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The French word for rape is viol. It signals the violence and violation inherent to the acts it names. Since early September, Dominique Pelicot, a 71-year-old Frenchman, has been on trial in Avignon for repeatedly drugging his wife, Gisèle, and raping her as she slept. He is also charged with inviting at least 72 other men into their home to do the same, on 92 occasions between July 2011 and October 2020, an average of about once every five weeks (Pelicot has admitted to raping her two or three times a week during this period, roughly 1400 times in total). Fifty men stood trial with Pelicot.
The involvement of the other men came to light because Pelicot filmed every act of abuse – this is the word he used to name the folder in which he stored the footage on his computer. The individual files had titles such as ‘fucked on the back 2’, ‘3rd anal’, ‘magnificent close-up from behind’. Among the more than twenty thousand images and videos Pelicot had saved, several were of his current and former daughters-in-law, Céline and Aurore, and two were of his daughter, Caroline, when she was thirty. In them she is asleep, lying on her left side dressed in underwear she does not recognise. She has no recollection of when or how the photographs were taken. Pelicot has admitted to almost everything, including that his motive was to ‘control women’, but he denies he ever ‘touched’ his daughter. The verdicts are expected to be handed down on 20 December.
We know these details because Gisèle Pelicot insisted on a public trial. She had the choice to seek justice anonymously and behind closed doors, but she wanted, among other things, to raise awareness of ‘chemical submission’, so that ‘one morning, when a woman wakes up and can’t remember what she did the previous day, she will say to herself: “Well, I heard Mme Pelicot’s testimony.”’ Indeed, women speaking out set this process in motion. Police inspected Pelicot’s computer after he was caught ‘upskirting’ several women in a supermarket in 2020 and one of them, Nathalie, decided to file a complaint. ‘Luckily,’ she said, ‘I didn’t just say to myself, “Ah, it’s just some old guy,” despite the fact that he played the victim.’
Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t conceive of her now ex-husband or the other men who raped her as ‘bad apples’, aberrations from the norm, but as products of what she has called a ‘macho and patriarchal society’ which ‘trivialises rape’. Her hope – and in this she is not alone – is that by publicising the behaviour such a society produces, the trial will be a step towards changing it. Her decision is astonishingly brave, not least because the culture she is condemning also produced the lawyers who have been questioning her and the journalists covering the case. The Telegraph did not disappoint, describing her choice of an open trial as an act of ‘public revenge’. The Daily Mail issued obsessive updates on the atrocities of the man they will only call ‘The Monster of Avignon’.
The defence tried to insist on closed hearings, but their arguments were ultimately self-defeating. The videos of Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse were, they said, too ‘nauseating’, too ‘indecent and shocking’ for public view; they would disturb the need for ‘serenity and dignity’ in the court. Her willingness to allow the videos to be seen must, they argued, either be an act of revenge (that word again) or evidence of her ‘exhibitionist tendencies’. They tried to conjure her as a patriarchal grotesque: at once a woman who enjoys sex too much and a woman who speaks out against the men who wrong her. A woman who must expect humiliation, who gets what she deserves.
One by one the accused were questioned, a process that went on for weeks. Gisèle Pelicot sat through almost all of it. The footage of the rapes was only broadcast in court when, after questioning, defendants maintained their innocence. One man insisted that he did it ‘pour satisfaire le couple’ (the only occasion Gisèle Pelicot walked out). The video was screened, the first time the accused had seen it. ‘I think I pleased the husband, not the couple,’ he conceded afterwards. Meanwhile, Gisèle was charged by the defence with not appearing sad enough (she cried only once in court). Can the exhibitionist not provide a little more drama?
Much has been made of how many of the accused were normal men living ordinary lives: a journalist, a plumber, a nurse, a soldier, a councillor, a lorry driver, a prison warden, a carpenter. One was quite literally the bloke round the corner: he and Gisèle would exchange greetings at the local bakery. Only two have a previous conviction for sexual violence, six others for domestic violence. Friends and family members of several of the men acted as character witnesses, including the partner of Cyril B., who testified that he is not ‘macho’ and that he had never forced her into any unwanted sexual encounters. Caroline, Pelicot’s daughter, says in her memoir that her father was ‘the one who took me to school, encouraged me in my sporting activities, my studies, my plans and later on in my career choices’. When the police first contacted her, Gisèle Pelicot recalled that they asked how she would describe her husband. ‘Un super mec,’ she said – a great guy.
Perhaps there is some underlying tendency that links these men, some pattern only experts can see. (Though perhaps not – the psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco argued in Le Monde that this was not ‘the trial of masculinity or patriarchy’ while also insisting that we must scrutinise the ‘education of young children’, as if these things could be untwined.) Reading reports of the testimony, patterns are hard to find. Many, certainly, experienced abandonment, parental alcoholism, neglect and abuse in childhood (Dominique Pelicot was raped by a nurse in hospital when he was nine), but others did not. The men described sadnesses and setbacks – a child dying, a business lost – tragedies that mark the lives of many people who will never rape. A number come from modest backgrounds; some are well off. One attributes what he called a ‘hatred of women’ to a single historic act of infidelity, but many more talk of building their own contented families. They all watch pornography, like at least 55 per cent of French citizens.
Only fourteen of the accused men have pleaded guilty to rape. Most of the rest claim that they, too, were the victims of Dominique Pelicot. Christian L., once a volunteer firefighter, said he must also have been ‘chemically subdued’. ‘It’s my body,’ he said of the video evidence, ‘it’s not my brain.’ Others said that they were manipulated by, even terrified of, Pelicot, the ‘seriously ill person’ under whose spell they were caught. For these men, the idea that Pelicot is a singular monster is a welcome reprieve. One defendant explained that the question of Gisèle’s consent was irrelevant: ‘She’s his wife, he does what he wants with her.’ A frequent defence – the one I find most chilling – was, in the words of Simone M., that the men believed Gisèle Pelicot was merely ‘pretending to be asleep, waiting to take part’. Some elaborated that they thought they were there to re-enact a scenario popular on porn sites: ‘sleeping woman’. At least one said that Dominique Pelicot told them that he and his wife would enjoy watching the video afterwards.
It is unclear whether any of the defendants were really proposing that they thought they were involved in the production of homemade pornography, but there are drearily practical reasons why this argument is not exculpatory. In pornography, the point is that things are not as they seem – the ‘unconscious’ woman is in fact conscious, and consents to pretending otherwise while having sex. In consensual porn, however amateur, the participants all know this; ‘non-consensual porn’ is just a synonym for rape. Since November 2022, OnlyFans has required that creators provide proof of consent from everyone in their content. The actors might meet beforehand, exchange names, confirm they’ve been tested for STDs. That none of this happened in the Pelicots’ house – that these men, on their own admission, never once met or spoke to the woman they claim was willingly involved, nor saw or asked for any proof of consent; that one of the men who came back six times was HIV positive; that at least one other man, probably more, was responsible for the four STDs with which Gisèle Pelicot was diagnosed after she learned of her abuse – debunks the fantasy that they were simply involved in consensual pornography. (Though it reminds us that the conditions of production for so much contemporary porn are conducive to exploitation. A recent Reuters investigation revealed multiple cases of men finding ways round the OnlyFans consent requirement, coercing women to film themselves while holding on to the proceeds.)
There is other evidence that the men in the Pelicot case knew exactly what they were doing. They all met in a chatroom called ‘without her knowledge’ (‘à son insu’, suggesting manipulation and a lack of consent), on a website that had, before it was closed down last June, long been tied to the co-ordination of sex crimes. One 37-year-old man had extended conversations with Dominique Pelicot on Skype, but chose not to participate after concluding that the plan clearly amounted to rape. There is the testimony of those who have confessed, like the former soldier who said he knew that Pelicot ‘was drugging his wife, who had not agreed to have sexual relations with other men’. When he took the stand, Pelicot testified that each of the participants knew the terms of the arrangement; he even said that he had warned some of them that it might get them arrested. Despite flimsy and misogynistic attempts by the defence to suggest otherwise, Gisèle Pelicot herself clearly had no idea about any of it; a decade of rape and dangerously high doses of sedation led to memory lapses, disorientation and gynaecological pain so severe that she went to see multiple specialists. When her husband accompanied her, she took it as an ‘act of kindness’.
Some of the defendants seemed to claim that pornography made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to distinguish between real life and the screen. The argument that porn can lead men to do bad things, perhaps even unwittingly – precisely because it encourages its viewers to suspend the distinction between fantasy and reality – is usually associated with conservatives or anti-porn feminists, not with the people who consume it. A court psychiatrist was reported as testifying that Charly A., who admitted to being addicted to pornography, ‘wanted to participate in a script’ and ‘was able to go from screens to an inert body’. It is one thing to think that porn shapes many people’s sexual expectations. It is another to think that porn is entirely constitutive of men’s sexual agency. This sort of vulgar determinism gives up on men as ethical agents capable of distinguishing between wanted and unwanted, and choosing accordingly. It also trivialises the deep phenomenological differences between the purely imaginary and the reality of engaging with another human body.
Recounting the details of the video evidence risks prurience. But precisely because rape culture is so successful at producing excuses for its perpetrators – and because our own imaginations are shaped by patriarchy and the porn it produces – the details become crucial, as both Gisèle Pelicot and the defence who tried to suppress them knew.
Each of the accused entered a bedroom and saw a woman lying still on the bed. None bothered to check whether she was, as they would later claim, playing along. Does a feigning body not betray itself in ways that even an accomplished actor cannot contain – a flickering eye, a tense arm? Husamettin D. initially refused to touch Gisèle because she was so still that he thought she was dead. The men, by this point, were already naked: Dominique Pelicot had them remove their clothes in the kitchen, one of several precautions to ensure they didn’t rouse his wife, including parking well away from the couple’s home, warming their hands and avoiding smoking beforehand or wearing cologne. (He didn’t, however, require they wear condoms.) More than once the court heard, on the videos, Dominique issue a rebuke: ‘Shh: you’re going to wake her up.’ The men persevered, getting onto an unfamiliar bed and manoeuvring Gisèle into position, her limbs heavy and uncooperative from the sedation. She never said a word, nor moved an inch to make herself more comfortable – in some cases, her husband arranged her body for the men. Experts testified that the amount of sedative Gisèle Pelicot was given meant that her state would have been more akin to a coma than traditional sleep. In multiple videos, she was snoring. This did not stop more than one of the defendants from putting his penis in her mouth, in some cases prompting her to choke. Some clips show Dominique holding her mouth open for them; in others, there is toilet paper over her eyes. ‘No violence,’ he reminds them, as they penetrate her orally, vaginally, anally, as they ejaculate on her face, her body. Some of the men leave the moment she stirs. One is seen gripped by surprise and panic as Gisèle showed signs of waking. Florian R. admitted on the stand that Gisèle Pelicot ‘did not move like someone who is having sex or who wants to’. Each of these men chose to ignore the testimony of her motionless body. ‘When you saw the lifeless body,’ she challenged the defendants in court, ‘did it not occur to you that something seriously wrong was happening in that room?’
When the Pelicot trial started, I had just begun reading Kate Atkinson’s bestselling series of murder mysteries, the sixth and most recent of which, Death at the Sign of the Rook, was published in August. The first book in the series, Case Histories (2004), quickly makes clear that the comfort on offer here is wry recognition. The story concerns three unrelated cold cases, two missing girls and another who was murdered, though we do not know by whom or why. As each case unfurls, the book becomes a study of the way women, for better and for worse (often much worse), adapt and accommodate to, are shaped and hardened by, male power and its familiar, sometimes devastating cruelties. Some of Atkinson’s women are both the victims of misogyny and its conduit. She is interested in what we don’t know about ourselves and one another, and her plots work in part because her characters – and her readers – are misled into thinking they know more than they do.
Hired to solve these cases is, as the blurbs say, the ‘beloved’ private investigator Jackson Brodie. The first time we meet Jackson he is listening ‘to the reassuring voice of Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour’. It’s 2004 and he is 45, ‘that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they’re going to die’. Where others choose Springsteen, motorcycles and ‘shagging anything that moves’, Jackson, though he wouldn’t say no to a BMW, dreams of retiring to rural France. His ex-wife, Josie, once the source of impulsive lust and dutifully obeyed orders, is ‘shagging some poncy guy with a goatee’. Jackson manages his sadness, and his bruised ego, by spraying some of her perfume in his tiny, new, bachelor bathroom (‘it wasn’t the same’) and listening to music compilations of ‘women in pain’.
A matter-of-fact, Thatcher-loathing Yorkshireman, ‘brought up on prudence and thrift’, Jackson’s likeability is due in part to the fact that he isn’t sanitised: he thinks about sex, even when he suspects he shouldn’t. He fancies his dentist, though the erection he gets while lying in her chair is, so he reports, a result of thoughts of plump French vegetables. He is not without flashes of masculine entitlement, but we forgive him because of what we could call his nascent feminist consciousness. (A phrase Jackson would think typical of ‘academic types’.) Years as a detective inspector investigating murders and sex crimes means he thinks it is hard to sift the ‘good guys’ from the ‘shitty little perverts’. ‘No woman,’ he concludes, ‘was ever truly safe.’ He is haunted by ‘lost girls’, especially those dismissed by a system that prefers ‘nice middle-class’ victims. And he makes clear what he would do to anyone tempted by the view that a woman ‘had somehow invited what had happened to her’. Jackson is the kind of guy who ignores it when friends ask if he’s ‘pussy whipped’, who wishes his 8-year-old daughter’s T-shirts weren’t emblazoned with phrases like ‘so many boys, so little time’, who sheds a quiet tear when the ‘racist old boot’ he worked for leaves him her estate, then worries to his (black) best friend about whether the cash might have originated in slave labour and should be given back. Atkinson offers up Jackson as the kind of decent guy we can all get behind – not a saint, not an angel, but a walking, talking, smoking, swearing personification of #NotAllMen.
By the end of Case Histories, Jackson is in a relationship with Julia, the client with whom he has spent much of the book flirting. The two were brought together by childhood trauma and a shared scorn for people who use the term ‘interfering’ when what they really mean is rape. I had become such an Atkinson fan that after finishing it I turned immediately to One Good Turn (2006), the next book in the series. Jackson seems a little darker here, no doubt because things are tricky with Julia. Unable to sleep, and absorbed in the plot, I found myself still reading at 3 a.m. Chapter 37 sees Jackson also lying awake at night, Julia asleep next to him. Usually, she sleeps naked but not tonight. ‘Jackson knew the pyjamas were significant, but he didn’t particularly want to think what that significance might be.’ Despite this,
“He fitted himself into the familiar curves and cambers of her body, but instead of pushing back and settling into his shape, she shifted away from him ... He moved closer to her again and kissed her neck, but she remained steadfastly asleep. It was difficult to wake Julia up, short of shaking her. Once, he had made love to her while she slept, and she’d hardly even twitched when he came inside her, but he didn’t tell her about it afterwards because he wasn’t sure how she would react. He couldn’t imagine her being particularly put out (this was Julia, after all). She would probably just have said, ‘Without me? How could you?’ Technically it was rape, of course. He had arrested enough guys in his time for taking advantage of drunk or drugged girls. Plus, if he was honest, Julia was such a sound sleeper that there had been a touch of necrophilia about the whole thing. He’d put a necrophiliac away once: the guy worked in a mortuary and didn’t ‘see where the harm was’ because ‘the objects of my affection have moved beyond earthly matters.’
What? I read the passage again. A woman asleep in the safety of her own bed, next to a partner she trusts. A partner who knows, as we do, that she is ‘a heavy sleeper’ (this is one of the first things we learn about Julia), a partner who also knows that when Julia’s father once tried to ‘stick his hands down her knickers’ she had ‘screamed the place down’, a partner who once stood next to her as she wept over the bones of her little sister. A man, having sex with a woman without her consent, knowing that what he is doing is ‘technically’ rape, convincing himself – as so many of Gisèle Pelicot’s abusers did – that she would have wanted it anyway, redescribing what he did as ‘making love’.
A writer of Atkinson’s intelligence and subtlety must be up to something, I told myself. And so, sleeplessly, I read back and I read on, trying to work it out. Perhaps Atkinson was taking aim at the comforting notion she spent much of Case Histories setting up: the idea that amid the perverts and the rapists, the shitty men and the sex pests, there really are some decent men out there. Isn’t the crushing disappointment we feel at Jackson’s blasé revelation familiar? Don’t many women know the experience of being let down by one of the ‘good’ guys, the man we admire for resisting what the world wants him to be, until, often without warning, he turns into that very thing? ‘You were a good husband and a good man, and I trusted you,’ Gisèle Pelicot said, on the one occasion she cried in court. ‘I never doubted you.’
Maybe there were warnings, clues laid down. Should I have paid more attention in Case Histories to what had seemed Jackson’s complex and interesting relationship to manliness – his worry, for example, that by being in touch with his feelings he was ‘turning into a woman’? Was Atkinson beginning an indictment of our tendency to pathologise sexual abuse rather than recognise its ubiquity and its connection to other manifestations of misogyny? As the books continue, Jackson sinks deeper into an embittered and fragile masculinity. At one point in Case Histories, he is challenged by a pervy teacher to admit that, in the same position, he too would sleep with his students: ‘At the end of the day you’re just a man.’ Back then, Jackson disagreed. But by the third book, When Will There Be Good News? (2008), he is sleeping with a woman fifteen years his junior, one who ‘hadn’t yet lost the glow of youthful enthusiasm’. ‘He was a man,’ he tells himself, ‘and he had taken it where he found it.’ Perhaps rape was a rite of passage.
After he and Julia separate at the end of One Good Turn, Jackson’s belief that he is a victim of deceitful, nagging women deepens. The possibility never occurs to him that she might have suspected what he did, might even have woken up during it, might have realised what kind of man she was lying next to, that her ‘infidelity’ (the cause of their break-up) might have been a way of getting out. In the latest book, Death at the Sign of the Rook, Jackson regularly stops himself from finishing sexist thoughts because he imagines himself ‘up before the Court of Women, Judge Julia, his ex, presiding’. Judge Julia, Judge Gisèle; all these men haunted by the fear of a woman’s vengeance.
As I read every interview I could find with Atkinson, it became clear that this wasn’t a six-book performance piece on rape culture and the evolution of the beta-creep. In the publicity for the fifth book, Big Sky (2019), in which Atkinson takes on #MeToo with a parade of women meting out justice to various men, she described Jackson as ‘the last good man standing’, who always tries ‘to behave like a gentleman’. ‘He knows,’ she said, ‘he’s got to protect women and children,’ even though he has a ‘strain of darkness’ himself. How’s that for a euphemism?
When Jackson first met Julia, ‘she made offering a cigarette seem like an invitation to sex.’ During a period of ‘enforced celibacy’, she insists she must ‘wank every night’. Does Atkinson think that Julia’s sexual appetite excuses, if not justifies, Jackson’s rape? Is she assuming the same slut-shaming logic offered by the defence in the Pelicot trial: that a woman who enjoys sex too much should expect men (and the rest of us) to presume that she is always up for it? Or does Atkinson, like some partners of the men charged with raping Gisèle Pelicot, think he just made a silly mistake? Either way, I didn’t want to believe it.
It’s not only Atkinson who seems to think there is nothing to see here. I started googling: ‘Jackson rapes Julia Kate Atkinson’; ‘Kate Atkinson Jackson Brodie rapist’; ‘“Jackson Brodie” sexually assaults Julia “One Good Turn”’. But all I could find was a short complaint on an obscure blog. A scholarly essay on ‘gender violence’ in the Jackson Brodie series doesn’t mention it. Google’s ‘AI Overview’ reassures me that ‘Jackson Brodie does not assault Julia.’ Book after book, reviewers respond with an often breathless admiration and excitement. ‘Be still, my heart,’ Marilyn Stasio wrote in the New York Times in 2019, ‘after nine long years in the wilderness, Jackson Brodie is back on the job.’ Don’t the Pelicot trial and the Jackson Brodie novels show, from different ends of the culture, that an essential feature of male power is being allowed to choose not to listen – to reason, to conscience, to evidence, to a woman’s testimony, whatever its form? And don’t they also suggest that essential to that power, too, is what women – what all of us – are expected to ignore?
Throughout my childhood, before my parents divorced, my father, when he was around, would read to me at bedtime. This was a privilege and there is no doubt a connection between this fact and what I now get to do for ‘work’. Sometimes, when I was a young girl, he would stroke my naked back, something he said he had enjoyed as a child, as he made up the stories I adored about the animals – foxes, badgers, rabbits, wise old owl – who played and misbehaved in our garden. This continued even after I found, in a drawer of his things, photographs of me lying asleep in my bed, propped up on my right side, naked. I had no idea how or when they had been taken. I was ten or eleven. I put the pictures back in their cardboard Ritz Camera carton and told no one.
Over the next couple of years, as my parents’ marriage imploded, my father continued to come up at bedtime. The animals became anachronisms, but it was clear he liked the ritual, and I liked that he hadn’t left us yet. So, I lay there on my front, my arms tight at my sides, useful barriers between his probing fingers and the breasts I wished I could send back to wherever they were coming from. I thought I’d pulled off a brilliant compromise. I didn’t have to be touched where I really didn’t want to be (my back was sacrificed territory) and his feelings wouldn’t be hurt. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I thought about what a 13-year-old girl lying face down on her bed, pyjama top off, arms clamped and rigid, must have looked like to a man in his early fifties. What was the testimony of her body?
I sometimes wonder about my father’s own childhood experiences. Did he know the songs reluctant bodies can sing? I haven’t spoken to him in more than fifteen years, and he hasn’t tried to contact me. The last time we saw each other – I can’t remember how it came up and the fact that it did seems barely believable – he shared his view that women who wear short skirts on nights out were ‘asking for it’. I have heard since that he, too, plays the victim, telling anyone who will listen that my mother turned me against him. I sometimes wonder if there is anyone else my silence failed to protect.
I feel, though perhaps I am deluding myself, very little about all this. I don’t remember the pictures being taken and the bedtime accommodations were not so different from strategies I’ve adopted to deal with other men whose anger or hurt I’ve wished to avoid. My father found so many other ways to make life miserable that this seems, in retrospect, the least of it. What interests me more are the reactions of two people, both of whom I’ve known since childhood, both of whom I told about this only recently. Each offered up episodes – of which, again, I have no memory. One told me that their partner had always found something a little off about my father. Indeed. He always wanted to cuddle a bit much, and I always gave in because I felt sorry for him, and because I loved him. I didn’t know this wasn’t the way a child should feel but also, somehow, I did. I just didn’t know how to talk about it. And neither did anyone around me.
Gisèle Pelicot’s family didn’t know how to talk about it. On the witness stand, Dominique Pelicot’s former daughter-in-law, Aurore, reported once hearing him say to his grandson: ‘But you never want to play doctor.’ Abused as a child, she worried she was reading too much into it, so said nothing. The Pelicots, she said, always seemed ‘a bit the ideal family’. Florian Pelicot recalled his father’s strange unease when he borrowed his computer, and the way he would take pictures of Aurore ‘from every angle’ at family events. Whatever signs there were, Gisèle Pelicot said, they only became apparent in retrospect.
What are we taught not to see? What do we see and are taught not to talk about? If we want to understand the logics of a ‘rape culture’ that produces the ‘Monster of Avignon’, the scores of men he convinced to join him, the website on which they all met, the terms in which they made their excuses, the porn they and millions of others consume, the desire that this porn both writes and represents, the desire of men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it from wanted it anyway, the women who are taught to stay quiet, who are kept quiet, and the ones who are ignored, defamed or humiliated when they do not – if we want to understand this ‘culture’ (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the ‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters? And perhaps also because we are worried that if we do speak up they might leave us, exclude us, react with the infantile fury we are taught so carefully to contain? Are we not, when we look closely, surrounded by these small acts of accommodation, denial, repression, evasion?
But speaking up isn’t easy and the hard distinction between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, makes these conversations even more difficult. Patriarchy does not mean that men cannot act decently, and kindly, indeed that the men in our lives may not sometimes be better and more reliable than the women. But it does mean that there are no men, no people, who can ever claim to be entirely beyond its reach. It is always there in the background, incentivising, rewarding and giving cover to good men who decide, however briefly, not to be.
The point here is not that all men are rapists-in-waiting, nor that all women who put their trust in men are at risk. The point is that patriarchy puts women in a sceptical scenario, making the distinction between the men you can and can’t trust difficult to draw. (It is not just women who suffer here: consider the man who really does just want to read to his daughter.) How many women have wondered whether a behaviour should be interpreted as a warning or instead as something they can safely ignore – perhaps even participate in and enjoy? Women in this situation are not helped by the tendency of men to get defensive, to use their comparative ‘goodness’ (‘I’m not that guy’) to shut down these conversations. (Many French men have expressed fury at the attempt to use Dominique Pelicot to start a national conversation about sexism.) It is certainly possible that the man who gets off on ‘sleeping girl’ porn or who sleeps with much younger women is not a creep. But if he is not to be, then might he need to be the guy who takes this sceptical scenario seriously, who is open to a conversation about where these desires might come from and what they might mean? If the price of a relationship is silence, is that not a sign that something isn’t right?
The other side of a culture of silence and silencing is one of not listening. Because, of course, many women do speak up, have always spoken up, and it is not only ‘bad’ men who ignore them. A group of researchers at the University of Cambridge recently reported on a study in Northern India where remotely operated drones were meant to be used to monitor wildlife. They found that the technology was used instead by local government and male villagers to surveil and humiliate women. Some women who worked together in the forest felt so intimidated that they softened the singing they used to deter attacks from predators. One was subsequently killed by a tiger. The lead researcher, who I have no reason to think is anything other than a very good guy, commented: ‘Nobody could have realised that camera traps put in the Indian forest to monitor mammals actually have a profoundly negative impact on the mental health of local women who use these spaces.’ Really – nobody?
The poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?’ ‘The world,’ her poem responds, ‘would split open.’ Gisèle Pelicot also believes that her testimony – her body on the screen, her words in court – might be enough to change society. Do we believe it too? Her decision means that some women will realise, as she did not, that they have been the victim of drug facilitated sexual assault. Some doctors will consider diagnoses and offer tests that they otherwise might not have. Recognition and the solidarity it can produce have always been central to feminism’s power. But what of society more broadly? Will men see themselves as implicated in the culture that produced Dominique Pelicot and his accomplices, and seek to transform that culture, and themselves? And if not, will we at least create the conditions that allow women to leave abusive men with dignity and in safety, investing in specialist support services, public housing, childcare provision, adult education? Or will we simply continue to ask underfunded justice systems (something France and Britain have in common) to prosecute bad men out of existence? In 1968, when Rukeyser wrote her poem, it was possible to think that the world might change if only women told the truth about their lives. But the last several decades, decades during which women around the world have challenged male power, have shown us otherwise. Even as we learn to talk, we find that talk alone won’t stop the world from turning much as it did before.
