Porn, prostitution and platforms
Thoughts on the Pelicot case, part two
What permits collusion with monsters?
Dominique Pelicot was a monster – strange and unnatural, at the furthest end of a distribution curve for the characteristics that make up a male sexual pervert. I wonder whether anything could have stopped Pelicot from acting alone and in secret. And it may be that no social influence or restrictive structure would have prevented him offending in some way, unless one day a polygenic version of the “PreCogs” from Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report will let us identify Pelicots from conception and intervene.
But for a decade Pelicot orchestrated the rape of his drugged wife by over 70 men, not one of whom reported him to the authorities or confided in a friend, relative or partner who then raised the alarm. And just so we get this straight in our minds, it is this terrible participation – not Pelicot’s monstrousness - which constitutes the most horrible and telling part of the case.
Of the 51 men identified and brought to court, the youngest was 23 and raped Gisele on the day of the birth of his first daughter. Another was Pelicot’s neighbour, a father of six who was invited into the Pelicot home to buy a bike tyre and then somehow persuaded to rape the sleeping Gisele. “I fell into (Pelicot’s) trap”, this man told the court. Could have happened to anybody, right?
At which you may reply that it seems to have happened to quite a few. They were mostly local, small tradesmen, workers or retirees from clerical jobs and lower tier management, a nurse, an ambulance driver, a couple of firefighters. At least four had previous convictions or arrests for domestic violence, another four having been arrested for the possession of child pornography.
Is it in any way significant which occupations don’t seem to appear? No one from the professions at all, no lawyers, academics, doctors, scientists. The “new social elite” of Professor Goodwin isn’t represented at all. Did such people not frequent the online chatrooms that Pelicot mined for his comrades-in-rape? Or were such Frenchmen who might have been so inclined simply able to procure what they wanted without slumming it among the hoi polloi? I honestly have no idea. Admittedly there was a “freelance” journalist, which these days could mean anything and nothing, ranging as it does from the writer of this Substack (and season’s greetings, by the way) to the creatures who run conspiracy sites defending Bashar al Assad. It’s a wide category these days.
“Normalisation”
Trial observers noted how several of the defendants seemed genuinely surprised to discover that what they had done was a serious criminal offence. It wasn’t so much that they thought that it was normal, that they didn’t think it was so very aberrant – it was more that using a living, unconscious woman as a sex toy existed somewhere on the scale of accepted behaviour. How could this be?
In a brilliantly written piece for the Times last week my former colleague, Janice Turner reminded her readers of some of the Gallic context:
Each time a prominent Frenchman is accused of rape — whether politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn or, currently, actor Gerard Dépardieu — famous French actresses leap to defend him. This is the nation that convicted child rapist Roman Polanski fled to from America and is still fêted. The #MeToo movement was regarded by many as a wave of Anglosphere prudishness, contrary to the spirit of French seduction.
Janice had much else to say besides, but my mind took me to the largest nation in the Anglosphere, where #MeToo had originated and where barely seven weeks ago the nation re-elected as its president a man who had once boasted about “grabbing pussy” and had, a year earlier, been judged by a US court (albeit in a civil case) to have committed a serious sexual assault and then to have slandered his victim. These infractions had been punished by US voters by twice electing him to lead their nation at the expense of women candidates.
That same man had tried hard to get the Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz appointed as US attorney general; a man who - according to a Congressional report published this week – had bene involved while in office in drug taking, prostitution, and paying for sex with a high school student.