#westelmcaleb #westelm #aziz #azizansari #metoo... #Shorts #madymills

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]So, I simply have to add to the West Elm Caleb discourse. For context, I covered the Me Too movement as a video journalist when I worked at New York magazine. And the backlash I'm seeing to the videos about West Elm Caleb really reminded me of my coverage about the backlash to the Aziz Ansari story on babe.net. So, I thought I'd do a little recap of that just to give some context about where we are now and how it relates to where we were then. PSA, before I get into this, doxing, threats of physical violence, outing a private person, obviously not okay. Not conflating these two things as the same.

[00:00:29]Just giving you some context and then you can decide how you feel about it.

[00:00:32]So, for those who don't remember the Aziz situation, quick recap, read the article if you want the exact story. I'm going to paraphrase. It's the anonymous account of a woman who went on a date with Aziz. They go to his house after the date. Intimacy occurs. At two different points, she tells him to stop.

[00:00:46]The third time he tries to initiate things, she says she feels uncomfortable and goes home. This bad date article on babe.net serves as a watershed moment for everyone who's been watching coverage of the Me Too movement so far and has been waiting for something to happen that they could use to delegitimize the movement and say it had gone too far. Caitlin Flanagan writes in The Atlantic that the Me Too movement is trying to cover everything from rape to bad date. She ends the piece saying women destroyed a man who didn't deserve it. Andrew Sullivan uses the Aziz story to cancel the Me Too movement and say it had gone too far. Story after story like this drops after the Aziz story comes out. Prominent feminist writers, survivors at the time were not trying to equate what happened with Aziz to the Weinsteins of the world. I interviewed one survivor of sexual assault from another celebrity and she really supported the idea of people speaking out about bad dates. She described it as all part of a pyramid of systemic sexism that bad dates, little moments of aggression are at the bottom of this big pyramid of problem. And the base of that pyramid creates a support system and can even go so far as creating a pipeline to the more egregious offenses that we were talking about during the height of the Me Too movement. It's not all happening in a vacuum. The other argument is that Aziz's career was destroyed. But was it?

[00:01:58]The year of the bad date article, Aziz was the top paid stand-up comedian. His show was renewed, and of course it impacted his reputation. He did a special apologizing. Just based on pure numbers, he was financially doing better than ever. The podcast You're Wrong About explains this beautifully. Please go listen to the podcast if you haven't.

[00:02:16]One of the hosts says, "It implies a very sweet world view to think that consequences anywhere mean consequences everywhere." Tying this all together, you don't have to be famous, and you don't have to be a criminal for it to mean something that you treated women badly. And women talking about men treating them badly does not necessarily mean the man is going to have devastating consequences. Sometimes it does. Most of the time they'll have no consequences at all.