Gisele Pelicot, utterly floored by this

It seems unthinkable that this may yet turn out to be a "Women Talking" scenario, carried out in France, rather than an isolated community in Bolivia.

The bar for basic standards of behaviour and what passes for decency is low enough without some men being able to take this example as indicative of their own comparative virtue in abstaining from such horrors.

I really can't find the words.

There's at least one other wife who was drugged and raped. Chances are there are many many more.

Utterly horrific. And as well as Gisele and her family and the awful pain they must be feeling, there is also the horror that the families of the men who did this must be feeling. Imagine being the mother, or sister or partner or daughter of the men who raped her. I mean can any of us imagine that? So many people traumatised by this, it doesn't bear thinking about.

Oh no - totally agree.
It's just that VISUALLY, when a baby is born (or even viewed beforehand!) it's the penis that makes the difference, and I'm SURE that in the old days, men waited for the baby and thought "great! it's got a willie!" or "oh no it hasn't got one!".
But please don't think that I think I am a man without a penis!
I'm fact one thing I'm against is the shenis or whatever names it's called - I mean the contraption that allows us to pee like a man - afaic all that's saying is "heres the bit you were born without!".
Sorry to go on but I sincerely don't want anyone to think I consider us to be just "missing" a bit.

This reminds me of how horrified I was when I heard about a girl in the US who was gang raped. I think she was only 13 or 14 and one of her attackers filmed her ordeal. It got uploaded to Pornhub.

It was one of the most searched-for clips on Pornhub and around one in five men in the US actively went out of their way to watch a young girl being gang raped. Men who are fathers, teachers, doctors and shopkeepers.

I remember walking down the street looking around wondering which men had been masturbating over footage of a child being hurt like that. Which men had said a cheery 'good morning' to me after they had enjoyed seeing that happen.

It's sobering to think that so many of our male colleagues, family members and neighbours don't think of women and girls as human beings.

On the subject of how many men in such a small area were involved, I remember reading a news article about a woman who I think was on death row. Whilst her crimes had been unforgivable, her childhood was horrific. Her father had kept her chained up at a young age and allowed his friends to sexually assault and rape her, even offering her as payment for work done around the house. Again, as in this French case, none of them had reported it to the police.

I remember thinking how could there be so many paedophiles in one small town/village, but as I have grown older and read more, it really does seem like a scary amount of men will do these kind of things with no issues if they think they can get away with it.

Read this on another thread and it's about where I am at the moment. I think I feel both a 'banked' and 'dispersed' rage. I feel the latter physically because the state of the world right now is the injury and cause. I don't think I experience banked rage as described here but I definitely want a long-term transformation of society for women. Despite my despair and desire for vengeance, I'd rather it was addressed through civil and social channels despite my acknowledgement that women's rights seem to be regarded as a polite fiction that can be removed when they're inconvenient to men.

In his 2006 book, Rage and Time, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk makes a distinction between two kinds of rage that casts some light on the mood and colour of our own moment. The first kind, which Sloterdijk calls “banked” rage, refers to the rage gathered and directed by popular, sometimes revolutionary leaders who achieved power by harnessing and “banking” the rage of the “humiliated and offended” victims of injustice and oppression across generations. Such leaders seek to gather a mass of anger into a “rage bank”, a reservoir of emotional and political capital that could power a long-term transformation of society for better or worse.

“Dispersed” rage, in contrast, lacks a sense of shared project or leadership, of a common understanding of what is wrong and how to put it right. The feeling of dispersed rage is intrinsically frustrating, insofar as it provokes bodily and psychic agitation which it can’t remedy. In this state of mind, we may feel injured or mistreated but can identify neither the source of the injury nor the cure.

www.theguardian.com/society/2024/sep/15/all-the-rage-why-anger-drives-the-world-josh-cohen

Something positive that might come from this would be a change to the legal definition of rape in France. At least in the UK there would be no defence of 'lack of constraint or surprise'. Though I of course hope that that defence will prove useless - the prosecution should surely argue that the fact Gisèle P was indeed surprised* when she found out what had happened to her, counters that defence. But it's a sexist conception of rape and that could change.

*Not trying to minimise her feelings. Using this as a legal term.

Porn is the biggest sector of the internet and men are the majority consumers, and amongst regular consumers men dominate even more.

Demand drives supply. Online porn is increasingly violent and degrading to women. It's addictive and men learn sex is abusive and women watching this porn learn to perform for male pleasure. I truly believe online porn is driving an epidemic of MVAWAG. Those in power don't want to do anything about it because most of them use it and like it.

The men in this case were IMO highly likely to be porn sick, and the internet facilitated the abuse to happen.

I'm finding it difficult to articulate how exactly this particular case has changed my attitude to men around me when I go outside. I find myself unwilling now to interact with them, I avoid them all whenever possible. I do not trust any of them.

If this level of abuse happened to an elderly woman by her husband of over 50 years whom she trusted, then it can happen to any one of us at any time. The number of men involved, none of whom thought to report to police, is chilling.

I think a large portion of men view women as service animals and walking orifices for their use. Not as actual full human beings. Some hate us, too many simply have no regard for us. To move through public spaces with a female body and this knowledge I am finding extremely difficult.

I'm finding the silence from politicians and so many men with wide audiences chilling tbh.

I just do not know where we as women can go from here. I feel like we need a revolution.

@Silkinside

I was being sardonic when I said ‘lucky for us women

Yes realised that’ 😉 but it is worrying that we will never know which men can be trusted. Also the fact that they know it's wrong & have to stop themselves acting on their impulses. It's just depressing to read about it all.

It's not great though that a man will write effectively 'don't rape and be violent to women because they will be violent back to us'. Gisele Pelicot is not likely to kidnap hundreds of men and castrate them, or even go down to a bar and hit a few, because that's the response of someone who is physically as strong as a man, and as violent a man, and socialised as a man. She's a woman. She's not physically strong enough to physically attack lots of men. That's the point of the horrific website her husband advertised on, and of a whole lot of porn. Physically dominating a woman is arousing to a huge proportion of men, and it's not because we are physically as strong as them, the domination of a weaker body with a cunt and a mouth is the point.

I was being sardonic when I said ‘lucky for us women’.

And we don’t know which are the good ones. Because some of the bad ones have created a fraudulent, yet convincing, pillar of the community nice guy image in order to access victims, whether those victims are women or children. I knew such a guy.

I've spoken to only two men to express my anger about this case. One is a close family member who got a bit 'calm down dear'. I'd hoped for better than that. The other is my DH who was slow to react at first but now really does seem to get it. He actually wrote about it. https://substack.com/home/post/p-148842070

A snippet:

"TLDR;
To men:
Men need to stand up as men and stand with women by first examining ourselves. Pay attention to what is actually happening before it is too late. If women’s concerns continue to be subject to gaslighting and dismissal just to protect the fragile male ego, then anger will keep building, as it rightly should, and men had better wake up soon because the next station for this train is Rage Central and you don’t want to see the stations after that… but then again, if you don’t play your part in changing the direction of things, you won’t need to be worrying about mosquitoes on your testicles (if you still have any)."

One of the defence arguments is that there's no constraint or surprise if the woman is unconscious.
FFS.

This case has absolutely sickened me and I've felt overwhelmed to think of just many men took part in this abuse. Of course I've always known that men are abusers, but my trust in them is now through the floor and I'm not sure it will ever resurface.

I've got thoughts in my mind that I don't want. Vengeance, hand these men over to a large crowd of angry women and let them be dealt with as the women see fit. I've never thought anything like that in my life, yet here it is.

@Silkinside

Lucky for us women, most of them don’t want to risk losing their families, jobs or freedom by being caught doing so. It’s the only thing that holds them back.

Where do we go from here though with this knowledge? How do we know which ones are the good ones? We all hope our partner is one of the good ones. But we never really know what they're thinking.

It's sad that the only reason some men don't act on their fantasies are because they might lose face or go to prison.

Yes, and when society breaks down they give themselves permission to act, especially if they can 'other' the people they're assaulting. Women are 'othered' anyway because we're not men. To be doubley 'othered' as enemies, or as outsiders. The Russian advance over Germany, the Balkan war, ISIS, 'comfort' women, to name a few off the top of my head. Or sometimes not the whole of society, just their little bubble, the 'wolf pack' in Spain.

Very true. I'm sure I read somewhere also that by waiving her anonymity (meaning that her photo could be used in reporting) meant that it was much easier for the reporting to use photos of the men accused, meaning that they weren't anonymous either.

These men, like those who raped Giselle, are believing what they want to believe to excuse themselves. It shows how so many men will grab onto the flimsiest of excuses to allow them to sexually abuse women.

We know this. Violent misogynistic porn is Mainstream around the world. All the men masturbating to women and girls being abused and tortured have convinced themselves through a variety of paper thin excuses, that it’s ok for them to do so. It’s not.

It’s the popularity of this porn that has changed me from Not all men, to Nearly all men. The evidence is staring us in the face. Most men are sexually aroused by hurting women. Lucky for us women, most of them don’t want to risk losing their families, jobs or freedom by being caught doing so. It’s the only thing that holds them back.

@stonedaisy

I believe he only got caught as he was investigated after a woman found him upskirting in a supermarket & police took his phone to investigate & then found evidence of this.

The whole thing is really eye opening in terms of what men will do if they think they can get away with it.

The thing that baffles me is why the husband was filming it all. He has provided solid evidence of what was happening. That's sick to think he wanted to watch it all again himself.

In Daniel Sloss' 2019 routine about one of his friends who raped another friend, he made this observation: “It has to involve us, and by us, I mean men,” he said.
“Don’t make the same mistake that I did for years, which was just sitting back and being like, ‘Well, I’m not part of the problem, therefore I must be part of the solution’, because that’s just not how this f!king sh!t works.
“I believe and deep down I know that most men are good. Of course, we are. But when one in 10 men is sh!t and the other nine do nothing, they might as well not be there. Being good on the inside counts for absolutely f!!k all.

Quotation: www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/comedian-daniel-sloss-called-out-for-all-men-to-do-more/news-story/51d9614213f8d3fc674c09be2bbdf92e

Routine:
https://www.tiktok.com/@essiedennis/video/7279767885877120289?lang=en