‘It is so rare, in fact it never happens, that crimes are so well documented.” 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 Gisèle Pelicot “being raped, unconscious, by complete strangers”. 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’t have found a clearer or more persuasive voice than Garcia’s, the author of We Are Not Born Submissive and The Joy of Consent.
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. “But I was seeing things that the journalists were not seeing, because we’re not doing the same job. Also, something deeper happened. It felt like I couldn’t 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.”
Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial is her new book about “the Mazan affair”, named after the Pelicots’ home village. Its subject is “unbelievably dark, but this is not a dark book”, she tells me over video call from Berlin, where she is now a junior professor at the Freie Universität, 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’s also surprisingly moving, not least because of Gisèle Pelicot’s courage.
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, Gisèle 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 “50 defendants plus one or two lawyers each. They were an enormous group, and she’s alone next to them, next to all these men that have raped her, and yet she doesn’t know them, has never seen them,” Garcia describes.
It was a bear pit; a lot of these guys had been sharing a cell while on remand. “They got along really well – they were bros hanging out. Over time, there was this atmosphere of: ‘These crazy feminists, these extremists who want to have us punished for something that we didn’t do.’”
Gisèle Pelicot, who was 71 when proceedings began, was often left feeling as though she was on trial herself. “I have felt humiliated while I’ve been in this courtroom,” she said at the time. “I have been called an alcoholic, a conspirator of Mr Pelicot.” 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. “They were saying: ‘You have the women behind you,’” Garcia, 41, recalls. “That was very powerful. Even up until the end – I don’t know if I want to say this publicly, because it makes me look like such a typical ‘woman’ – but I cried every time she was applauded.”
That ordeal resumed for Gisèle 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, “to make clear that rape is rape, that there is no such thing as a small rape.” Dogan lost his appeal, and his sentence was increased to 10 years.
Nothing has changed, insofar as the same defence arguments were lodged, rejected again by the jury. Yet this time, Garcia says, “Gisèle Pelicot’s 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.”
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’t 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) – 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’t: “This is what men are.”
Garcia describes wryly in the book how people from Paris would say: “This is men from the south”; intellectuals would say: “These don’t look like guys who read many books”; her German and American colleagues would say: “It’s really a problem with French culture.” (I had a trace of that myself – I couldn’t imagine it happening in the UK, but I just wasn’t imagining hard enough.)
When I admit as much to Garcia, she openly laughs: “At 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 wives in sexual positions. I wish we could decide that this was a problem with French culture.”
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Drugging women to rape them is often either passed off as the woman’s 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 – getting aroused by a person who’s pretending to be asleep. In Living With Men, she writes that chemical submission delivers “maximal transformation of the victim into a thing”. I would prefer “person” – once the person is a victim, the transformation is already under way. But I’m only tinkering with her sentences because I admire them. As for asphyxiation, she tells me: “BDSM 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’s thought of as a new defence in rape or even murder trials, that the strangulation was just because: ‘We were into this – it’s rough sex gone wrong.’ That’s funny for me, because it is not new.”
She delves into some stunning detail on the judges’ questions during the trial: a handful of men used as their defence that they couldn’t have raped Gisèle Pelicot because they couldn’t get an erection, and video evidence backed this up. “There was one judge that was silent most of the time,” she says, “but really interrogated them: ‘How come you couldn’t have an erection?’ He didn’t once ask any of the 45 other men: ‘How come you could have an erection?’ Once you see the videos, there’s nothing about it that is arousing. It’s not a rock movie of a hot woman on a beautiful bed. It’s a naked woman that could be your grandmother. You don’t know her, she’s in a coma; how does this turn you on? Let’s 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’re going for it 100%?”
Garcia doesn’t like the phrase “rape culture”, finding it too loose, but refers in the book to the “cultural scaffolding of rape”, an idea coined by the New Zealand psychologist Nicola Gavey in the mid-00s. Three assumptions underpin it – 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 – men as hunters, women as prey, male desire as a “standby position, waiting for the opportunity to rape”, she writes.
One of the most bracing elements of Living With Men is the comparison Garcia draws between sitting through the Pelicot trial and Hannah Arendt’s 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. “There are two reasons why I had to make the analogy with Eichmann. The first is that I’m a philosopher who goes to a trial. So anyone is going to ask me: ‘What do you take from Arendt in Jerusalem?’ And the second is that ‘evil’ and ‘male’ 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.”
In fact, there is a much more profound comparison, which is what Arendt ultimately concluded. “If a criminal trial works the way it should, it will not do the work that you’re expecting it to do,” Garcia says. “If 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.” Just as Gisèle Pelicot’s experience in court replayed and even amplified her violation, so Eichmann’s defence that he was passive and merely obedient reframed the Holocaust as pointillism, an atrocity in which no single person’s actions had meaning, no individual was at fault. “The big difference is, there are historians who think Arendt believed Eichmann’s defence unduly – that he was playing dumb. These guys in Mazan, they’re not playing dumb, they have literally nothing to say about what they did. This, for me, was terrifying.
“In 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’s not because they’re dumb. It’s because there’s something about what it is for them to be a man, and to be entitled to women’s bodies, that makes them, I think, at least some of them, deeply convinced that they haven’t done anything wrong.”
The trial took a toll on Garcia. “I 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: ‘Are you being stupid? This is the one place you should not feel safe.’ But you can’t feel that way.” She’s not some anti-man feminist, she says. “I 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.” It feels like needless contrarianism, almost trolling, to call this book uplifting; but it’s a map of terrain that is inescapable without one. It’s incredibly uplifting.
Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial is published by Polity, price £20. To support the Guardian, order a copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
