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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Gisèle Pelicot's story outraged the world. The sickening parade of crimes to which she was subjected and her betrayal are dark pages in our history. Feminist philosopher Manon Garcia decided to attend the trial and to analyse its resonance for our future.
It became the trial that demonstrated that trials will never suffice to serve justice. If the perpetrators, for the most part, seemed so unashamed of what they had done, can we see in their sentencing anything meaningful? If their lawyers defend their clients by relieving them of responsibility for their actions, how will these men, their families, their friends see this trial as anything other than an injustice? If, even as the most explicit proof streamed before the court, the victim was stonewalled with the bland denial of facts, what can juries achieve in cases when the evidence is lacking? The threat of incarceration will never be powerful enough to stop men raping. If trusting the justice system, as those who fret about feminist overreach counsel us to do, gets us nowhere, what do we do?
Above all, one question haunted Garcia: under such circumstances, can we live with men? And at what price?
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Seitenzahl: 249
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraphs
Notes
Introduction
Notes
Consent
Notes
The Old Lady and the Gynaecologist
Incest
Notes
Ordinary Men
Notes
Masculinity/Masculinities
Notes
‘Don’t You Want Me Baby?’
Note
To Subdue an Unsubmissive Woman
Notes
Anger
The Trial
Notes
The Videos
Writing Mazan
Notes
The Normal and the Pathological
Notes
The Judge in Us
Notes
A Good Victim
Lemaire
Dominique P.’s Final Act
Note
14 December
Rapeable
Note
What Remains of our Love?
Notes
You Have to Be a Little Bit Fond of Women
Notes
Acknowledgements
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraphs
Introduction
Begin Reading
Acknowledgements
End User License Agreement
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Living with Men
Reflections on the Pelicot Trial
MANON GARCIA
Translated by Maya B. Kronic
polity
Originally published in French as Vivre avec les hommes. Réflexions sur le procès Pelicot© Climats, un département des éditions Flammarion, Paris, 2025.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025.
Excerpt from Triste tigre by Neige Sinno © P.O.L Éditeur, 2023.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-7314-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025942120
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Dedication
To Gisèle Pelicot, Caroline Darian, and all the others
To Maxime and Caroline
You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.
—Marguerite Duras1
Retinas and pupilsBoys have sparkling eyesFor a fools’ gameTo see under the skirts of girls
—Alain Souchon,‘Sous les jupes des filles’ (1993)2
Notes
1.
Marguerite Duras,
Practicalities: Marguerite Duras speaks to Jérôme Beaujour
(New York: Grove Press, 1990), 41.
2.
‘Sous les jupes des filles’, Paroles et Musique d’Alain Souchon, © Éditions Alain Souchon.
Introduction
What strikes me this morning, as I arrive at a quarter past seven outside the courthouse in Avignon, is the women standing patiently waiting for the gates to open. Next to me in line, as I join an English colleague whom I arranged to meet there, are two young women in their twenties, soon joined by a third who brings coffee and croissants. Across the street, a huge banner flutters on the city walls. ‘Rape is rape’, it proclaims, in response to Guillaume de Palma, one of the defence lawyers. During the opening days of the trial, he had declared that ‘there is rape and then there is rape’, implying that the mass rapes inflicted upon Gisèle Pelicot were not so serious after all, were not ‘real rapes’. Les colleuses – feminist activists who paste up political collages made up of multiple posters on city walls – have taken the trial onto the streets of Avignon, lining them with bold slogans, particularly along the path Gisèle takes to court each day. The collages are in several languages; depending on which stage the trial is in, they offer words of support to Gisèle or highlight the outrageous declarations of the accused men and their lawyers.
In front of us I notice a group of older women. They must be regulars: they obviously know one another and they talk together, gravitating around one woman in particular whose natural authority is plain to see. Brigitte, impeccably dressed and made up, with matching scarf and lipstick, has been taking the 6.19 bus to the courthouse every morning since September, even though the hearings do not start until nine. Brigitte, Bernadette, Dominique, and the others make quite an impression on me. These women, all of them retirees, came at the beginning of the trial, which they had read about in the local papers. One day, then another, until they decided that this was where they were going to spend the entire autumn of 2024. They have become experts; they know the case inside out, including all the names of the accused, their lawyers, and their defence strategies.
Today, 4 November, as the hearings resume after a week’s break for All Saints’ Day, the main topic of conversation is the organization of the trial: the Avignon court, which had not been prepared for the possibility that Gisèle Pelicot would decline her right for the trial to be held in private, has been overwhelmed by the amount of public and media attention the case has attracted. The courtroom is far too small to accommodate the court staff, the defendants, their lawyers, the plaintiffs, journalists, and the public. It was decided that the public would have to follow the proceedings from an overflow room. But even this room has proved to be too small, and consequently members of the public have to arrive very early to have any chance of getting a seat, which they then risk losing when proceedings are suspended. In practical terms, this means that these women who had been coming since the beginning of the trial, getting up before dawn every morning, had not been present for Gisèle Pelicot’s testimony just before the holiday: there had been a short break before Gisèle spoke, the overflow room had been emptied out, and latecomers waiting outside had entered in place of the regulars.
I listen to them bemoan the fact that their regular attendance isn’t taken into account, and I can’t help thinking that maybe it’s not so bad, that maybe they’re going a little over the top being so outraged about it. But as time goes on I’ll realize that this business of the queue, of the overflow room, of who has the right to see what, is actually all-important: it highlights the problem of the funding of the French legal system, but also the question of the place of citizens and journalists in criminal trials. Later, when after three days spent in the overflow room I’m finally able to get into the ‘real’ room thanks to my press accreditation, I’ll be able to gauge just how much I hadn’t previously been able to see, feel, or understand. The camera in the courtroom is fixed: in the overflow room we are shown a wide shot of the judges, the public prosecutors, and the witness stand where the experts, witnesses, and defendants appear. We never see the police, the defence lawyers, or those defendants who are in custody. Neither do we see the camaraderie between the defendants, their grins, nor the way in which Dominique Pelicot seems to physically preside over the trial from the dock (I shall come back to this). Conversely, the judges and journalists neither see nor hear the reactions of the public audience watching from the overflow room.
Outside the gates, time passes and the queue grows longer: young women interested in the trial, a mother and daughter who have come a long way to see ‘Gisèle’ and to understand what happened to her, an actress from the west of France. Some men will arrive later, but I won’t be able to talk to them: for those of us there that morning, their presence is a mystery. What do they want? Are they here in the hope of seeing the videos of Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse? Brigitte reassures us that there won’t be any videos today. But on the days when there are, she says, the crowds roll in, and you can see some of them getting ‘hot and bothered’ in the overflow room. So who are these men? Some of them seem to think that it is not to be missed, or that they owe it to themselves to be there, but they don’t talk to us, apart from two guys who are clearly hoping to chat up the women in the queue.
Several minutes before the gates open, a few men walk up to the gate without taking their place in line. My first thought is that they are trying to jump the queue, but then I decide they must be waiting for some other trial. At first, the obvious escapes me: some of them are defendants in the trial I am here to see. Of the fifty men accused alongside Dominique Pelicot, one is on the run, some are in detention, but the majority are not being held in custody. They come to court in the morning, and we pass them in the corridor on the way to the toilet or at the coffee machine. It’s true that on busy days during the trial they wear masks and hoods in the courtroom to avoid being photographed, but this is not always the case. And since we only see them on the screen in the overflow room when they’re on the stand, I spend my first few days in the queue wondering about every man without a lawyer’s robe I see out there – rapist or not? – and once I’ve identified them and learned of the hatred some of them harbour for the ‘rabid feminists’ present at the trial, I make sure not to catch their eye.
Even before arriving in front of these gates, before stepping into the lobby or entering the overflow room, I had already felt that I was attending the trial, that I understood the trial, that it was something I myself was living through. As a philosopher specializing in feminist issues, and in particular in the concepts of ‘submission’ and ‘consent’, for months I have been caught up in this story, which seems to me to throw up infinite variations of all the questions that have absorbed me for nearly fifteen years now. I was already gripped by the story when Lorraine de Foucher covered it in Le Monde in June 2023. I devoured every article I could find on the subject on a daily basis, and I felt as if all I thought about was her, them, that bedroom in Mazan. And now, on this fine winter’s morning in Provence, I can see that the other women here are just as caught up in the trial as I am, and feel just as strongly as I do that something of their own lives is at stake in these daily hearings. I experience a solidarity that is neither abstract nor immediately political: beyond the questions of whether or not Dominique Pelicot is a monster, whether or not Gisèle suspected what was going on, whether or not these other men are just ordinary men, this morning I can see that we are extremely shaken by this trial, all of us who wait there together. We are all moved when we see Gisèle Pelicot arrive, flanked by her two lawyers who seem like they are protecting her from the violence of the world, greeted with applause as she is every morning and every evening. Out in the lobby, the idea of a ‘we the women’ becomes something quite palpable and concrete.
No doubt that is what prompted me to write this book: in this trial there is something at stake for ‘we the women’ – even though I am not yet entirely sure who this ‘we’ is. It is something that is difficult to sum up in one article, one column, one opinion piece. Because this is not just the trial of rape, the trial of rape culture, or the trial of chemical submission, as the media has repeatedly suggested. But nor is it just the trial of these particular men. Of course, there must be a fair individual trial of each of the fifty-one accused according to the rules of the French republic, but that trial is surely not the reason we are all out here queuing in the cold; nor does it explain why three hundred journalists from across the world have applied for press accreditation to cover the story.
One of the central theses of this book is that, paradoxically, what makes the Mazan rape trial an important historical trial is that it marks the end of the idea that we can place our hopes exclusively in the legal system. It is a trial that demonstrates to us that legal trials alone will never be enough: if a single man in a small town like Mazan can manage to find at least seventy others living within a radius of less than fifty kilometres from his home (the coco.fr website that he used worked by geolocation, and Dominique Pelicot wanted to make sure the men could get there quickly), then how many men are there in France who would be prepared to rape an unconscious woman if the opportunity arose? When so many of the accused, faced with the most explicit and damning videos imaginable, still try to deny the facts or any criminal intent, what can judges or juries hope to do in cases that do not involve a meticulous collector obsessed with capturing everything on video? When for the most part these men seem so unashamed of what they have done, so quick to make excuses even after lengthy periods of imprisonment, how can we see their sentences as anything more than temporary punishments that will have very little impact? When their lawyers make speeches overflowing with sexist clichés and continue to defend their clients, minimizing their responsibility, how can these men, their families, and their friends see their sentences as anything other than an injustice? No prison system will ever be vast enough, powerful enough, or effective enough to stop men from committing rape. But if there is no chance of solving the problem by ‘letting justice do its job’, as invariably recommended by those concerned that feminists are going too far, then what is to be done? As is the case for many women, one question keeps nagging at me, haunting me, returning when I least expect it: Can we live with men? And if so, at what cost?
I know that this question may irritate, offend, or upset people, but frankly, I would prefer it to cause problems for me rather than to haunt me as it does. I would like to be able to call for calm, to let things run their proper course, but even more than usual, this trial highlights the immense patience, resilience – or perhaps we should say submission – that women are obliged to exercise daily. I get dressed and I worry: not too sexy (‘No wonder she got raped’), not too sloppy (‘No wonder her husband cheats on her, have you seen how she’s let herself go?’). If I wear this dress, will my students take me seriously? In any case, luckily, I’m getting older now, so I’m less conspicuous. I walk down the stairs and worry: What if there’s an aggressive man in the corridor again? – and take my daughters across the park to the nursery. Thank god I have the kids with me, since the men who hang around the park are more likely to bother me when I’m alone. I watch the news. Puff Daddy? Yeah, well, no surprise there. But even Abbé Pierre, a beloved priest who spent his life combating poverty and homelessness – even he raped countless women? Online comments on videos of me or others: ‘Haha, wouldn’t even rape her with a stick.’ A colleague who is astonished that I teach in a philosophy department (‘Aren’t you in Gender Studies?’), close friends who excuse the inexcusable acts of their friends or loved ones, atrocious family stories, decades of lies discovered upon the opening of a letter, stories of incest, beatings, verbal abuse. And the political climate doesn’t help: it’s women’s fault, it’s feminism’s fault, that young men are increasingly voting for the most extreme right-wing parties, from Donald Trump to Jordan Bardella to the German neo-Nazis; that’s what happens when men are prevented from having free access to women’s bodies!
I could go on, I could give an endless list of the many ways in which my existence and that of other women is fenced in by male violence, but what I am interested in here is something else: understanding what’s at stake in this trial. Is it simply a morbid fascination with evil? It is obvious when reading articles from the beginning of the hearings, which revelled in the crudest and most shocking details, that such fascination is at least a part of what is going on. Like the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War, the trials of terrorists, or those of major sex offenders, the Pelicot trial is, in its own way, the trial of evil itself. But Dominique Pelicot is not alone in the dock here. This is not the trial of just one man, but of a group of men, some of whom have not been identified and are still out there in the world quietly going about their business. The variety of social profiles, ages, and backgrounds of the fifty other defendants is both curious and terrifying: could it be that the average ‘guy next door’ would willingly rape his neighbour’s sleeping wife if given the chance? A dizzying question for many of us, especially those who thought that perhaps #MeToo would be the final episode in the fight against gender-based and sexual violence.
In short, this was not a rape trial like the landmark case that took place in Aix in 1978,1 but rather a trial that focuses attention upon a whole series of fundamental questions about the relationship between men and women, about evil, violence, incest, gender norms, and power. A great many books have been written on major trials: legal chronicles, literary works, works by historians and sociologists and, of course, Hannah Arendt’s book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. These books are fascinating, of course, but I want to do something slightly different here: rather than chronicling the trial day by day, I want to use the trial, its little catchphrases, sometimes the bare facts, but more often the media’s treatment of them, to unravel, as a philosopher, the threads that are intertwined in this affair. Because this was indeed one of those historic trials in which we seem to detect monstrosity and evil incarnate, but it was also an absolutely ordinary trial, with ordinary defendants and a ‘good victim’ (we will come back to that later). Moreover, just as the Aix trial cannot be understood outside of the context in which it took place – the activism of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF, Women’s Liberation Movement), its call for the criminalization of rape and its 1976 Feminist Manifesto against Rape, but also the protest against the Algerian War and the use of trials for political ends – the Pelicot trial cannot be understood apart from a particular series of moments in French feminism which no doubt was initiated by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair2 and then amplified by the #MeToo movement.
Like Simone de Beauvoir, I believe that philosophers should not harbour too many illusions about the power of philosophical language. There are emotions, experiences, and truths that philosophy finds it very difficult to capture. And the risk is particularly great when it comes to sexual violence, since these issues have so often been conceived of as external to philosophy. Unlike the strictly philosophical books I have written before, here I have allowed myself to write more freely, and sometimes more personally. As Susan Brison superbly demonstrates in Aftermath, her book on rape and philosophy which guided me through this trial,3 writing in the first person does not necessarily compromise the objectivity of one’s analysis. On the contrary, I believe that it is only by giving an account of the subjective experience of a trial like this that we can fully understand what it is like to be a human being, and particularly a woman, in the world that the trial reveals to us.
Notes
1.
In 1974 two young Belgian lesbians, Anne Tonglet and Araceli Castellano, were raped by three local men in the Calanques, near Marseilles. The victims hired feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who succeeded in having the case tried as a serious crime (
crime
), rather than as a misdemeanour (
délit
), as had been the case for rape up until that point. Moreover, like Gisèle Pelicot after them, Tonglet and Castellano declined their right to have the trial held in private. This highly publicized trial was a turning point in French criminal law, as it led to rape being officially categorized as a serious crime a few years later.
2.
In 2011 French politician and former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York and charged with sexual assault against a hotel maid. The charges were later dismissed, but a number of further allegations and scandalous revelations emerged. This highly publicized case focused attention on the legal treatment of sexual assault and the role played by political power in its perpetuation and the silencing of its victims.
3.
Susan J. Brison,
Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Consent
When you don’t know what to do, you can always pass a law – it doesn’t cost much and it’s very satisfying. Whether it actually works is another matter!
The words of an Italian politician, as reported by Robert Badinter1
It has often been said that the Mazan rape trial was a trial about consent. And it is likely to be a milestone in the widespread use of the vocabulary of consent in matters of sexual violence. But this turning point is not a legal one, and should not be understood as such. It will, I hope, be a turning point in the social conception of rape. For what the trial revealed is that, while it has not yet become fixed in the majority of people’s minds as the most fundamental and necessary notion for understanding what is wrong with sexual violence, the concept of consent is in fact well established in the legal world.
Allow me to explain: ever since the #MeToo movement, a great deal has been said about the need to change the definition of rape in the French Penal Code. And indeed whereas many countries define rape as non-consensual sex, France defines it as sexual penetration or oral sex obtained by ‘coercion, threat, violence, or surprise’. The reasoning of proponents of a change in the law proceeds as follows: they begin from the observation, which I absolutely endorse, that sexual violence is overwhelmingly widespread. The figures are indisputable here: it is estimated that, in France, an average of 230,000 women aged between 18 and 74 are victims of rape, attempted rape, and/or sexual assault every year;2 according to the Virage survey, 14.5 per cent of women and 3.9 per cent of men aged between 20 and 69 have been victims of sexual violence;3 every three minutes in France a child falls victim to rape or sexual assault – 160,000 a year.4 In view of the sheer scale of this, it is then assumed that such violence would be less widespread if it were appropriately punished and perpetrators were therefore more afraid of the consequences of their acts. In any case, the figures we have at our disposal demonstrate that such violence often goes unpunished because it is rarely reported, those who report it are often not believed, and it is often not properly dealt with by the police or the courts. One of the problems is that many cases of sexual violence are considered to be sexual assaults rather than rapes (and therefore attract less severe sentences), or do not lead to any criminal conviction. In some widely discussed cases, for example, the accused have been cleared on the grounds that they did not know that the victim had not consented to what took place. On this basis, some conclude that the problem is that article 222-23 of the French Penal Code defines rape as ‘an act of sexual penetration, of any kind, or any oral–genital act committed on the victim, or forced onto the perpetrator, by means of violence, constraint, threat, or surprise’, rather than defining it, as is now the case in a growing number of countries, in terms of absence of consent on the part of the victim.
I shall come back to the issues that such a change in the law might raise, but first of all I should like to show that, in the Mazan rape trial as in others, the vocabulary of consent is not absent, but is on the contrary absolutely omnipresent. In the examining magistrate’s indictment, for example, each of the defendants was questioned about Gisèle Pelicot’s consent or absence of consent. One ‘admitted that PELICOT Gisèle was not consenting’, another ‘explained that the situation had not been presented to him as a rape, but as involving a consenting couple. He therefore contested the alleged facts, but agreed, having seen the videos, that Gisèle [PELICOT] could not have consented.’ Similar remarks appear in the minutes of the hearings of other defendants.
Sociologist Océane Pérona devoted her doctoral thesis and a number of articles to examining how police officers investigate sexual violence. One of her findings is that ‘the police systematically question respondents about their knowledge of the consent or non-consent of the complainants’. They constantly refer to the notion of consent in their questioning in spite of its not being explicitly invoked in the definition of rape. Indeed, as Pérona points out, in the Dubas ruling of 1857, the Cour de cassation, the highest court in the French judicial system, defined rape as ‘lack of consent’, and described this lack of consent in terms of violence, coercion, or surprise on the part of the perpetrator. While the law makes no mention of consent, case law clearly establishes a link between violence, constraint, and surprise – to which threat was later added – and non-consent, thereby justifying the use of the vocabulary of consent in both police investigation and criminal trial.5
However, this does not mean that complainants have everything in their favour – far from it. Because, unfortunately, using the term ‘consent’ does not of itself guarantee the proper treatment of sexual violence. Again, Pérona’s work is useful here, because it shows that police officers’ apprehension of whether or not the victim consented, i.e. whether or not an offence was committed, depends upon the part played by what the sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon call ‘sexual scripts’.6 Every one of us, based on our personal, social, and professional life and experiences, has an idea of what sexual
