There have been protests in 30 cities across France, people marching in outrage over the case of Dominique Pelicot who drugged his wife Gisèle and raped her and invited more than 70 other men – strangers – to come to his house and rape her too. Pelicot is a monster, a modern-day Bluebeard. But what has shocked France most is how very many normal Frenchmen he was able to find, in and around his Provencal village, who were up for having sex with an unconscious woman.
If the feminists of France really want to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain from porn
A firefighter, a painter, several businessmen… every week as the trial continues another set of these ordinary men shamble into the courthouse in Avignon and make their bad excuses. They thought it was consensual, they say, and that Gisèle was in on it; that she was faking sleep. But they had been told not to wear aftershave or to smoke for fear that Gisèle would smell a rat when she came to. The chat room they’d met in was called ‘Without her knowing’. A son insu.
For the marchers, the Pelicot case is clear evidence that most men are still steeped in the vicious misogyny of the past. The placards they carry are very #MeToo: ‘I am Gisèle.’ And: ‘Not all men, but only men.’ In response to the case France’s new justice minister, Didier Migaud, last week solemnly promised to rewrite the legal definition of rape to include the word ‘consent’.
‘Educate your sons,’ say the marchers’ placards. To me it feels like watching hounds suddenly, inexplicably swerve away from the scent and set off in entirely the wrong direction. What happened to Gisèle has zip all to do with a lack of education. Some of the men on trial are graduates; others are in their twenties, and sex education has been compulsory in France for two decades. Why would M. Miguad think it would improve matters if the word ‘consent’ was to appear in French rape law? I don’t expect there’s ever been a set of rapists in history with a better understanding of the need for consent – or ‘enthusiastic, informed consent’ as my niece’s university has it.
What the protestors don’t seem to grasp is that it’s precisely because these men understood the importance of consent that it carried such erotic appeal to proceed without it. The lack of consent is the point. And it’s not patriarchy that’s to blame, but porn-ography. It’s porn which leads a human down into the sludgy gutters of his own psyche – and if the feminists of France really wanted to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain. Not just from the obviously illegal stuff, but from all of it.
This isn’t an original point. It’s one I’ve borrowed from the author Mary Harrington, who recently wrote about the Pelicot case and ‘the degree to which the atrocities themselves are bound up in and emblematic of the porn industry’s central operation: the monetisation of taboo’. As Harrington explains it, pornography, the whole great, growing, metastasising, $100 billion mess of it, is not about selling sex so much as selling transgression. The dopamine hit that drags human bonobos back to their laptops time after time is a result of busting through a taboo, and that’s why it’s progressive. Once a taboo is normalised, it loses its transgressive power, so you look for another. And some men (not all men, but enough men) keep chasing that feeling until they end up in a chat room with Dominique Pelicot. A son insu.
Sean Thomas explained it all extremely well in a piece he wrote two decades ago in The Spectator’s Boris Johnson era (unsurprisingly). I hadn’t been long at The Spectator back then, and porn was just beginning to burrow its way into the internet. The piece caused a stir in the office, and I still think it’s to the credit of both Boris and his deputy, Stuart Reid, that they ran it.
Sean had become curious about online porn and he’d followed his curiosity, clicking away from site to site until he found a taboo that hit the spot – after which he lost control. And when he finally kicked the habit, he wrote about it. Sean’s conclusion was this: ‘Most male sexuality is designed by evolution to be an unscratchable itch; a desperate, unsatisfiable urge. It is like hunger: just as you aren’t meant to wake up one day and say, “Oh, I’ve had 6,000 meals, I think I’ll stop eating now”, so men aren’t meant to wake up one day and think, “Oh, I’ve ogled 500 girls, I think I’ll stop staring at them now.” A further problem with this is that when a man starts to explore his more deviant sexual fantasies, he can find himself in an addictive spiral, pursuing ever stranger forms of sex.’
It baffles me that in the decades since Sean’s piece, instead of developing a clear understanding of how porn acts on a brain, we’ve all become slowly habituated to it, slowly boiled alive in porn culture like frogs. Men in leather pup masks having sex in the street? What of it? It’s Pride. Take the kids! Got yourself a ‘rape kink’? Go for it! Be you. Join the growing ‘rape kink’ community on Reddit. The only serious modern taboo is ‘kink shame’.
As the police were rounding up Gisèle Pelicot’s abusers last year, a report was published in France which revealed that as much as 90 per cent of online porn featured violence towards women. ‘Women… are humiliated, objectified, dehumanised, assaulted, tortured, subjected to treatment that is contrary to both human dignity and French law… the women are real and the sexual acts are real and the violence is real. The suffering is often perfectly visible and at the same time eroticised.’ And it was also reported that more than half of 12-year-old boys in France view porn every month. So, yes, educate your sons.
Comments