By: Hana Reid
For ten years, Gisele Pelicot lived a nightmare she could neither see nor remember. Her husband of five decades, Dominique Pelicot, drugged her unconscious and invited dozens of men to rape her, meticulously filming the abuse. The full extent of this horror came to light in 2020 when Dominique was arrested for upskirting women in a supermarket, unraveling a chilling pattern of violence. On his computer, police found over 20,000 videos organized in a folder labeled “abuse.” Among the evidence were photos of his daughters-in-law and an image of his daughter at 30, lying on a bed in underwear she doesn’t recognize.
For years, Gisele had suffered unexplained health issues and memory blackouts, her husband gaslighting her through countless appointments. Dominique ultimately admitted to most of the charges, claiming his motive was to “control women,” but he denied abusing his daughter. Dominique was charged with orchestrating the rape of his wife by at least 72 men on 92 occasions between July 2011 and October 2020; he raped her two to three times per week during this period, a staggering 1,400 times. Fifty men stood trial alongside him. The grand scale of the rape crime ring shocked the world, but perhaps more disturbingly, they revealed a disquieting truth that many survivors already know: the men who committed these atrocities were not monsters. They were ordinary.
Ordinary Men, Horrific Choices
The men implicated in Gisele’s abuse were not fringe outcasts or depraved caricatures. They were teachers, IT technicians, firefighters, nurses, truck drivers, and butchers. Three-quarters were fathers; half were married or in relationships. Friends and family members testified on their behalf, vouching for their character. Even with undeniable video evidence, many of Gisele’s rapists denied culpability. Some claimed she was feigning sleep, recreating the porn genre of “sleeping woman,” while others argued they had been drugged themselves. One man dismissed the question of her consent entirely, stating, “It’s his wife; he does what he likes with her.” These excuses, both implausible and grotesque, reflect a societal normalization of violence against women via objectification.
The narrative that rapists are monstrous aberrations distracts us from a far more disturbing reality: rapists are just men. They are people who make a choice—a choice to affirm the belief that they are entitled to someone else’s body. One in three women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime: every person knows more than three women. These staggering numbers underscore the ubiquity of a problem too often ignored or rationalized.
Society pathologizes sexual violence rather than recognises its ubiquity with patriarchy, misogyny and ultimately, masculinity. The very culture that produced what the media has dubbed the “monster of avignon,” and the 72 men that joined alongside him. The website where they met, the porn they sought to recreate, the desire to take from women what they know they don’t want to give, the illusion that the women they take from want it anyways, the women who are taught to stay quiet, keep quiet, taught to forgive and the ones who are ignored, defamed and humiliated.
Patriarchy’s Silence and Complicity
We live in a society that perpetuates male entitlement, teaching boys and men, subtly and overtly, that dominance is intrinsic to masculinity. What does masculinity mean if it is not tied to control, conquest, and the subjugation of, if not women? Rape is not the result of an uncontrollable urge or an otherworldly evil. It is a decision, a moment when someone chooses to justify continuing without consent, affirming a culture that whispers they have the right. The normalization of violence against women in media, language, and everyday interactions affirms this justification. It seems that the biggest privilege of being a man is to be able to turn a cheek, to not listen, to ignore the interruptions that the patriarchy creates for women. The schisms in their life, the all-consuming, all-knowing mental gymnastics of compartmentalization of who the good guys and bad guys are, knowing that this dichotomy is a distraction from a painful truth. Ultimately, men’s silence and ambivalence allow for a culture uninterrupted, even if the cost of preserving that culture is women living in constant danger.
Caroline, Gisele’s daughter, described her father as a supportive presence in her life. “He encouraged me in my studies, took me to school, and was always there for me,” she said. Gisele herself described Dominique as a “super mec”—a great guy—when police first contacted her. The uncomfortable truth is that it is easy to hate monsters. Still, it is harder to reconcile the fact that regular or even ‘good’ people can do monstrous things. Rapists do not exist in the shadows; they walk among us. They are the charming, popular guys at school, the nerdy quiet kid in the corner, your friendly neighbour, colleague, even husband.
Women know the feeling of being let down by the good guys, the guys we admire for resisting what the world wants them to be. “You were a good husband and a good man,” Gisele said on the only occasion she cried in court. I never doubted you.” Why would she? Would you? He was a good guy. Patriarchy forces women to be the skeptics, but the line between the guys you can and can’t trust is hard to discern. The patriarchy tells us the signs are always there, that we should be smart and alert at all times–otherwise, we are inviting the unassuming violence that may lurk in even the most unsuspecting places. Sometimes the signs are there, but sometimes they’re not, and you don’t know till it’s too late. How many women have decided whether behaviour should be interpreted as a warning or something they can safely ignore, and even participate in, and how many women have decided that they can settle for less than acceptable behaviour, because society has told them it’s normal.
If we speak up, they might leave us, exclude us, or react with the fury we are taught to contain. Are we scared that when we examine our lives a bit closer, we are engulfed by acts–small and big–of accommodation, denial, repression, evasion, and guys just playing the game?
The Cultural Roots of Violence
Instead of recognising sexual violence’s roots in patriarchy and misogyny, society’s response to sexual violence often pathologizes it as an anomaly, something that the bad guys do. Many French men resisted using Gisele’s case as a springboard for a national conversation on rape culture. They leaned on the tired “I’m not that guy” defence, citing their comparative goodness with those on trial, which demonstrates how there is no profile for those who commit sexual violence, allowing them to escape accountability. This resistance only underscores the insidiousness of rape culture, which thrives on silence, ambivalence, and the refusal to confront uncomfortable truths. It’s easier to say it’s other guys, till it’s none of them (that you know anyways) and certainly, easier than everyone just taking a look in the mirror. It may not be every man, but it could be any man—any time, any place.
The distinction that patriarchy has created between good guys and bad guys has separated the nice guy protector types from possessive, creepy, pervy rapey types who spend their free time lurking in sketchy dive bars preying on drunk barely women, leaving no space in between for reality. It is always in the background a voice in our heads– incentivizing, rewarding and covering for the good guys, who, however, momentarily, decide not to be.
Pornography, which all of the defendants watched, was cited by some defendants as a factor in their actions. Several men claimed their consumption of porn blurred the lines between reality and fantasy–precisely what it’s meant to do, robbing themselves of their own autonomy. This argument, commonly representative of Conservatives and anti-porn feminists, places the blame on media rather than the perpetrator and culture that creates it, as well as highlighting how normalized depictions of sexual violence influence behaviour. Men (and everyone else) are culturally conditioned by porn, but like getting into a car drunk, if we know porn normalizes violent behaviour and we choose to watch it, are we not in the driver’s seat?
The Path Forward
Gisele is a hero because she is loud in a society that wants silence: “When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.” Yet despite her overwhelming evidence of over 20 000 videos which the police came to her with, the 50 perpetrators collectively received sentences falling 211 years short of the prosecution’s recommendation of 652 years. If a survivor with over 20 000 videos of video evidence and a world of women supporting her could only do this, where does that leave those who don’t?
For most survivors, justice remains elusive. Out of every 1,000 sexual assaults in the U.S., only 310 are reported to police, 50 lead to arrest, 28 result in felony convictions and a mere 25 result in jail time. That means that with a report filed, the arrest rate is 5%, a conviction rate of 9% and an incarceration rate of 8%. Per 1000 sexual assaults, the rate is 2.8% and 2.5%, respectively. In comparison, the conviction rate for murder is 70%, drug trafficking 68%, burglary 64%, and assault 36%. Statistics around the world tell a similar story; in the UK, of 70 330 rapes reported from 2020-2021, only 3.2% were prosecuted, with 1378 to a conviction, less than 2%. To top it off, three billion women live in countries where marital rape is not explicitly criminalized, and even more live in countries with legal loopholes to avoid charges.
The endemic of violence against women seems comparable to a purge that we have become desensitized to. A 2015 study done in an American liberal arts college asked male students if they would force a woman to have sex with them if they knew there wouldn’t be any consequences; over one third said yes. If your chances with getting away with sexual violence is 97.2%, where does that leave survivors? Most people, like Gisele, are often raped by people they know —”nice” men whose public personas mask private violence – they just don’t have the videos to prove it. Regardless, in the justice system, the unfortunate consequence of womanhood seems to be enough to lessen the gravity of any sentance, societal desensitization numbing us to even the most horrific acts.
If society is to address the epidemic of sexual violence, it must dismantle the structures that enable it. We must ask ourselves what impact Gisele will have. Will more survivors choose to make their cases public and be believed? Will people who’ve gone through this trauma realize that they too, are survivors of drug-facilitated sexual assault and abuse, and will doctors offer tests and diagnoses they otherwise would not have? Will society realize the patriarchy’s role as a facilitator of sexual violence and seek to transform culture and themselves–even if it means leaving masculinity behind? Will men use their privilege to continue to ignore the constant state of danger that women must exist in, or leverage it to create change? And if not, will we at least create safe and support ways for women to leave abusive relationships and file reports without fighting tooth and nail for a tiny sliver of justice? Will we invest in specialist support systems, public housing, childcare provision, education, and rehabilitation systems for those who are perpetrators? Or will we continue to rely on under-funded justice systems to unsuccessfully prosecute bad men out of existence?
Until we confront the uncomfortable truth that rapists are not monsters but ordinary men, that the line between “good guys” and “bad guys” is dangerously thin, we will continue to fail survivors like Gisele and countless others. Justice begins not in the courtroom, but in the cultural reckoning with what it means to be a man.
