One of the most powerful things I’ve read in ages: Sophie Smith on
Gisèle Pelicot and what her experience tells us about humanity, and men,
and complicity.
“What are we taught not to see? What do we see and are taught not to
talk about? If we want to understand the logics of a ‘rape culture’
that produces the ‘Monster of Avignon’, the scores of men he convinced
to join him, the website on which they all met, the terms in which
they made their excuses, the porn they and millions of others consume,
the desire that this porn both writes and represents, the desire of
men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the
getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it
from wanted it anyway, the women who are taught to stay quiet, who are
kept quiet, and the ones who are ignored, defamed or humiliated when
they do not – if we want to understand this ‘culture’ (or rather, this
way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the
‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and
forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small
anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are
so relieved they are not monsters? And perhaps also because we are
worried that if we do speak up they might leave us, exclude us, react
with the infantile fury we are taught so carefully to contain? Are we
not, when we look closely, surrounded by these small acts of
accommodation, denial, repression, evasion?”
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