There are thousands of men who have spoken out openly in support of Gisèle Pélicot and against her attackers, what we need to see as soon as possible is millions of men questioning all the rapists, confronting them and bringing them to justice.
Gisèle Pelicot, to victims of sexual violence: “You are not alone”
As children, my brothers learned to defend themselves against bullieswhile my sisters and I were learning to protect ourselves from the world. I woke up thinking about this because I was talking to a friend whose eleven-year-old daughter is a self-proclaimed feminist. He worries that his daughter is so aware and concerned about male violence. “I tell you not all men are violent, but reality doesn’t help me,” my friend says with a look of dismay.
We tend to normalize what in our childhood constitutes the unwritten book of rules of life, these are the maternal, paternal, grandparental advices, which dictated to us where to look, whom to trust, whom or what to fear and which voices we should deny. We rarely reflect on how these phrases repeated by those who educated us have shaped our way of assessing danger and risk or of valuing safety and well-being. With these rules we learned to react from childhood and to live in adulthood.
We deliberate very little about the emotional mechanisms that were activated in our childhood to understand how to love, how to desire, how to disagree, how to detect and reject violence in order to escape it; how to recognize the flashes of benevolent happiness that so often elude us.
Almost no one knows how they learned to be brave, almost no one remembers how they learned to live with the fear that ruminated in their guts. I grew up with a mother who taught me to detect the difference between what I feel and what I think. She trained me to listen to others, to listen to myself, because my mother understood that I was hypersensitive and decided to give me tools to take this temperament towards the path of courage and not that of cowardice.
The word coward, moreover, comes from French cowardwhich comes from the Latin that refers to the tail slipped between the legs of wolves and dogs to show their submission. In our language, fear is cowardice, that is, submission in the face of danger, in the face of the power of those who can harm us. A professor of criminology once told me that one of the characteristics of aggressors is that they live in fear – they are cowards – and that they inflict fear to feel less weak. Cowards submit and reproduce the commandment “better to mistreat than to be mistreated”.
The word bravery, in Latin, means action of being strong; that is, to show strength, not to submit to fear. If I have learned anything at 61, it is that cowardice incites the exercise of violence, I have seen it many times in the eyes of aggressors, pedophiles and torturers. They are all cowards and, subjected to fear, they attack. non-stop so that no one knows that their cruelty comes from the fear of being dominated. It is a paradox that is always repeated. Thus, in the world, we see millions of courageous women and girls facing evil with dignity, protecting others and seeking to negotiate to achieve peace. We see millions of cowardly men who, without confronting those who are violent, deny or minimize sexual violence against women, girls and boys.
It is curious to go back to the origin of words, emotions and ideas to understand that our culture, our art, our literature and our epics in general associate bravery with what is masculine, in this astonishing fantasy what is heroic is what is violent, the fear of being conquered incites to conquer, to colonize countries, bodies, peoples. The truth is that beyond the myth of courageous men, women have learned, some in childhood and others much later, to be strong out of necessity, to defend themselves from the world, to be social lubricants dedicated to avoiding the friction generated by the cruelty of the violent who mostly belong to the male universe.
When someone talks about “murderous women,” none of us feel concerned, we know that they are referring to the aggressors in particular, not to all of them. It is curious that so many men feel targeted when we talk about “rapist men, aggressors” or “potential rapists.” Perhaps it is because in childhood, so many people were taught to submit to the rules of the game; if they had been girls, they would have learned to protect themselves from the world, to be brave, to protect others. They would certainly have less time to wage war, commit genocide, rape and destroy childhoods.
A few weeks ago, Gisèle Pelicot, accompanied by her lawyers, a prosecutor and the French police, denounced her husband and 72 men, invited by her husband Dominique to rape her after he intentionally put her to sleep. She insisted, like many of us, that victims should not feel responsible, guilty or ashamed. The time has come to shame the rapists, declared the courageous Gisèle.
It is true that not all men are violent and not all women are good and supportive. It is also true that every 12 seconds a woman, girl or boy is a victim of sexual violence and that 99% of the perpetrators are men. In criminology we say that perpetrators know what they are doing, that sexual violence always requires preparation in which the perpetrator makes decisions and knows what he is doing, because sexual violence is an exercise of power to colonize the body and will of his victim. victim, is, for many men, an epic act of submission that reinforces their virility and eroticizes the appropriation of the body of the pornified victim.
The lesson we learn from the Pelicot trial lies in an indisputable fact: the men Dominique Pelicot contacted on social media to rape his wife agreed without questioning anything. The rapists, aged 26 to 74, stated during the first police investigations that “if the husband invited them, everything seemed normal, because a husband has rights over his wife’s sexuality”. One of them – aged 26 – stated that, even though she appeared sedated, he thought she had consented to be drugged in order to be raped. Imaginary consent.
Thousands of men have spoken out openly against these attackers and in favor of Gisele. What we need to see as soon as possible is millions of men questioning all the rapists, confronting them and bringing them to justice. We need to hear millions of men admitting loudly to cowards that women’s bodies belong only to them. And yes, a public act in which they acknowledge a thousand times loudly their will to build a world in which their daughters and the rest of women should not be brave, but simply strong, free and happy.
