Men Gone Vile
I read an article in Monday’s New York Times that’s been haunting me since. It reported on a man—a husband, father, and grandfather—whose perverted actions were so disordered that they upend the meaning of marriage, family, decency, consent, and gender relations.
The article, “France Confronts Horror of Rape and Drugging Case as 51 Men Go on Trial,” tells how Dominique Pelicot, married for 50 years to Gisèle, spent the last 10 years of their marriage—when they were in their late 50s and throughout their 60s—adding crushed sleeping pills to his wife’s food and drink, and inviting men to rape her while she was unconscious. He started with the sleeping pills when he wanted her to wear certain clothing, which she didn’t want to wear, and when he asked her to engage in certain sex acts that she refused to engage in. But Dominique Pelicot didn’t just feel entitled to his fantasies; he felt entitled to their realization. By knocking out his wife, he dressed her the way he wanted and did whatever he dreamed up to her insensate body.
Pelicot found his way to a chat room called, in English translation, “Without Their Knowledge.” That’s where he appears to have met the (at least) 83 like-minded creeps who came to his house to rape his wife. According to the article, many “of these men have children and are in relationships.” Fifty of them are being charged with sexual assault, which raises questions about why the other 33 are not being charged. Some of these rapists claim that they thought Gisèle wanted to be unconscious for the encounter as part of a sexual fantasy; or that Pelicot, as her husband, could “consent” for both of them. Pelicot photographed and videotaped these encounters and stored them on his computer desktop in a file called “Abuse.” The police found all this filth when three women reported Pelicot to the authorities when he tried to photograph up their skirts at a grocery store, and all his personal tech was confiscated.
The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde aspect of the story is deeply unsettling. Gisèle describes her husband—they’ve been together since they were 18—as “caring and considerate.” Their daughter describes Pelicot as “a warm and present father.” From the article, it sounds like Dominique Pelicot was a househusband, or at least the primary caregiver for the couple’s three children, while his wife was the breadwinner. Was he so bitter about his atypical gender role in the family that he had to exercise complete, violent sexual and physical control over his wife in this other satanic sphere? How does a husband/father/grandfather become a monster like this? Is it gradual? Is it sudden? Is he a psychopath? He certainly seems to demonstrate the four Dark Tetrad personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. Was he always this way? He’s under investigation for other assaults, and has admitted to attempting to rape a 19-year-old when he was in his mid-40s. I find it unlikely that there weren’t other assaults.
Gisèle, who has divorced Pelicot and changed her last name, decided to make the trial public in order to educate people about the apparently widespread practice of drugging people (it’s mostly women, of course, who are drugged) with “malicious intent.” A pharmacist cited in the piece says that most cases of what the French call “chemical submission” take place at home, not in bars.
What an obscene perversion of everything holy and good! Ivan Illich, in his book, Gender, lays out how the complementarity of the genders, throughout time and across cultures, reflects and recapitulates a cosmic duality. Many aspects of that complementarity got torqued and twisted with the Industrial Revolution, with its erasure of complementary, gendered work and its substitution of a “free market” of jobs that everyone competed for. Competition in everything elbowed out the gentler option of complementarity in everything.
That complementarity encompasses difference. Men and women are not the same. Men tend to be bigger and stronger than women. Louise Perry has written well about this. There are always outliers, but typically, even the weakest men are stronger than most of the strongest women, making women potentially vulnerable to physical or sexual assault. In functional cultures, two realities will serve to protect women from such violence. First, there is the acceptance of social and cultural mores that assume that men’s greater strength and size confers a responsibility that they use those assets to protect women and children and vulnerable men; i.e., to make sure that the vulnerable don’t fall prey to other male predators who don’t respect those societal guardrails. By corollary, this would include calling out men who behave poorly. This can be understood broadly, as a cultural mandate, but it is certainly active in microcosm in many places and in many families, where it is expected that fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands, and grown sons look out for their sisters, wives, nieces, mothers, aunts, daughters, and young and vulnerable male relatives—a kind of kinship-based insurance policy. Since today’s families tend to be thinner, smaller, and more geographically dispersed than earlier iterations, that layer of protection is compromised.
The second traditional way that women are protected requires thick social connections, amplifying this kinship-based insurance policy. Psychologist David Buss, in his book, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, And Assault, writes, “Having multiple allies gives women multiple weapons of defense. If a brother is not around on any given day, an uncle, a male friend, a sister, or a female friend can provide backup.” It’s a safety-in-numbers idea that takes a real battering when lives, like our modern Western ones, are so atomized and busy that intersections and encounters between friends and relations are often rare and highly curated. People don’t have time to “pop by,” and it can even be perceived as a kind of intrusion—to the point where someone considering it might easily talk herself out of it--in our very choreographed and scheduled world. Popping by, of course, offers a window on the lives of friends and relations that will provide a different framing--and possibly different information--than what’s revealed in more curated gatherings. It increases the likelihood that something “not right”—or its aftereffects--will be witnessed.
I wondered, reading the article about the heinous Pelicot, where were the friends and relations who might have recognized that something wasn’t right in that dyad? And what about his associates? Where were the brothers, uncles, and close friends who might have held him to a higher standard of behavior?
When families and friends share living space or live very near to one another, when neighborhoods are porous and people visit each other frequently, it’s going to be harder for someone like Dominique Pelicot to get away with organizing multiple rapes of his wife over a decade. According to the Times article, Gisèle was experiencing memory, hair, and weight loss. Something was off. Her children and friends noted it, and Gisèle visited doctors to find a diagnosis and relief. So in that sense, her kin and friends were observing, noting, expressing concern. It’s just that the locus of concern was limited to Gisèle and what might be physically wrong with her; it didn’t detect toxicity and disease in the couple. I’m not finding fault here, only making an observation; I think what was really going on would have been very difficult to imagine.
I realize that, since drugging your wife and raping her is now a thing (according to the article), at least in France, it’s important that doctors know this is happening so they can consider the possibility when faced with a constellation of puzzling symptoms like Gisèle’s. But I’m sympathetic to the docs that didn’t connect these dots in her case. I felt reading this story as I did when I first learned about the Pakistani-British grooming gangs in northern England that have targeted thousands of young girls for serial sexual abuse. It was just so horrific. Could it be true? How could it be true? The grotesquerie was so extreme that it seemed borderline impossible.
But it’s eminently possible.
We marinate in an atmosphere of absolute libertinism and anything goes that leads here, to this place, where a man disrespects, humiliates, and violently harms his wife and the mother of his children, where he invites strangers to his home to do the same, where he records and catalogs his loathsome transgressions digitally for easy retrieval. Wasn’t the sexual revolution supposed to lead to a place of freedom and unfettered autonomy? In our world, where some legalistic idea of “consent” is all that matters in sexual encounters—where there’s no reckoning with morality, with downstream effects of choices made, with beauty, dignity, and right action—this demon Pelicot managed to find a way to wriggle around even the issue of consent. Taking the idea of wife as property to its obscene extreme, he took from her the consciousness that, at the very least, would precede consent in a more morally ordered world.