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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.
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...
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