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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 think the starting point is to ask which rape/sexual assault cases DO get a lot of attention. And the answer to that is simple. When the person accused is Jeffrey Epstein; Harvey Weinstein; members of the Duke Lacrosse team; etc. In other words, if the alleged perpetrator is coded as being part of the white elite.
Stranger rapes with a "perfect victim" (roughly, middle-class and hot) get a lot of attention locally when they happen regardless of the perp.
Nobody gives a flying flamingo about date rapes or rapes of chavettes unless they happen to reinforce a partisan narrative. The Weinstein and Epstein cases have the legs they do because "blue-state white male 'billionaire'* elites are depraved sex pests" can be used to reinforce both partisan narratives, and the (((perps))) having an obvious ethnic skew that powerful people don't want to talk about gives you double super conspiracy theory memeness.
* Epstein liked people to think he was a billionaire, and is widely referred to as one by his left-wing political opponents, but his net worth peaked in the mid three figures. Weinstein never claimed to be a billionaire, and his net worth peaked in the low three figures. This is part of a general problem talking about the super-rich, which is that the level of wealth needed to qualify is between $30 and $100 million depending on who you ask, and neither "millionaire" nor "billionaire" is a useful description at that level. The midwit leftists complaining about "billionaires" absolutely mean to include Weinstein and Epstein in the group they are complaining about.
Is this a typo or do you mean +10,002,000 with obligations of -10,000,000? Which indeed is very different from a man with $2000 in his account, although we don't have good ways to talk about this.
I was puzzled by this. I think he meant deca-millionaire. Maybe it’s a British thing?
Low/mid three figure millions. Online guesses of peak net worth are 300-500 million for Epstein and 150-250 million for Weinstein.
Dropping the last six figures when talking about client net worth/deal size is a financial professional shibboleth. (Even relatively successful financial professionals are not rich enough to do this when talking about our own money). I should probably stop doing it on the Motte.
I’ve heard “he is worth 100 or 150” without giving the base but I’ve never heard anyone mention figures while dropping the first six.
I probably overgeneralise some of these things. I am still trying to promote "metre" as a colloquial term for 10^9 Euros.
[Joke explanation for non-traders - "yard" is a corruption of "milliard" which was used in old-school British English to refer to 10^9, with "billion" being 10^12. (This convention is still used in French and German.) So a "yard" was traderspeak for 10^9 currency units, assumed USD unless otherwise stated]
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