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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 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?
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.
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