Invisible Women: not all men...but how many?
“I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello. I never thought he’d come and rape me.”
GFPs, today I want to talk about something weird that has been going on in my WhatsApp groups these past weeks. There is one story that every woman I know is talking about - and which not a single man I know is talking about.
It’s the kind of story that crops up every now and then. The kind of story that makes me think of that famous Germaine Greer line from The Female Eunuch:
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
This is a dispiriting idea, and one which, most of the time, I want to qualify. Some men, sure. After all, I know all too well how much some men, men who have never even met me, hate me personally, let alone women as a whole. These men have been sure to let me know over the years, most extremely via the deluge of graphic and detailed rape and death threats I received in the wake of the banknotes campaign, coupled with the spreading of what they thought was my home address online (thankfully it was an old one).
And then of course, like too many women I have been sexually assaulted — although I always put that down more to the men in question thinking I’m subhuman (after all why else would you think consent doesn’t matter?) rather than actively hating me. Or does thinking a woman is subhuman count as hating her? (This is a rhetorical question).
In any case, most of the time I navigate the world feeling pretty secure that most of the male half of humanity does not actively despise me simply because I’m female. Are a lot of them unthinkingly sexist? Sure, but then again so are we all in one way or another (see Invisible Women for evidence of the power of the default male for example). These men who hate us, they are surely in a minority.
But then a news story emerges that shakes this foundation of semi-security and finds me looking at the men around me and thinking, “would you do this to me?”
I’m talking, as I’m sure many female GFPs reading this will know, about the horrific case currently going through the French courts, of the woman whose husband of fifty years has admitted drugging her and then inviting men over so that he could film them raping his unconscious wife.
When the couple were first brought in for questioning over what Gisèle (she was referred to only by her first name in court) believed had been a “one-off” up-skirting incident (another data point there to add to why police have to start taking “low-level” sexual crimes seriously), she told police that Dominique Pélicot was “caring and considerate”. The marriage was, to her knowledge, a “happy” one.
This fairytale came crashing down in November 2020, when police showed Gisèle, now 72, the 20,000 images and films they had found on her husband’s computer that documented her being raped almost 100 times over nearly a decade. He had saved them in a folder labelled “abuse.”
“My world fell apart. For me, everything was falling apart. Everything I had built up over 50 years.”
But also, some things started to made sense. Gisèle had been losing weight, losing hair, even at one point losing control of one of her arms. She had also “begun to have difficulties remembering things and concentrating,” and worried she was developing Alzheimer’s — a fear she shared with her husband who “supported her.”
But she didn’t have Alzheimer’s. She just had a husband who hated her.
Some of the men have claimed that they were unaware that Gisèle was not a willing participant, but this stretches credulity. For a start, police say that most of them were recruited by her husband on a sex-chat website called “a son insu,” which means “without their knowledge,” where “members discussed preferences for non-consenting partners.” The men, say police, were also given strict instructions about how to attend their rape appointment:
They had to park at some distance from the house so as to not attract attention, and to wait for up to an hour so that the sleeping drugs which he had given Gisèle could take effect.
[The police] further claim that, once in the home, the men were told to undress in the kitchen, and then to warm their hands with hot water or on a radiator. Tobacco and perfume were not allowed in case they awoke Gisèle. Condoms were not required.
One of the men was HIV-positive. He is accused of raping Gisèle six times. It was later discovered that she had several STIs.
Now, the details of this case are extreme and horrifying, without question. But that is not exactly what has got my female WhatsApp groups buzzing. After all, we are often faced with extreme and horrifying things men do to women; in the same week as this court case has dominated headlines, for example, the Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei was doused in petrol and set on fire by her ex boyfriend. She has since died. So it’s not the extreme nature of the crime that we’re fixating on. Rather, there are two things we can’t stop talking about.
The first is how normal all these men seemed to be to those around them.
Gisèle’s husband appeared to be the perfect husband, father and grandfather. Thirty of the men who her husband filmed with a comatose Gisèle over the previous decade have not been identified, but fifty of them are on trial alongside her husband. They range in age from 26 to 74 and many of them, like Gisèle and her husband, are married with children. They include “a local councillor, nurses, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, soldier, firefighter and civil servant.” One of the accused was her neighbour. He came over to check their bikes.
“I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello. I never thought he’d come and rape me.”
No one had a clue. No one had any idea how much these men hated women. Because how else can you describe a man who arranges, in a chat-room dedicated to non-consensual sex, aka rape, to come over and rape another man’s unconscious wife? Who do you do that to if not someone you hate?
And to these men, I have a question: why are you not talking about it?
The second thing we just can’t stop talking about is how many of them there were. In just this one small area of France. What does that mean about how many other men would do this if they had a chance? How many men in our lives? Men who are married. With children, and grandchildren. Who seem like devoted husbands and fathers?
This is the question we women have been asking ourselves in the wake of this story as we look at the men around us. The men we love. The men we know and trust. The men who, unlike us, are not talking about this story unless we bring it up with them.
And to these men, I have a question: why are you not talking about it? Does this story not disturb you as much as it disturbs us? Are you not as horrified as we are to be faced, yet again, with just how many men we’re talking about here? With how they live among us, so well-hidden in plain sight, behind happy suburban marriages? Why are you not talking about this to your male friends? Why are you not talking about this in public?
Are you scared about what you might find out?
Or do you just think it doesn’t concern you because this is a thing men do to women and you’re not one of those men?
Well let me tell you. It does concern you. Men have to start talking about this. They have to face up to the sickness that is in their community and they have to reckon with how pervasive it is. Because this thinking, this behaviour, it flourishes in silence. Men who think like this need to know that their fellow men do not secretly wish that they could do it too if only they had the balls or the opportunity. Hell, women need to know it. We need to hear it. We need to see you discussing it with each other and to know that it bothers you as much as it bothers us. To know that you’re as desperate as we are to find a solution to this scourge of male violence against women.
And no, I’m not talking about a few token social media posts; I know too many men who talked a good talk on social media and later transpired to be doing the same things in private that they condemned in public. I’m talking about having actual discussions about what these stories mean, why men behave like this, and what we need to change to make it stop. I’m talking about challenging your son when he idolises men like the alleged rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate.
Gisèle is a hero. She had the right to have this case held in private. She had the right to keep the horrific details of what was done to her by the man she had trusted and loved for over fifty years, behind closed doors. But she chose not to do that. She chose to have her name released. She chose to testify. And she did this because she wanted to shift the “shame” of what had been done to her back onto the men who did it. She chose to testify for “every woman who's been drugged without knowing it... so that no woman has to suffer.” To do otherwise, she said, would be to give her attackers what they wanted.
I am not asking men to be heroes. I am not asking them to do anything like as difficult as what Gisèle did. I am simply asking them to talk. To each other. To women. To boys. We need the men who wouldn’t do this, who I have to still believe are in the majority, to be at the forefront of stamping this behaviour out. To teach boys that this is not what being a man looks like. And to show women that you have our backs in this world that, too often, still seems to hate us so very much.
Men aren’t talking about this because a lot of them are DOING it, or at least know they would if they had the chance. The fact that this case exposed a large number of men (how often are 50 people on trial at the same time for the same offence?) from a relatively small area means your neighbour, your husband, your brother, the man in the corner shop, the delivery driver, your children’s teacher - most of them are doing it, or wish they were
The multiple rapes by Dominique Pélicot and the men in his village are vile and sickening. I hope I’m on the same side as Caroline Criado Perez and Germaine Greer et al in this moral dilemma.
It’d be easy to come to the comments here and agree with Caroline Criado Perez and with Greer’s line from The Female Eunuch that ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them’.
If I were talking to men about this – which I will try to do – that is the line I’d take. But I’m not, so I’ll say something different, which may annoy some of the readers here, GFPs, I think they are called.
#notallmen
There, I said it.
It’s easy, with the relentless reports about women getting brutalised everywhen and everywhere to believe that no man can be trusted. In the last few years, I’ve noticed: a rise in reports about rape as a weapon of war (with new emphasis on the Soviet soldiers in Germany at the end of WW2); the horrendous treatment by the Taliban of women in Afghanistan; the mass sexual assaults on New Year's Eve 2015-2016 in Cologne; the mind-boggling savagery of the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012; and on and on.
It's almost become a genre of porn.
What it leads to is an impression that there are hardly any happy marriages left, hardly any women who have not suffered sexual assault, hardly any man who is not a predator and potential rapist.
Caroline Criado Perez does acknowledge that ‘most of the time I navigate the world feeling pretty secure that most of the male half of humanity does not actively despise me simply because I’m female. … These men who hate us, they are surely in a minority’.
But the Dominique Pélicot story has shaken the little faith she had because the men involved seemed so normal to those around them and because there were so many of them.
I don’t know how many men are normal or what normal men are like. I wish I did. We all have our dark sides as well as our light sides.
In an attempt to draw this away from the men vs women problem, the comparison I would like to offer is with Nazi Germany – I assure readers that it’s pure coincidence that Germany pops up again in my illustrations – and Adolf Eichman.
Adolf Eichman seemed so normal that Hannah Arendt coined the phrase, ‘the banality of evil’, in her report on his trial, and there were undoubtedly many in Nazi Germany like him. But neither of these facts means that all Germans in the country were capable of exterminating Jews. Or so it seems to me.
What do you think?
Is every man a predator and potential rapist?
Was every German under the Nazis capable of exterminating Jews?
Is every human being intent on destroying the environment that supports life on Earth?
Does anyone have any reliable data on any of these questions?