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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.
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?
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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.
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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%.
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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.
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Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463
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...
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.
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.
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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.)
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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.
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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, 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 retribution 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 it's 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 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.
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Here's why it didn't get much press coverage:
"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). "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).
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.
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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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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:
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.
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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?
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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.
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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