The Gisele Pelicot case highlights just how frighteningly high is the number of 'normal' men who have a penchant for, and might be willing to act on, rape.
I’ve just finished reading a great book titled Bad Men: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment & Assault by psychology professor David M. Buss. Great book, but worst title ever. Didn’t the publisher consider those of us who use public transportation? BAD MEN is in like eight-foot letters on the cover, so there’s no way you can read this without looking like a man-hating crazy-ass victim feminist asshole. I read it with the cover curled back, and later with the book flat on my lap, the way some were reading Fifty Shades of Grey several years ago.
Just as I finished, I learned of the horrifying Gisèle Pelicot rape case in France. She’s making the trial of fifty-one of her accused rapists public, and also allowing the French press to publish her name. She's also allowing the court to show her recorded rapes. From 2011-2020, husband Dominique drugged her and invited men to have sex with her unconscious body. Gisèle is no young, naive ingenue; the rapes began when she was 58 years old. She learned of them four years ago when police informed her. They found them after arresting her husband for upskirt photography.
According to the Secretary General of a French human rights commission, nine out of ten French women don’t press rape charges, and when they do, 80% of the cases are dropped.
But not Gisèle’s.
The ‘normies’ who rape
Eighty-three individuals have been identified by police as having visited the Pelicot household to use a stranger’s wife’s body for their own sick sexual pleasure. Not all have been identified by police and one is on the run. Fifty-one men are on trial at the moment, along with Dominique Pelicot.
According to Herald Scotland, Dominique was described by two psychiatrists as having ‘obsessive fantasies’ approaching ‘necrophilia’ and described him as having ‘a total absence of empathy’. He recruited men in chat rooms to live out their rape fantasies on his now ex-wife.
Who were these monsters, between the ages of 26 and 74, some of whom made return visits?
They were otherwise perfectly ‘normal’ men going about their daily lives. They were “firefighters, stonemasons, gardeners, prison guards, soldiers, journalists,” most without prior criminal charges. One was late to his first day of trial as he was taking his son to school. Dominique Pelicot himself is adored by his grandchildren.
According to Bad Men, roughly one-third of men fantasize about raping a woman. One six-study summary put the number at 31%. How the studies phrase the question changes the numbers. The 30-odd-percentages come from those in which the question included the word ‘rape’; when the word is removed, and phrased as, “I fantasize about forcing a woman to have sex,” 54% admitted to it, and 62% said “it would be exciting to use force to subdue a woman.” Sexual coercion fantasies appear to be a lot more common than we know, and Buss notes that some of the men who entertain these fantasies claim they would commit rape if they believed they wouldn’t be caught or punished. That plays into the high number of rapists who commit the act while the woman is drugged or passed out from alcohol.
It feeds the feminist concern that ‘we don’t know which men are rapists,’ and while many of these men may never act on their fantasies, we know some might, and in fact, may already have. Rape activists note that you’re more likely to be raped by someone you know, but if up to half of men may be prone to rape if they can get away with it (which they probably would, since the victims are loathe to report it, or at least at the time, which may explain the 80% dropping of reported rape cases), it gives weight to women’s overall fear of male strangers. Historically, women have had much to fear from strange men, in times when there were zero consequences if there was no one around to defend her.
Bad Men is an analysis of the evolutionary sexual strategies employed by both men and women over the millennia to impel or force the opposite sex to give them what they’re wired to want. For men, that’s to impregnate as many women as they can, thereby perpetuating their genetic line, and for women it’s to get a man to commit to just her and their co-created children, since she has a helluva lot more skin in the reproductive game, and other women’s children with her partner is a zero-sum game stretching finite resources more thinly.
It all, as Buss notes, boils down to reproduction: Women do the heavy lifting, bearing all the metabolic costs and being equipped to carry, give birth to, and feed the baby. Men’s investment is essentially hop on, hop off. We have evolved to strategize and manipulate each other to get what we want. Men learn to manipulate women into having sex; women devise strategies to avoid those manipulations, and to manipulate men; and both continuously leapfrog strategically.
Men possess, Buss says, endless rationalization for their actions. Some believe ‘their victims really wanted it’. Some of the accused in the Pelicot case claim Dominique ‘tricked’ them into thinking his wife had consented. Others felt the husband’s consent was all they needed, illustrating that loathsome patriarchal belief in certain men that a wife is a husband’s property and he can do with her as he wishes, including pimping her out.
(If I was a filthy rapist who wanted to cover my ass, I would have asked to speak to the undrugged wife first. But apparently rapist rationalization defeats logic.)
Protecting the rapists
Males with a high sex drive and short-term mating strategy, combined with Dark Triad traits—psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism—do whatever they need to do to get what they want, including, if the traditional wooing methods don’t work, ‘deception, threats, force,’ and alcohol and drugs. Roughly 81 percent rape under those last two conditions.
They’re also prone to committing multiple rapes. One study of convicted rapists with assured confidentiality found 126 rapists admitting to sexual violence against 882 victims. Another study with 37 rapists charged with ‘only’ 66 offenses total, admitted collectively to 433 actual rapes. That’s 11 victims per rapist.
What’s so unusual about the Gisèle Pelicot case is that she was willing to go public and face her accusers. That’s more than one can ask of a woman dealing with just one rapist, but Pelicot appears to be an abnormally courageous woman willing to take on the inevitable backlash against a woman who accuses a man, or a crowd, of rape. French feminists, of course, are rallying behind her, as #MeToo has come home to roost for several French celebrities accused of sexually abusing women, including actor Gerard Depardieu, and film directors Benoît Jacquot, Jacques Doillon and Christophe Ruggia.
France is still home to Roman Polanski, the Polish film director accused in 1976 in the U.S. of having raped a 13-year-old, and he fled to France to avoid prosecution.
Artists Claude Lévêque and Jan Fabre also stand accused of sexual crimes against women, as has French writer Gabriel Matzneff.
Gisèle Pelicot’s got the labia
Fifty-one accused rapists with some pretty damning videos and Pelicot’s filthy ex-husband are pooping their pants right now as the—who knew?—unconsenting wife holds them all accountable. It’ll be interesting to see if any of them receive light sentences for what they’ve done. Several, of course, are arguing that it ‘wasn’t really rape,’ because, well, they didn’t know this fell under the legal definition of rape. Even if they met Dominique in a chatroom called ‘A son insu’, meaning, roughly, ‘without knowledge’.
It was a chatroom for wannabe rapists who wanted to pump an unconscious, unconsenting woman.
Gisèle Pelicot didn’t hide away on an island in shame somewhere with a changed name. Instead, she grew some massive labia and decided not only to face her rapists herself in court, not only to allow her name to be published, and not only to allow the rape porn to be displayed in court, but to hold as many accountable as she could.
According to Bad Men, men simply don’t understand how upsetting rape, or its possibility, is to women, unless they have a close family member or friend who’s been raped and has had it ‘splained to them. Rape is the most feared aggressive act by women; men report that being sexually victimized by a woman is only ‘moderately bothersome’, and I wonder how many responded, “You can’t rape the willing!” I also wonder how they’d respond if asked how ‘bothersome’ it would be to be overpowered and raped by a man.
Evidence strongly indicates it’s a lot higher as the fear of rape increases dramatically in men faced with the real possibility of going to prison.
It’s why I’ve argued that accused rapists don’t get off ‘scot-free’ if they’re wrongfully acquitted or receive a light sentence. They spend months worrying about the very real possibility of being violently and viciously raped up an orifice not designed for entrance, and forced to orally pleasure another man.
Take rape seriously—ladies!
Bad Men validates, along with Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear, what I’ve been stating for many, many years: Failing to report a rape at the time, with evidence intact, collaborates with rapists to keep it a relatively consequence-free crime. Failing to report a rape, like failing to report a home invasion robbery, isn’t illegal. It’s the victim’s decision whether to hold the offending parties accountable. It demonstrates the choice victims must make, however ugly: Does she report it and do what she can to hold him accountable? Or does she let him go free to rape again, which he may do now that she’s taught him it’s true what they say, 80-90% of rapes go unreported. And of course, 100% of unreported rapes result in zero convictions. The odds are heavily stacked in the rapist’s favor—by women.
If nothing else is accomplished, a reported rape that’s thrown out of court or results in an acquittal or the judge more sympathetic to the accused than the victim, at least forces the victim to become known to his family, friends, and other groups, so women in his orbit can know they need to be careful around him. Most critically, it forces him to ponder the possibility of his own rape, including gang rape, in prison.
Holding a man accountable for rape is NEVER a wasted effort. If nothing else, there’s a report or a complaint filed with the police they’ll find if he’s accused again by others.
Bad Men notes the high percentage of repeat rapists, and how most raped women don’t receive ancillary physical assault in this process; in four-fifths of them, they’re out like a light, whether from drinking too much or unwittingly consuming a drug like a roofie.
The best prevention for avoiding this horrific crime is to teach young girls, and for women to be aware themselves, of the importance of not drinking too much in public places, and to always always always keep one’s drink firmly in hand. Women have the power to avoid rape, and to prevent it for others; for every woman who fails to report a rape, every woman he rapes after her is partly thanks to her.
It’s collaboration, plain and simple. We’ve got to stop this, ladies!
Gisèle Pelicot grew some labia and is making sure all of France, and perhaps all of Europe is watching as she, with a near-unnatural courage, holds her rapists accountable. Other rape victims need not go as deeply and dramatically as she has; all they need to do, once they realize they’ve been raped, is go directly to the hospital and try and get a rape test—yes, I know how hard it is to get one, and how many rape kits are thrown away unused—but until we demand better treatment nothing will change. If a woman does everything in her power to hold the rapist accountable and see him duly punished—and fails—she is still a real hero to other rape victims. She tried. She grew the labia to say, “I want him to end with me.”
She can go to her grave knowing she did what she could to stop a rapist, rather than giving him permission to do it again. And again. And again.
I wouldn’t shame a woman who decided weeks, months, or years later to report, but at this point I do shrug my shoulders and say, “You waited too long. It’s your word against his.”
Unless she keeps the stained clothing. Then, maybe, she can get a little justice, even if it’s just public shaming, to hold her accused rapist accountable.
Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts of more recent articles there too!
Comments