Mayor of Mazan (Gisèle Pelicot)

Oh, I don't know. Why would they be seeking something right there if there was no hate? And there's a level of "not caring" that overlaps active hate. When it comes to dehumanising people, to feeling free to ignore the fact that someone else has as many feelings as you do, and enjoying that freedom to harm someone else, well if it isn't hate it will do just as well.

You can go too far worrying about the causes and the thinking. These men probably weren't thinking, they were doing their best not to think. Or to empathise. They were choosing to shut down the bits of their brains that could have said "don't". As people do when they're deciding to do something bad to someone else for their own satisfaction. For a few of those men the empathic or ethical ways of thinking might be missing or blunted, but probably not so much you'd notice. And some people imagine sex as a kind of secret "anything goes" zone and porn mightily encourages that.

None of us are perfect and one of the most dangerous combinations is hating or despising people plus getting something out of acting on those feelings - money, sexual satisfaction, job security, status. The men were somewhere along the righthand bit of ther NAMALT chart but it doesn't matter exactly where. Pelicot himself was way off the far end, the others not. As the psychiatrist on "51 Men" said, they weren't serial rapist types but they weren't just average either though there was nothing obvious to distinguish them from average men. Banality of evil and all that. 50-100 men who funnelled themselves along that path out of, I dunno, how many men in the locality?

So "not all snakes" but even with just a 1 in 100 chance for getting bitten by an individual snake the chances of getting bitten ramp up massively because life is not just one walk through the snake pit, life is one walk after another after another. We're going to meet the poison snakes and women do have to hope the circumstances don't add up to getting bitten. And as a society we have to try to cut down the opportunities (and by that I mean keeping the snakes away, not telling women to keep off the grass) and decrease the reward the snakes get from biting.

With racism, this site cries “not all white people “ when it is put to them that whites are inherently racist.

I don't @EddyF Most of us were raised with racist culture, maps, books, history, parents etc. Makes sense that we have to challenge it or it will self-perpetrate. You have to do the work. And chances are it will linger.

And there are very few places where all the bad shit that happens to Black people is done by white people. But in those places, as everywhere else, most of the violence will be done by men, Black or white.

I walked into our local Tabac yesterday to post a letter (at 12 o’clock) and it was full of men getting hammered after a few hours spent hunting. I was so extremely uncomfortable I almost left. This case has unveiled something that makes it impossible to unsee. I was so relieved I hadn’t sent my daughter in, but it doesn’t lesson the fear that I have for her and all young women having to negotiate and keep themselves safe in this world.

I think this is wrong. It's more a case of women overestimating how much men care about them. There's a difference. Men don't actively hate women, their actions are not driven by seeking to harm women. Any harm caused is a byproduct of them seeking pleasure or whatever else they are seeking. It's not that they hate women, it's that any pain or damage inflicted is seen as a necessary evil to get what they want. They just don't care about it.

In the French case, the men were not seeking to harm the woman. They were seeking something for themselves - sexual pleasure, control, the thrill of doing something outside the norm.

The outcome might be the same either way but the problem can never hope to be addressed until we understand the cause of the problem and the thinking behind the behaviour.

This ^^

Plus it is very uncomfortable for many women to accept that men, as a group, are a significant threat to women because it is easier to think that it's only a minority and therefore it won't affect them. Many women do not want to accept the facts because the facts are horrendous.

Unlike other generalisations that are unfounded, such as overweight people being lazy etc. men are a threat to women.

Let's stick with facts:

69,184 recorded rapes by police between 1st July 2023 - 30th June 2024 in the UK- perpetrators 100% male

5 in 6 women who are raped don't report it so we can conclude that there were 415,104 women raped last year in the UK

If you include sexual assault that figure rises to 798,000 women raped or sexually assaulted in the last year in the UK. (figures accurate to year ending 2022)

1 in 30 women (so probably at least one woman you know) was raped or sexually assaulted by a man last year.

Responding to this thread with comments about not all men is frankly missing the point by quite some margin.

There is a double standard. With racism, this site cries “not all white people “ when it is put to them that whites are inherently racist.

Putain as ‘fuck’ is just a short version of what the word really means, obviously. It’s an easy and cheap fuck with a woman who does that for money. I can’t believe when people use these words in general, but here it’s just not acceptable. You can justify it as you want, but the reality is that you are using the word ‘slut’ in a thread in which you pretend to care for women.

@niadainud and @Persimmons123 Yes, I prefer arsehole myself. We all have one, we can all try not to be one. The Mayor of Navan did not try hard enough.

It makes men uncomfortable to talk about such things. When you are the beneficiary or at least not the main victim of a structural unfairness, and you're not doing anything to challenge that unfairness then talking about it to the people who are the main victims is going to feel uncomfortable.

But when it comes to real arseholery the closest I can get is "let them eat cake".

Do you know what it means?

@Tarraleah

"all generalisations are stupid.
It's not defending men - who couldn't care less about a random MN poster - to simply point out that they are not a different species, and there's no "them" vs "us".

What's next? You hear about teen mothers found guilty of killing baby and hiding the body, so you start asking what's wrong with teen mothers? Again, stupid generalisation that would make no sense. That's literally how racists mind work by the way.

There are shit human beings everywhere, but there are also caring ones who help, and who are as horrified as you are about this story.

It's so boring, predictable and completely pointless and unhelpful to start ranting against "men"."

The crime statistics speak for themselves. Men are responsible for over 80% of all violent crime and over 99% of all sexual crime. It's certainly not all men but it is ONLY men who are responsible for terrorising women. There is a reason your friends or family ask you not to walk home alone at night, not to drink too much on a night out, not to dress too provocatively. Ask yourself why women are expected to take these precautions. Why can't we trust men to not attack and rape us?

Did you really have to write ‘putain’?

and he fails to realise this makes it worse, because she will never know what actually happened to her, the images and clips she has will be a tiny percentage of what actually happened to her.

Me too, has taken me 50 years to finally get it, I never agreed with her as a young girl when I first read her writings. I really think I now really dislike men as a class.

very well written @MrsTerryPratchett thank you for expressing this.

please read more

I often wonder how she knew this?

I would imagine quite a few of these rapists wife's thought their husband was fantastic too.

I'd expect more from a man. I don't know any men who'd say this.

It’s irrelevant really whether all men are or not like this. Many are and that’s what we are discussing. Until I hear that swathes of women are raping and doing horrific sexual things en masse to men I think you can stop
with the NAMALT.

The reason you want to say NAMALT is because it is too worrying to talk about how many men (not all men but ONLY men) are like this.

It's unusual as far as we know.

Mme Pelicot was drugged and raped for ten years before her h was found out because of a random upskirting charge.

Do not be so complacent about abuse being rare.

I was talking to a couple of people about it. The woman was horrified & knew as much as I did. The bloke had vaguely heard about it but didn’t even know Mme Pelicot’s name. Maybe I shouldn’t have been as shocked and surprised by that as I was.

Most mumsnetters are level headed and don’t buy into hysteria. This particular case is bizarre and unusual which is the precise reason it’s getting so much media coverage. Obviously if you are talking to a bunch of women with loving sons, brothers, fathers and husbands and say ‘gosh look at this one weird overseas event doesn’t it prove how shit men are,’ they are going to say no. It’s not anti feminist to say this, it’s common sense.