been harmed."

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Ford's words, here, are particularly poignant in light of this week's conversations surrounding the sexual encounter described by Grace, who accused Aziz Ansari of sexual misconduct during a date in September 2017.

Ford correctly identifies the urgent need for "better, more definitive language" in order to have "nuanced discussions about the spectrum of harm inflicted on the bodies and psyches of women" during bad sexual experiences.

"We can build that language together, if we keep talking to each other about this," writes Ford.

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Ford then talks about what we, as a society, need to do in order to "snip the cultural thread" that causes what happened to her friend.

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She says that rather than dismissing bad sexual encounters that we struggle to categorise as assault or consensual sex; we need to "call out the grey areas," "learn from them," "go deeper" into them and "have the tougher conversation."

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This is not, as Ford points out, about "warring" with one another. It's about "revealing ourselves" to one another as we speak uncomfortable truths.

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"Don't give up on the conversation because it's hard or you feel ashamed. You're not alone," concludes Ford.

This is just the beginning.