For me, the news of the week, the one that upset me, the one that touched me, is the story of this magnificent woman whose dignity was not taken away even by infamy. Therefore, because we owe it to her, because she stood up and asked for transparency for those who have been and those who could be victims like her, I bring her to these lines today.
My father is without a doubt one of the biggest sex offenders of the last 20 years.
“Abuse/night of May 26 with Marc Sodo. 5th time.”
“Abuse/night of June 9 with Charly. 6th time.”
This is how Dominique Pélicot labeled the computer files in which he recorded the violations perpetrated by other men on his wife—fifty years of marriage, ten of assaults—while he watched them. The horror, the perversion, the vice, the use of the woman’s body to an almost unimaginable degree. “I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,” Gisèle said. More than a hundred rapes, about eighty different men, four infected STDs, and a woman who internally declares herself “a field of ruins.” I suppose I could talk to you about appointments, quotas, or so many things that we will continue to be involved in today, but for me, the news of the week, the one that shook me, the one that reached me deep down, was the story of this magnificent woman whose dignity even infamy has not taken away. It is for this reason, because we owe it to her, because she stood up and wanted transparency for those who have been and those who could be victims like her, that I bring her to these lines today. “Shame must change sides,” he declared with his head held high. Let’s go.
They treated her like a “garbage bag.” The man she shared her life with did it—“a nice guy,” she thought—neighbors from all walks of life did it, ordinary people did it, anyone, the common man: firefighters, journalists, factory workers, soldiers, delivery men, computer scientists between the ages of 26 and 74, almost all husbands and fathers. Other families destroyed, children and women discovering the monster they sleep with or who gave them life. Only three of them left without raping her when they saw that she was so sedated that she looked dead. The others did it and several repeated it. An inhuman horror that deserves reflection beyond the issues of consent and chemical submission.
Let’s get to the heart of the matter. This Pélicot was messing around on the Internet from his little neighborhood. While watching porn, of course, and on the Internet, he discovered a chat room called Coco in which there was a room housing men who took pleasure in raping unconscious women. “Behind her back” was the name of the group. In the past, they would never have dared to admit what psychoanalysts call their sexual perversion, society too, and which are today considered paraphilias, in some cases as a form of whitewashing of instincts or tendencies whose practice is absolutely unacceptable.
Let’s look at the semantic transition of perversion (on the other handreversed, deflected action) and the apparently kinder paraphilia (para-philiainclination towards the improper or abnormal) which being words that originally have the same meaning, in Spanish they suppose to soften what immediately the evil suggests perverse to the softer that the suffix filia evokes. It is still a euphemistic form. There are obviously all kinds of paraphilias, many of which do not harm anyone, or even that are sought to be practiced with people with complementary or similar tastes. But this group includes perversions that necessarily involve harming: pedophilia or rape fantasy or voyeurism around marital rape, for example, or non-consensual submission. We must avoid any attempt to put them in a bag that includes “sexual tastes” because in any case they are sexual tendencies that must be repressed. That is why I like to talk about paraphilias only when it comes to sexual divergences that can involve consent, but the others, which can only be satisfied by harming others, I like to call them sexual perversions and those who suffer from them find only that to be suitable for repressing their satisfaction forever. Why then are they freely represented in pornography? Why are they freely talked about in online chats? If we are so aware that hate speech leads to the possible passage to acts of violence, does it not happen in this area?
There have always been sexual perversions, some terrible, and Sade’s reporting landed him in prison – you’ll remember the scene from “Philosophy in the Toilet” in which men sick with syphilis ejaculate inside Eugenia’s mother, whose genitals are then sewn back together to ensure a slow death: “Truly, Dolmancé, what you are making us do is horrible; it is an outrage at once to nature, to heaven, and to the most sacred laws of humanity. But this is the 21st century and the Internet has provided material that was never available. Now they locate each other and talk in groups about what they would never have confessed before. Now, in pornographic supermarkets, open or clandestine, they find what they are looking for, often obtained by criminal means. Now they can meet and agree to act out their infamous fantasies. It is even possible that many, carried away by the need to intensify stimulus measures, will come to discover in their research aberrations and abuses that they had never even thought of.
Pélicot felt pleasure “in seeing his wife forced into practices that she usually rejected”. He spoke as though he was suffering from an addiction. Others put into practice, because they could, because it was within their reach, the aberration that they thought or talked about. Sexual fantasies have always been a private means of escape or pleasure that the vast majority of the population has never thought of putting into practice. It is the context that now favors this unacceptable, inhuman and criminal transit. “They take action because they break all the locks, because neither conscience, nor what is forbidden, nor the superego, nor social control, nor the laws stop them”, says one of the experts who participated in the evaluation of the defendants. Ordinary men, all men, good fathers of families “break the locks” and take action. In this single sentence, the expert sums up all the filters that humanity has put in place to prevent the passage of thoughts to actions that humiliate, offend and harm others.
The immense dignity of Gisèle – who will soon be able to leave behind her executioner’s surname and return to her maiden name –⁸, her head held high in the face of the aberrations she has suffered for which she is not responsible, reminds us that a society in which more and more individuals are able to “pick the locks” is an increasingly unlivable and increasingly inhuman society. And this technology not only frees the good, but also gives free rein to all the fears that live inside human beings. And finally, that forms of social control beyond the laws must exist so as not to whitewash what is repugnant, what is harmful, what is aberrant.
Today, the trend is precisely the opposite and that is how things are happening for us.
