If a rapist says it's all right, then it's not rape?

[MsAmerica]

The Trial of Gisèle Pelicot’s Rapists United France and Fractured Her Family
After fifty-one men were convicted, Pelicot became a feminist hero. But additional accusations left her children struggling to accept her new role.
By Rachel Aviv

At the trial, he admitted to all the charges—“I am a rapist, like those in this room,” he said.

Nearly all the other defendants denied committing a crime. “As long as the man is there, giving me instructions, it’s not rape,” a construction supervisor said.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/02/the-trial-of-gisele-pelicots-rapists-united-france-and-fractured-her-family

Well yes, but more than one. So I suppose the question is how believable the excuse is to society and to those around them; and what that says about society. Like the rough sex defence - nobody really believes a woman consented to being killed, and yet so many accused men and indeed defence lawyers, seem to think it's worth a try to get the jury on their side.

On another thread, a poster was talking about giving up her anonymity (post conviction) because she feels that anonymity may have the effect of keeping rapes, and the victim's experience, out of public consciousness and I think that's true: it was noticeable that the lawyers for the defence in Gisèle Pelicot's case used shocking arguments several times that they then had to apologise for or even withdraw due to the public outcry. I think they were so used to going in hard against anonymous victims in a closed court that they were taken by surprise when there was such outrage at some of their arguments.

One of the worst was a woman barrister actually.

But I do think that the woman's status in islam as her husband's possession, without a right to refuse sex with him may well have made it easier for some of them to convince themselves that they weren't rapists.

Depends on the sect. Liberal, western Muslims don’t believe that and haven’t for a very long time. Muslim women had rights to divorce and their own money/possessions long before Christian women did in England.

As for marital rape, that was not legally recognised when I got married in an English church, and I’m not that old. That was even socially extended to any boyfriend you’d had consensual sexual relations with, and then raped you, well that wasn’t considered rape socially or legally that was a lovers tiff and the woman being spiteful. Getting black out drunk and waking up naked in someone’s bed, that was your fault as a woman for being so irresponsible, no one really cared enough to look into spiking in the 1980/90s

That’s the world I became a woman in- our own society had all these beliefs less than one generation ago…so no I don’t think we can pin any of this on fricking “Islam” ffs

I don’t understand why this thread has been injected with talking about Islam when the supramajority of rapists were not Muslim. Even the ones being assumed to be Muslim is based on seeing the odd Middle Eastern or N African name in the list of 51 when there are Christians and Jewish people with these names too.

For example, what does an Arab Christian call God? Allah. Allah just means God in the Arabic language.

The fact that not everyone is a “good” Muslim is hardly much of an argument - Muhammad is the model they’re meant to follow, “the perfect man”, and some of the things he did are objectively horrifying.

That’s the difference with comparisons with non muslim countries and with modern day Christianity: of course you can find things like disgusting views on rape, but they’re not actually the law these days, and even when they were they weren’t explicitly based on what Jesus did. Whereas even in fairly developed Muslim countries where criminal law is not based on sharia (so no hands being cut off for stealing) family law is pretty much always explicitly sharia law. So women get a lower level of inheritance than their brothers, and lose out in divorce and so on. And that is the law, not just some misogynistic c… of a policeman or a judge or whatever. A law that is difficult to change because to do so means arguing against Islam as being better than other religions.

And the idea that Islam is progressive is hilarious. Yes they may have stopped the tribespeople from exposing unwanted baby girls but they’re also threw out the previous practice that adoption created an actual family bond - and that was purely because Muhammad wanted to marry his adopted son’s (ex) wife. So that wasn't just the usual excuse of “That was normal at the time” - which itself is a pisspoor explanation from a religion that considers itself eternal.

Yeah, I hate the way some feminists try and shoehorn the patriarchy into everything, even when it's a far from normal occurrence. It's like saying that Lucy Letby represents women as a group.

It's usually that very same people complaining about misogyny/the patriarchy that will shit a brick and call you a racist if you dare suggest that certain cultures are way more misogynistic/homophobic/intolerant than ours. They will literally argue against anybody that suggests it's a bad idea to let large numbers of these men into our country unvetted.

I don't really care about an individual's ethnicity/religion/political views as long as they're generally decent, unless they're an advocate of the third reich or somesuch. But for all the talk or intolerance and misogyny nobody dares say a peep about the fact that the majority of UK Muslims state when surveyed that homosexuality should be a crime.

It’s not though: female mass murderers are vanishingly rare - and there is significant evidence that the levels of care at the Countess of Chester Hospital were so poor that it’s not clear that any murders took place there in the first place.

But even if LL is that rarest of things, a female mass murderer, it would be stupid to compare one person with the numbers of men who rape women every week of the year.

Your comparison is like deciding that because one person once found a diamond lying in the gutter, there’s quite likely to be one under every dirty leaf in all gutters.

Male mass murderers are vanishingly rare too. People don't understand statistics. If six women are killed annually by a falling coconut it's possible to say that "women are 600% more likely to be killed by a falling coconut". It doesn't however mean we need to worry about death by coconut in reality.

Men actually save far more women than they kill. If men disappeared tomorrow there would be more female deaths. If we look at the fire service alone, it's 90% male dominated. That's almost 30,000 male firefighters in the UK alone. If each one saves just a couple of female lives the figure absolutely dwarves the number of femicides. And that's just the fire service.

Oddly feminists don't like discussing the men that risk their lives to save others. And it is men in pretty much every dangerous profession. The stats speak for themselves. 95% of people that die at work are male.

But the comparison wasn’t so to male mass murderers - it was with male rapists. Who are clearly not all that rare, sadly.
You’re the one who brought in the comparison with Lucy Letby, which is frankly bizarre.

And as for “feminists don’t discuss men risking their lives” well, duh. That would be a strange thing for a feminist to get involved with. Should professional footballers start posting on their twitter feeds about boxers or gymnasts?

Oh and if men disappeared tomorrow the single source of the vast majority of violent female deaths would be gone. I think we’d manage with the increased fire risk.

You genuinely believe more women are killed by femicide than car crashes?

Dont forget all the boy racers (a real danger round my way) would also disappear in your scenario where there are no more men.

So yeah I think if there were no male drivers road deaths would fall too.

And as for “feminists don’t discuss men risking their lives” well, duh. That would be a strange thing for a feminist to get involved with. Should professional footballers start posting on their twitter feeds about boxers or gymnasts?

It's this kind of disingenuousness that's put me off feminism. I'd wager it's also why the vast majority of women don't identify as feminists nowadays despite supporting 'equality'.

I'd imagine that if professional footballers started claiming to be the toughest sportsmen in history or stating that football was the best sport to develop self defence skills then somebody might pipe up and mention boxing.

Similarly, if feminists are going to present men as the scourge of female existence and claim that we'd be safer with no men around it's a fair observation to point out that despite 100 femicides being prevented annually somebody still has to save thousands of female lives by rescuing them from burning buildings and cutting them out of cars.

I'm not even sure the 'marital rape was acceptable' isn't a load of bollocks too tbh. I decided to Google it as the last two sensational claims I read by feminists were masterpieces of twisting the facts. First was the claim that 'the majority of men would rape if they could get away with it'.

What was omitted was that it was actually only the majority of about 50 American college students who were surveyed. No diversity in age/ethnicity/nationality/religion/etc. They might as well have surveyed 50 Taliban members and proclaimed that 'the majority of men think women shouldn't be allowed outside'. 🤣 Best bit was the fact that these male students were apparently offered course credits for partaking, so they likely just did it for the points and gave silly answers.

Same with the '1 in 5 female students being raped' survey. I read it and there was a foreword by the authors specifically saying it 'probably shouldn't be taken as proof of anything' lol. Turns out they'd asked the students if they'd ever had sex that they regretted and then classified it as 'unwanted sex', which then got lumped in with the sexual assaults etc. They literally said most of the 'victims' probably weren't aware they'd been classified as such and might not agree.

I've seen so many people on here referencing the above but conveniently leaving out the bits I mentioned. And yet I've seen some of the same posters picking holes in the 'Partner Abuse State of Knowledge' metastudy which was undertaken by over 100 university scholars from 20 universities in UK/US/Canada alongside domestic abuse charities/orgs. They read over 10,000 previous studies and analysed in detail the data from 1200 peer reviewed studies.

When they concluded that women actually perpetrate more DV than men, despite causing less fatalities, suddenly the data wasn't strong enough for these posters. Although a study of 50 American teenagers apparently was if it reached the conclusion they liked. Same with the study where the authors literally warned it shouldn't be taken as gospel.

So, ever the cynic, I did some googling to see if spousal rape really was seen as perfectly OK. Seems it's only been used as a legal defence four times and in three of those cases the man was convicted of assault. Here's an excerpt from a trial in 1954, almost four decades before it was made illegal:

Decision/Outcome

That the appellant could not be guilty of rape, as the implied consent of a wife to have intercourse with her husband could only be revoked by court order or a binding separation agreement. In the circumstances, this consent had not been revoked. Nevertheless, a husband was not entitled to use force or violence for the purposes of exercising his right to intercourse; to do so would amount to an assault.

https://www.lawteacher.net/cases/r-v-miller-1954.php

So, it seems you could rape your wife so long as you didn't do it by force. A simple "sod off, Jeremy" would seemingly have confounded the majority of would be spousal rapists as it's presumably pretty hard to force somebody to do something without using force. It seems more a matter of semantics to me from the little I've read - it took me less than five minutes to find the above.

Similarly, women in the UK can't by definition commit rape as it requires a penis. That doesn't mean it would be accurate to state that "it's deemed perfectly acceptable for female teachers to coerce children into sex because not one female teacher has ever been charged with statutory rape as a man would be". In reality they'd be charged with assault just like the spousal sexual assaulter who couldn't by definition be called a rapist at the time (much like how women still can't in this country but can in others).

And no I'm not a cool girl/handmaiden/pick me/sufferer of internalised misogyny etc. I just dislike what are essentially female MRAs. I'd probably rather see all feminists shipped off to Mars than all men tbh. At least we might have a chance of working alongside the good men who make up the majority, rather than suffer this endless whinging by blue haired misanthropes that don't actually do anything to help in the real world. Obv NAFALT but sadly far too many are.

They'd have to fall 'quite a bit' to get below 100 a year.

And tbf whilst men are the primary abusers of women, who are the primary abusers of children? 🤔 In some ways that's a worse stat because the primary pattern of adult DV is bidirectional. So both partners are often technically abusers. It's hard to argue it's a two way thing when perpetrating abuse on a child though.

Totally agree about statistics!

Can you link to anything that backs that up?

Of course. In fact I could just as well have said that if men disappeared tomorrow the cause of the vast majority of violent deaths of all humans would disappear - except that of course there would be no more male victims either.

https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/crime/UN_BriefFem_251121.pdf

For the U.K., two women are murdered per week by a man. The numbers of men killed by women are tiny.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/domesticabusevictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025

You’re assuming that if there were no men, women couldn’t be emergency workers at all.
That’s clearly nonsense. Women are already firefighters and ambulance staff. Men are needed because women can’t carry men but if there were no men that constraint would also disappear.

For someone who claimed that OTHER people didn’t understand statistics this is amusing.
The reason more women abuse children than men is because far more women are primary carers, and even more so, isolated primary carers than men.

Comparing early Islam based law from pre medieval times (700 AD) is always going to look less progressive wrt women’s rights and status than modern day Christian based laws (2000 AD).

Now if you wanted to discuss Christian based laws from 700 AD, I’m all in for that.

@gladriel
“I'm not even sure the 'marital rape was acceptable' isn't a load of bollocks too tbh.”
”So, it seems you could rape your wife so long as you didn't do it by force. A simple "sod off, Jeremy" would seemingly have confounded the majority of would be spousal rapists as it's presumably pretty hard to force somebody to do something without using force. It seems more a matter of semantics to me from the little I've read - it took me less than five minutes to find the above.”

Such ignorance from a younger woman who did not live then. Marital rape was not recognised as rape. I was there. I lived it. You are using a search engine to look for records of court cases, there were next to none because the women coerced into sex by their husbands could not file a police report, because technically no crime had been committed.

There was only a crime if force and violence causing grevious bodily harm-as in beaten black and blue had happened and the police station actually felt enough pity to file a charge of assault against their husbands. Most police would advise women to stop angering their husbands, that if they’d just lied back and thought of England their husband would not have had to slap some sense into them and then refuse to file a report.

You basically only had recourse under assault laws.

absolutely shocking that five minutes of Googling makes you think you know better than the lived experience of millions of women who are telling you this is how it was. Read a few books by us.

It’s a bit more complex than that
https://factually.co/fact-checks/society/uk-muslims-support-lgbtq-rights-poll-percentage-202949

Women would have to kill each other then too, instead of sending a man to do it.
We are just as a capable of violence when there is no man we can manipulate into doing it.

I wonder if you don't get accepted in the law world and get employed , promotions etc unless you collude with the misogyny in the law regarding rape.

I dont think any emergency workers 'carry men'