The ‘Mazan Affair,’ which pitted a woman against 51 defendants charged with raping her without her knowledge, at the instigation of her husband who administered drugs and handed her over to strangers, is drawing to a close. The case—the only one of its kind—has gripped French and international opinion. Throughout the public discussion, this trial has become, under the influence of the press, one of ‘patriarchy’ and ‘male toxicity’—while the real causes of this tragedy have been carefully hushed up. Indeed, this tragedy can only be read through the lens of two crucial evils of our time: the empire of pornography and the moral corruption eating away at a broken society.
For ten years, Gisèle Pélicot was drugged by her husband and handed over to strangers to be raped in the marital home before the eyes of the husband, who filmed the assaults. The police established that the victim had been raped 92 times, by at least 73 different men. 51 have been charged, while the others have not been identified.
Right from the start of the trial, Gisèle Pélicot took part in the hearings with rare courage, and quickly became a figure of resistance, refusing the trial behind closed doors so that, as she put it, “the shame would change sides.” With the unfailing support of her three children, she now wants to keep her name, out of respect for her grandchildren who bear it. She wants it to be a source of pride for them one day, in the name of the battle she fought.
Gisèle Pélicot, assisted by her daughter, who has since set up an association to raise awareness of it, has become the spokesperson for a poorly identified evil that she has experienced first-hand: chemical subjection, i.e., rape without the victim’s awareness because of psychoactive substances.
The dignity of this woman during the long and trying hours of the trial, during which she had to watch, over and over again, the terrible images of her own ordeal, certainly commands respect. But the trial was gradually transformed by the analyses in the press. Over and above Gisèle Pélicot’s very unique story, it has become a question of putting ‘male toxicity,’ consent, and patriarchy on trial through her—evils that our good conscience delights in denouncing and that are seen as inexhaustible sources of possible future ‘deconstructions.’
Yet on closer inspection, the atrocious tragedy at Mazan is in fact the pure product of our contemporary society, which has gone too far in deconstructing itself. The vengeful stigmatisation of an alleged patriarchy by the media and feminists obscures the deep roots of the evil.
Patriarchy is a convenient culprit. But let’s be clear: patriarchy has not been in power for a long time now, and our Western society is no longer ‘patriarchal,’ if by that we mean a vertical, authoritarian society oppressed by a dominant, omnipotent male. The father figure has been mocked and ridiculed for some time now, and his authority reduced to nothing. Everywhere, on the contrary, the figure of the dominant woman is promoted as the universal solution to all humanity’s ills. Women, we are told, means no more violence, no more exploitation, no more war. Compassion, dialogue, and ‘feminine’ sentimentality have been elevated to the rank of cardinal virtues, while virility is regarded as necessarily suspect. But we’re going to venture an unpopular opinion: on closer inspection, Dominique Pélicot is not a ‘patriarch.’ If he had been, he would have forced his wife to submit to his ‘marital duty’ and his follies, without bothering to drug her.
The roots of the evil that came to the fore at the Mazan trial are to be found elsewhere.
Its beginning was pornographic society. Gisèle Pélicot’s ordeal had its origins in the reign of digital perversion available to everyone. Dominique Pélicot regularly frequented gloomy websites and fed his imagination with dubious practices. One day, he went from being a spectator to a director. He recruited his actors on a forum where other enthusiasts of deviant practices met. In this respect, Dominique Pélicot is just a small part of the huge and rapidly expanding galaxy of amateur pornography which, according to the experts, is in the process of competing in terms of content production with the more ‘traditional’ circuits of the pornographic industry. Platforms such as Onlyfans, or in France, the Jacquie et Michel website, are encouraging this trend. For some years now, the web has been teeming with ‘amateur’ videos, some of which can be shot by private individuals with no production machinery behind them and filmed with a simple phone. This means that anyone can become an improvised ‘producer’ of pornographic material, and at the same time take part, on an individual level, in the dissemination of a new kind of visual content.
Dominique Pélicot’s behaviour is emblematic of this ‘fashion.’ He was not content to simply take action and have others take action. He filmed, photographed, filed, and kept records of his misdeeds and those of his accomplices.
The responsibility of the pornographic wave in this case helped shape the behaviour of the accused who, like their diabolical mentor, navigate almost daily this bleak world of digital sexuality, which blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual.
The testimonies of the defendants on the stand are revealing in this respect. In rapid succession—an unprecedented fifty or so defendants for a single victim—the vast majority of them gave their view of the facts, without a hint of guilt. The press rightly took offence, but not for the right reasons. The media interpreted the scandalous statements made by Dominique Pélicot’s accomplices according to a single pattern: the ‘rape taboo’ had to be broken, awareness had to be raised, again, about the evils of ‘patriarchy.’
But as far as each of the men in the courtroom was concerned, there had been no rape, and patriarchy had nothing to do with this distorted view of the facts. The omnipresence of pornography in which they live has helped them to abolish the boundaries of reality. It makes those who consume it believe that, through the intermediary of a screen, everything is possible, everything is authorised. There is no adultery in pornography, nor is there any problem of consent. There are simply no limits. How can we ever reproach them for making what they see on screen coincide with what they experience?
The trial of the Mazan rapes should be a trial of moral misery, a condemnation of a perverted society that, a few decades ago, established the principle that in sexual matters, anything goes, anything is possible, anything is desirable in the name of ‘sexual liberation.’ It is striking to note that, in the testimony of the accused, the following justification recurs like a Leitmotif: I would never have thought that the woman was drugged without her knowledge, I thought it was a fantasy of the couple. “Why would I go and rape a 70-year-old woman?” one of them ingeniously defends himself.
You might think that this was an argument put forward during the trial to support the defence, but this argument says a lot about a mental universe made up of a loss of reference points and moral corruption. There are no longer any moral restraints when it comes to sexual matters. Fathers are involved. They play with a father and a mother—drugged or not, it doesn’t matter. This is not rape, but a life-size game between consenting adults. The methodical destruction of social control and the moral standards of the society that the Left castigates as patriarchal results in precisely this kind of drama. In the emptiness of their lives, these lost men are no longer aware of what can be done and what cannot.
It will no doubt be objected that past centuries must have known many equally sordid stories. True enough. But this case has thrived on behaviour that has become commonplace and is not seen as reprehensible. The latest debates on blocking pornographic sites in France are revealing in this respect. The associations that succeeded in having the sites blocked are child protection associations, which take great care in their communications to make it clear that they have no intention of fighting pornography—a right, a freedom—but that they simply intend to “protect children.” Adults can do what they like. Duly noted.
The Mazan trial is therefore a stolen trial. The real trial will not take place, because we would have to talk about family, morality, decency, and human dignity. All things that we have taken a malicious pleasure in evacuating to accuse, today, a decaying patriarchy that has little to do with it.
Mazan Affair: A Trial of Moral Misery
Gisèle Pélicot (L) arrives at the Avignon courthouse for the trial of her ex-husband Dominique Pélicot accused of drugging her for nearly ten years and inviting strangers to rape her at their home in Mazan, a small town in the south of France, in Avignon, on November 20, 2024.
Photo: Christophe SIMON / AFP
The ‘Mazan Affair,’ which pitted a woman against 51 defendants charged with raping her without her knowledge, at the instigation of her husband who administered drugs and handed her over to strangers, is drawing to a close. The case—the only one of its kind—has gripped French and international opinion. Throughout the public discussion, this trial has become, under the influence of the press, one of ‘patriarchy’ and ‘male toxicity’—while the real causes of this tragedy have been carefully hushed up. Indeed, this tragedy can only be read through the lens of two crucial evils of our time: the empire of pornography and the moral corruption eating away at a broken society.
For ten years, Gisèle Pélicot was drugged by her husband and handed over to strangers to be raped in the marital home before the eyes of the husband, who filmed the assaults. The police established that the victim had been raped 92 times, by at least 73 different men. 51 have been charged, while the others have not been identified.
Right from the start of the trial, Gisèle Pélicot took part in the hearings with rare courage, and quickly became a figure of resistance, refusing the trial behind closed doors so that, as she put it, “the shame would change sides.” With the unfailing support of her three children, she now wants to keep her name, out of respect for her grandchildren who bear it. She wants it to be a source of pride for them one day, in the name of the battle she fought.
Gisèle Pélicot, assisted by her daughter, who has since set up an association to raise awareness of it, has become the spokesperson for a poorly identified evil that she has experienced first-hand: chemical subjection, i.e., rape without the victim’s awareness because of psychoactive substances.
The dignity of this woman during the long and trying hours of the trial, during which she had to watch, over and over again, the terrible images of her own ordeal, certainly commands respect. But the trial was gradually transformed by the analyses in the press. Over and above Gisèle Pélicot’s very unique story, it has become a question of putting ‘male toxicity,’ consent, and patriarchy on trial through her—evils that our good conscience delights in denouncing and that are seen as inexhaustible sources of possible future ‘deconstructions.’
Yet on closer inspection, the atrocious tragedy at Mazan is in fact the pure product of our contemporary society, which has gone too far in deconstructing itself. The vengeful stigmatisation of an alleged patriarchy by the media and feminists obscures the deep roots of the evil.
Patriarchy is a convenient culprit. But let’s be clear: patriarchy has not been in power for a long time now, and our Western society is no longer ‘patriarchal,’ if by that we mean a vertical, authoritarian society oppressed by a dominant, omnipotent male. The father figure has been mocked and ridiculed for some time now, and his authority reduced to nothing. Everywhere, on the contrary, the figure of the dominant woman is promoted as the universal solution to all humanity’s ills. Women, we are told, means no more violence, no more exploitation, no more war. Compassion, dialogue, and ‘feminine’ sentimentality have been elevated to the rank of cardinal virtues, while virility is regarded as necessarily suspect. But we’re going to venture an unpopular opinion: on closer inspection, Dominique Pélicot is not a ‘patriarch.’ If he had been, he would have forced his wife to submit to his ‘marital duty’ and his follies, without bothering to drug her.
The roots of the evil that came to the fore at the Mazan trial are to be found elsewhere.
Its beginning was pornographic society. Gisèle Pélicot’s ordeal had its origins in the reign of digital perversion available to everyone. Dominique Pélicot regularly frequented gloomy websites and fed his imagination with dubious practices. One day, he went from being a spectator to a director. He recruited his actors on a forum where other enthusiasts of deviant practices met. In this respect, Dominique Pélicot is just a small part of the huge and rapidly expanding galaxy of amateur pornography which, according to the experts, is in the process of competing in terms of content production with the more ‘traditional’ circuits of the pornographic industry. Platforms such as Onlyfans, or in France, the Jacquie et Michel website, are encouraging this trend. For some years now, the web has been teeming with ‘amateur’ videos, some of which can be shot by private individuals with no production machinery behind them and filmed with a simple phone. This means that anyone can become an improvised ‘producer’ of pornographic material, and at the same time take part, on an individual level, in the dissemination of a new kind of visual content.
Dominique Pélicot’s behaviour is emblematic of this ‘fashion.’ He was not content to simply take action and have others take action. He filmed, photographed, filed, and kept records of his misdeeds and those of his accomplices.
The responsibility of the pornographic wave in this case helped shape the behaviour of the accused who, like their diabolical mentor, navigate almost daily this bleak world of digital sexuality, which blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual.
The testimonies of the defendants on the stand are revealing in this respect. In rapid succession—an unprecedented fifty or so defendants for a single victim—the vast majority of them gave their view of the facts, without a hint of guilt. The press rightly took offence, but not for the right reasons. The media interpreted the scandalous statements made by Dominique Pélicot’s accomplices according to a single pattern: the ‘rape taboo’ had to be broken, awareness had to be raised, again, about the evils of ‘patriarchy.’
But as far as each of the men in the courtroom was concerned, there had been no rape, and patriarchy had nothing to do with this distorted view of the facts. The omnipresence of pornography in which they live has helped them to abolish the boundaries of reality. It makes those who consume it believe that, through the intermediary of a screen, everything is possible, everything is authorised. There is no adultery in pornography, nor is there any problem of consent. There are simply no limits. How can we ever reproach them for making what they see on screen coincide with what they experience?
The trial of the Mazan rapes should be a trial of moral misery, a condemnation of a perverted society that, a few decades ago, established the principle that in sexual matters, anything goes, anything is possible, anything is desirable in the name of ‘sexual liberation.’ It is striking to note that, in the testimony of the accused, the following justification recurs like a Leitmotif: I would never have thought that the woman was drugged without her knowledge, I thought it was a fantasy of the couple. “Why would I go and rape a 70-year-old woman?” one of them ingeniously defends himself.
You might think that this was an argument put forward during the trial to support the defence, but this argument says a lot about a mental universe made up of a loss of reference points and moral corruption. There are no longer any moral restraints when it comes to sexual matters. Fathers are involved. They play with a father and a mother—drugged or not, it doesn’t matter. This is not rape, but a life-size game between consenting adults. The methodical destruction of social control and the moral standards of the society that the Left castigates as patriarchal results in precisely this kind of drama. In the emptiness of their lives, these lost men are no longer aware of what can be done and what cannot.
It will no doubt be objected that past centuries must have known many equally sordid stories. True enough. But this case has thrived on behaviour that has become commonplace and is not seen as reprehensible. The latest debates on blocking pornographic sites in France are revealing in this respect. The associations that succeeded in having the sites blocked are child protection associations, which take great care in their communications to make it clear that they have no intention of fighting pornography—a right, a freedom—but that they simply intend to “protect children.” Adults can do what they like. Duly noted.
The Mazan trial is therefore a stolen trial. The real trial will not take place, because we would have to talk about family, morality, decency, and human dignity. All things that we have taken a malicious pleasure in evacuating to accuse, today, a decaying patriarchy that has little to do with it.
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