Gisèle Pélicot has become the protagonist of a story of sexual violence that mixes the most terrible and the most heroic: for at least a decade, her husband sought out other men to rape her – including him – while she slept on the edge of the abyss. coma the effects of the medication provided by Dominique Pélicot. The police counted 92 rapes between July 2011 and October 2020. 51 men, including her now ex-husband, are currently answering before the French courts. This is where the other part of the trial that has fascinated appears: the resilience of a woman who decided to hold the hearings open so that everyone could see and hear because, in the words of her lawyer, “shame must change sides.”
While the case contains some elements that help us understand rape culture and the extent of gender-based violence, the shock and horror also generate other, more questionable effects. Portraying the attackers as monsters and focusing on such an extreme case facilitates a story in which many can say that “all men” do not do “these things” because “these things” are, in fact, monstrous. And the monstrous always seems to be an exception. The problem is that monstrous gender-based violence is the norm and not the exception, it is perpetrated by men and not by monsters, and, although cases like Gisèle Pélicot’s exist, a good portion of sexual violence continues to go unnoticed and does not usually involve such macabre strategies.
Sexual violence expert Bárbara Tardón points out that rape culture is contradictory: “The sexual aggressor is the most hated and, at the same time, it seems that no one is because the patriarchal pact allows men not to feel like one. Perceiving Dominique Pélicot as a monster serves, in a way, to focus terror on him and the other 50 men and to ‘save the others’.” Not all menus (“Not all men”) were being said a lot on social media these days, taking up the already classic expression from the time of Me too. If no man wants to identify with a sexual aggressor, avoiding the mirror seems easier when it comes to a husband who, for years, has been drugging his partner with the aim of raping her with the men he sought out on the Internet and whose attacks he recorded.
“It brings together all the characteristics of the monstrosity with which rape is represented in history, while sexual assaults are not seen in other cases where the behaviors are much more normalized and invisible, behaviors that many men have carried out. “This case is not the most frequent violation,” explains Tardón. Statistics and studies on sexual violence show that the vast majority of assaults are committed by known men and without the need to resort to extreme violence.
There are men who insist to the point of forcing the women next to them, men who interpret silence or discomfort as a “yes”, men who understand that sex is possible with someone who has consumed a large amount of alcohol or drugs. In any case, with more or less violence, attacks that scandalize society are possible because there are many other “less extreme” ones, linked to each other, the expert emphasizes.
evil and fear
Another contradiction of this rape culture that this case reveals is the mixture between marriage, jealousy as an element of so-called romantic love and the ability to attack the person you say you love. “This raises a seemingly incomprehensible paraphilia, which is this idea of giving your wife’s body to other men. But if you look at the facts with a magnifying glass, the surprise begins to dissolve, because it also constitutes one more tile in the whole mosaic of atrocities that patriarchy has perpetrated against women. Apparently, what is monstrous is that the accused made his wife’s body available to other men, but there is a whole tradition of male behavior based on the satisfaction of men at the expense of women. The interests of heteropatriarchy come before the interests of your wife,” reflects the writer Antonio J. Rodríguez, author of The jealous god. Monogamies, monotheisms, monopolies (Debate) and The New Old Masculinity (Anagram).
Bárbara Tardón adds something similar: that rapes occur within marriage and that, in addition, they have been facilitated by the husband to other men, this has “frightening” connotations because it is understood “that whoever is in a relationship with you cannot rape you.” The reality, however, shows that families, homes and heterosexual couples are spaces where women and girls suffer enormous sexist violence.
Following this case, Antonio J. Rodríguez reflected on evil and fear in a text on Substack. Regarding the former, he believes that whenever men have to evoke or explain evil, they turn to World War II, the Holocaust or terrorist attacks. However, the case of “the pack”, the thousands of missing and murdered women in Latin America, the trafficking of women during armed conflicts, parricides associated with gender-based violence or recent crimes such as that of the man who burned the athlete Rebecca Cheptegei are part of a “repertoire of attacks on the integrity and dignity of women that are only the tip of the iceberg of something much deeper, and explain, I believe quite clearly, how gender terror is probably the exposure of a structural evil” the most transversal that exists.
Precisely this description of evil allows men to experience gender violence in a more foreign way. Rodríguez remembers the fear he felt at the height of jihadism, fear for himself, for his son and for those around him, “and here the emotions are different, it is horror, stupor, but not fear.”
Let’s not ask for heroism
While Gisèle Pélicot’s attitude is admirably heroic, precisely because it constitutes a surprising exception in a world where victims remain exposed to the risk of stigmatization and questioning, it should not be used to create a new standard of the “good victim.” As an example of revictimization, one only has to look at the cover of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which caricatures the woman who had to take on this “big guy,” as she herself defined him, to whom she was married, who drugged her, raped her, other men and an engraving.
“There is a good intention in identifying her as a brave woman who resisted her attackers, but we cannot glorify victims who behave like this in a context where we say that sexual violence is so structural. “The majority of victims do not want to or cannot be like this, because the system will not always be with them,” explains Bárbara Tardón, an expert on sexual violence. If Rosa Parks was able to stay in her seat on that bus and Gisèle Pélicot asks to sit with her face uncovered during an open-door trial, it is also because they are accompanied: by a network, by an anti-racist or feminist movement. that creates the conditions for rebellion and change, he says.
