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This trial is a huge event in France. Hopefully it will lead to some real cultural change, and with any luck the rest of the world will be able to learn something as well.
The bravery of this lady for going public and beating on the pots and pans as loud as she can is incredible.
We need serious sex-ed with consent at the pinnacle of it. (And, even then, we need some major cultural changes)
It's a great example of why teaching people about consent is important. Some of the men on trial claim they thought it was a consensual kinky game played between husband and wife, and that they were unaware they were raping anybody.
I don't expect they will have much success with this argument in court. But it's the kind of shit one might fall for if one has not received the training to know with immediate certainty that consent is only established by an active yes, never by the lack of a no, and that it needs to be personally gathered by anyone involved in the act. And that without consent, it's rape.
It's fucking obvious, but I can totally see how some people could buy into their claim of good faith and act as if it means something. Not necessarily because they're bad people, but because they lack the training to understand what consent means and why it's important.
Police were only able to identify 50 suspects out of the 83 that appeared in Dominique Pelicot’s videos.
Their ages range from 26 to 68 and they hail from all walks of life - firefighters, pharmacists, labourers and journalists. Many are fathers and husbands.
Of the other men accused, 15 admit rape, but all the others admit only to taking part in sexual acts.
how the fuck did he find 83 other rapists? is there a rapist website where they meet up?
a rape club?
is it just common that men are willing to do that?
i can accept that occasionally a person’s mind will break and they’ll do evil things… or will in some twisted dictatorship… but when teams of evil people form i start to feel very jaded about humanity….
So, a few things:
I don't know how many of the first group are being honest, but the existence of both can give you an idea of how bad our culture used to be towards rape, and still is to a large extent.
There's a pretty striking moment of archival footage, from the 60s or 70s I think, of some french dude being asked in the street "and you, have you ever raped a woman?" And his response is a very matter-of-fact "well, of course!".
People don't want to believe that rapists are, in many ways, just ordinary people. So they both refuse to see it in others, and refuse to see themselves as capable of even contributing to the problem. Hopefully this can be the wakeup call many men here in France need to realize they must push back when their friends make rape jokes, for ex.
i’m sure the first one was the plausible deniability the husband set up… but still if they never met her beforehand, there’s no way they can pretend like they thought is was consensual….
and even if it was, i can’t imagine anyone who isn’t at least a latent rapist would go through with that….
i hate to “kink shame” but serial killers often start off with “consensual non consent” and bdsm… if that really gets you off and you indulge in it, there’s a very thin line between that person and an actual predator.
…
like, some of that stuff is perfectly fine, but the idea of meeting a man with a drugged unconscious woman and just taking his word that everything is fine and with her knowing, is just absurd…
….
i do hope that rape jokes will go the way of racist jokes… i mean, they usually aren’t considered acceptable…
He probably lied and said she wanted it....duh.
yeah but she was completely unconscious…
i assume he probably lied, i also assume everyone knew it was a lie….
1 in 2 women have experienced sexual harassment in some form.
1 in 4 have been sexually assaulted.
One could cry ‘not all men!’ and that is most certainly true. But it is still doubtful it is a small minority running about perpetrating all these acts. Even if it is not 1 in 4 men committing the assaults, those numbers are still far too high.
it’s clearly not 1 in 4 men each sexually assaulting one woman…
you can probably apply the old Zipf math too it and assume a very small percentage of men are responsible for the vast majority of it….
but still, we need to find their websites and track them all down, much like CSAM websites….
I very, very much doubt it’s a tiny minority. But even if it’s, let’s say, 1 in 200 men doing it, that’s still a very large number of people. Way too many people. And realistically I doubt the number is that low given the frequency of occurrences and the scope of area over which they occur.
A problem is also the idea of "doing it" as the key phrase here.
What is "it" exactly? Is "it" drugging women and raping them? That might even be fewer than 1/200. I sure as hell hope it is. In either case it's surely too many - enough that you should never fucking leave your drink unattended.
Is "it" being a bit lax on consent? She's drunk, you're drunk, you're in bed together, she's so drunk it's not really clear what she wants. You made it this far, surely that's consent enough? In this category of rape, I think there's a whole lot more than one in two hundred.
Your partner says she doesn't feel like it, but you'll go for it anyway - it's not like she's fighting to resist you either? Yeah, a whole lot more than one in two hundred.
Groping someone in a club when drunk? Hell, we've all seen it happen from people we genuinely thought knew better.
I like to believe that the amount of men who would, say, drug and rape someone, is in a very tiny majority. But as for men willing to make arguments about "blurred lines" where there is none, I'm sadly less optimistic.