The trial of Dominique Pelicot in France for drugging, raping and recruiting dozens of other men to rape his wife is so appalling that it is hard even to contemplate it.
Pelicot took his wife Gisèle Pelicot to a swingers’ club in 2009, and when she rejected the option, within two years he was inviting strangers to come to his home to assault her. He filmed the rapes and kept them in a hard drive in a file marked “abuse”.
His brave wife has waived anonymity so that other women would know that the shame belongs only to the rapists, not to the person who is raped. She endured years of memory loss and four inexplicable sexually transmitted infections, but no doctor thought about the possibility that she might be being assaulted. It may be time to start using again an old-fashioned word about these rapes – evil.
While admitting his crimes and that his wife is blameless, Pelicot has attempted to explain his actions in various ways, ranging from having been sexually assaulted aged nine, to witnessing a gang rape of a “little handicapped girl” when he was 14, to suffering stifling boredom when he retired. While being sexually assaulted as a child is a horrific trauma, there are many others who suffered in this way but never perpetuated the cycle of abuse.
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The Pelicot case is a grotesque example of rape. The fact that some of the alleged rapists state that they presumed that consent was involved because the husband was facilitating their actions is pathetic and inexcusable.
We have an instinctive sense of the degree of violation involved in sexual crime. For example, if a burglar beats an old woman during a robbery, it is considered heinous. But if she is raped, even if the physical injuries resulting from the rape are less serious than from a beating, it is universally recognised as somehow a more shocking attack on her dignity and psyche. There is something weighty and significant about sexual violence that is directly linked to how intrinsic our sexuality is to our personhood. This is completely clear in consent violations, particularly cases such as the Pelicot assaults which have a unique significance, gravity and awfulness.
However, every age has its blind spots when it comes to sex. Ours may be that we see clearly the distinctive awfulness of sexual crime, yet as a culture we have somehow decided that there is nothing intrinsically weighty or significant about sex in itself. If someone wants to treat it as trivial, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. There is a serious disconnection here. The fact that sexual crimes harm us in profound ways explains why sexual violations inspire revulsion. Still, somehow, that does not lead us to the logical conclusion of the need to treat sex in general as uniquely significant.
If consent violations are intrinsically worse when they are sexual in nature, other ways of treating people badly that do not amount to consent violations, but do involve sex, are worth taking seriously.
[ Fifth of young Irish men would continue if partner was ‘not enjoying’ sexOpens in new window ]
At their best, sexual encounters can express love, commitment, tenderness and pleasure. At their worst, they can bring people to places of great evil. Somewhere in between there is an area that is not criminal, but where harms still accrue if sex is seen as essentially trivial, just another recreational activity. It is a fundamentally irresponsible attitude that can lead to people being hurt in a way that is more intense than other ways of hurting people. It also breeds a certain type of callousness if other people are cynically perceived as just a means of gratification.
“Use things and love people” remains a reasonable guideline. Our culture has decided that guideline only applies if we want it to, and that sex has no intrinsic significance in the absence of egregious consent violations.
Previous generations, most particularly women, suffered from stigmatisation and shame that meant it was difficult, if not impossible to acknowledge sexual desires and needs without being somehow painted as “promiscuous” or unfeminine. That was deeply unjust and deprived many women of happiness and fulfilment.
But have we now gone so far the other way, that we underplay the destructive potential of sexuality without constraints? Have we trivialised sexual encounters to the extent that anything goes, so long as it involves adults and that full consent is given?
Consent is a good foundation but it can never be the full building. The proliferation of ugly, misogynistic, violent porn online is testament to the fact that sexuality without love, without boundaries, can become an addiction.
Some men are drawn again and again to indulge in a porn habit that makes them feel empty and yet, often sends them to darker and darker corners of the internet in search of more extreme images.
Carl Jung was right when he said that where the light is brightest, the shadows are darkest. Sex has an intrinsic goodness and significance but when we insist on treating it as trivial and banal, and its connection to love an optional extra, the shadows deepen rather than disperse.