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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.
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".
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