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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.
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.
Edit, see a thread here which illustrates the kind of structure I'm thinking of: https://x.com/willsolfiac/status/2023143282889326852/photo/1
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.
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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.
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.
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...
Obligatory Stonetoss cartoon.
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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.
Nice if true. I hope you're right. Especially given the holiday weekend.
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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.
TBH I suspected the study was awful. In politicized fields of science it can be better to reason from first principles.
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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.
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