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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28019 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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This Valentine's Day, I am thinking about why the Pelicot rape case has received so little attention, sparked so little discussion. This is the case of a French man, Dominique Pelicot, who invited 72 men to rape his drugged wife, Gisèle Pelicot, over the course of nine years. The trial took place in 2024 (all accused found guilty), but it surfaced in the NYT again this week. I could not find a single mention of it in on this site.

Yes, it's been reported in every media outlet. No, I'm not claiming it's been hidden or suppressed. But the case has no political relevance. It hasn't generated heated discussion. No one seems to care or talk about it that much. Why? Here are my speculations.

You could claim that this was an isolated incident that has no implications for society in general, that one specific forum enabled the perpetrators to find each other. But these men were mostly from nearby towns, within 50km, from all walks of life.

I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman if there were no consequences. This is the nature of men. We have known this since the beginning of time. Most adults understand this already. The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general, and this particular manifestation is hardly a surprise. Women largely know this force, too, because they have been told of it, or because they have been targeted by it, though they sometimes pretend not to know.

Men aren't eager to discuss this particular case because it is unflattering to the male sex. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to inspire moral outrage among men. It doesn't trigger tribal instincts - race was not a factor, for instance. And a couple of the elements that make rape viscerally repugnant are absent in this case. For one, she was unconscious during the rapes. In some sense, apart from the drugging, the violation was merely psychological - the knowledge post facto of the strangers' assault, and the knowledge of her husband's betrayal - and I have the sense that many men simply struggle to empathize with psychological harms to women. Men can empathize with other men, but in this case the would-be secondary victim, her husband, wanted to cuck himself. "So be it," seems to be the unsaid reaction.

It's harder for me to say why women aren't eager to bring this up as ammunition in the gender wars. Doesn't this vindicate the radical feminists? I see it discussed in forums dominated by women, but not much beyond that, and even there not particularly passionately. Maybe one factor is that Gisèle Pelicot herself apparently didn't believe her daughter's claims of abuses at the hands of her husband, and so isn't the perfect victim. But perhaps the whole thing is just unpleasant and depressing. It seems to shatter the possibility of love, and of the dignity of women among men. She thought he was a good husband.

And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement. No surprises at the trial. No one even cares to come out and repeat the defense of the accused, that they thought she had consented. No one wants to argue. There is nothing to be done. Castrate all men? Don't have the bad luck of marrying a depraved cuck? Conservatives have nothing to say. Do liberals have something to say? If so, I haven't heard it either.

I'm also wondering about the claim that this case has received "little attention". I think it has received a large amount of media attention for an event in France not related to international policy, at least in Finland, and has been discussed in considerable detail by feminists in social media, insofar as I've seen.

To me this case spoke more strongly to the nature of the French, who I have always disliked.

This.

I notice that legacy media occasionally tries to push the story but there’s basically no social media take-up by anyone reading the news, because it gets (rightly) understood as categorised in a box of “Shit French people do”, not “Shit men do”.

And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement.

Exactly, it's the equivalent of a "man tries to rob a grocery store, shoots at police, police return fire, man is shot and killed" crime story. Even if the man is black or gay or trans or disabled, no one important is going to accuse the police of needlessly taking his life.

Sure, there's some merit in estimating the share of men who are so depraved they might have sex with an unconscious old woman, but it looks like it's low enough that no one has to update their priors.

I know very similar things have been said in parallel responses a number of times already, but really, you have answered your own question in the last paragraph. The world is a terrible place! This story is outrageous, but so is the life story of every single one of a million of starving orphans in the Third World, any random child of a single mother having a severe case of Münchhausen syndrome by proxy, or lone elderly person caught up in one of those Floridan elderly care scams where the local judge and state-appointed legal guardians are in cahoots, or anyone working in a Bangladeshi sweatshop. It turns out we don't actually care for all these horrible fates if they don't directly intersect with ours, and we surely wouldn't even have the capacity to if we actually tried.

Whether accurate or not, the pitch of the toxoplasma stories is that their contents, and our allocating a share of mind-space to having a stance on them, will have a real material impact on our lives. What is the pitch for caring about the Pelicot case, over caring about any of the other myriad of outrageous tragedies including the ones I listed above?

I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman if there were no consequences. This is the nature of men. We have known this since the beginning of time. Most adults understand this already. The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general, and this particular manifestation is hardly a surprise. Women largely know this force, too, because they have been told of it, or because they have been targeted by it, though they sometimes pretend not to know.

Have we really known this? What large fraction?

It would be uncharitable to say you are typical-minding here, and I am not trying to establish myself as some kind of saint by saying "What the fuck?" but really... what the fuck? To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is, and I have a hard time believing I'm some weird undersexed outlier. It's not even just about it being rape (which it obviously is), but it would also be like fucking a RealDoll, which I know some men do also but I have always thought has to be the absolute last refuge of the desperate and pathetic.

Obviously there are men who get off on it (I know there are men who will stick their dicks in anything warm), but I'm unconvinced, even if this guy found 72 of them, that they aren't akin to rapists and pedophiles... sure, we all know these urges exist in the male population, and they aren't super-rare, but neither are they... normal.

It's harder for me to say why women aren't eager to bring this up as ammunition in the gender wars. Doesn't this vindicate the radical feminists?

It only vindicates them if you agree with them that this is in fact the natural state of men and we'd all do it if given the chance and that every husband secretly hates his wife. That's certainly a view unironically held in parallel, horseshoe-like, by a certain strain of radical feminists and ultra-misogynists, but the problem is that they are largely wrong about men being amoral rapacious monsters barely(unfairly) held in check by society.

And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement

Well, yeah. I doubt even our he-man woman-haters will be able to muster much of a "This wasn't actually bad" argument. How do you defend it? She was unconscious so she didn't really suffer? She's female and therefore should be available for any use to which her husband sees fit? You have to go pretty far out there to defend the indefensible. Some things don't engender disagreement even between liberals and conservatives.

To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is, and I have a hard time believing I'm some weird undersexed outlier. It's not even just about it being rape (which it obviously is), but it would also be like fucking a RealDoll, which I know some men do also but I have always thought has to be the absolute last refuge of the desperate and pathetic.

I’d add my 2 cents from a dudebro perspective.

If you’re a toxic shitty dudebro with a friend group of the same sort, you’re likely to regularly engage in acts that you basically consider to be pranks. Either you do this in a pair or in a group, or by yourself, but also in the latter case you’re mostly doing it to gain bragging rights and form memories with other shithead dudebros.

Some examples I can think of: acts of vandalism and theft typically associated with teenage delinquency. (Smashing up the mailbox of that neighbor you hate. Stealing a car while drunk, going on a joyride at night, abandoning it at some desolate place. Stealing and shoplifting for the hell of it.) Pulling pranks on your loser computer nerd classmates and bullying them. Getting blackout drunk and boning the town slut. Getting some loser broad drunk/drugged and spit-and-roasting her with your bro. Lying to some woman you picked up that you’ll use a rubber and then doing her bareback. Going on an exotic vacation and boning some whorey tourist girls. Picking up some fat girl who’s clearly desperate and without self-esteem, debasing her sexually (but still consensually, at least in the everyday normie sense of the word) and never calling her afterwards. Jizzing on your girlfriend’s hair even though you promised her you won’t do that. And boning some unconscious / passed-out girl.

The sole reason you’re engaging in any of this is so that you can brag and tell stories about it to your bros, have a good laugh about it and down another round of drinks, and forget about it until you bring it up again sometime later. It’s not that you’re proud about it; on some level you do realize that all of this is kind of wrong, and that you’d never do this to a woman you do care about, or you imagine you would care about. And it’s also assumed that you’ll embellish or simply make up some details. After all, it’s done for laughs, to have fun. Your bros know it, and you know that they do the same things, the embellishment included. It’s basically a male bonding ritual. And it’s not like sleazy women don’t have something similar anyway.

To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is

I am a man who happens to have this fetish, and indeed I am a man who related this fetish to my gf, she thought it was hot, and we contrived some bs about our apartment being too close to a busy highway in order to get a doctor to prescribe heavy-duty sleeping pills that we could indulge this fetish. And it was great.

It’s the “doing another guy’s wife” and “doing a fugly old grandma” that confuses me about the appeal. Not the unconsciousness, which, indeed, is a distinct improvement over the vanilla sex act.

And it was great.

Out of curiosity – I assume you mean it was great for you? Presumably your girlfriend didn't remember it? Or did she?

I did indeed mean that it was great for me and she didn’t remember it. However, she’s a self-proclaimed sub, and so while she didn’t remember the act, the abstract knowledge of it has an enduring appeal.

Well, I believe there is a fetish for everything, but you know that fetishes by definition are outside the norm, right? And your girlfriend was willing - would you actually do it to a woman who hadn't consented?

but you know that fetishes by definition are outside the norm, right?

Well that’s begging the question isn’t it? We are trying to puzzle out who are really the minority, those who see the unconscious woman as a gross RealDoll vs those who still see her as person.

would you actually do it to a woman who hadn't consented?

No, sure, but your previous post wasn’t complaining about the absence of consent, it was complaining about the absence of consciousness.

Okay, but specifically asking a woman to let you drug her so you can fuck her unconscious body and her agreeing to cater to this very specific fetish is not the central example of "Guys who like fucking unconscious women."

If she's into it, okay, whatever. (Though, sorry, yes, I still think that's weird. But lots of people are into things I think are weird.)

is not the central example of "Guys who like fucking unconscious women."

You are basing this statement on what evidence?

I can get the appeal of sleep sex as an extension of a freeuse fetish (where the focus is on relieving oneself without the worry of mutual pleasure, essentially enhanced masturbation) but I'm baffled that you consider it a strict improvement. Not being able to see the woman in pleasure is a considerable opportunity cost, even setting aside the lost potential of her active participation.

As someone with a hobby for trying to theory-of-mind others' fetishes, I would imagine that there is some element of taking observation/judgement to detract from the enjoyability of the act, or feel oppressive in a way that doesn't let you fully indulge sexually - some sort of anti-exhibitionism (except not necessarily concerned with the gaze of third parties as much as with that of your target?), and closely related to the time stop trope (the thing where the protagonist can freeze his time for everyone but himself and have his way with the bodies of other people in everyday situations, the targets being none the wiser).

If you were to feel crushingly self-conscious about how the person you are performing any sexual act with perceives you, it would make sense that any act where that possibility is not removed would be strictly inferior.

Close, but you’re way off. I think I’d describe it more as “Will you please just shut up and stop getting in the way of my enjoyment”. Sex with a conscious partner is like trying to watch a movie with someone who’s always interrupting: “Ooh can we rewind I liked that bit”, “Volume up please!”, “Want some popcorn?”; and I’m like do you mind I’m trying to concentrate. Being obliged to consider someone else’s watching preferences takes me right out of the zone.

Now, in fairness, sometimes you really are more interested in the watch party bantz than the watching itself. But not often.

It's a fetish so of course it doesn't have to be rational, and it's been around a long time. I can't remember where I read this years ago, and I don't know if it's true or just fiction, but there were claims that some Victorian brothels specialised in having prostitutes who pretended to be, or were drugged to be, sleeping while clients had sex with them. Other claims were pretending to be dead, to the extent of lying in a coffin and wearing heavy makeup to look pale and bloodless.

Again, no idea if this is truth or fiction, but it's possible.

The two parts of your statement do not logically synch up. If you don’t consider it an improvement, then you don’t see the appeal, because, by your own logic, it is not appealing (compared to the default).

I think Eupraxia means that it's one thing for sleep sex to have its own appeal that might make up for the advantages it otherwise lacks relative to conventional mutual sex; and another thing to declare it a strict improvement.

I don’t know what the percentage is, but it seems we have ample evidence to conclude that some nontrivial percentage of men really would rape more or less any human given the chance. Between this case, the Epstein Files, Rotherham, wartime rape, I wouldn’t be surprised at any number between 5 and 80 percent of men.

5 percent I believe. I don't think you'd find 80 percent in an Indian slum.

To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is, and I have a hard time believing I'm some weird undersexed outlier. It's not even just about it being rape (which it obviously is), but it would also be like fucking a RealDoll, which I know some men do also but I have always thought has to be the absolute last refuge of the desperate and pathetic.

I'm just a "desperate and pathetic" virgin, but I think this sounds unreasonable. Isn't it a stereotype that the hotter a woman is, the less effort she feels that she needs to put into sex? Yet, despite this stereotype, men still seek out hot women (including prostitutes). The difference between sex with a lazy "starfish" woman and sex with an unconscious woman seems negligible.

Isn't it a stereotype that the hotter a woman is, the less effort she feels that she needs to put into sex?

I've encountered this claim on many occasions. There's no way to express the following opinion without sounding like I'm humblebragging, so consider this an inb4.

I've had an unusually high number of female sexual partners, so my sample size is unusually large. Some of those partners I would consider quite attractive (with the caveat that none were literal supermodels or Hollywood actresses); some were "mid"; some were not even that, and I only had sex with them out of sheer desperation at the tail end of a lengthy dry spell. If this claim (that attractive women put in less effort in the bedroom) has any truth to it, then in my fairly extensive sexual history I honestly cannot claim to have observed it firsthand. I've been with hot girls who starfished and passable girls who starfished; I've been with hot girls who were rearing to go and passable girls who were rearing to go. I think the best predictors of how enthusiastic a woman will be in bed are a) her basal sex drive (controlling for how long it's been her last sexual encounter); b) her sexual experience (everyone's a little shy and awkward their first few times; the trope of the pure virgin who's a demon in the sack during her deflowering only exists in porn); and c) how attracted she is to her sexual partner. In the latter case I'm thinking in particular of a fairly hot girl I met ~7 years ago, who did have sex with me but seemed of two minds about it. I imagine it would have been a very different experience if I'd been someone with whom she had more chemistry.

Frankly, I think this "hot girls are all crap in bed, while mid girls give it socks" thing is one of the purest, most transparent examples of sour grapes in human history. I daresay most men claiming as much have literally never had sex with an unusually attractive woman, and so aren't in a position to make any kind of generalisation.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that my assorted sexual partners came from a diverse array of ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, socioeconomic statuses and so on. It's not like I'm making a sweeping generalisation about the entire fairer sex based on a sample drawn from a single country.

The difference between sex with a lazy "starfish" woman and sex with an unconscious woman seems negligible.

I assure you, it is not. I've had sex with women who seemed a bit unenthused or tired etc., but I would never dream of having sex with a woman who was literally unconscious.

As a contra anecdote - I've also slept with lots of women, and I've found my level of attractiveness varying quite a bit over the course of my life so I've done a decent range.

I've found this meme to be an exaggeration but mostly true. Plenty of mid women are mid in bed, but the gorgeous women were way more likely to be bad, especially 9s and 10s. Being bad in bed doesn't always mean unenthusiastic, but plenty of 9s and 10s just didn't know how to do anything. Importantly this sometimes included what they liked - since they knew they could count on a man trying as hard as possible they never put much effort into figuring themselves out either, much less a dick.

Might be enthusiastic, but technical skills were rare.

Women have a meme about men with big dicks being bad in bed, and similarly it's not universally true but really does seem to capture the heart of it.

especially 9s and 10s

I suppose everyone has their own definition, but assuming a “10” is at least 99.9th percentile for fit, healthy people your age (so probably 99.99th percentile overall; one in ten thousand men or women) I think seducing many 10s would be quite impressive.

Isn't a "10" more likely to be, uh -- 90th %tile?

Unless you are using the female scale, which as I recall is exponential to the point where a 90th %tile man is like a "5" -- men are much more linear!

It seems better to model it like a normal distribution where the vast majority of people are in the 3.5 to 6.5 range. Your way seems to lead to a lot of ambiguity between what counts as an 8 or a 9 or a 10, for example, because they’re all equally common.

That's the female scale! I maintain that my way is far closer to the way that men see the world; it is, in fact, non-trivial to tell the difference between a 9 (maybe even an 8) and a 10.

The neat part is that this... kind of reflects the male view on attractiveness pretty perfectly.

Fair dinkum - my standard for what a 9 or a 10 is is something like "is a model" "could be a model" "if you told your friends she was a model they would believe it." With a 10 being more of a get drunk with your bros and sass each other and they won't disagree she is a 10 even though that is a big brag.

I don't think I've thought of it the terms you describe but it's an interesting thought. If a 10 means 99.9th percentile then it really means something, but I suspect you'd run into taste issues. Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, and Lisa (Blackpink) are all probably 10s by any objective standard but if you go by 99.9th percentile for an individual man's interest then at least one of those three is likely to get thrown out most of the time (see: the hate for Zendaya here).

Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, and Lisa (Blackpink) are all probably 10s by any objective standard but if you go by 99.9th percentile for an individual man's interest then at least one of those three is likely to get thrown out most of the time (see: the hate for Zendaya here).

I agree that the people calling Zendaya ugly are overdoing it: by any metric she's a pretty girl. But I'd hardly call her a 10/10. In fact, I think part of the basis of her appeal is that she has a certain girl-next-door quality that makes her seem approachable and down-to-earth: a nerdy MCU fan projecting himself onto Tom Holland could imagine himself dating Zendaya in a way he couldn't with (to pick a handful of her MCU costars) Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman or Cobie Smulders. I think any of these women (in their prime) would be considered more attractive than Zendaya by just about everyone.

I mean this is where taste comes in - you'll note that she doesn't look at all like your other examples.

That said she's literally famous for being beautiful in an industry that the most beautiful people in the world go into. If getting paid millions of dollars a year to be beautiful isn't a sign of being a 10/10 then I don't know what is.

You are allowed to find her not attractive. Many people don't like um ethnic women, or women who are low on curves. That's preference, but if we are looking objectively...

More comments

We should compare spreadsheets. (You do have a spreadsheet, right?)

I am an adult in a committed relationship now. For legal reasons any spreadsheet would have been deleted looooong ago.

I did have a (female???) friend who kept detailed information on her phone with phallus stats, which should would whip out at parties from time to time.

That was always horrifying and amusing.

Dying to understand the significance of the three question marks.

I am an adult in a committed relationship now.

So am I. The spreadsheet stays.😁

Dying to understand the significance of the three question marks.

Gossiping with your girlies about men's performance is very female coded. A spreadsheet (or document) with detailed stats is very male coded.

So am I. The spreadsheet stays.😁

I like my balls attached, thanks.

Isn't it a stereotype that the hotter a woman is, the less effort she feels that she needs to put into sex?

Uh, I understood the stereotype is that the hotter she is, the less effort she needs to put into obtaining sex. Which is pretty obviously true. The stereotype that hot women neither enjoy nor actively participate in sex is a new one to me, unless you're just referring to the stereotype that women in general don't really enjoy sex and only perform it to the minimum degree necessary to secure a mate. Which, may be true for a lot of women, but (ahem) I have it on good authority, not all of them.

I cannot say I am a connoisseur of prostitutes but my understanding also is that men generally prefer hookers to at least pretend to be into it and are not going to enjoy the experience much if she just lies there with an "Are you done yet?" expression on her face.

The difference between sex with a lazy "starfish" woman and sex with an unconscious woman seems negligible.

Can't say I've done either, but damn, who are these guys finding? And obviously, the difference would still be pretty significant in terms of at least implied consent (which, evidently and depressingly, a lot of guys still seem to think is a quaint modern notion that we shouldn't care about that much).

"Obtaining" is probably not the correct word. She's "obtaining" sex with the man whether she's enthusiastic or not, after all. That's not the relevant part. What I think is going on here is that hot women normally assume, for a good reason, that they have a strong mesmerizing effect on men. If she submits to a man's desire, she assumes that he'll be so overwhelmed with urge and longing that he'll be unable to think of anything else but taking her in hand and ravishing her. This has indeed been normally the case throughout history. It's just the typical female fantasy (heh) and the reason why "rape fantasies" exist. The idea that she'd need to proactively take additional steps to inflame his urges so as to ensure that he really wants her and that he's really enjoying it all is, frankly, not only alien but also degrading and demoralizing to her.

That sounds like a just-so story. How many hot women have you had sex with, to know so much about the calculations in their mind and their sexual performance? Do you base this on anything at all other than supposition?

Uh, I understood the stereotype is that the hotter she is, the less effort she needs to put into obtaining sex.

That's less a stereotype than a factual statement. But @ToaKraka is far from the first person I've seen claiming that attractive women are crap in bed, while mid women are demons in the sack. I don't think there's anything to it, but I have independently encountered multiple men making such a claim.

Uh, I understood the stereotype is that the hotter she is, the less effort she needs to put into obtaining sex.

I'm pretty sure I've seen jokes on 4chan (and possibly even on Reddit) about how the ugly "practice girlfriend" will put in extra effort in bed while a hotter woman will not. But I can't find any such jokes after a cursory search.

they are largely wrong about men being amoral rapacious monsters barely(unfairly) held in check by society.

I think you're wrong here actually. I think you're the one doing typical minding, and most men are actually like this. Some are like you and me, who find that behavior repugnant, but then... Africa. And India. And and and.

I think this is another case of fish in the post-Christian sea having no idea about water.

I linked this down-thread but there's notes about each of the convicted rapists in this case here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelicot_rape_case#Convicted

Do you see a pattern?

I'll admit some of these fit some stereotypes.

Nizar Hamida

Had eight prior convictions, including domestic violence and attempted abduction of his child with a former partner.[65] Said he went for a sexual encounter to celebrate the end of his bachelor days as his wife-to-be was arriving shortly from Tunisia.[64]

Mohamed Rafaa

Had prior conviction for raping his 17-year-old daughter, for which he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Raped Gisèle while the Pelicots were at their daughter's holiday home on the Île de Ré.[64]

Hassan Ouamou

Convicted in absentia having fled the country, travelling between Morocco and Romania claiming no intention of returning to France. Thirteen prior convictions in connection with theft, violence, drugs, and possession of weapons.

But to me it's not that solid a pattern. Plenty of these people have proper French sounding names and like they'd be familiar with Christianity.

The most solid theme for me is: losers and imbeciles with a splash of psychopathy.

I also noticed the overrepresentation of Arab names among the perpetrators.

I'm skeptical that Christianity (or Western civilization) is the sole difference, though I know this is a popular theory (with Christians). Yes, large parts of the third world are rapacious hellholes, but there are ancient and contemporary non-Christian societies that do not seem to have been such.

I'd like to draw the distinction between states with enough capacity (and will) to deter rape by threat of violent reprisal, and peoples who believe that rape is implicitly morally wrong regardless of circumstance.

As far as I can tell this is a uniquely Christian innovation. Even the notion that a woman should have the final veto in whether she gets married seems to be Christian; c.f. the custom of the priest asking her if 'she does'.

Jewish legal codes speak for themselves and Islam is cool with sex slaves taken in wartime. Pagans understood rape as a normal reward for conquering armies and that higher class men could naturally enough have their way with lower class women, not to mention slaves.

Really, the notion that rape is wrong is fairly peculiar historically.

Same with murdering one's own infant children but that's another topic.

Jewish legal codes speak for themselves

Could you expand on this? I'm not familiar.

As far as I can tell this is a uniquely Christian innovation.

I mean, the Chinese have evidence of this in writing even in pre-Imperial history; 墨子 discusses punishments for rape during the Warring States period, and various annals including 春秋左傳 and 詩經 describe rape in a decidedly disapproving manner. I'm sure other cultures would

This is, of course, in the background of a very different philosophical culture and climate than Christian Europe. For one, the Christian idea of sin is probably actually quite peculiar, which I suspect makes much of the difference in mental interpretation.

墨子 discusses punishments for rape during the Warring States period, and various annals including 春秋左傳 and 詩經 describe rape in a decidedly disapproving manner.

Yeah but they disapprove because it soils the man’s qi, in a ‘this practice is not consistent with obviating temporal desire and attaining the Dao’ sort of way. That a woman is involved at all, let alone an unwilling one, is of no consequence - they’d complain just as much about a long goon session.

I think this is really quite inaccurate, and frankly, quite disparaging and myopic.

For one, since I previously referenced 墨子 Mozi:

墨子卷十五號令

官府城下吏卒民家前後左右相傳保火火發自燔燔曼延燔人斷諸以眾彊凌弱少及彊姦人婦女以讙譁者皆斷

Mozi, Chapter 15, section on Orders and Commandments

Among the officials, officers, soldiers, and common people within the government offices and the city, those to the front, rear, left, and right are mutually responsible for reporting and preventing fires. If a fire breaks out due to one's own negligence, and it spreads to harm others, the responsible party shall be beheaded. For any who use their numbers to bully the few or the weak, who forcefully violate or rape women, or those who encourage such actions, all such offenders shall be beheaded.

We can see that rape is packaged as part of actions that harm others.

Aside from this, while rape (as 强姦/彊姦) is not often directly mentioned in Chinese annals except in legal settings, the euphemisms used are telling.

The most direct is 妻/妻略 - “to wickedly take [as if she was] a wife”; others include:

  • 不敬 - “to show disrespect”
  • 非禮 - “to fail to behave in accordance to ritual and manners”
  • 弗賓 - “to fail to treat as a guest”
  • 姦亂 - “anarchic/disorderly licentiousness”
  • Etc.

Even in veiled form, these terms show disapproval of rape both as a personal affront to the woman as well as besmirching the honour of her husband or clan. Of course this is not quite the same idea as our liberal standards of rape, but it nevertheless is very far from the idea “that a woman is involved at all, let alone an unwilling one, is of no consequence”. And to this day, the term for molestation is 非禮.

Or you could go through eyewitness accounts of the Nanjing event for more details about how the Chinese reacted to the rape of their women. That works, too.

What makes your statement even more bizarre is that some Chinese cults that actually do have a strong proscription not just on rape, but on sex in general, sometimes were also the most sex-egalitarian; IIRC some millenarian cults (maybe some parts of the White Lotus societies?) worshipping Wusheng Laomu were like this, though I couldn’t find any sources in a hurry. Traditional Daoist thinking would both admit that 精 "essence" is lost in ejaculation, but that abstinence produced various maladies and infirmities, so caution and moderation would be most healthful.

hieroglyphics

Links: 1 2 3

I would argue that it is more accurate to say that it is "uniquely Western" as we see similar attitudes present in the late Roman Republic, but to the extent that one's notion of "Western Civilization" is inextricably entangled with the influence of Christianity, I agree.

Really, the notion that rape is wrong is fairly peculiar historically.

I would argue that women have always thought it's wrong, so it seems more like the notion that women's feelings should be considered is peculiar historically. And I don't think it's that peculiar, or that Christians have been particularly better about not raping and treating lower class women as public goods. It is definitely not a uniquely Christian innovation that women have some say in who they marry; Christians are not the first people ever who recognized female agency and gave women rights.

Your reference to Jewish legal codes and Islam makes me think we're going to go down the same road we've gone before, where the worst and most uncharitable readings of what other religious books say should be taken literally, without context, and as exactly what all those people really believe and those with a more humanitarian reading aren't really following their religion, whereas Christianity (and the Old Testament in particular) should be not subjected to similar treatment.

I weary of the women-haters (I don't mean you, though you seem to be giving them too much credit) who argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property and before our modern age, no man in any civilization ever gave a shit how females felt about their treatment.

The changes to law codes imposed by Christian missionaries are, afaik, not really disputable; they do seem to involve women being asked their consent to marriage. This process occasionally happens today in parts of the deep third world where Christianization imposes huge increases in the rights of women over very low baselines.

It's fair to point out that Christianity does not immediately solve every problem with poor treatment of marginalized groups, and that societies which are not Christian often have some informal pressure for women to get the rights Christian law codes later guarantee(the Viking sagas are quite explicit that a woman's father's consent is important to a marriage, not hers, but use the girl's consent as a trope marker for good fatherhood). But anthropologists are still making hay out of cultural differences between villages in polynesia and remote parts of Africa and the Amazon which were Christianized at different times. It seems to be a robust finding that women and girls in traditional societies have a much better go(albeit not up to modern western societies) when their village is Christian.

I'm not disputing that Christianity greatly improved the lot of women (and the poor, and many other marginalized groups). I'm disputing that improvements in women's rights are uniquely Christian and that only Christian societies ever treated them as more than property.

I weary of the women-haters (I don't mean you, though you seem to be giving them too much credit) who argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property and before our modern age, no man in any civilization ever gave a shit how females felt about their treatment.

There are precious few (though admittedly not zero) women-haters here who "argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property". Most restrain themselves to recognizing that humans tend to view each other instrumentally by default, and that includes men viewing women instrumentally, women viewing men instrumentally, and society viewing both instrumentally. That the non-women-haters seem to only be concerned about the former and sometimes the latter--when women are being viewed instrumentally by society--demonstrates they don't view men as humans deserving rights and view women as inherently superior to men.

There are precious few (though admittedly not zero) women-haters here who "argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property".

If I had a nickel...

It wouldn't be a lot of nickels, but it would be more than one.

That the non-women-haters seem to only be concerned about the former and sometimes the latter--when women are being viewed instrumentally by society--demonstrates they don't view men as humans deserving rights and view women as inherently superior to men.

The concise response to this is "balderdash."

The less concise response is basically the same with more words: people (like me) who push back against those who view women as instrumental goods/property are not the "Women Are Wonderful" simps the latter like to characterize the former as, but merely arguing that we are all human beings and part of rising above our monkey natures (which should be our goal as a species with starfaring ambitions) requires not viewing every relationship as transactional and every other human being as an instrumental good. This includes treating women as Sex, and whatever bad thing you think women treat men as.

How are "people who push back against those who view women as instrumental goods/property" and never push back against those who view men as instrumental goods/property while smearing any who do as "women-hater" not deserving of the title "Women Are Wonderful" simps?

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I think the starting point is to ask which rape/sexual assault cases DO get a lot of attention. And the answer to that is simple. When the person accused is Jeffrey Epstein; Harvey Weinstein; members of the Duke Lacrosse team; etc. In other words, if the alleged perpetrator is coded as being part of the white elite.

Stranger rapes with a "perfect victim" (roughly, middle-class and hot) get a lot of attention locally when they happen regardless of the perp.

Nobody gives a flying flamingo about date rapes or rapes of chavettes unless they happen to reinforce a partisan narrative. The Weinstein and Epstein cases have the legs they do because "blue-state white male 'billionaire'* elites are depraved sex pests" can be used to reinforce both partisan narratives, and the (((perps))) having an obvious ethnic skew that powerful people don't want to talk about gives you double super conspiracy theory memeness.

* Epstein liked people to think he was a billionaire, and is widely referred to as one by his left-wing political opponents, but his net worth peaked in the mid three figures. Weinstein never claimed to be a billionaire, and his net worth peaked in the low three figures. This is part of a general problem talking about the super-rich, which is that the level of wealth needed to qualify is between $30 and $100 million depending on who you ask, and neither "millionaire" nor "billionaire" is a useful description at that level. The midwit leftists complaining about "billionaires" absolutely mean to include Weinstein and Epstein in the group they are complaining about.

Stranger rapes with a "perfect victim" (roughly, middle-class and hot) get a lot of attention locally when they happen regardless of the perp.

I basically agree with this. Kind of a variant on Missing White Woman Syndrome.

Nobody gives a flying flamingo about date rapes or rapes of chavettes unless they happen to reinforce a partisan narrative. The Weinstein and Epstein cases have the legs they do because "blue-state white male 'billionaire'* elites are depraved sex pests" can be used to reinforce both partisan narratives, and the (((perps))) having an obvious ethnic skew that powerful people don't want to talk about gives you double super conspiracy theory memeness.

I basically agree with this as well. Although I think that if Weinstein or Epstein had been non-Jewish, the amount of mainstream attention would have been roughly the same. It's basically the fact that they are coded as elites, particularly white elites IMO.

I think they would have got the same amount of attention in the first few months after coming out. But it is the "outsider" (including fake outsiders like Trump when he was in opposition) conspiracy theory-type interest in Epstein which makes the scandal run for years, and I can see that "was he Mossad" is a huge part of that.

Although I think that if Weinstein or Epstein had been non-Jewish, the amount of mainstream attention would have been roughly the same. It's basically the fact that they are coded as elites, particularly white elites IMO.

I think the Jewishness means the Hard-Right pounds the drum harder, but if they were non-Jewish then the NGO-Left would pound the drum harder, so in the end it kinda balances out, yeah.

I think the NGO-left is lousy with 'anti-Zionist' anti-semites for whom "Mossad is sponsoring paedophiles" is catnip in the same way "Jewish elites are sponsoring paedophiles" is catnip for right-populist anti-semites.

I think the NGO-left is lousy with 'anti-Zionist' anti-semites for whom "Mossad is sponsoring paedophiles" is catnip in the same way "Jewish elites are sponsoring paedophiles" is catnip for right-populist anti-semites.

I would have to agree with this, except that far-right anti-semites seem to get pretty excited about "anti-Zionism" as well.

AFAIK Bill Cosby was canceled for sex stuff and he's black. Is he "coded as a white elite" too? Or are "elite-coded" and "white elite-coded" synonymous?

Is he "coded as a white elite" too?

They considered him a race traitor.

AFAIK Bill Cosby was canceled for sex stuff and he's black. Is he "coded as a white elite" too? Or are "elite-coded" and "white elite-coded" synonymous?

Probably you could come up with a formula for the amount of attention an allegation of sexual misbehavior will receive based on various factors including the perceived race, social status, notoriety, etc. of the alleged wrongdoer, the alleged victim, etc.

I'm certainly not claiming that alleged sex crimes by non-white celebrities receive no attention. If someone is well known, then a serious accusation of wrongdoing against that person is going to get attention. That being said, I'm pretty sure that if Bill Cosby had been white, the allegations against him would have gotten much more attention.

OTOH, Cosby was conservative coded. On the other hand, Diddy. On the gripping hand, Tyson.

his net worth peaked in the low three figures

Is this a typo or do you mean +10,002,000 with obligations of -10,000,000? Which indeed is very different from a man with $2000 in his account, although we don't have good ways to talk about this.

I was puzzled by this. I think he meant deca-millionaire. Maybe it’s a British thing?

Low/mid three figure millions. Online guesses of peak net worth are 300-500 million for Epstein and 150-250 million for Weinstein.

Dropping the last six figures when talking about client net worth/deal size is a financial professional shibboleth. (Even relatively successful financial professionals are not rich enough to do this when talking about our own money). I should probably stop doing it on the Motte.

I’ve heard “he is worth 100 or 150” without giving the base but I’ve never heard anyone mention figures while dropping the first six.

I probably overgeneralise some of these things. I am still trying to promote "metre" as a colloquial term for 10^9 Euros.

[Joke explanation for non-traders - "yard" is a corruption of "milliard" which was used in old-school British English to refer to 10^9, with "billion" being 10^12. (This convention is still used in French and German.) So a "yard" was traderspeak for 10^9 currency units, assumed USD unless otherwise stated]

You may give the wrong impression, yes :) Though very interesting to know!

Celebrities get more attention than regular people? Shocker.

I'd never heard of Epstein prior to his arrest. "Celebrity" is a bit of a reach.

Not quite the right word, perhaps. Still, is elites being more scrutinized by the public eye such an oddity?

No, absolutely not, provided the scrutiny is actually warranted (the Duke lacrosse case being a prominent example in which it was not).

Duke lacrosse bros weren’t celebrities

Duke lacrosse bros weren’t celebrities

Agreed. And if the accused individuals in the France case had been French bankers that nobody had ever heard of before, you can bet the case would have provoked a lot more outrage.

Even Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein weren't celebrities in the sense that they were relatively unknown before the accusations came out against them; the main reason they are well known is the accusations themselves.

Even Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein weren't celebrities

To echo @FiveHourMarathon: other than Harvey Weinstein, the only single individuals more frequently thanked in Oscar acceptance speeches were Steven Spielberg and God. If that's not a celebrity, I don't know what is.

If you asked the average Joe or Jane in early 2000s who Harvey Weinstein was I bet few would know (do ordinary people pay attention to thank you’s in an Oscar speech — do they even pay attention to the Oscar’s?).

If you showed a picture even less would’ve been able to tell you who that was.

If you asked them who Clooney was, a majority would be able to tell you.

do they even pay attention to the Oscar’s?

They don't now, but this is a fairly recent phenomenon. I'm old enough to remember people being outraged when The Dark Knight didn't receive a Best Picture nomination, a decision which was so controversial that it was the primary impetus for increasing the number of nominees from 5 to 10. In absolute terms, the best ratings the Oscars ever received was in 1998, when 57 million Americans (i.e. 20% of the country) tuned in. For comparison, in the same year the Seinfeld season finale saw 76 million viewers (27% of the country) tune in. Until very recently the Oscars were just as much as part of the Zeitgeist as any major sports tournament and would make for just as reliable water-cooler conversation.

Separately from the Oscars thing, The Weinstein Company produced some of the highest-grossing films of the twenty-first century, meaning millions of people would have seen the name "Weinstein" immediately before watching a film they enjoyed. That's bound to create name recognition and positive mental associations.

If you showed a picture even less would’ve been able to tell you who that was.

A noisy metric. People who work behind the camera are bound to be less facially recognisable than people who work in front of it, but that doesn't mean they aren't famous. A lot of people couldn't identify Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Alfred Hitchcock, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson etc. from their photos, but don't tell me these men aren't famous.

Sure people used to watch the Oscars (though still not most people). Someone ruining Weinstein in passing would not create widespread name recognition. Movies perhaps but even then how many people paid attention to that kind of thing?

Walt Disney was some what recognizable as he did shows etc as part of marketing. The other famous people were directors and people would go see movies due to directors. Pretty rare to go see a movie because of a producer.

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Harvey Weinstein was extremely well known before the accusations themselves.

Harvey Weinstein was extremely well known before the accusations themselves.

The average person had no idea who Harvey Weinstein was before the infamous article came out. But anyway, let's assume for the sake of argument that he was a celebrity. Certainly Reid Seligmann had not been a celebrity.

@ChickenOverlord

He was well known enough for his name and activities to be a punchline in 30 Rock and for his name and appearance and attitudes to be parodied in Entourage which I suppose were higher concept than like, NCIS or Friends but not exactly esoteric knowledge.

He was well known enough for his name and activities to be a punchline in 30 Rock and for his name and appearance and attitudes to be parodied in Entourage which I suppose were higher concept than like, NCIS or Friends but not exactly esoteric knowledge.

Obviously it's a matter of semantics, but I would say that these things do not make him a celebrity, although I would agree he was well known within his industry. In any event, I think the example of Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty shows that the "celebrity" hypothesis lacks explanatory power. Unless of course you strategically re-define the word "celebrity"

The stuff in 30 Rock was inside baseball, nothing to do with the average person.

He was well known in the movie industry and by film nerds and by the sorts of people who actually pay attention to movie credits (guilty as charged), but he wasn't really well known amongst the general public.

Yes, the "Duke lacrosse bros" weren't themselves celebrities, but also nobody knows or refers to them as individuals merely as pseudo-anonymous representatives of an elite University.

But that’s conflating things—elite and celebrity. The two do not always go hand in hand.

Yes, the "Duke lacrosse bros" weren't themselves celebrities, but also nobody knows or refers to them as individuals merely as pseudo-anonymous representatives of an elite University.

I think the key word here is "elite." The woke media were super excited about the idea of elite white frat-boy types gang-raping a black woman. It totally fit their Narrative.

Duke University is a celebrity because it is an elite university. Representatives of Duke University become celebrities by proxy in their representative role, which is why they are always referred to as "member of the Duke lacrosse team" rather than individually named.

Duke University is a celebrity because it is an elite university. Representatives of Duke University become celebrities by proxy in their representative role, which is why they are always referred to as "member of the Duke lacrosse team" rather than individually named.

What would you say about a university which is not elite, but still very well known. For example, Alabama or Texas A & M. Would you say those qualify as "celebrities" under your definition?

Yes, by definition (emphasis mine):

The state or fact of being well known, widely discussed, or publicly esteemed.

Being an elite institution is merely a way to become a celebrity, and likely in my mind the reason Duke University is.

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Exactly. I think your point is correct and conflating elite with celebrity misses a key point.

You could’ve also mentioned the UVA scandal.

It's harder for me to say why women aren't eager to bring this up as ammunition in the gender wars.

What's the point? I'm already fresh off a ban for being inappropriate in tone to a guy who said paedophilia isn't a real crime, it's "The baby-rapist is a canard invented to shame young men out of dating 17 year olds."

What response do you think I'd get about dragging up a case where a woman was drugged and raped between the ages of 59 and 68, her husband being responsible for arranging and doing all this? Robin Hanson's gentle silent rape would be the least of the examples shoved at me about how this wasn't a real crime at all.

It's a disgusting betrayal of trust, and the guy was clearly a creep along all dimensions, but what good is it trying to persuade the unpersuadable that this was wrong?

Over a period of nine years, from July 2011 to October 2020, Dominique Pelicot, a man from Mazan in south-eastern France, repeatedly drugged and raped his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and invited male strangers through the internet to rape her while she was unconscious. Gisèle, who was unaware of the abuse being perpetrated against her, was raped at least 92 times by 72 different men while her husband filmed and photographed them. The crimes were discovered in September 2020 after Dominique was arrested for taking upskirt photographs of women in a supermarket; the ensuing police investigation uncovered hundreds of images on his computer equipment of men raping his wife.

The trial of Dominique and 50 other men accused of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault began in Avignon on 2 September 2024, and concluded on 16 December, with verdicts delivered on 19 December. All were convicted, with Dominique receiving the maximum 20-year prison term. Dominique was also found guilty of taking indecent images of his daughter and two daughters-in-law, and the rape of the wife of co-defendant Jean-Pierre Maréchal, who was charged with drugging and raping his own wife, and not Gisèle.

The crimes were discovered in September 2020 after Dominique was arrested for taking upskirt photographs of women in a supermarket

One crime at a time, man. One of the most egregious cases I have seen.

Sex pests are consistently unintelligent and seem to compulsively commit crimes to satiate their disgusting desires even when there's a high likelihood of being caught. If he was smart enough to do one crime at a time, he wouldn't be rape cucking his wife in the first place.

I don't know whether "Only commit one crime at a time" is somehow difficult advice that you need to be smart to follow, or if criminals are even dumber than I think after grokking that criminals are the dumbest people alive.

I think it's the dumbness, but also impulse control. "Don't do two crimes at same time" is very difficult unless the criminal in question is disciplined as well as smart. Doesn't even need to be all that smart provided he can be disciplined. But I think the sex pest types don't have the self-control or the smarts to figure out "pick one crime, stick to it" because it's all about what gets them their jollies so why not do a little from column A, a little from column B, and hey let's graduate to column C while we're at it?

Seriously this guy seems to be just genuinely awful

Yeah. The wife was brave to go public, a lot of people would have been too shocked and traumatised to do that. There's a lot happening behind closed doors that we have no idea about.

Robin Hanson's gentle silent rape would be the least of the examples shoved at me about how this wasn't a real crime at all.

It's a disgusting betrayal of trust, and the guy was clearly a creep along all dimensions, but what good is it trying to persuade the unpersuadable that this was wrong?

<high decoupler hat>

Hanson isn't saying that rape of this form shouldn't be a crime or isn't wrong. His argument is better characterized as this is wrong and a crime, but so is cuckolding, in the sense of forcing a man to raise another man's child without his informed consent.

</high decoupler hat>

Hanson almost certainly has no objections to Pelicot and his fellow rapists being punished as he is, or even significantly more.

Before we question "why is there no outrage over X?", we must first consider if there is even something to be outraged over. Horrific crime happens, people know this and it's why we expect for police and other authority institutions to exist to punish them. In this case upon being discovered, the men they could find involved were arrested and charged. There's not really much anyone could object to in this scenario except against the criminals, the people who are already in the process of being punished.

Now if they get off easy then there would be room for outrage. If the police had ignored it, there would be room for outrage. If a bunch of freaks were trying to defend it, there would be room for outrage. Right now the process worked. It's a tragedy for sure, but not really much else.

And like you said there's also little toxoplasma. Nobody is calling for collective punishment over gender or race so there's no reason to "defend innocent men" or anything so no counter outrage room either. It seems to be the simple idea of guilty people get punished working as it should.

I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman if there were no consequences.

50/2,000,000/20 years = large fraction?

Yeah, you really have your finger on something big here. Huge effects. With such a strong signal that certainly holds true for every man, and women being unconscious like a third of their lives, the true rape rate must approach 100%.

I think that the "large fraction" of men is actually closer than your 50/2M.

Consider a hypothetical woman whose kink it is to have men fuck her while she is unconscious. So she explains that to her tinder dates. "I will let you record a short video statement of me consenting for legal purposes, then drink my roofie and as soon as I am unconscious, you can perform certain sex acts we agreed upon beforehand."

Do you honestly believe that 99% of men would go ewww and quit their date right there?

My prediction would be that there would be 10-30% for which that kink would be a hard no. Perhaps 5-10% would be really into it. The remainder would find that it makes sex less enjoyable for them. Some would be able to arrange another fuckdate on short notice which they anticipate will lead to hotter sex. The others would likely take her up on her offer -- it might not be the best sex of their lives, but it beats jerking off.

That is to say, a majority of men on tinder would likely be willing to go along with having sex with an unconscious woman, as long as there are no ethical or legal obstacles. I do not think that this tells us anything about men except that a lot of them are underfucked and will prefer suboptimal sex to no sex.

In the French case, it seems very unlikely that the husband contacted 2M men and only got 50 to take him up on his offer.

From an evopsych point of view, I would imagine that by inclination, most men are born indifferent about consent, just as we are born without much in the way of inhibition towards killing members of our outgroup or stealing from them. The pro-social preferences for not raping, murdering or stealing all have to be taught, and just like we sometimes fail to instill a deep preference against murder, we also sometimes fail to instill a deep preference against rape.

Presumably (I did not read deeply into the case), the husband searched his accomplices in forums where the norms about consent were horribly absent, perhaps some telegram channel related to upskirt photos. This might explain why he found so many without anyone reporting him to the cops.

At the end of the day, my feeling is that there is a significant minority of people who are severely misaligned, and only the threat of punishment keeps them from defecting. His accomplices were simply taking up his offer because they believed that their crimes would be much less likely to be discovered compared to rapes they might commit on their own.

Your thought experiment is "what if it weren't rape"? Yes, I expect those numbers would differ, if consent was explicit and the woman were attractive.

But this is just misandrist equivocation. "Some significant fraction of men would engage in behavior that would be rape if not for all the explicit consent and instruction from the woman" isn't great evidence for "some significant fraction of men are hardened rapists who are victimizing anything unconscious in their general vicinity".

To state the obvious, we have to adjust for

  • the rarity of the opportunity (I admit, there aren't many Dominique Pelicots around)
  • how many men would have sought out the opportunity if they knew it existed
  • how many men sought out such an opportunity but just didn't find it (it's not like it was well advertised)
  • how many men were afraid of being caught and decided against it
  • how many men who would have done it if the victim were younger or more attractive
  • how many men went through with it and simply weren't caught
  • not sure where you got 2 million. ChatGPT estimates the population within 50km of Mazan to be 700-900k, so adult men are probably 300-400k?
  • it was 9 years, not 20

I'm genuinely curious what your honest estimate would be of the fraction of adult men who would have sex with an unknowing unconscious woman (that they're attracted to) if they could be guaranteed no consequences. I want to say 5% of men acculturated to the modern West, probably much higher in other times and places. The prevalence of rape in wartime historically points to higher number I think.

How familiar are you with the case? Because it reads like a swinger presenting conman type succeeded in persuading a bunch of dumb low life deviants -- more likely to be rapists -- to entertain his own fetish. Some portion of them were fully cognizant of the situation, but others were too stupid to see the game or indeed convinced themselves their fantasy was real. A French retiree pimping his wife of 40 years without consequences. In other words you, a low life, congregate on Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum so you're very motivated to indulge in your preferred paraphilia. The number of men in the Wiki chart without prior criminal convictions is a minority.

If we restrict the circumstances to the worst aspects of the real crime as we see it, then I feel safe with an an estimate of <1% of men as likely to participate in it. If we ignore the substance abuse claims said to a judge we have: a child porn guy, sixteen prior convictions including child sexual assault guy, a repeat domestic violence offender, "eight prior convictions for theft" man, career drug dealer fled-to-Morocco guy, a previous inpatient at psych ward, and a one Mohamed Rafaa who had served time for raping his own daughter. What percentage of men are likely to do any of those things? There's an answer to some of your questions in the data of sexual offenders.

A couple do sound like average enough middle-aged men, but then I'm reminded these were late middle-aged men (old for rapists, statistically) found themselves guilty of rape after they trolled the Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum. I don't think there are any men in this case who were surprised when they discovered they were quite willing to engage in a criminal taboo. Bob, college student, who decides to have sex with Anne after a night out on the town because she said she would put out but fell asleep is something that sounds way more generalizable to me. Bob committed date rape, and I'd guess 5-15% of men are potentially like Bob. The complexity of consent is no stranger to this forum and few cases are as clear cut as sex with a drugged French retiree. Bob rarely finds himself popping into the bedroom of an old, sleeping French woman with her scumbag husband cheering him on with high-fives and assurances from the cuck chair.

Sex with an unconscious Scarlett Johansson lookalike does sounds like something with more potential popularity among men. An unconscious woman, however, is next level for "Are you done yet?" My assumption is that sex with an unconscious stranger is (I imagine) categorically different than bad sex with a disinterested or bored woman no matter how attractive they are. (Can confirm.) So we're back to asking about general rates of sexual deviancy and willingness to act on that. Almost all men will have sex with women not fully interested in the sex, but <5% could shamelessly rape strangers to completion as unconscious sex doll objects without memory.

You know who I bet could answer your questions well? Aella.

Maybe but Aella doesn’t shower so….

An unconscious woman, however, is next level for "Are you done yet?"

With the caveat that this isn’t something I’ve actually experinced, I’m actually pretty sure this isn’t the case, because if the woman is unconscious there isn’t any pressure to finish.

I want to say 5% of men acculturated to the modern West

IMO, this is ridiculously low.

  • "Would you fuck a random hot woman (with no STDs)?" Call it 30 percent (assuming the other 70 percent have romantic partners and don't want to cheat).

  • "Would you fuck a hot woman (with no STDs) who put zero effort into the sex, but merely allowed you to have your way with her?" Still 30 percent (all of the remainder).

  • "Would you rape a hot, unconscious woman (with no STDs), if it were magically absolutely 100-percent guaranteed that you wouldn't be caught?" I think 10 to 20 percent (1/3 to 2/3 of the remainder) is a reasonable guess.

And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement.

I think that's the main point. There is no apologetic side for the husband or his co-conspirators.

Speculatively, I would also say that Mme Pelicot being older has something to do with it. The instinctive aversion that women have to rape stems primarily from the fact that they are forced to carry the child of an inferior man they didn't choose, who is presumably absent. Men's instinctive aversion is that someone is doing this to 'our' women. Gisele was 58 when the rapes started, so our pregnancy alarms don't go off.

People are obviously sympathetic to Gisele, but I think the general reaction shades more towards confusion and disgust than outrage. As if her husband had sex with an animal or something.

some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman

Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463

Approximately 32 percent of study participants said that they would have "intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse" if ''nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences.'' Yet only 13.6 percent admit to having "any intentions to rape a woman" under these same circumstances.

But I still don't believe it?

If this is true, why don't men just more or less openly rape women as they please? Why do I go on the beach and see women in bikinis, or go out in the city and see women in very revealing clothes late at night? Is the idea that men would be unwilling to force a conscious women but are OK with unconscious women? Do we think rapists are really affected by how women feel, as opposed to being impulsive lowlives? It could be so, I am not a rapist and do not pretend to know...

The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general

Why are men looksmaxxing, jestermaxxing, prestigemaxxing and not just rapemaxxing? Why is feminism a thing? The corrupting force of male sexuality doesn't seem to have that much explanatory power, based on the world I see.

I think men's true proclivities are different from what they say, or perhaps people are fiddling the figures (the above link uses a very small sample size of 70-80 men at one university - exactly the same sample size as the Pelicot case though). Or perhaps the 'nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences' part is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

If 30% of men would rape if they thought they'd get away with it, then how many would go 'eh, not a big deal' (taking the path of least resistance) - who is left to create strict rules punishing rapists, who is left to create consequences? Couldn't the rapey many just ignore the few? The structure of Western civilization would surely be quite different if men were actually like this, it would look more like Africa or India or those stories from Rotherham where the girl gets raped again by the first taxi driver who sees her.

Edit, see a thread here which illustrates the kind of structure I'm thinking of: https://x.com/willsolfiac/status/2023143282889326852/photo/1

The western system, it is thought, permits free sexual relations and allows, even encourages, women to dress revealingly and to provoke men. One Pakistani man who had recently arrived in England, commented on seeing a of female University students sunbathing that the male undergraduates who were passing by could not be real men or else they would have thrown themselves on the women

Why are you complicating this, isn't the conclusion we should draw from "men say they would do this thing if there were no consequences, but then they don't do that thing" that "they believe there will be consequences."

I'm wondering where the consequences come from. If men were generally like this then we'd expect women to be property of specific men, their husbands or fathers. It'd be 'Rape of the Sabine women' writ large. But that's not the case, there are consequences without regard for whether she was married or not, large and powerful organizations run by men that treat rape as an offence against human dignity.

Why are men looksmaxxing, jestermaxxing, prestigemaxxing and not just rapemaxxing?

The easy answer there is that the maxxing-type men want sex not as an end in itself, but as a means to gain approval from other men.

Once you notice the daddy issues inherent in manosphere culture, you really can't unsee them.

If 30% of men would rape if they thought they'd get away with it, then how many would go 'eh, not a big deal' (taking the path of least resistance) - who is left to create strict rules punishing rapists, who is left to create consequences? Couldn't the rapey many just ignore the few?

For a purely recreational act, though, energy tradeoffs can result in large deterrent effects even from relatively mild potential consequences. You see similar logic in predator-prey relations, where an opportunistic predator will still decline to chase most prey, and will back off pursuing an animal with any capacity to fight back, simply because it's not worth the risk of taking any damage at all. Better to hold off and look for an easier target.

Just because a guy would cheerfully rape an incapacitated woman in a cone of silence doesn't mean he thinks it's worth it to potentially get scratched or bruised, or risk social disapproval or reprisals from her allies, as would happen with frank rape under normal conditions.

The easy answer there is that the maxxing-type men want sex not as an end in itself, but as a means to gain approval from other men.

Broscience has always been comfortable with the idea that the muscular figure that impresses bros is more cut than the figure which is attractive to women, which itself is more cut than the optimal athletic figure you see among e.g. World's Strongest Man contestants. Just don't suggest that a bro's interest in his bro's cut figure is homoerotic...

Just don't suggest that a bro's interest in his bro's cut figure is homoerotic...

Obligatory Stonetoss cartoon.

The easy answer there is that the maxxing-type men want sex not as an end in itself, but as a means to gain approval from other men.

It seems to me that the easy answer is that men want to be in a relationship with someone whom they love and who loves them in return, someone who makes them both feel like a better person and want to be a better person. Yeah, sex is great and fun outside of that, but if given the choice between a woman who actively wants to be with you and a prostitute who will only stick around as long as you pay her, most men will prefer the former. Basically, the easy answer is that men are generally romantic.

Basically, the easy answer is that men are generally romantic.

Nice if true. I hope you're right. Especially given the holiday weekend.

Is the idea that men would be unwilling to force a conscious women but are OK with unconscious women?

The idea is that men have a lot of things that, in sexual terms, they'd like to do but can't or won't do because of fear of consequences. We've already thrashed out on here that male and female sexual drives are very different in strength, intensity, and objectivity. Men (in general) want sex and don't really give a hoot about emotional associations with sex; casual sex is good enough. So men who would like to have sex with no strings attached but don't want to go through the bother of meeting the woman, taking her out to dinner, and getting over the barriers to casual sex just to have sex, would (if given the opportunity) like to have sex and then nothing more comes of it (hence 'if she was unconscious and I didn't get caught') but in real life that usually requires, if she doesn't want to have sex with you, trying to force her and then you get accused of rape and then bad things happen to you, so you don't do it.

After all, date rape drugs exist, even if not as much as claimed and if many such cases are in fact "no, you got black-out drunk, you weren't drugged". So guys who would drug women in order to fuck them and get away with it do exist.

I followed the citations, and the "sexual aggression scale" the researchers used in their questionnaire involves asking questions with five possible answers ranging from "not at all likely" to "very likely". However, they got that 30% statistic by re-coding the answers as either "yes" or "no".

So this seems like the classic social-science trick where you inflate the number of "yes" responses to a question by providing one answer choice that means "no" and four answer choices that all mean "yes". And because they asked about both "rape" and "forcing a female to do something sexual she didn't want to", you get the bias where people want to answer that one is less likely than the other.

(The "Materials and Methods" section of the paper makes clear that the "something sexual" wording was what they actually asked on the questionnaire. The researchers seem to have paraphrased that as "force a woman to sexual intercourse" in their results, which also seems kind of misleading.)

Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463

That study is awful, please read this article explaining its bad methodology. They used a 5 point scale that indicated likelihood to engage in any given activity. The question that's usually focused in on as the source of this claim was like question 35 on a long quiz asking if you would force a woman to do something sexual, where a question about whether you would rape a woman had just been asked in the same quiz, creating the implication that this question was something different that wasn't rape and obviously making people want to give rape the lowest likelihood.

As to how that five-point measure got made into the 1-in-3 statistic? Anything that wasn't recorded as a 1 was taken as a "yes". This is frankly a ridiculous method of coding that data and inflates the percentage by a crazy amount. The answers provided on that scale were basically "No, Yes, Yes, Yes, or Yes." Also "the men in Edwards et al (2014) were in between two to seven times less likely to say they would rape a woman than kill someone if they could, depending on how one interprets their answers. That's a tremendous difference; one that might even suggest that rape is viewed as a less desirable activity than murder." I suppose we live in a murder culture too, then.

In other words, it's an incredibly sketchy study with such awful methodology that I can't help but regard it as being intentionally bad just to inflate the percentage.

TBH I suspected the study was awful. In politicized fields of science it can be better to reason from first principles.

In other words, it's an incredibly sketchy study with such awful methodology that I can't help but regard it as being intentionally bad just to inflate the percentage.

Well I think that given the woke capture of the social sciences, any study which is unflattering to men as a group should be considered suspect.

It seems like we get these kinds of "men are sexual degenerates" posts semi-regularly, I've never found them particularly convincing, and this one's no exception. The major problem with your analysis is that it is, ultimately, an example of the Chinese robber fallacy, in spite of the atypical circumstances of this case. It is always possible to find examples of regional cabals of people who have helped to perpetrate or cover up a crime, but that does not make it an illustration or indication of larger society (I would also note that 50km around Mazan is a massive radius that features the city of Avignon, home to 487,000 people in its larger metropolitan area, and the arrondissement of Carpentras is itself home to 220,000 people; it is not particularly surprising to me that someone could find 72 criminals there over a period of nine years if they really tried). But here is an example of what one can write that follows the broad strokes of your comment, if so motivated:

This Valentine's Day, I am thinking about why the Thai penile-amputation epidemic has received so little attention, sparked so little discussion. This is the curious case of a rather hyperspecific form of crime that became oddly common in Thailand in the decade after 1970, where angry wives severed the penises of philandering husbands. I could not find a single mention of it on this site. You could claim this was an isolated incident that has no implications for society in general, that this is cherrypicking isolated cases and not reflective of an attitude that women have towards men generally. But series of interviews carried out with prominent Thai women revealed that they almost unanimously endorsed this method of retribution. It was to the extent that expertise in managing penile amputations has developed in Thailand, and that “I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat,” is a common joke and immediately understood at all levels of society.

This article notes about it: "In 2008, the Journal of Urology carried a retrospective by Drs Genoa Ferguson and Steven Brandes of the Washington University in St Louis, called The Epidemic of Penile Amputation in Thailand in the 1970s. Ferguson and Brandes conclude that: "Women publicly encouraging and inciting other scorned women to commit this act worsened the epidemic. The vast majority of worldwide reports of penile replantation, to this day, are a result of what became a trendy form of retribution in a country in which fidelity is a strongly appreciated value."" It was endorsed by female society at large, publicly, occasionally in a televised way (which suggests they expected no blowback for these viewpoints), and thus resulted in a rise in prevalence in Thailand.

In the West, such light-hearted endorsements have occasionally become apparent as well, and for far less than infidelities. The Catherine Kieu Becker case is only one example of that. On July 15, 2011, a popular CBS daytime television show titled The Talk discussed the news story of Becker who was charged with drugging her husband, tying him to the bed, and waiting until he awoke to sever the man's penis off with a knife. She then proceeded to throw the appendage into the garbage disposal before calling 911 and reporting the crime herself. The audience members along with the other hosts immediately after hearing the details and the supposed reasoning for the mutilation (the husband had asked for a divorce) responded surprisingly by laughing. One woman in the audience was heard saying, "That'll teach him" and the host found it amusing enough to repeat it so it could be broadcast. Sharon Osbourne, one of the hosts of the show, offered her opinion that she felt the crime was "quite fabulous" only after making a gesture with her hands mimicking what the severed body part would have looked like while being destroyed in the garbage disposal. In spite of the talk of how men find it hard to relate to women, men do not collectively laugh on TV about women being raped; I find it quite interesting that women are capable of making light and even excusing when this kind of mutilation occurs to men.

I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of women do not view sexually violent retribution against men as particularly heinous, and are very capable of endorsing these acts, committing it while justifying it to themselves as a method of revenge for perceived slights. This is the nature of women. The vast majority of women know just how vengeful women can be, and I have the sense that while women can empathise with other women, most of them simply struggle to empathise with harms to men. The women in question here had issues with their husbands, their husbands weren't satisfying their needs in one way or another, and as such they're capable of viewing it as a trivial matter when they do the deed.

Is this sentiment unhinged? Maybe it is, but it's where this kind of reasoning is capable of getting you. When looking at 8 billion people interacting over the course of decades, it will always be possible to find case studies that sound like prima facie convincing evidence for most any position. But that never stops people pointing at them as soldiers for whatever viewpoint they want to support and going "See? This proves [sweeping statement] about [significant proportion of the population]".

I don't think it's unhinged. I do actually find the reaction of women to penile amputation (which is worse than post-menopausal rape) very troubling and recall encountering this phenomenon on a different occasion as well. I will conclude that both sexes struggle to empathize with the opposite sex, especially as regards sex-specific harms, and perhaps I have given one direction less attention than it deserves. This is all very discouraging.

Interesting, I wondered if the Thai cases were inspired by publicity around Lorena Bobbitt, but that case happened in 1993 so couldn't have been a factor.

The audience members along with the other hosts immediately after hearing the details and the supposed reasoning for the mutilation (the husband had asked for a divorce) responded surprisingly by laughing.

I know it's an inappropriate remark to make on my side in this context, but I find this hilarious. You'd assume as a man that the thing that's incur women's wrath in this case would be him not wanting a divorce or refusing one (i.e. expecting the poor wife to just keep putting up with it). Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I guess.

With respect to Sharon Osbourne, I agree with you but I wouldn't draw that many conclusions. If you read up on her antics and controversies, I think you'll also find that she's generally an insufferable, aggressive twat. And The Talk has always been a lipstick feminist circlejerk, as far as I know.

And with respect to the Thai/Siamese story, I'd mention the Hungarian post-WW1 rural arsenic poisoning epidemic, which was more or less a similar phenomenon.

Here's why it didn't get much press coverage:

  1. Based on their names, at least 24% of the perpetrators were of obviously Arab descent (hence likely Muslim), despite Arabs representing 7% of the French population. In this regard the case is a bit like France's small-scale answer to the grooming gangs scandal.
  2. Contrary to your claim that the perpetrators came from "all walks of life" and represented a cross-section of French society, they were in fact overwhelmingly from working-class backgrounds (if professions like canteen worker, car mechanic, farmhand, mason's helper, supermarket receptionist, construction worker, factory worker, video rental shop owner, soldier, restaurant manager, construction worker, truck driver, firefighter, forklift driver, delivery driver, carpenter, electrician and food processing worker are any indication).

"Woman gang-raped by scions of the wealthy elite" is a man-bites-dog story that woke journalists can't get enough of (see Epstein's island, "A Rape on Campus", the Duke lacrosse scandal, Brock Turner – I posit it's not an accident that two of those turned out to be completely made up, and it still seems to be an open question as to whether any actual "gang rape" occurred on Epstein's island). "Woman gang-raped by working-class men, many of them first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants from Arab countries" is a dog-bites-man story, in addition to being profoundly dissonant with the woke worldview.

It also explains why feminists don't want to talk about it, as most modern feminists have been so compromised by intersectionality theory that they can only conditionally agree with a statement like "rape is bad" after they know the ethnicities of victim and perpetrator. Following the October 7th attacks, a popular slogan highlighting this hypocrisy was "#MeToo, unless you're a Jew". To be more exacting, I think the modal Western feminist is functionally operating on the principle "#MeToo, unless your rapist was a man of colour" – less pithy, admittedly, but more precise. Liberal feminists simply do not want to acknowledge or pay attention to sex crimes committed by Arabs, Pakistanis, immigrants etc. for fear of "giving ammunition to the far-right". They especially don't want to discuss the possibility that men from such demographics commit a disproportionate amount of sex crimes, and that there might be cultural reasons for this (as certainly seems to have been the case with the aforementioned grooming gangs scandal: I've read some articles claiming that, within Pakistani culture, a married Pakistani man raping a white British teenager who "dresses like a whore" is not even seen as adulterous, never mind criminal).

Your comment convinced me @ffrreerree2 was right on the money to bring this up as a Culture War topic.

It's basically Epstein Island but for blue collar and/or immigrant types instead of the elite, the victim is older instead of underage and the videos of the rapes exist.

How so?

sorry I edited this in a few minutes after my reply

It's basically Epstein Island but for blue collar and/or immigrant types instead of the elite, the victim is older instead of underage and the videos of the rapes exist.

See also media coverage of white on black shootings vs black on black shootings.

Is there a general way to balance the ubiquity of "dog bites man" stories with the novelty of "man bites dog" stories such that audiences are cognizant of the relative merits of both?

You can have men bite dogs so many times it becomes mundane.

I remember the days when the Rotherham grooming gang scandal was on the news for the first time (to an extent). Jezebel, which normally dissects the smallest and most trivial "outrages" of the last vestiges of patriarchal misogyny in multiple columns, posted one column about the entire subject, which consisted of nothing but repeating the official press release of the police.

They especially don't want to discuss the possibility that men from such demographics commit a disproportionate amount of sex crimes, and that there might be cultural reasons for this (as certainly seems to have been the case with the aforementioned grooming gangs scandal: I've read some articles claiming that, within Pakistani culture, a married Pakistani man raping a white British teenager who "dresses like a whore" is not even seen as adulterous).

It's simply an ingroup-vs-outgroup thing. I guess Islam plays into it somewhat but in the end it's fundamentally tribal. If the women of the outgroup signal any disrespect towards the moral code of the ingroup, they're fair game.

There was a lot of discussion of the case in the UK press and by opinion columnists, feminists prone to sharing infographics on social media certainly shared infographics about this case. The present Queen commented on it. Beyond that stories from non-Anglo countries are never going to be as prominent in the anglophone press for obvious reasons, but I think it received extensive coverage.

I have the same question I had last time this came up. When she repeatedly passed out for hours only to wake up later with body aches and sore and messy private parts, did she not suspect anything? This seems like the sort of thing you only get away with a few times before even the slowest people wise up, but somehow he did this to her 2-3 times per week(!) for 9 years(!) including sex acts she wasn't willing to do, such as anal(!), and apparently these strange men were sometimes forcing her to gag on their members while she was unconscious(!). I do not understand how you she could not out the pieces of the puzzle together.

I'm really not trying to blame this victim here as the husband seems like an absolutely awful person, but there must be more to the story. Did the wife have some psychological issues that caused her to miss the signs? Was she aware of it but refused to report it because she feared for her safety? Was she hiding the abuse because she was too ashamed to reveal it? Did she have some mild kink that her husband just took way, way too far?

If you read up on the case it started with her own prescription for sedatives, then he added muscle relaxants and would police and supervise the men to such a degree that he insisted they warmed their hands before touching her and didn't smoke cigarettes beforehand lest they smell of smoke. Apparently she did initially question him about deliberately drugging her but he gaslit her (if you'll pardon the proper use of the term) that she was too ill to know her own mind.

Thanks, that makes a lot more sense. Really sad stuff.

I have the same question I had last time this came up. When she repeatedly passed out for hours only to wake up later with body aches and sore and messy private parts, did she not suspect anything?

Seems to me that the right kind of childhood trauma would accomplish this pretty handily. Enough horrifying experiences at the hands of a caregiver during the right developmental window, and a kid's brain is extremely capable of constructing a protective narrative that runs "this didn't happen"/ "I feel weird but this was OK, ____ loves me, so clearly there's nothing wrong"/"since ___ is my only protector, actually they are great and I am fine."

Everyone's lived reality is heavily filtered through their existing stock of life narratives, so it's plausible that a traumatized person with this background could go on to (a) feel most comfortable/ most attracted to other horrifying abusers, and (b) not consciously notice signs of additional abuse, or notice them but on some level be incapable of recognizing or acknowledging them. It's how women who were molested go on to serially date child molesters, and often don't consciously notice the signs that those men are also molesting their own kids.*

Pelicot's mom died when she was 9 and she went on to be raised by her military father. I haven't read her memoirs, but that history, while not dispositive, is also not a history that's inconsistent with suffering childhood abuse at the hands of a male caregiver at some point. During her marriage, even prior to the rapes, there were also many red flags that her husband was a deadbeat and a sexually dangerous man: convictions for assault and upskirt pictures, as I remember, and he didn't hold a steady job but launched a series of failed businesses while her salary supported the family. The fact that she stuck with him through all of that has to say something about what she'd been primed to see as normal in a relationship.

*This is also why I am unimpressed by people justifying sexual aggression/violence against women by quoting stats on the number of women who fantasize about these things. Repetition compulsion will make you seek out repeated encounters with the things you most fear and loathe, in a vain attempt to master them.

This would make it all add up for me. And adds an extra layer of tragedy to the whole affair.

Being raped by strangers in your sleep is not a common occurrence. It's entirely possible that she thought her husband was having sex with her while she slept and even if she didn't like it she didn't see what the big deal was. Like if you know your husband doesn't always take no for an answer you'd just assume it was him doing it.

This seems the most likely explanation to me. Not noticing anything at all or attributing it to menopause seems far-fetched. Noticing but not jumping to the deeply-weird truth seems plausible.

All this is speculation, but if she was used to waking up sore because hubby wanted some and didn't bother waking her up before sticking his dick in, that would have been enough of an explanation for her (and hubby sure sounds like the kind of guy who thought a little somnophilia was no big deal). Also she was 58 when this started, so she would have gone through menopause. Physical and mental changes happen then. Doctors are very prone to being dismissive of women's complaints along the lines of "you're just getting older, these are natural changes" if she did go to her doctor about it.

And if he was careful enough to clean up, and if she mentioned anything to him he had plausible explanations like "oh you must be getting incontinent in your old age" and so on, then it would take a lot to immediately jump to "the answer must be I'm being raped by strangers in my sleep". You'd sooner think you were paranoid and worry about were you going crazy than accept that as an explanation.

I would think that the problem is self-compounding due to the absurdity heuristic. A woman waking up with sore genitals for the first time ever could conceivably put 2 and 2 together and go "oh God, have I been raped in my sleep"; but provided she otherwise trusted her husband, what kind of a mind does it take to go "I've been periodically waking up from sleep with sore genitals for years; it must be because I have been systematically raped every time"? The latter sounds insane. Even if the thought occurred to her, she might very well dismiss it as ridiculous paranoia. Human bodies are weird and full of little aches and itches, middle-aged women's bodies especially. I would guess that precisely because it was a somewhat regular occurrence, she just assumed these sensations must be some kind of natural most-menopausal ailment.

I don’t really understand your point, or what you’re trying to say. I care about and love the women in my life a great deal. I empathize seriously with the experiences of victims of sexual abuse, and in fact I find their stories hard to encounter because I feel such anger and outrage at the loss of self-possession and immense sense of shame and guilt that survivors struggle to overcome. It’s evil, plain and simple.

The reason it’s not a subject of debate is just what you said last: there’s no toxoplasmosa. It was a horrible crime and the guilty were sentenced.

You seem, at least to me, to be trying to argue from this case that heterosexual love is impossible, or that heterosexuality is inherently corrupting. Well, actually, you said “male sexuality.” That’s interesting.

Your profile hasn’t seen any posts in two years, and in one of the final posts before this valentine’s post you wrote this:

I bring these examples up not to harangue men but to explicitly set aside the discourse about romantic relationships, in which most men and women seem happy to accept a certain asymmetry. A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy. As a spergy gay man, I don't have a dog in this fight, if it is a fight, but I do find explicit commentary on the expectations of gendered social interaction helpful (and entertaining).

Do you believe that love between gay men is possible? Is lesbian love possible?

Both, as I’m sure you know, have cultures of asymmetry and opposites, of masc tops and femme bottoms and dalliances with much older, wealthier men and daddy kinks, of butch lesbians and lipstick lesbians. Is gay love fairer than straight love to you?

Asymmetry coexists with mutual desire all the time, and with every orientation. And so, of course, does abuse and sexual assault. Love exists in spite of the evil of this world, and indeed sexual tenderness exists in concert with the impulses of male sexuality.

Most men are driven by a desire not only to please themselves through sex but to please their partners as well. I don’t doubt that, as a gay man, you are highly familiar with gay men who would rather give head than receive it; you should understand that the desire to please your sex partner exists among straight men as well. Most men highly enjoy sex noises and dirty talk from their partners, as a sign of that dirty phrase, “enthusiastic consent”, and of mutual pleasure. There could be no jokes about women faking orgasms if men did not find the idea of women faking orgasms to be Ego-destroying. Men overwhelmingly find the idea of sex with an unconscious person unarousing, in addition to morally unconscionable.

I guess I wonder what drives you to believe that male sexuality is inherently corrupting, instead of merely a force that can be used for good as well as bad — obviously, in this case, for bad. Have you ever fallen in love with someone, and wanted more than anything their happiness? Have you ever desired sex with someone out of a desire for unity with them, to make them feel good, to be as close with them as physically and emotionally possible? These are all compatible with the intensity of raw, undifferentiated male desire, and if you might allow me to say, far more erotic than mere lust.

Men do a heinous thing, get found guilty. No defense, no fanfare, and no additional traumatic publicity for the victim (except for the NYT going for round 2, I guess). What, exactly, is missing here?

I can't really imagine all of those men thought they were knowingly raping this guy's wife against her will. I have to believe he told them it's her kink to be drugged up and raped and then she wants to watch the videos later. Or something. This is a lame excuse but I can see at least a few pathetic horn dogs falling for it.

Now let me see if any of the men offered any defense.

Update: I'm back. A few of the men said they thought it was a role play situation and that they were led to believe this by her husband. But most of them sound utterly indefensible. So, I underappreciated the horror by quite a bit.

There's a full table here with notes about each man and their defenses, if available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelicot_rape_case#Convicted

They kind of sound like the dregs of society to me.

But yes, what is there to say? You can find dirt bags to do sex crime if you look long enough. The were all publicly shamed and convicted. The right thing happened, at least. My update is France takes these crimes more seriously than I would have expected. Also the right thing.

I'm slightly reassured it was only 72 men over 9 years and not, like, a thousand. Suggests the candidate pool is not a vast ocean.

I'm slightly reassured it was only 72 men over 9 years and not, like, a thousand. Suggests the candidate pool is not a vast ocean.

She was in late middle age.

The dates given in the Wikipedia article for the incident suggest that the victim was about 59 years old at the start of the incident, and it continued until she was about 68.

Where I'm from, I think that'd be called "old age". And to @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola's point above, it seems like a stage of life where it'd be pretty normal to have a lot of unexplained aches and pains.

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