In a recent post on Matriarchal Blessing, Celeste Davis quotes from a French Q&A about the Dominique Pelicot case:
He said: « So, let me get this right. In the fairly small town of Mazan, Dominique Pélicot easily found 90+ men willing to rape his wife while she was drugged and unconscious. Hundreds more saw the messages on the forum and not one decided to tell the police about it. »
At that point, a lot of us were kind of bracing for either a dismissal of the facts, or some convoluted explanation for how those men were unique. But no. He continued:
« So, does that mean that in every town, every village in our country, there are just as many men willing to rape an unconscious woman? »
Lorraine de Foucher replied, « Yes. »
« But then that means that there are thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands! » (You could hear at that point the wheels turning in his head).
« Yes », she nodded again.
« But… that’s abominable! It’s a catastrophe! It’s a national emergency! »
« …… Yes. It is. »
I would be delighted to say that’s a big pile of bollocks. It isn’t. Consider, as exhibit A, this CNN story about an online network of men who bond over drugging and raping their spouses. Absolutely horrifying — be wary if you have related triggers — not only in the act itself but in the way the men on the various sites reinforce each other’s behavior, advise on the choice of drugs, etc.
It’s another example of my point that 10 percent of men (or any group) are actively good, 10 percent evil and 80 percent can go either way (the percentages are guesstimates). Dominique Pelicot’s community might not have been rapists in the ordinary course of events; given an invite, they swung to evil. And even those men who didn’t act kept mum about it. Similarly, these online forums may push some men who might not have turned rapist otherwise — though that emphatically is not an excuse. If all it takes to get someone to rape their partners is a chat online and a desire to impress your new buddies …
Exhibit B, Rick Pidcock’s discussion of how photos of Epstein’s parties don’t include any adult women: “as soon as there was a table, food, hors d’oeuvres, a main course, some red wine on a table, the women disappeared.” Why? Publisher Anand Giridharadas at the same linke: ‘These are men who basically want a frictionless experience of the world. And they associate many different types of things with friction. Like a 40-year-old woman opposite you at dinner is the nightmare of these men because a 40-year-old woman with opinions, whose passport you don’t have in a locker, an actual grown woman with thoughts and opinions who can leave and come and go as she pleases and is free and is mature and has strength, these men were so terrified. They clearly organized themselves logistically to never be in the presence of such women. You do not see 43-year-old women in the Epstein Files.”
Giridharadas goes on to say it’s about creating a “power distance” between men and women: “For some very small number of men, that means pedophilia,” he said. “For a larger number of men, it means … only being comfortable at the table when it’s like a guy’s thing, that the women are kind of accessories, women are for fun time, women are for the pool, but not the dinner table because the dinner table is for conversation and conversation is two-way. And these guys don’t want to hear anything women have to say.” Or as he puts it on his substack, “Conversation has the problem of being two-way. Women and girls in this world were for receiving — for doing things to, not with.” (Celeste Davis sees this primarily as a matter of men being trained to shun anything feminine, including women).
The substack piece goes on to draw a line between Epstein’s circle and the power of money to eliminate friction in people’s lives. These men have the money and connections to get what they want without having to wait or go through the processes most of us do; indeed, being forced to play by the rules infuriates them. “I don’t believe it’s an accident that this promise of seamlessness, of a touch-point-free existence, of the removal of anything indifferent to one’s wishes, of the outer world rendered as an extension of the self — it simply cannot be an accident that sometimes, for perhaps a small subset of these men, this expectation goes beyond skipping the line at Newark, and beyond even having the 25-year-old girlfriend who is simply grateful to be kept around.”
Pidcock sees a similar connection with complementarian ministries: women are restricted to carefully limited roles and when the men on the ministry board sit around talking Serious Business, there are no women in the room. And women whose writing is platformed on complementarian websites “tend to focus on topics such as women’s roles in the home and in the church, homeschooling, body image, processing emotions, abortion, parenting and other concerns young complementarian wives and mothers might be interested in. It’s not nearly as common to find a woman focusing on atonement theology, the Trinity or many of the theology-rich themes the men write about.”
I also see a resemblance to something Kristin Kobes duMez wrote about (and I’ve linked to before), the nostalgia for traditional community that ignores many of those communities kept women behind the scenes in support roles.
Then there’s Lili Loofbourow’s piece on aging, petulant men from the Toddler’s first presidential term. Much like Giridharadas’ billionaires, “the only thing the Old Boy hates more than being told no is being questioned. He is both fussy and smug—think of Paul Manafort seething, arms crossed, as he stared at underling Rick Gates in court, or Sen. Lindsey Graham theatrically yelling “This is hell” about a hearing process his own party devised. The Old Boy is so essentially dishonest that his lies seem almost innocent. An Old Boy lies fluently and to your face, and he will explode in rage if you point this out to him not because you’re wrong (this is key) but because you don’t matter and neither does the truth; an Old Boy gets to say and do what he likes.” And what drives them to cross lines —sexual assault, corruption, Alex Acosta giving Epstein a sweetheart deal — isn’t just the money or sex but “the thrill of feeding appetites that can’t actually be satisfied, of gloating, of winning the game.” And the thrill fades, so on to the next transgression.
Patriarchy, wealth, entitlement, the desire never to be denied anything, including women’s bodies. It’s a vile mess.
