The defendants in the French rape trial are telling us something creepy

It is the case that has shocked France.

Prosecutors say that, for nearly a decade, Dominique Pelicot He repeatedly drugged his wife and invited strangers to join him in raping her.

Prosecutors claim she was assaulted by dozens of men while she lay unconscious and that her husband filmed most of the encounters and then archived the videos in digital folders, including one titled “abuses”.

When Dominique Pelicot’s trial began last month, his wife, Gisele Pelicotwaived his right to anonymity and spoke with remarkable aplomb.

She has become the feminist heroine from France:

Women in protests in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux shout:

“We are all Gisèle.”

Dominique Pelicot has pleaded guilty to all the charges against him and has said, bluntly:

But there are others 50 men on the bench with Dominique Pelicot.

Most of them are accused of aggravated rape to Gisèle Pelicot.

More than a dozen have pleaded innocent; some have alleged that they were tricked or told that Gisèle Pelicot was pretending to be asleep because she was shy.

Feminism has long been interested in the relationship between knowledge and power, in how women deprived of knowledge are deprived of power.

In recent weeks, we have been brutally reminded that ignorance, or the pretense of not knowing, can also be a convenient tool of the powerful.

He consent It requires an effort to know the other’s desires, while rape requires completely ignoring—annulling—the other, allowing oneself to be aware only of one’s own pleasure.

In fact, drugging a woman to her complete submission seems a particularly obvious manifestation of a man’s desire not to know.

“I do not accept being called a rapist,” protested one defendant in court.

“I am not a rapist. “It’s too much for me,” he said.

He then explained how much he has learned about consent since his arrest:

“The magistrate told me: even if you are married, a woman does not completely belong to you.”

“Maybe not at all,” the judge corrected, perfecting the defendant’s sexual education in court.

“Yes, women do not belong to men,” he replied.

“I hope they teach it in schools. “It took me 54 years.”

One of the defendants said he was “devastated” when he found out what had happened.

“I will never get over it,” she told Gisèle Pelicot in court, as if she had been raped without the knowledge of either the attacker or the victim.

When pressed, he described it as a “involuntary rape”.

Dominique Pelicot preserved meticulous video evidence of most of the assaults, so the defendants they cannot refute the material facts.

The only defense they have is to say that they did not know that what they were doing was rape because they did not know that they did not have Gisèle Pelicot’s consent.

Some have alleged that they went to the couple’s home to have filmed sexual relations assuming that Gisèle Pelicot was pretending to be asleep, but they thought that she was participating, or that they understood that Dominique Pelicot could give consent on her behalf, as her husband.

(“She’s his wife. He can do whatever he wants with her,” said one of the accused.)

One claimed that he did not know what “consent” meant.

More and more countries in the European Union have sexual consent laws based on “yes means yes,” but France still defines rape as a sexual act committed through “violence, coercion, threat or surprise.”

This trial has reopened the debate about whether the definition should be changed.

Without the affirmative consent requirement, a defendant can argue—as one of the defense attorneys did in this trial—that “without intent to commit it, there is no rape.”

The system insists that efforts be devoted to trying to guess the true intentions of men who are accused of committing a sexual act with a woman who snores.

A recent Ipsos poll revealed significant progress in understanding rape since the beginning of the #MeToo movement in France, but about a fifth of French people still said they do not consider forcing their partner to have sex to be rape, and almost 10 percent said forcing someone who is drunk or asleep or unable to express Your consent is not rape.

Among men ages 18 to 24, the proportion is close to 30 percent.

(“For me, rape is grabbing someone in the street,” one of the accused is reported to have said.)

It seems that Dominique Pelicot found it easy to find men willing to participate in the abuse of his unconscious wife; Many of the defendants lived about 65 kilometers from their home.

If the quantity makes them monstrous, seen one by one, they are sadly normal.

Men with family and work:

a journalist, a firefighter, a nurse, an official.

Apparently, one of them missed the birth of his daughter because he was at the Pelicot house.

According to Le Monde, 72 of the 83 men Dominique Pelicot contacted on the internet forum Unbeknownst to him (without your knowledge) or by Skype They said yes.

Of the minority who refused, it doesn’t seem like any of them bothered to call the police.

Presumably they didn’t want to know either.

Valentine Faure is a contributing editor at Le Monde.

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