\n<\/p>\n
\u2018I<\/span>t is so rare, in fact it never happens, that crimes are so well documented.\u201d Manon Garcia is the French feminist philosopher whose thinking featured so prominently in the final stages of the Dominique Pelicot trial. There are, she points out, 20,000 videos and photos of Gis\u00e8le Pelicot \u201cbeing raped, unconscious, by complete strangers\u201d. One might struggle to understand why, in the face of such compelling factual evidence against her husband Dominique and a further 50 men, prosecutors would need to bring in a philosophical argument to explain why this was wrong. But since they did, they couldn\u2019t have found a clearer or more persuasive voice than Garcia\u2019s, the author of We Are Not Born Submissive and The Joy of Consent.<\/p>\n Last November, six weeks into the trial, Garcia arrived in Avignon to watch mass rape in the dock. She had intended to come for a day or two, just to see it, and then go back to her normal life. \u201cBut I was seeing things that the journalists were not seeing, because we\u2019re not doing the same job. Also, something deeper happened. It felt like I couldn\u2019t do anything else. My kids were three and five, and I could not be a mother, be in my daily life, while the trial was happening.\u201d<\/p>\n Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial is her new book about \u201cthe Mazan affair\u201d, named after the Pelicots\u2019 home village. Its subject is \u201cunbelievably dark, but this is not a dark book\u201d, she tells me over video call from Berlin, where she is now a junior professor at the Freie Universit\u00e4t, following stints at Harvard and the University of Chicago. She has a penetrating gaze and a remorseless dry wit, and her book, from the subtlest scene-setting to the starkest conclusion, is gripping, eloquent, angry, funny and profound. It\u2019s also surprisingly moving, not least because of Gis\u00e8le Pelicot\u2019s courage.<\/p>\n <\/span>Gis\u00e8le Pelicot in December 2024, after the trial of the men who raped her. <\/span> Photograph: Miguel Medina\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Having survived rape on an unimaginable scale, and 10 years of thinking she was dying, because of the cocktail of sedatives and anti-anxiety medication her husband was spiking her with, Gis\u00e8le Pelicot somehow found the strength to waive her right to anonymity so that the trial could be held in open court. This meant she was faced, every day, with \u201c50 defendants plus one or two lawyers each. They were an enormous group, and she\u2019s alone next to them, next to all these men that have raped her, and yet she doesn\u2019t know them, has never seen them,\u201d Garcia describes.<\/p>\n It was a bear pit; a lot of these guys had been sharing a cell while on remand. \u201cThey got along really well \u2013 they were bros hanging out. Over time, there was this atmosphere of: \u2018These crazy feminists, these extremists who want to have us punished for something that we didn\u2019t do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Gis\u00e8le Pelicot, who was 71 when proceedings began, was often left feeling as though she was on trial herself. \u201cI have felt humiliated while I\u2019ve been in this courtroom,\u201d she said at the time. \u201cI have been called an alcoholic, a conspirator of Mr Pelicot.\u201d There was barely any room for her own supporters, most of whom had to watch in an overspill room. But the women who were there applauded her, every day, at the going down of the sun, and in the morning. \u201cThey were saying: \u2018You have the women behind you,\u2019\u201d Garcia, 41, recalls. \u201cThat was very powerful. Even up until the end \u2013 I don\u2019t know if I want to say this publicly, because it makes me look like such a typical \u2018woman\u2019 \u2013 but I cried every time she was applauded.\u201d<\/p>\n That ordeal resumed for Gis\u00e8le last Monday, when 44-year-old Husamettin Dogan, sentenced to nine years in prison, appealed against his rape conviction. She was taking part, her lawyer, Antoine Camus, said, \u201cto make clear that rape is rape, that there is no such thing as a small rape.\u201d Dogan <\/strong>lost his appeal, and his sentence was increased to 10 years.<\/p>\n Nothing has changed, insofar as the same defence arguments were lodged, rejected again by the jury. Yet this time, Garcia says, \u201cGis\u00e8le Pelicot\u2019s lawyers successfully opposed the use of old sexual pictures of her in the trial, arguing that it risks exposing her to secondary victimation. This was a victory that can have strong jurisprudential consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the shocking things about these 50 rapists is that their only common denominator was that they were from the same 50km radius. (Dominique Pelicot didn\u2019t want to take chances on the drugs wearing off.) They came from every class, from every age group (the youngest was 27, the oldest 74) \u2013 a lorry driver, a soldier, a journalist, a DJ. They were single, they were married, they were fathers, they were not. They were such a perfect randomised cross-section of society that the world tied itself in knots to come to a sensible conclusion that wasn\u2019t: \u201cThis is what men are.\u201d<\/p>\n Garcia describes wryly in the book how people from Paris would say: \u201cThis is men from the south\u201d; intellectuals would say: \u201cThese don\u2019t look like guys who read many books\u201d; her German and American colleagues would say: \u201cIt\u2019s really a problem with French culture.\u201d (I had a trace of that myself \u2013 I couldn\u2019t imagine it happening in the UK, but I just wasn\u2019t imagining hard enough.)<\/p>\n When I admit as much to Garcia, she openly laughs: \u201cAt the end of the trial, German journalists found a Telegram group where 70,000 men were sharing recipes for chemical submission and pictures of how they were raping their wives. This summer, 32,000 Italian men were found on a Facebook group where they shared pictures of their [she mimes some air quotes] sleeping<\/em> wives in sexual positions. I wish we could decide that this was a problem with French culture.\u201d<\/p>\n D<\/span>rugging women to rape them is often either passed off as the woman\u2019s alcoholism or drug abuse, or camouflaged as a kink, by the defendant and then his defence team. Garcia considers this really deeply, the difference between what we might call forced unconsciousness (chemical submission, non-consensual asphyxiation) and a fetish like somnophilia \u2013 getting aroused by a person who\u2019s pretending to be asleep. In Living With Men, she writes that chemical submission delivers \u201cmaximal transformation of the victim into a thing\u201d. I would prefer \u201cperson\u201d \u2013 once the person is a victim, the transformation is already under way. But I\u2019m only tinkering with her sentences because I admire them. As for asphyxiation, she tells me: \u201cBDSM and kink can be a response to how to create a better sexuality in a patriarchal world, but its mainstreaming has been used as a cover for men who commit sexual violence. It\u2019s thought of as a new defence in rape or even murder trials, that the strangulation was just because: \u2018We were into this \u2013 it\u2019s rough sex gone wrong.\u2019 That\u2019s funny for me, because it is not<\/em> new.\u201d<\/p>\n She delves into some stunning detail on the judges\u2019 questions during the trial: a handful of men used as their defence that they couldn\u2019t have raped Gis\u00e8le Pelicot because they couldn\u2019t get an erection, and video evidence backed this up. \u201cThere was one judge that was silent most of the time,\u201d she says, \u201cbut really interrogated them: \u2018How come you couldn\u2019t have an erection?\u2019 He didn\u2019t once ask any of the 45 other men: \u2018How come you could have an erection?\u2019 Once you see the videos, there\u2019s nothing about it that is arousing. It\u2019s not a rock movie of a hot woman on a beautiful bed. It\u2019s a naked woman that could be your grandmother. You don\u2019t know her, she\u2019s in a coma; how does this turn you on? Let\u2019s do this as a thought experiment. Imagine a guy on a bed in this little bedroom, snoring, saliva coming out of his mouth, 30 years older than you, a stranger, and you\u2019re going for it 100%?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Gis\u00e8le Pelicot\u2019s supporters outside the courthouse in Avignon, France, last November. <\/span> Photograph: Alexandre Dimou\/Reuters<\/p>\n Garcia doesn\u2019t like the phrase \u201crape culture\u201d, finding it too loose, but refers in the book to the \u201ccultural scaffolding of rape\u201d, an idea coined by the New Zealand psychologist Nicola Gavey in the mid-00s. Three assumptions underpin it \u2013 men only want sex, not love; women only want love, and will have sex in order to obtain it; sex is vaginal penetration by a penis, ending in ejaculation. These myths frame the sexes at odds \u2013 men as hunters, women as prey, male desire as a \u201cstandby position, waiting for the opportunity to rape\u201d, she writes.<\/p>\n One of the most bracing elements of Living With Men is the comparison Garcia draws between sitting through the Pelicot trial and Hannah Arendt\u2019s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. Adolf Eichmann, of course, was on trial for being an organiser of the Holocaust, which cannot be paralleled. \u201cThere are two reasons why I had to make the analogy with Eichmann. The first is that I\u2019m a philosopher who goes to a trial. So anyone is going to ask me: \u2018What do you take from Arendt in Jerusalem?\u2019 And the second is that \u2018evil\u2019 and \u2018male\u2019 are the same sound in French. The banality of evil and the banality of males is the same sound. So the joke was constantly made.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, there is a much more profound comparison, which is what Arendt ultimately concluded. \u201cIf a criminal trial works the way it should, it will not do the work that you\u2019re expecting it to do,\u201d Garcia says. \u201cIf you want this to be a social trial about sexual violence, or if you want the Eichmann trial to be a trial of nazism, this is not what the criminal trial can give you. If it were to give you this, it would be a bad criminal trial.\u201d Just as Gis\u00e8le Pelicot\u2019s experience in court replayed and even amplified her violation, so Eichmann\u2019s defence that he was passive and merely obedient reframed the Holocaust as pointillism, an atrocity in which no single person\u2019s actions had meaning, no individual was at fault. \u201cThe big difference is, there are historians who think Arendt believed Eichmann\u2019s defence unduly \u2013 that he was playing dumb. These guys in Mazan, they\u2019re not playing dumb, they have literally nothing to say about what they did. This, for me, was terrifying.<\/p>\n <\/span>The trial of Adolf Eichmann, in the glass booth, in Jerusalem, December 1961. <\/span> Photograph: Bettmann\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cIn the French justice system, if perpetrators recognise what they did, if they think about it constructively, they will go to prison for less long. So these men have had a very strong incentive to do this work, they have been in prison for two years or sometimes four, and yet they cannot. It\u2019s not because they\u2019re dumb. It\u2019s because there\u2019s something about what it is for them to be a man, and to be entitled to women\u2019s bodies, that makes them, I think, at least some of them, deeply convinced that they haven\u2019t done anything wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n The trial took a toll on Garcia. \u201cI had very strong sleep problems, because I really felt like any moment I could fall asleep, and something horrible could happen. The only place I felt safe was next to my husband, and my brain was saying: \u2018Are you being stupid? This is the one place you should not feel safe.\u2019 But you can\u2019t feel that way.\u201d She\u2019s not some anti-man feminist, she says. \u201cI just want men to understand that this is the world we share, and you being a man has something to do with this being the world we share.\u201d It feels like needless contrarianism, almost trolling, to call this book uplifting; but it\u2019s a map of terrain that is inescapable without one. It\u2019s incredibly uplifting.<\/p>\n Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial is published by Polity, price \u00a320. To support the Guardian, order a copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018It is so rare, in fact it never happens, that crimes are so well documented.\u201d Manon Garcia is the French feminist philosopher whose thinking featured so prominently in the final stages of the Dominique Pelicot trial. There are, she points out, 20,000 videos and photos of Gis\u00e8le Pelicot \u201cbeing raped, unconscious, by complete strangers\u201d. 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