POLL: hey chaps why aren't any of you talking about the Gisele Pelicot rape trial

I don't really know what to say about it other than it's hideous and horrific and grotesque. I guess the one thing that does strike me about it, or more about the commentary around it, is that in the early days it was sold as a "look at the monstrousness of ordinary men" story, but then as more reporting came out it turned out that mostly these were dudes with a history of creepiness and violence and not just everymen.

Like they made it seem like some kind of Stanford prison experiment-type revelation, as though most men would rape an unconscious woman if given the opportunity, but then it turned out that these were all (or mostly?) exactly the people you would expect to rape an unconscious woman.

I haven’t been talking about it because I haven’t been talking about much of anything but I’ve been reading the conversation on the “no men in the room” thread. I have not responded to anything there because I’m a man and I haven’t started another thread to post my responses/reactions to that conversation because that would be weird.

The entire situation is absolutely horrific, absolutely disgusting. I am in awe of Gisele Peticot’s character and strength.

It's almost over except for the appeals and confirming the sentences ? I followed it quite avidly, criminal cases is where LeMonde's coverage is at its best, Mazan also feels very close as I've been to the area countless times.
The shock and outrage at the facts quickly made way for a triumphalist tone - Gisèle as an icon for women's dignity (yes), there will forever be a before-after Pélicot case (I'm less optimistic). It's scary to say the least that the guy probably gave himself away after ten years, that nobody ever (seriously) suspected him, and that the sentences would look quite different if he had erased his hard disk.
I think to some extent you can say "everyman", just because he found 50 people in such a close perimeter, and there was a great diversity of profiles even if mostly uneducated, messed-up men, some with potential traumas, Pélicot included. I think it's clear that there was some level of manipulation from Pélicot, although that's at best a mitigating factor, and it's clear that they were all counting on impunity.
At least justice has been served, that's always a gain.

DJP otm

Indeed.

I haven’t been talking about it because I haven’t been talking about much of anything but I’ve been reading the conversation on the “no men in the room” thread. I have not responded to anything there because I’m a man and I haven’t started another thread to post my responses/reactions to that conversation because that would be weird.

The entire situation is absolutely horrific, absolutely disgusting. I am in awe of Gisele Peticot’s character and strength.

― DJP, Monday, January 6, 2025 3:00 PM

exactly my response

just because he found 50 people in such a close perimeter

My understanding is that there were at least a hundred men but there was only video evidence of about half of them?

I haven’t been talking about it because I haven’t been talking about much of anything but I’ve been reading the conversation on the “no men in the room” thread. I have not responded to anything there because I’m a man and I haven’t started another thread to post my responses/reactions to that conversation because that would be weird.

The entire situation is absolutely horrific, absolutely disgusting. I am in awe of Gisele Peticot’s character and strength.

― DJP, Monday, January 6, 2025 3:00 PM

exactly my response

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, January 6, 2025 2:12 PM (twelve minutes ago)

mine as well

ditto. I did even search at one point to try and find the appropriate thread for an non-gender-limited open discussion. Unfortunately, you will probably not be shocked to hear that most of the old threads with relevant keywords have abhorrent "old ilx" content in them. :(

I have thoughts about man alive's everyman question, i.e. to what degree can we extrapolate from this case about the rot at the core of people and what the avg person is capable of, but I am struggling to articulate them beyond that this story has shaken some assumptions...

I think this case asserts what we all have forgotten from childhood and the process of being raised to be a functioning adult in common society; people are at their core venal and will try to get away with what they think they can and “ wing a good person” is learned behavior that takes constant work to maintain. That we think it’s unfathomable or incomprehensible is both an expression of privilege that we’ve never endured a gauntlet of similar abuse along with the low bar we need to clear for our behavior to be deemed acceptable and a testament to how we were raised and the subconscious work we put into reinforcing those lessons.

Like, I don’t think you can look at 50, 100, whatever the number actually was it was way too fucking high, men in the same town participating in this and go “oh but all of them had some weird sex pest accusations so it’s not like it’s everyone” because that completely ignores the elephant in the room, namely that this place had so many guys of differing level of sex offender in close proximity and they all found their way to raping the same woman.

Also, while I appreciate that this thread/poll has opened an avenue for us to talk about this, I’m not going to vote in it. If you want to know why this is the most time ive spent on ILX talking about this, refer to my first post.

whole thing is so abhorent and depressing, i've not really wanted to think about it very much tbh. i certainly don't have anything helpful or interesting to say on the subject. can only echo the general admiration for gisele pelicot's bravery

Like, I don’t think you can look at 50, 100, whatever the number actually was it was way too fucking high, men in the same town participating in this and go “oh but all of them had some weird sex pest accusations so it’s not like it’s everyone” because that completely ignores the elephant in the room, namely that this place had so many guys of differing level of sex offender in close proximity and they all found their way to raping the same woman.

Thank you. Honestly.

Not in response to DJP but back to thread: If men were labeled for the things they routinely do, as rapists, harassers, coercers, abusers...it would be a lot of "normal" men. Believe women or don't, I don't feel like arguing about it.

I've discussed it with my wife. Would not ever discuss it here for multiple overlapping reasons, many of which are covered as options above and others that are not.

these were dudes with a history of creepiness and violence and not just everymen

please can we not let this important distinction distract us from looking at the monstrousness of ordinary men. i guess by "ordinary" i mean "commonly occurring" because sure you can say it's not "normal" to want to do this but they were everyday guys.

if they were some special subset of creepy dangerous men who were always going to do this, then what do we do about that?

The shock and outrage at the facts quickly made way for a triumphalist tone - Gisèle as an icon for women's dignity (yes)

And yet in my rage towards these men I find strength in reading about her even though we must all know one does not move on from these events. Her whole world has been shattered. The bedrock of everything she believed has been destroyed. Every memory from her time with this man is now tainted. Years of meaningful life are now rotten and irrevocably sullied.

Only two have a previous conviction for sexual violence, six others for domestic violence. Friends and family members of several of the men acted as character witnesses, including the partner of Cyril B., who testified that he is not ‘macho’ and that he had never forced her into any unwanted sexual encounters.

i was unaware there was a thread where it was a topic.

I just don’t get looking at the circumstances of this case and saying “they were all coincidentally exceptions to the rule that just happened to coalesce together in the most awful way possible that doesn’t end in murder”

There are 70,000 ppl on a Discord about how to rape ppl. Sexual violence permeates every aspect of humanity afaict.

Or Telegram? Either way 70000 is a large number.

xxp Yes. The purpose of a system is what it does.

It's a terrible case obviously. Shocking in its particulars but honestly not in a broader sense. It makes me think about those surveys of male college students where like a third of them say they would force nonconsensual sex if they were sure they wouldn't get caught or punished.

There are 70,000 ppl on a Discord about how to rape ppl. Sexual violence permeates every aspect of humanity afaict.

otm. IMO we're still a long way from acknowledging at a social-political level how normal rape has been in the history of our species, and how normal it remains despite the last few centuries of women's rights gains in some parts of the world.

Still routinely used as a weapon of war, for example.

xp (sorry for redundancy)
Most everything I've ever learned about SA reveals it as deeply pervasive and mundane. The scale and level of organization makes this case shocking — it's certainly not mundane from Gisèle Pelicot's perspective — but the idea that there are discrete categories of people like creeps, sex pests, sex offenders, etc. is a fantasy / somewhat self-serving form of bigotry (not to derail, but this is true of "criminal" in general).

DJP otm regarding the poll question, as in, I also read the posts in the other thread, felt implicated in the discussion about the silence from male posters, but couldn't think of how to address that appropriately. I can also add that sexual assault is a topic I generally avoid bringing up, esp irl, because people I love have been assaulted while I have not. I'm not sure how to reconcile being sensitive to trauma while not contributing to a culture of silence around the issue. I appreciate cat starting this thread and broaching the issue.

I read the LRB piece that gyac quoted from in the other thread and was glad to have been directed to it: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/sophie-smith/sleeping-women. I found it particularly useful for thinking about the "everyman" issue, being reminded that I learned that you shouldn't initiate sex with a sleeping partner from an advice column in the 90s (this was before I was sexually active if that matters) and that norms of consent have changed in my lifetime; for example: my sister was very good at prompting us to ask her children if they wanted hugs, rather than simply assuming "we're family so it's always fine/welcome."

i'm personally glad to see that men _are_ reading that thread and not posting to it... i know other people may feel differently.

i'm also glad there's a place outside that thread for it now... while i _am_ a woman and a SA victim, and i think both those things are important, i have other experiences that i am not sure fit neatly in that thread.

for me, one of the things i believe most strongly is that what i guess i could refer to as "rape culture" isn't a state of nature but is something that's _taught_ to people who are perceived as men. there's this school of gender-essentialist second-wave essentialism that holds that there's something inherently, i don't know, _dangerous_ about men, and i genuinely don't belive that's true. i do like men, and i do have a hard time trusting men. the idea that there is such a construct as a "good man" who will never sexually assault anyone is just, like, not something i find plausible. to me, sexual assault isn't necessarily a question of individual virtue. i guess i'm gonna talk about my experience of being an SA victim a little bit more, in spoilers again:

Because the thing is, I genuinely believe that the person who sexually assaulted me is a Good Person, to the extent such a thing exists. Good people can do bad things. There are so many ways in which the whole thing is so hard for me to talk about, so many possible ways to be misunderstood haha. For instance, I'm not in any way caping for my rapist or justifying what they did. I left them. They're not in my life and it's overall, I think, a good thing that they're not in my life, difficult as it is. Which it is! It cost me a lot leaving them. I'm still, in some sense, emotionally paying off the consequences of that decision.

Does it make sense to anyone if I say what I believe, that my rapist didn't sexually assault me _intentionally_? That they didn't rape me _on purpose_? I haven't ever seen rape framed that way. I think about myself of seven years ago, someone who had only ever known life as a man, who didn't have the experience I do now, and god, no, they wouldn't have understood that statement. I've genuinely encountered situations where people of my acquaintance have sexually assaulted people without intending to at all. I mean how fucked up is that? It's so fucked up, and I don't even know how to talk about that. I didn't know how to talk about it to the person who raped me, either. I do remember that I actually tried once. I remember that this was definitely in 2017, because I remember it happening in an apartment we only lived in that year. I told them that, when they touched me sexually without my consent, it felt like being sexually assaulted. That was the best way I could think of to describe it. God, they felt terrible about that. They didn't blame me or accuse me of making things up or anything like that. They just felt really really bad, to the extent that I wound up apologizing to them. I didn't think they were a bad person, I just wanted them to ask permission before touching me like that. I was never able to get them to do that. Again, I do kinda feel like it was my fault that I couldn't make them not do that, that it was my responsibility to make them not do that.

I _didn't_ think of myself as a rape victim for a very long time. It just didn't occur to me that I might have been raped, again, because the narratives of rape I knew bore no real resemblance to what happened to me. Yeah, that seems weird. Given that I didn't know I was a woman for the first 43 years of my life, it maybe seems a little less weird than it otherwise might, but still: weird. Being an SA victim is weird.

When I started really listening to women's experiences of being sexually assaulted, the effects it had on them, I definitely noticed that I had a lot of the responses women typically have to being sexually assaulted. Being a trans woman made it a lot easier to accept. I looked at the (utterly horrifying) statistics regarding how many trans women are sexual assault victims, and combined that with my behavior, I said, huh, I'm probably a sexual assault victim. I wonder when that happened?

Being trans, weirdly enough, also makes it easier for me to talk about having been sexually assaulted. What Gisele Pelicot is doing is brave. Me? Nah, I got nothing to lose. People already call me a groomer, a predator, an affront to man and God. A lot of people won't _believe_ me if I talk about being a sexual assault victim, but it's not like there's much they can do to lower my social standing.

The thing about SA - I've talked with plenty of other SA victims - is that it's a traumatic event, and trauma does tend to fragment memories. Remembering the whole of it is difficult. There are these little flashes of it that hit sometimes. The other weird thing is that I'd remember these things, acknowledge that yes, I was a sexual assault victim, that my rapist sexually assaulted me - and then I'd just, like, forget. Not deliberately suppress it, I'd just stop thinking about it. It was really difficult to think about. It's not as difficult to think about now, but it's still difficult.

And at the same time it was ordinary. It's something that men do to women all the time. It's a bad thing, but they're not necessarily bad men. It's not _necessary_ for someone to be a bad man in order to do that. It's an ordinary act done by ordinary men.

As to the question of why men do that, well, it's not just because they _can_, it's because men are kind of _supposed_ to behave that way. At least, that's the best sense I can make from all of the crap I was taught growing up AMAB. Even the stuff I knew was stupid bullshit, I mean, I heard it over and over again. That stuff has an effect.

And it is hard, I mean, to have that level of self-confidence, to be able to _listen_ and then talk, and know you're not an expert, and not know if you're doing the right thing, or saying it right, or being appropriate. That's all stuff I had to learn, stuff I wasn't ever taught growing up. I was taught to argue, to debate, to _reason_. And the more I listen, well, the less sure I am of myself. The less I want to talk.

Obviously, it doesn't keep me from talking entirely, lol. I think it's OK to make mistakes! Even if I get mad at someone for saying something incredibly stupid, I generally don't think they should never talk again, just that they should spend a little more time learning before opening their mouth and talking ignorant shit. I don't _want_ to always be talking about this awful shit, I don't _want_ it to always have to fall to women to have to say hey, you know what, that's pretty offensive and awful, maybe don't say that, because, of course, then we're the ones who have to take the shit for saying that, even if it's totally right and we're totally justified.

Women were treated as legal property until relatively recently (still are some places). The degree to which male supremacy has shaped most of our societies is so vast that it's almost hard to grasp. And the degree to which that supremacy has been rooted in threats and acts of sexual and other violence is similarly vast. We just elected a known sexual assaulter as president. It's not even disqualifying for national office. So that's where we are.

Indeed, a history of sexual assaults and misogyny seems to be a prerequisite to serve in the Trump administration

i've been following this story on and off ilx. i also read the no boys thread because i think it's important and also most of my favorite posters are there. i'm not as active on here outside of the hoops board anymore, but i think gyac's and la lechera's posts (among others, but especially theirs) on this topic were really valuable gut checks for me.

Thanks this thread for making me aware that there is a no boys thread. I'll have to go poke my nose in there after I'm done here.

I haven't been talking about Gisele Pelicot because I haven't been following her case; to me it is "an awful thing I read one long article about," like the doctor who made millions giving healthy people fake cancer diagnoses.

...But I talked about the doctor article with family over the holidays, and I haven't talked about Gisele Pelicot with anyone. I haven't even mentioned it to my partner, who I normally talk about everything with, or my pastor and my church friends (but none of them has said anything either). That's probably the shame, I'm not really "afraid of saying the wrong thing" in either of those contexts (maybe the "family at the holidays" one).

Two take two posts as 'saying it better than I could', DJP and rob otm. I too read the No Boys thread, felt implicated and couldn't think of an appropriate response so stayed quiet. I'm not convinced a poll is the way to go, but glad the thread is here.

I could easily have said I felt implicated by the case, full stop. Surely any man should be continually reflecting, auditing, after coming into contact with something like this? It *shouldn't* take something like this but there it is.

I have some experience of a case tangential to this, with a good friend of my partner's. As much as the details were horrific, it was also how it revealed particular attitudes among people I respected (and thought I knew). It split family and friendship groups, all divided along lines of how *true* the details were. The fact that the guy was imprisoned (vanishingly rare in cases of this nature, of course) seemed to mean little.

All of which is to support the idea that it's endemic and trying to isolate 'certain kinds of men' is irrelevant to the discussion.

"To take two posts" obviously. Christ.

Post election I have disengaged from the news for my own mental health including removing nearly every bookmark from any political/news thread on ilx (and boy did I have a lot of them).

I could vote for half these responses, but DJP and mbison probably closest to my thoughts. I second the praise for the posts I have read in the "no boys allowed" thread) and sorry the few women on ilx have had to bear this alone.

it's so awful that i don't know what to say. it's unspeakably awful and triggering to think about. I feel horrible for Gisele Pelicot and angry at all the men involved.

I can’t think of anything I would post in response that wouldn’t come across as performative outrage or something. I’m a little taken aback at all the men here who can’t follow current events because it makes them upset or whatever. We all need to toughen up for this coming fight.

I don't have anything to add, DJP otm and I suppose kudos to man alive for immediately demonstrating why women might not discuss this outside of the "no boys" thread. The one thing I would have added is the brutal LRB article - and unsurprisingly gyac already has that covered - thank you.

i remember reading this and thinking the last line was so ominous. also, that study in the 2000s that found so many men who say they would force a women but wouldn't rape a woman. !!!

"Indeed, experts note one last trait shared by men who have raped: they do not believe they are the problem."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/health/men-rape-sexual-assault.html

also, that study in the 2000s that found so many men who say they would force a women but wouldn't rape a woman. !!!

this is horrifying.

I have been thinking about how many people seem to think it's ok to assault an unconscious person. This case, the Chanel Miller case, the uncountable unprosecuted cases of people (women usually) being assaulted while they were unconscious. I can't wrap my brain around anyone ever thinking this is ok and yet it happens literally all the time.

both times I was assaulted, I was unconscious, although in my case, the guy in question took active measures to ensure I became that way first.

it might come down to the reason people avoid doing bad things - because they understand ethically that it is wrong, or because they fear societal reprisals. put someone in a situation where, in their mind, 'nobody will know' what they did, a lot of people won't pass muster because they don't actually feel that sexual assault is a bad thing. beyond rationalizing it with victim blaming, I've even heard some assholes say 'it's a victimless crime, they don't remember it!'.

like the typical dad speech to the kids - do most dads tell their kids "always ask for consent, because respecting women and their bodies is important, and they can always revoke consent at any time", or do they tell them "get consent because otherwise you are going to get burned?". I feel like a lot of fathers focus on avoiding assault/etc as a strategy for avoiding punishment but not teaching them the healthy reason for not doing things like that.

The sex talk I had with my father was effectively “you may want to do all sorts of things with a woman but if she says no, she means it”

At the time, I rolled my eyes and was like “well duh, of course” but seeing how society is as I became a more aware adult made me really appreciate that even that terse, obvious statement was leaps and bounds ahead of where baseline society was operating.

Even now, I look back on that and think “how was that a better than average sex talk”

Which is to say, it seems like a lot of guys don’t even get that, or if they do then they’re reassured be society at large that they can ignore that if they think they can get away with it

yeah, dad's speech to me was more an abdication, he found out I learned about sex from my 'best friend', and then said "oh, he tell you what goes where?" and I said "yeah" and he said "cool", then waited for 5th grade sex ed to teach me the rest. he was very adamant about like protection against STDs, but never really addressed rape/assault, guessing he assumed we wouldn't do that or something. the message about respecting women came more from my mother, who, despite being a lot more conservativey back then, was always a feminist.

Based on what my male straight friends have told me, their fathers (or mothers) didn't mention consent and rape because it went without saying, "Oh, Carlos would never do such a thing."

Also: Neanderthal, I don't know if you revealed this information in other threads and I missed it, but I'm so sorry.

It’s definitely different from the talks cis-women get from their moms. I remember as a teenager wanting to go to college in NYC and my mom saying absolutely not, you would get raped or murdered or both! Granted this was around the time of the Central Park jogger case, but still… I was raised with that sense of fear, and it was very clear that had I been born male, I would have gotten a very different talk.

xp I don't think "getting away with it" is the whole story though that's definitely some of it. It reminds me of the whole phenomenon (popular when I was in college, I hope not still) where men would use the internet/early social media to share photographs of their man friends passed-out drunk, posed with various obscene props, things written or drawn on their faces, etc. There's a social aspect to it that goes beyond simply exercising power over an incapacitated person. Men advertise that power, they invite other men into the circle of power and swear them to secrecy.

I recoil when I imagine Gisele and her husband in public together bumping into one of his co-conspirators: the husband pretending to make introductions, the knowing looks and smiles, wink wink nudge nudge.

*I realize my comparison risks trivializing rape, and I apologize if I have erred in bringing it up here. I don't mean to equate the two. I started drinking and using drugs and having sex (with a pretty shitty attitude about consent) all around the time I started college, so these experiences are sometimes hard for me to disentangle.

definitely not the whole story, it's not always borne out of opportunism, but often direct intent as well.

Based on what my male straight friends have told me, their fathers (or mothers) didn't mention consent and rape because it went without saying, "Oh, Carlos would never do such a thing."

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, January 7, 2025 4:44 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Right. I don't think most guys get any education in consent at all but ianag. No one thinks that the boys/men they know are the problem. And when presented with clear evidence that they are, have done these things, they will still be excused. Everything in the world, every news story, every personal experience, confirms this.

Purity culture also puts all the burden of policing these interactions onto women, so naturally when men violate the boundaries that is also women's fault.

Men advertise that power, they invite other men into the circle of power and swear them to secrecy.

Yes. I figured out w/r/t street harassment many years ago that men were doing it a display of power that was meant for other men to see. Unquestionably. It wasn't for women, it wasn't even remotely, like, pick up lines or compliments (although we've also all experienced those and they are also harassment depending, I guess, on how they land for the person being addressed). It was vulgar, vile things that were meant to demean and humiliate a woman, so they could laugh about it with other men.

"so and so wouldn't do this" is just about the most infuriating response when I see it. local theater director/professor got called out for inappropriate advances from one of his ex-students and immediately, that was the retort from prominent friends of his (who, fortunately, did get called out and pilloried for it rather than the ex-student taking the heat, which was a refreshing change)

Many of us are old enough to remember the Antioch policy on consent in the early 90s. That was when I had just started college and learned about consent. Too late for me unfortunately but I remember it being oft-ridiculed. They were bad times!!

in general i haven't talked about this because i don't really know what to say about it other than it confirms things i already knew were true. and i wasn't yearning for the men of ilx to comment on it because idk one of them might say these men were aberrations. (some very thoughtful posts in here notwithstanding.)

as a trans woman i kind of don't even know how to summarize my relationship to sexual assault, but needless to say the men i grew up around, even the men i knew in my early 20s had this notion of being owed something and it was always a woman's body. i feel like i inherited, kind of inevitably because it is just imo kind of absorbed without language, a variation of that feeling; i recently revisited my livejournal posts from when i was 16 and there is this aching inadequacy in every post, that i could not possibly be enough for someone. (this isn't quite incel dehumanization logic which i think i would've found really hateful at the time, but growing up thinking i didn't deserve love or sex didn't give me a healthy attitude toward it, actually itruined my relationship toward it before it even started etc.) the subtext of these posts is that i felt that way because i wasn't a man, because i was out of touch with my desires, alienated from them even, and all the models of "love" and companionship i was presented involved some kind of violation of boundaries, and i couldn't bring myself to do that. i don't want to say this is because i was "good," it's probably more because i was a woman. (it also might've been because i was traumatized.)

my parents never had a sex talk with me that wasn't "we were going to have the sex talk but we think you get it???" and yeah, i did understand it through aggressively picking up on context clues, but no one was having any sort of nuanced talk with me about assault, and even though i pretty quickly picked up on the necessity of consent, just the bare bones requirement of communicating with your partner, it was only after my first few sexual experiences that i really came to terms with it. there was a night in college where i got really drunk with another girl and neither of us really remember having sex but we did, and i still think about it, just as i think about how a dear friend and i had sex when we were both blacked out and had i been sober i definitely would not have wanted to have that sex, and that also is something that is fixed in my mind as something i never want to go through again, never want to put someone through. and since i started wearing dresses i have been casually assaulted at bars a lot, which feels like something i'm just supposed to absorb and forget, but would it kill a man to ask if he can put his arm around me (the answer is always "no" ftr). it feels so embedded it is inextricable, and when i think of the men i've known all my life, even the "good ones" who are my friends, when they gather together and talk about women i kind of lose it and think to myself "i need a woman in this room with me, just to make this stop"

sorry if that long monologue is at all beside the point or detracts from the current convo

xps re: "So-and-so wouldn't do this" / "No one thinks that the boys/men they know are the problem"

This is the one thing I have really tried to take to heart from the many hours of child sexual assault prevention training that our church requires of volunteers. There were times it struck me as excessive or alarmist, because we are a small church and everyone knows everyone else, and of course S or K is a safe person to walk a child to the bathroom without another adult accompanying... But at the end of the day, what keeps kids safe isn't the moral character of their adult supervision, it's adults getting all up in each other's business, asking uncomfy questions and delivering annoying reminders about the policies that we have all agreed it is in the children's best interests to follow.

god even just thinking about my college roommates who were men, they definitely considered themselves "the good ones," and yet i feel like i learned a lot when one of them fell in love with my friend and got very possessive and aggressive toward her as it became clearer she wouldn't be in a traditional relationship with him (something he knew about from the jump!!!) or how another of my roommates also groped my friend and her sister when he was drunk. thrill of power, the feeling of ownership, whatever, it sickens me every fucking day, and i don't know of a solution other than you all have to become lesbians. you all have to love women and know women and talk about women as people. i know some of you think you do. but trust me. you don't

xp

Many of us are old enough to remember the Antioch policy on consent in the early 90s. That was when I had just started college and learned about consent. Too late for me unfortunately but I remember it being oft-ridiculed. They were bad times!!

even just thinking about my college roommates who were men, they definitely considered themselves "the good ones,"

This just reminded me that my sophomore year roommate out of the blue one weekend confessed to me that he thought he might have "fucked up a little" (or words to that effect) by using his finger to penetrate his date while they were drunkenly making out, because "I think she was actually passed out." I don't think I said anything besides agreeing that that sounded bad and asking if he'd talked to her about it. It would not have occurred to me at the time I think to, like, track her down (I didn't know her) and suggest that she might want to file an assault charge. It was just the-kind-of-thing-that-happens-at-frat-parties. Also in college my girlfriend's roommate one weekend told us that she had been out on a second or third date with a guy and had been placed in a situation where she felt like she had to have sex with him — which she didn't want to do — in order to get a ride home. The idea/awareness of date rape was gaining currency at the time, and we all agreed that what happened to her was date rape. But she didn't want to pursue it or do anything other than not see him again, because she was like, "I went along with it ..."

placed in a situation where she felt like she had to have sex with him — which she didn't want to do — in order to get a ride home

weirdly i have been in this situation as the person being pressured, by a woman

neando it's really awful that you got assaulted. :( that maybe seems like an obvious thing to say but a lot of times assault victims don't hear that, particularly if the victim happens to be a guy.

The sex talk I had with my father was effectively “you may want to do all sorts of things with a woman but if she says no, she means it”

― DJP, Tuesday, January 7, 2025 8:39 AM

i _did_ learn "no means no", but, idk, it never occurred to me that a woman might _want_ sex. it felt like something i was supposed to convince her to give me. i felt this constant sense of external pressure to prove that i was _really_ a man. that pressure, to me, was annoying and stupid. the way i saw it at the time, obviously i was a man, what the hell else was i going to be? but i did still feel that pressure, and it did still affect me. the number one thing i felt like i was supposed to do to prove that i was a man was to have sex with women.

it occurred to me yesterday that what those men did in the pelicot case reminded me a lot of the infamous milgram experiment. it's good that spousal rape is mostly illegal now. when it wasn't, that was kind of taken as an imprimatur - well, if spousal rape was wrong, it would be illegal, right? well, no, there are lots of things that are wrong but aren't illegal, but that's not the thinking people seem to have. maybe it's different in younger generations, but me, the way other people acted around me, i got this sense that people thought it was ok for a husband to speak and act on behalf of his wife. that the two had become "one flesh".

to me, dominique pelicot, gisele's ex-husband, corresponds to the role of the experimenter in the milgram case. he's an authority - his saying that this was something she _wanted_ was more important to the men who raped her than the fact that she, personally, had never actually consented, that she had clearly been drugged. he said it was ok and - the milgram experiment shows this as well - _nobody was there to tell them it wasn't ok_. even if someone knows something is wrong in the abstract, if a figure of authority contradicts what someone believes, there's a tendency to go along with that figure of authority.

moreso than in any previous time in my life, there are a lot of figures of high authority openly saying that sexual assaulting women is ok.

so then the question is, how the hell does one respond to this, as a man? i obviously am not a man, and at the same time i _did_ ask myself that question, starting in 2016. donald trump's behavior shook me. i didn't, this seems stupid to me now, but i didn't think men actually _did_ that sort of stuff. i was ignorant, and it took something as egregious and blatant as that for me to recognize how ignorant i was.

when i started questioning, my goal wasn't to _become_ a woman, or be a _real woman_, or anything like that. honestly i find it a little awkward, the extent to which i'm basically an ordinary woman. my goal wasn't ever to conform to some abstract model of gender - it was just to figure out what was right for me. in order to do that, i finally worked out the strength to throw out all my assumptions about who i _had_ to be. very few people are able to _do_ that, are able to go that far. and i feel, like, really glad that i was able to do that. i don't think that's something that only benefits trans people. there is something amazing and liberating in just saying... the hell with all this crap, i'm gonna start from first principles and find out what parts of being a man _work_ for me. how i choose to understand my own manhood.

and it turns out none of it worked for me, i related to none of it, but i gotta assume that i'm kind of an outlier on that one. because i do think men are great, there are a lot of things about being a man that's great, but that just aren't _me_. i always had this sense of manhood as this responsibility, this burden to be borne, and to me being a man is cool and fun and worth celebrating, and that's just something i don't see a lot of cis men doing. there's this tendency to kind of take a lot of the best things about being a man for granted, like there's nothing cool or different about it, it's just _normal_, everybody's basically like that. and not everybody is basically like that. i'm not like that. sexual assault isn't _fun_. i didn't get the sense that my rapist was having a really great time of it. that's one of the stupidest things about the whole situation, these men did this horrible thing to this woman and i get the sense that some of them didn't even _want_ to.

i mean, getting back to the milgram experiment... when those subjects delivered what they thought were lethal electric shocks to an innocent person, it fucked them up. they felt terrible about it. it's possible to express empathy for them because they didn't _really_ kill someone. if they had, for me to say, oh, jeez, those poor people... those poor people? what about the person they FUCKING KILLED? but since they didn't kill anybody, we can look at that and say wow, that's a fucking awful thing to do to a person, we can't ever do that again, it's grossly unethical.

to me, that's my takeaway from the gisele pelicot case, that's why it _is_ important to talk about it and think about it. because now i can look at myself and say "i'm not like them", and it's obviously true, and seven years ago, honestly, i didn't do what they did, but i _was_ like them. not in the sense that i was a _man_ - i wasn't - but in the sense that i was subject to the same sense of obligation, the same pressures, the same power structures, that the men who assaulted gisele pelicot are. when people say that "patriarchy hurts men", that's what that means to me. even though i wasn't a man, i directly experienced the ways in which patriarchy hurts men, and there was this sense of... i mean, what the hell can i do about that?

that was one of the primary motivators for me - my saying "i am not a man in the way that these other men are men", and trying to figure out, well then, how am i a man? i think it is possible for people, on an individual level - not necessarily collectively, right now - to say not just "i am not a man the way these men are men", but to go from there to "these men are not men the way i am a man." which _isn't_ something i can say.

honestly that's one of the reasons i'm so enthusiastic about queerness in general. because being queer is a direct, overt rejection of patriarchal norms, the norms that say that men have sex with women and only women. patriarchally constructed masculinity is so increasingly rigid, though, and there are so, so many ways to not be a man like that. it's fucking hard, though. it's really fucking hard. it's also, i think... i think it's basically _necessary_. i believe every man needs to come to that personal reckoning, to not just say "i'm different from them" but to find meaningful ways to understand and express that difference. because just saying "i'm not like that"... i mean, i figure 37 out of 40 men are. at that point... i mean, as a woman, at that point, it doesn't benefit me to distinguish between "good men" and "bad men". because it's not about _men_ at that point.

as usual i have a lot to say lol

weirdly i have been in this situation as the person being pressured, by a woman

― c u (crüt)

idk how weird it is! the important thing to me, speaking as someone who's had the adverse experiences i've had, isn't the _gender_ of the person doing it or the person who's being pressured, but the norms that are being put into practice by that behavior. which is why i talk about "patriarchy" rather than "toxic masculinity". there are a lot lot lot of women who promote patriarchy, and that's _not_ a judgement on women or feminism or anything like that.

just to briefly address the poll question, i guess i'll be the only one to admit that i hadn't heard of the case until today. i have a reason for why i have been (purposefully) "avoiding the news", but also appreciate that i do need to toughen up. the case is both unspeakably awful and not surprising. rape culture is endemic with men; this demonstrates that.

alfred's comment about many boys not getting any "talk" at all because "they would never do such a thing" is very otm. my own sex "talk" from my dad was less than 10 seconds along and used christmas lights and male and female connectors on the plugs as a metaphor before he got angry at himself and ran back inside, leaving me holding the christmas lights. he never thought i'd do such a thing, and he 100% never got any sort of talk from his dad.

i'm not sure my comments here help at all. given the volume of complete bullshit that i've posted over the years, it might be surprising that i take the time to consider whether my words are helpful or are proving any new insight, just anything positive at all. but a similar thought - "what am i adding here?" - might be behind some of the lack of talk about, although undoubtedly, the almost entirely male population of ilx is the dominant reason.

my own sex "talk" from my dad was less than 10 seconds along and used christmas lights and male and female connectors on the plugs as a metaphor before he got angry at himself and ran back inside, leaving me holding the christmas lights.

I'm sorry, zach, I laughed.

something that was eye opening to me in my early and mid 20s was hearing my close women friends talk about what behavior from men they thought crossed a line. i learned that many things men considered to be fair game in the course of pursuing sex were actually not cool by the standards of most of the women i was friends with. being privy to that gap in understanding -- hearing straight male friends talk about their pursuits of women and straight female friends talk about being pursued by men, and sometimes those people talking about each other -- made me understand how radically far apart straight men and women are, generally speaking, in terms of boundaries

tbh i think a real issue is a lack of friendships between straight men and women. how many straight men have women who confide in them? who would learn directly from a close friend about boundaries, because that person felt comfortable speaking honestly and not in a way that was being filtered thru a layer of self-protection? i think these bonds exist between some brothers and sisters, but i think most straight men grow up and go thru life w/o any close women friends who weren't ever romantic or sexual pursuits

i have a reason for why i have been (purposefully) "avoiding the news", but also appreciate that i do need to toughen up

this has nothing to do w/ the gisele pelicot story but i do just want to say that it's ok to disengage w/ the news to protect your mental health, and your ability to be a good citizen fighting for a better world isn't tied to some notion of mainlining depressing news to toughen yourself up. if that actually just makes you depressed it's okay to take a step back. you're here reading about it now. that's okay.

Xp Jordan — I have a lot of straight male friends that weren’t romantic or sexual pursuits. That’s an odd assumption idk.

I'm guessing he means the old Chris Rock adage, "No man has a platonic friend. Their lady friends are women they were trying to fuck, but took a wrong turn".

I will cop to being this guy until maybe my late 20s. I was lonely, I had very damaged, backward notions of love and romance, and a very weird, possessive sense of entitlement.

Other men called me out one time when I was bitching that a woman changed her mind about dating me, saying she didn't owe me shit, and she had every right to do so. and that was the first time that message started slowly to sink in.

I was also in a relationship a few years later with one of the kindest hearted women I'd ever met and she wound up helping indirectly teach me to unlearn the rest of unhealthy ideas. After we broke up, I started forming legitimate friendships with women, where there was no ulterior motive, just respect and kindness. Now I have many of them!

But I do remember very vividly when I was the Chris Rock guy and lots of men still are

I think it goes back to When Harry Met Sally iirc

I'm guessing he means the old Chris Rock adage, "No man has a platonic friend. Their lady friends are women they were trying to fuck, but took a wrong turn".

that's definitely not my point, and with all due respect i would never ask you to speak for me

fuck off dude

don't say 'all due respect' if you don't mean it.

hence the word 'guessing'. you know what, i'm not gonna do this here because this is counterproductive. i'm sorry

Yeah difficult to see that interpretation. I understood what you meant, and it’s not untrue. I wonder if it’s worse now; a younger friend of mine (mid-20s!) told me she has few male friends and most young men she knows don’t have any female friends at all. Would track with the mainstreaming of redpill culture but it’s awfully depressing all the same.

I do have male friends and I love them but sometimes there is simply no getting away from the fact that sometimes we exist in different realities (this is a general comment that applies to decades of my life). There are certain conversations you can have with a woman, as a woman, that you don’t need to explain or qualify or, for lack of a better term, translate. And sometimes you don’t have the energy for it.

It’s my most hated ones oft-repeated belief, right up there with “secret admirers” and other forms of emotional subterfuge in which ulterior motives prevail.
It’s simply not safe to be friends with men a lot of the time. Sometimes safety can reveal itself but confide in? That takes LONG TIME buddy.

It’s simply not safe to be friends with men a lot of the time

yeah i was gonna say this

i recently finally read the price of salt and there's a scene where the main character and some guy are having this philosophical discussion about friendship in his kitchen and then right at the end of it he kisses her. i was like. yeah. if that just doesn't just completely embody it

all good posts. for clarity purposes i wasn't trying to say J actually subscribed to the belief that men didn't have real friendships w/ women, but the last sentence made me think that he was talking about how some men only made friends with women for ulterior reasons and didn't seek out friendships for the sake of friendship.

ivy LL and gyac otm

the thing about whether the relationships started out as romantic or sexual pursuits honestly doesn't matter

my experience in the world is as a straight passing gay man. i've had lots of straight male friends throughout life as well as close women friends, and over time i've heard both sides of a broad cultural conversation about sex and romance -- including about boundaries -- that i don't think actually intersect that often, primarily because in lots of cases these things are being said in confidence. *my* perception of some of my women friends' boundaries were actually incorrect and i only learned that because i heard it from them directly over the course of our friendships, because they felt comfortable speaking to me in ways they might not to a straight man or because i was among a broader group of women and other nonthreatening people at a certain time, or in a certain group chat etc

also i just want to say for the record that gay culture has its own unresolved issues when it comes to boundaries so i'm not trying to take some stance of superiority here

I guess I’m lucky in that I’ve always had female friends who are “just friends.” My closest friends in general have been guys, but one of the two people I’d call my most intimate friends in the sense of what I feel comfortable sharing with them is a woman I’ve known for more than 30 years. We’ve seen each other through a lot. In college I shared a house one semester with my girlfriend and 4 other women, and that was a great and in many ways eye-opening experience. (I was the only one in the house who actually got along with everybody lol.) Half of my bosses have been women, including all but one of my favorite bosses. In high school we had a big friend group that all hung out together that was about half guys and half girls, and there wasn’t really much dating within the group. People who had girlfriends or boyfriends, they tended to be from outside that core group. It was all healthy and good to be able to be in that kind of environment and I wish it was a more common experience than I guess it is.

just to briefly address the poll question, i guess i'll be the only one to admit that i hadn't heard of the case until today. i have a reason for why i have been (purposefully) "avoiding the news", but also appreciate that i do need to toughen up.

― z_tbd

i'm gonna push back on this last bit! you're not the first person i've heard talk about "toughening up" and honestly i believe the exact opposite. the narrative i hear is that men are supposed to be "hard", and i think this is a _problem_. i was talking to my oldest brother on christmas and i said that i thought it was alright for someone to have their feelings hurt when they're misgendered, and his response was to say that was "soft". i mean he's not a stupid man, and he's not, like, what i'd call the embodiment of toxic masculinity. it's astonishing to me that he somehow got the idea that being "soft" is bad. masculinity is _very_ hard, inflexible to the point of being brittle. there's no give to it. it doesn't bend, it breaks.

the thing that astonishes me most... i mean mostly i don't talk to men, i talk to _women_, trans women who have internalized these stupid patriarchal standards, and so much of the work i've done, so much of the work i see other trans women doing, is liberating ourselves from these standards. if there's a single statement that's more emblematic of patriarchal thinking than any other, it might just be "facts don't care about your feelings". there's so much packed into that. there's this idea of "facts good, feelings bad". that men are _logical_, _reasonable_, and women are _emotional_. it's not actually true. what i find is true, often, is that men are encouraged to bury their emotions, to not acknowledge them, and what happens when they do that is that they find ways of expressing their emotions as if they are facts. i see it over and over again - more than that i did that, i did that a lot. because i didn't know how to acknowledge and accept my feelings. it wasn't something i ever learned.

-

I'm guessing he means the old Chris Rock adage, "No man has a platonic friend. Their lady friends are women they were trying to fuck, but took a wrong turn".

― Riposte Malone (Neanderthal)

so as established this quote doesn't represent what any other poster here has said, and having said that... i mean the question for me isn't whether or not it's _true_, but that it gets presented as if it is. one of the things i find most fascinating is the way i look at women now versus the way i looked at women pre-transition. i was really vigilant in what i said to women, how i interacted with women, because there is this _cultural assumption_, this expectation that whether a man wants to fuck a woman is a core consideration into how he interacts with her. i never wanted to fuck a woman in the PIV sense, but i was very well aware that my interactions with women would be interpreted in that light. it really limited the ways interacted with women. a lot of times i'd see a woman wearing a cute outfit, and that wasn't something i could ever say when i was perceived as a man. if a man says that to me now, i absolutely _will_ assume that they mean they'd like to see it on their floor, whether they say that or not. because that's the norm, and because it's my _responsibility_ to protect myself. i like men, but as a woman in a culture where sexually assaulting women _is_ considered normal and acceptable, where men who commit sexual assault face no meaningful consequences, i gotta protect myself, no matter what i _want_.

and to be clear that's not something that any individual man is able to change. i don't think saying "rape is bad" is, like, effective, because plenty of men believe that and say it loudly. to me what's needed is, like, radical non-identification what that entire model of masculinity. i think that's _possible_, if difficult. if it's possible for me to not be a man, it's possible for men to not be _that sort of man_. maybe i'm wrong on that, idk.

anyway it's so much different interacting with women now. even if i'm sexually attracted to a woman, it just doesn't seem to _matter_ the same way it did when i perceived myself and was perceived by others as a "man", though i mean it does often mean that i'm more nervous and awkward and insecure around them than i usually am around women (and i often am nervous and awkward and insecure around other women - that's something women are taught, to compare ourselves to each other negatively). i mean being a lesbian brings with it its own problems, but there isn't this sense of women as being fundamentally Other, this bullshit myth of the mysterious, inscrutable woman. i haven't actually read _the feminine mystique_, now that i think about it. probably i should. i act differently now than i did when i was a "man", but mostly that's for entirely practical reasons. it's not because i have a "feminine essence" or anything like that. i don't know what a "feminine essence" is supposed to be. the people who talk about having women as friends, people who listened to women and learned from them... i never did that, before transition, and that was definitely a big problem for me. that caused me a lot of trouble. so i'm really happy to learn that other people haven't and aren't making the same mistakes i did.

something i do now that i didn't do before is that i listen to people who aren't like me with an understanding that they know things that i don't, that what i think about their lived experience is of no consequence or relevance. like not to dunk too much on my oldest brother, but the dumb shit he said is just so emblematic of patriarchy. he's not a stupid person, he's not a strawman, and he said this dumb shit to me not more than a couple weeks ago. i'm talking to him, he's already admitted that he doesn't actually know anything about being trans, and he says "ok, i don't know what it's like to be transgender, but you don't know what it's like to be cisgender. you don't know more than me." which is staggeringly stupid, and i mean, that is a _normative_ attitude, this idea of "diversity" where everybody is equal, and who's right and wrong is determined by, i guess, logic, reason, facts.

I can’t think of anything I would post in response that wouldn’t come across as performative outrage or something is where I'm at with this. Men need to call out the shitty behaviour of other men at times when they are being shitty, but I don't want to add commentary - this is about women being heard, valued, and respected; I do not need to be a voice in that conversation.

I don't think I've ever clicked on the "no boys" thread because I am a boy and I guess I took it very literally.

I often think about how when you ask a man what the worst thing that could happen if they reject a woman is "they might laugh at me" and if you reverse the genders of the question women will say "they might rape and murder me." As an effete gay man I constantly self-police my behaviour and actions for safety in a world of ambient homophobia risks, I cannot imagine how exhausting and depressing and infuriating it must be to have to do it the standard that women have to to just to be safe.

Yeah another one of those little revelations in college was hearing a group of women talk about walking with keys between their fingers like brass knuckles when walking across campus at night. I had no idea! I walked across campus at night all the time by myself without any thought at all. It was like, oh, this world feels safe to ME, but it doesn't feel safe — isn't safe — for all of these people I care about.

The fact that a lot of men don't realise that is insane to me. I think my mom taught me the keys thing when I was around 10. I've never not done it. Still do it now.

see also: women not wearing headphones when walking alone so they can hear their surroundings

I used to walk home from the bus station or last train home after midnight in winter all the time in my late teens with my headphones on and I thought it was "cute" that my pals would all insist we texted when we got home, until one day I actually heard them say that they would worry someone hadn't got home safely if they didn't get that text. Stuff like this which is so instinctive for people who've had to learn how to be safe but doesn't seem obvious to people who don't have to worry.

If I'm alone I always only wear only one ear bud at low volume.

great post kate! regarding the very first part (and also jordan xposts), i also don't care about toughening up, and am very untough in general. i regret mentioning it, but i was glad to hear your take on it and appreciated you bringing it back to the thread topic <3

I don't think I've ever clicked on the "no boys" thread because I am a boy and I guess I took it very literally.

I didn't even know of its existence until this thread appeared. Haven't clicked on it.

Yeah another one of those little revelations in college was hearing a group of women talk about walking with keys between their fingers like brass knuckles when walking across campus at night. I had no idea! I walked across campus at night all the time by myself without any thought at all. It was like, oh, this world feels safe to ME, but it doesn't feel safe — isn't safe — for all of these people I care about.

I never assumed I was safe anywhere. I didn't specifically think I was in danger of being sexually assaulted, but I always walked around with my eyes open, on the off chance that someone might attack me. There have been times when I've been in danger — I remember once a guy deliberately slammed into me on the sidewalk in Manhattan, then insisted that I had slammed into him and broken his sunglasses, and now he wanted hundreds of dollars. I told him to go fuck himself and moved away as quickly as possible, but in my head I was preparing to shove him into traffic if the situation escalated. For the last five or six years I lived in New Jersey, I never left the house without a knife. Same thing here in Montana. And frankly, I think people should spend more time thinking about exactly how they would defend themselves if they were attacked in the street. Kick in the balls? Claw at the eyes? Have your first move in mind so you're not paralyzed in the moment.

wtf

Although the story itself is horrifying I am so struck by the power of Pelicot's refusal to be ashamed or embarassed by things that were done to her or against her. It will take more than one strong person in a particularly gruesome case to shift attitudes and beliefs, but the strength she has shown is remarkable and inspiring.

Just literally unimaginable, what she has gone through psychologically after finding out everything (not even everything!) that happened to her physically. The determination to come to court day after day is staggering.

I don't think I've ever clicked on the "no boys" thread because I am a boy and I guess I took it very literally.

I didn't even know of its existence until this thread appeared. Haven't clicked on it.

me either, as it's not on ILE or ILM and I didn't realize anyone actually used most of the other boards.

I’ve nothing useful to say other than that as a cis male I have learned many times in my life that my experience, and perception of security, differs sharply from that of women in similar circumstances. I have also to my shame learned that my perceptions of boundaries were sometimes way off. I view this case and the discussion it’s triggered here as another opportunity to learn.

I had no idea! I walked across campus at night all the time by myself without any thought at all. It was like, oh, this world feels safe to ME.

Xp unperson — yeah, that’s sound advice re defensive thinking. … but in the case of someone with a gun … idk.

one example that sticks in my mind is hearing about a male friend of mine who was making out on his bed w/ a woman who i was also friends with, and when she said she didn't want to have sex and went to leave he said something to the effect of "but wait i have a boner, you can't just leave me hanging." the interaction ended there and when this was brought up in a group chat i was in w/ some female mutual friends of both people in question, my response at the time was something like "well that's pathetic, but it hardly rises to the level of crossing a line." but a few of the women in the chat were like "actually no, that is getting into coercive behavior and we're not comfortable with it." maybe it wouldn't cross *every* woman's boundary, but our straight mainstream culture had not taught me to even consider the possibility that such a statement could rise beyond the level of being purely innocuous, and further because i didn't know my male friend to be anything other than upstanding i assumed that these women who were friends w/ me and the man would still ultimately share my view that this situation was non-threatening because well, we all know this guy is nice. but that was not exactly the case

i understood i.e. that men and women had different experiences walking alone in new york, but not quite the extent that something like the above scenario would be seen completely differently by men (well, me and my friend) and women, and further that these sorta micro interactions are the kinda thing that chip away at women's overall sense of safety, security, being listened to and understood etc

There have been times when I've been in danger — I remember once a guy deliberately slammed into me on the sidewalk in Manhattan, then insisted that I had slammed into him and broken his sunglasses, and now he wanted hundreds of dollars. I told him to go fuck himself and moved away as quickly as possible, but in my head I was preparing to shove him into traffic if the situation escalated.

umm it's worth saying that this is a common scam that homeless, mentally ill etc individuals run in new york to try and pressure people into giving them more than just a buck at a time, and though it can be frightening to be accosted by a clearly desperate person, shoving such people into traffic is not a solution. further, i don't think this example is really relevant to anything being discussed in this thread

I get what you’re saying J0rdan … I was mostly just super taken aback by the friendship bit, because I know that a lot of my straight male friends don’t have those interests in me, thus it made me think, “so, are they not really my friends then?”

And I don’t think I am weird… my mother and her mother both had a lot of platonic male friends without that undercurrent…

unhelpful waffle here from my very male perspective, but the main thought i've had about this whole case is that people - predominantly men - are capable of doing truly deplorable things if they think they can get away with it and i can't help thinking about that in the same sort of terms as the disgusting war crimes we've seen in gaza and beyond. we seem on the whole to be amoral monsters who would basically do anything we please once the fear of getting caught is removed, and the lack of empathy and compassion that implies is just so alien to me, it makes me feel dizzy thinking about it. somehow i'm not shocked by it at all, but at the same time i just cannot fathom these fuckers out

genuinely didn’t think my takeaway from this thread was going to be that some men will carry a knife around with them every day everywhere and wait for the slightest provocation to use it or push someone into traffic

genuine paranoiac fantasia there that makes you seem more dangerous than the world you’re walking around in!

I don’t think he was saying that. A lot of people I know carry knives with them. A lot of them are women.

meanwhile we were in fact talking about sexual assault and femicide, not unperson being terrified of new jersey and manhattan in the years 2015-2019

WOMEN HAVE A REASON TO, xp

And the urban safety thing re women … idk it obviously varies, but the most common thing is robbery/mugging … like if you are carrying a bag a certain way, it’s a lot easier for someone to steal, so being extra vigilant is a good strategy.

meanwhile we were in fact talking about sexual assault and femicide, not unperson being terrified of new jersey and manhattan in the years 2015-2019

meanwhile we were in fact talking about sexual assault and femicide, not unperson being terrified of new jersey and manhattan in the years 2015-2019

we seem on the whole to be amoral monsters who would basically do anything we please once the fear of getting caught is removed, and the lack of empathy and compassion that implies is just so alien to me

I took the initial "toughen up" in context---he didn't know about the case because he hadn't let himself take in the news---like I was doing after the election for a while, then I gradually got back into it, though still no politics threads, no Politico closer looks either, for the most part, not yet. Trying to get back into a thicker skin, w/o becoming callous.
The manipulative nature of Pelicot's husband was briefly mentioned on here, and I'll probably go looking for more on that, though w barf bag in mind---his takes-one-to-know-one approach to other damaged-and-damaging men with alibi-suppliers etc, is all too plausible, incl. local news: "He killed the wrong person, your Honor, but his motive was understandable, and we his white xtian prosperous relatives will keep him close." (It works sometimes.)

Maybe it’s my age or something in my personality about not wanting to be a member of a “victim class” but this thing about not feeling safe with men is just super at odds with my experience. I definitely get red flags about people where I don’t feel safe, but I feel comfortable with straight men more than what other women here have said for themselves.

One of the earliest parts of the reporting that stuck in my mind like a nightmare you can’t wake up from - due to the abuse including the sedatives she suffered from memory loss as well as unexplained sores and damage. So she went to the doctor and he accompanied her. When the doctor was asking about her symptoms and how she experienced them, he was downplaying it, trying to suggest she was maybe a candidate for Alzheimer’s, and he was the cause of all of this the whole time.

I think about that a lot. That and the men in the street who passed her and who knew her in the most awful ways and they were faces in the crowd to her.

gyac thanks for your response to me, that's a helpful way of framing it, i do tend to passively lurch towards pessimism it's true

to answer the thread question, every time I think about this I retreat to rage, which is a default option because of my own toxic masculinity. I want all of the perpetrators sent to prison for such a long time that all of their families forget about them. Or worse. And I don’t think that’s a useful addition to the discourse here, so I’ve been leaving it out.

“Justice” is such a mediocre solution in these cases. It’s profoundly frustrating.

i think what i was getting at is less that there aren't close friendships between men and women but more so that my perception (as a gay man! i can't speak to any lived experience here as a straight person) is even in those situations there is often an imbalance in how women talk to male friends about their sexual/romantic interactions vs how they talk to their female friends. are the situations being discussed in the same way in both instances? are there things that are held back when the other person in the convo is a man, are there fears or statements of boundaries that aren't articulated to a close male friend in the same way a woman might feel more innately safe confiding in another woman? i don't want to portray women as a monolith or negate the experiences of women in this thread who may have fully different dynamics w/ straight male friends, and i also don't want to imply that women need to take up the work of confiding more in their male friends for the purposes of education or anything like that. perhaps until extremely recently, the society we've built has not really provided women a forum to speak openly and safely, to or among men, about sexual boundaries and comfort levels, without fear of any sort of repercussion, and i feel like that dynamic, to some degree, permeates all the way down to even close personal relationships, including in many cases long term relationships, marriages etc (again speaking broadly culturally and not implying that this is strictly true in all friendships/relationships)

As a young person I never considered confiding in men about my relationships. Never ever ever. Why would I??

The fact that I've been friends with a lot of ilxors for 20+ years is a testament to how much the majority of them are NOT the kinds of friends who turn around and try to do something unwelcome, to impose their desires on someone in their company. Thanks, btw! Speaking just for myself, not implicating any other woman who has experienced those friendships differently.

In general it's very common for men in casual situations to try something though, even if it's just ("just") a verbal cue to see if you're interested in them or will let them go further, and then they have to be dealt with and have their boundaries readjusted for them. You're never allowed to forget that men might want something from you that you haven't offered. To be fair there's nothing inherently sinister about asking, "Would you be interested in going out some time?" but like jfc could we just NOT for like TWO SECONDS have to think about keeping men far enough away?? I would just like to be a person. I'm friends with men who treat me like a person.

thanks to everyone for their honest posts here. I remember taking a self-defense class in college and I think there was one other man out of 30 students. ftr I have been assaulted violently since then and remembering various lessons from the class prob saved me from more serious injury. don't wanna blur the lines here any further tho and respectfully request we try to stay on topic.

to add to my previous "DJP otm" I have been talking abt the case with my wife since it broke, and I do read roxy's immortal girls only thread, but did not feel it was my place to start a thread and absolutely did not want to hear some of our male poster's opinions on this.

sorry that was an xpost with io

Honestly it depends on the person! Like is the subject of interest to them and are we good enough friends… how judgmental do I think they’ll be … and a lot of it is about trust. Like sometimes I don’t trust that a female friend will honor my privacy and won’t gossip, whereas men that i know are less likely to gossip about certain things because they’re mostly talking about bands and gear and politics, etc.

Idk some of it might just be an introvert/extrovert thing?

And I think in this simplistic view of straight men and women, we are forgetting the men who are friends with women who function as their surrogate moms…

Although the story itself is horrifying I am so struck by the power of Pelicot's refusal to be ashamed or embarassed by things that were done to her or against her. It will take more than one strong person in a particularly gruesome case to shift attitudes and beliefs, but the strength she has shown is remarkable and inspiring.

― boxedjoy, Tuesday, January 7, 2025 10:07 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Ms Pelicot, I don't know how (who can know??), is doing something so simple and so extraordinary...she's refusing the filth, the shame, the stench, the vile poison that women are given on a spoon, which is the message that women can be shamed and demeaned by men's choices and treatment of them. That's the rule, we're supposed to play by the rules. She's not, she's standing against the rules like an untouched holy thing, and it's extraordinary and pure and incredible.

"the shame is not for us, it is for them" is so inspiring, yes

but the main thought i've had about this whole case is that people - predominantly men - are capable of doing truly deplorable things if they think they can get away with it

this is probably true, but I can't but wonder about the online element that lead up to these horrific crimes (plural)... that these guys were lurking in weird chatrooms or message boards with a bunch of other like-minded creeps, and it sort of conditioned them to think that perhaps if these other guys find this acceptable, then maybe it's not so bad... like whatever moral objections one might normally have to acts like these were dissolved by some kind of consensual group-think

perhaps I'm being overly generous

I assure you that you are, reflexively reverting to #notallmen here is part of the problem not part of the solution

god I can’t believe that bullshit posted this morning. Sorry, everyone.

bullshit I posted

As I mentioned in the other thread it’s the same thing Chanel Miller did by centering herself (in her own story) — I did nothing to deserve this. The violator is the one who violated. Google Emily Doe victim impact statement for more inspo or simply click here

https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/30-the-recent-past/emily-doe-victim-impact-statement-2015/

I assure you that you are, reflexively reverting to #notallmen here is part of the problem not part of the solution

it wasn't reflexive, but I get your point

sorry the "reflexive" part was more directed at the early responders, apologies

and read my post again - I'm just saying that there's a path from 'huh, I might have weird fantasies about something like that' to actually getting in your car and making the drive over

Ultimately I think if anything this case empowers me to speak more openly about what I have experienced. What do I have to be ashamed of??
(Not that I plan on doing so here or anywhere in particular but the reminder that the shame is not mine to carry is very important)

it's courageous AF but I love that she carries a kind of breezy pluck in all the photos I've seen

regarding the KEYS IN FINGERS thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Vy9jCQPWM

tldw: is more likely to cause injury to yourself than your attacker

(citation needed)

I think I fell in the "so awful idk what to say" group - I think I saw the headlines and references on social media and felt a bit sick and didn't feel like seeking out the details or bringing it up for discussion. Personally I don't think I ever got a talk from my parents about consent, they were oddly quiet about any element of my personal life for a long time, but I think they had the assumption that I understood what was ok and what wasn't; I did grow up in a family with a largely feminist bent (and generally a lot of female relatives), and my group of friends in high school did not include a lot of traditionally masculine dudes. I do feel like I don't have much to contribute due to never really existing in largely male spaces that can breed this tendency to dehumanize women or view them as a adversarial force or mysterious object or whatever - I've tended to have more female friends for most of my adult life, and I've worked in fields that employ a lot of women. I was thinking today about Kate Beaton's (very good, very upsetting) Ducks, which is about her time working in the oil sands of Alberta and the environment of sexual predation and misogyny and overall brutality that festers there, but is also about how that experience makes her consider what the men she loves might be capable of if they lived in that environment. (Not that environment is everything - I've certainly become aware of predators existing within very consent-focused, often largely queer communities that I'm adjacent to, who knew how to say the right things in order to evade the consequences of abusing the people in those communities.)

the topic of this thread seems too important to derail, but women's self defense and the conventional wisdom about women's self defense are also important, so about the "keys between the fingers" tactic:

in the video shared above, Annette Evans, a combatives instructor, explains several reasons why this tactic is impractical and shows an experiment (at about 3:00) in which a man repeatedly punches a block of ballistics gel while holding keys and hurts his hand more than the block

if you've been relying on this key tactic, please be aware that it is safer and more effective to hit an attacker with your (empty) closed fist, the bottom of your fist, or the heel of your hand

also, as Evans points out, in the event of a violent encounter you really do not want to lose the keys to your car and home

I was taught to rake the keys across the face/neck and try to gouge out the eyes, not punch.

thx both of u

what we were taught in the self defense class was to go for eyes, throat, or groin, how to punch, how to get out of chokeholds, etc. keys were not mentioned. I am just automatically skeptical of youtube links which is on me, not to derail further

sleeve, there are unbelievable quantities of garbage self defense videos on YouTube, so you're right to be skeptical ... Evans' "On Her Own" site and videos look pretty sensible

Jaq, I think gouging is more feasible than punching, but keys held this way will slip and slide between fingers; if they make contact with something solid, the impact is as likely to cut your hand as the target

it's more reliable to attack someone's eyes with your stiffened fingertips, which you can direct more accurately than keys

still more reliable is gouging with your thumb, since you can use your fingers and hand on the side of his head to find his eye (your sense of touch is more accurate than your vision when someone is grabbing or hitting you)

apologies for extending this gruesome tangent ... the keys tactic is a pet peeve, not because it could never work (I'm sure it has), but because psychological reliance on a tool like keys (or a knife, or a handgun) sometimes seems to block people from thinking more realistically about personal safety

But the point of keys is not really to inflict "damage", it's the element of surprise to the assaulter, the confidence it gives to the assaulted. In 99% of cases you are not going to pummel the assaulter to the ground. Even with self-defense class or another weapon (spray, etc), you just buy yourself enough time to run / seek help. As such, the biggest danger of using keys, imo, is to lose your keys.

Thank you, Brad C, Jaq, sleeve, and Nabozo for expanding on the topic. Sorry for just dropping a youtube link, but I don't honestly know much about the topic of self-defense. I had just remembered hearing someone tell me that the keys thing was not a great idea.

I don’t know if anyone knows this but this thread is about the Gisele Pelicot trial, not opinions on self defense.

Thank you, I know. But tipsy and ENBB had discussed the keys technique above and it jumped out at me as a potentially important sidebar.

i think what i was getting at is less that there aren't close friendships between men and women but more so that my perception (as a gay man! i can't speak to any lived experience here as a straight person) is even in those situations there is often an imbalance in how women talk to male friends about their sexual/romantic interactions vs how they talk to their female friends.
― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, January 8, 2025 1:05 AM (twelve hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think this ties back nicely to the topic. It's maybe not really that it's different (because why would it be the same) as the fact that women express, share and process their feelings a lot more compared to men. They often initiate those discussions, among themselves, with men, one-to-one, in groups, discussions that are necessary to commonly establish boundaries. Men have a tendency to isolate, close up like oysters, they don't learn how to draw resources from others because they don't want to depend on others. This creates silence, secret, taboo, shame.

You could see the men sentenced in the Pélicot case as an extreme form of isolation, illustrated by years spent on a website selling satisfaction for sexual deviance, where you slowly drift and lose sight of the basic moral compass because there is no one to check you.

Ok this is one thing that I really don’t understand… trying to think like a man here … like even if these other men genuinely believed she was consenting, they weren’t deterred by other obvious red flags related to self-preservation… Like:
1. A dude wanting other men to fuck his wife is not normal. What if he has second thoughts, then things can get ugly and awkward
2. The woman is unconscious. Even if it were consensual, it looks bad … assumedly these men have people in their lives who would think they were pieces of shit for doing this if they were to find out
3. Blackmail potential… like, do these men not watch tv or movies? Revenge porn, don’t they know this exists?

I think, more importantly, you can view them as such and not sympathize or empathize with them.

A lot of our cultural mores tie tragedy and sympathy together, which is very important when directed towards the victim. You may call this vindictive, or another way of perpetrating the cycle, or whatever, but if we believe in free will, this same grace doesn’t extend to the perpetrators, particularly in this case. The level of abuse Gisele Pelicot endured is beyond forgiveness, particularly for her husband. This is the type of thing should merit shunning if we want our society to improve, again in my opinion.

Not saying that the most horrific thing is these men’s stupidity, obviously it’s the act of rape and being part of the conspiracy… but they are also stupid.

They were filmed the whole time, the camera was handheld by Pélicot or on a tripod. Mind-boggling isn't it ?

Not even stupidity would stop them — that’s how strong the pull was. Idk what’s to gain by trying to “understand” them. Beyond forgiveness otm.

The banality of evil …

They don't believe / don't care she's consenting, they believe they can plausibly claim that they thought that she's consenting (and conscious).

the Sophie Smith piece that's been mentioned a few times talks about this (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/sophie-smith/sleeping-women)

Perhaps there is some underlying tendency that links these men, some pattern only experts can see. (Though perhaps not – the psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco argued in Le Monde that this was not ‘the trial of masculinity or patriarchy’ while also insisting that we must scrutinise the ‘education of young children’, as if these things could be untwined.) Reading reports of the testimony, patterns are hard to find. Many, certainly, experienced abandonment, parental alcoholism, neglect and abuse in childhood (Dominique Pelicot was raped by a nurse in hospital when he was nine), but others did not. The men described sadnesses and setbacks – a child dying, a business lost – tragedies that mark the lives of many people who will never rape. A number come from modest backgrounds; some are well off. One attributes what he called a ‘hatred of women’ to a single historic act of infidelity, but many more talk of building their own contented families. They all watch pornography, like at least 55 per cent of French citizens.

Only fourteen of the accused men have pleaded guilty to rape. Most of the rest claim that they, too, were the victims of Dominique Pelicot. Christian L., once a volunteer firefighter, said he must also have been ‘chemically subdued’. ‘It’s my body,’ he said of the video evidence, ‘it’s not my brain.’ Others said that they were manipulated by, even terrified of, Pelicot, the ‘seriously ill person’ under whose spell they were caught. For these men, the idea that Pelicot is a singular monster is a welcome reprieve. One defendant explained that the question of Gisèle’s consent was irrelevant: ‘She’s his wife, he does what he wants with her.’ A frequent defence – the one I find most chilling – was, in the words of Simone M., that the men believed Gisèle Pelicot was merely ‘pretending to be asleep, waiting to take part’. Some elaborated that they thought they were there to re-enact a scenario popular on porn sites: ‘sleeping woman’. At least one said that Dominique Pelicot told them that he and his wife would enjoy watching the video afterwards.

Idk what’s to gain by trying to “understand” them. Beyond forgiveness otm.

otm, the whole thing is so evil it's incomprehensible

This conversation happening alongside the news about Meta rolling back whatever lame fact-checking they were doing and adding explicit permission in their content guidelines to harass LGBTQ people — plus of course the impending reinstallation of Trump — has me thinking about the force and fluidity of social mores. Where do we actually look for moral guidelines? We are animals with strong instincts to seek certain things: food and shelter come first, but sex isn't too far down that list. But we're also social animals, we have to live together, so we need guidelines to contain those instincts and drives so that we are not constantly living in fear of having our food, shelter or mate stolen or abused by other people.

So at the top, we have laws, enforced with various forms of punishment for transgressions. But laws are really just one form of behavior guidance, and not many people sit around consulting legal codes on a daily basis. We have some general sense of what's allowed and not allowed, but I think the biggest factor is our peers, our communities. People are more likely to do something if they see someone else doing it, and especially if it's someone in a position of any kind of authority. We've talked plenty on the politics threads about how Trump represents this total indulgence of the white male id, a permission slip of sorts to do whatever you want and don't worry about the impact on anyone else. He explicitly represents that in regard to sexual assault — he is a champion of sexual assault who got elected president twice with people knowing it. Musk and Zuck's lifting of the behavioral guard rails on social media is similarly empowering to people's most selfish, self-satisfying instincts.

How does any of that tie to Pelicot's ability to recruit rapists? I mean, he was starting with a self-selecting group, right? These weren't just random people he solicited on the street, they were people already inhabiting online fantasy worlds of rape and forced sex. We can speculate about the different personal and psychological paths that brought those men to those online spaces to begin with, but the point is that they were already self-identifying as people with violent sexual fantasies. Once someone has already walked to the edge of a moral cliff and is peering over excitedly, it probably doesn't take a tremendous amount of permission from a gatekeeper to persuade them to step off it. Dominique Pelicot gave them that permission.

To me this case doesn't signify exactly that any randomly selected group of 50 men will happily rape someone if given the chance. But it does signify the power of social and moral permission from any kind of perceived authority — if someone is granting you permission to do something you already desire. And the fact that Pelicot was perceived by the other rapists as an authority, as a gatekeeper, ties directly to our still strong social/cultural sense that a husband is the head of a household and the ultimate arbiter on what can be done to/with his wife. I would guess that none of those men would have broken into the house and raped Gisele Pelicot without her husband's consent and urging.

What we're seeing all around us right now is a range of permissions being granted explicitly and implicitly for a range of violent and destructive behaviors. There's a moral darkness settling in, a Purge-like indulgence of certain aspects of the id, and this case is among other things a horrifying example of what can come from that.

And again that brings me back to why I am personally still talking about this: Gisele Pelicot’s brave and otm refusal to accept shame for this. Eternal shame on them for what they did.

Oops guess that was xp

I’m genuinely curious about the response to this in France, especially from French men.

“Some elaborated that they thought they were there to re-enact a scenario popular on porn sites: ‘sleeping woman’.”

Okay so…this is inherently a rape fantasy. It’s not a third special thing that’s somehow different. It’s sex without consent and, I must say, the freedom of having complete disregard for the other person at all.

absolutely, and that is a key point of that essay

Tipsy, good post

A frequent defence – the one I find most chilling – was, in the words of Simone M., that the men believed Gisèle Pelicot was merely ‘pretending to be asleep, waiting to take part’. Some elaborated that they thought they were there to re-enact a scenario popular on porn sites: ‘sleeping woman’.

OK, I've thought about it and I do want to address this excuse from a kink perspective. I'm going to spoil it, because I'm gonna get into detail into some pretty extreme kink here.

I am a sexual assault victim. I also have fantasies about being sexually assaulted, and have had those fantasies since before I was sexually assaulted. My experience of being sexually assaulted is _categorically different_ from my fantasies. In fact, it is common and routine for people to have fantasies about acts which, if committed, would be heinous, criminal acts. Cannibalism, for instance, is a fairly common, routine fantasy that people have. Sometimes people with this fetish do try to actually do the things they fantasize about. This is _notable_ and _rare_. Further, the vast majority of people who have these fantasies are utterly _horrified_ by it when it happens. They do have some understanding of the difference between fantasy and reality. If people can sexually fantasize about cannibalism without eating other human beings, I don't see a reason why fantasizing about sexual assault should serve as a pretext for committing sexual assault.

Some people in kink communities do practice what is known as "consensual non-consent". I haven't, but if I found someone I trusted enough, I absolutely would. When people do this, it is _explicitly pre-negotiated_ in PRECISE terms by all the parties involved. The prevailing standard for kink is not just consent, but _enthuasiastic_ consent.

Most of the people I know who do kink are doing so in large part to address trauma, shame, and stigma regarding their own sexuality. This is ALWAYS negotiated. A normal part of kink is also aftercare. When I bottom or submit in a kink context, part of the negotiations invariably involves the top or dom finding out what care I need after the scene, and then providing that care.

Using the existence of "consensual non-consent" kink as a pretext for sexual assault is, to my mind, no different from a rapist excusing their act on the grounds that "she wanted it".

Gisele Pelicot’s brave and otm refusal to accept shame for this. Eternal shame on them for what they did.

Finally got around to reading that Sophie Smith piece (like the Lucy Letby New Yorker piece its how I tend to engage in stories like this) and seeing it all put in one place, and crossed with stuff around her father and how popular fiction tends to normalize thrash behaviour really packed even more of a punch.

For Darian, the case has robbed her of one of the most basic necessities of life: sleep. How do you doze off at night when you fear you might have been abused in your sleep, when you are terrified you might lose control and become someone’s prey? When she first found out about the allegations, she didn’t sleep for five nights straight. She ended up needing medical help and was admitted to an emergency psychiatric ward where – terrifyingly for her – staff tried to sedate her. Yet the whole issue of sedation “was, you know the reason we were in this nightmare”. This hospital approach was “absolutely not what I needed”, she says. Her body and brain resisted drugs, “so they had to use this massive dose … it was really experimental”. This is now part of her campaign for better support of victims. She has tried to be honest in public about her vulnerability as a survivor, and not look like what she calls a “pseudo wonder woman”. She announced halfway through the trial that she would go into a clinic for a few days to try to recover after “weeks of repeated insomnia”.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/11/caroline-darian-daughter-of-gisele-pelicot-interview

Sleep disturbances are one of the most common reactions to SA/CSA -- the most common?! Hard to let your guard down when you fear being attacked with your guard down.

Constant hypervigilance takes such a tremendous toll, too. Even when someone's awake, always scanning the environment for potential threats, always making sure one has an escape route... how do you trust anyone at all when someone you trusted did _that_ to you?

See also: ptsd thread (it’s the only thread that shows up when you search ptsd so I’m not linking it)

Reading about this case through the statements gisele and her daughter have made induces a kind of vertigo, I try to imagine having your world/decades of personal context “swapped out” all at once like that and my brain can’t do it. The strength of both of them stuns me.

The interview with his daughter is just awful, having to live probably the rest of her life never knowing what he did to her. Horrible.

My mum was raped by my grandma's thug boyfriend when she was 14-15 and this was how my sister was conceived. It's a taboo subject within the family and I don't even think my mum has ever really processed this. But what GP has gone through here is so fucking far into the extremosphere of difficult things to process, it's hard to even think about it from her perspective. You could spend a lifetime with someone and not know they are a monster, anyone could, and really not know them.

I’m asking nicely to please be mindful of dropping graphic trauma, esp other people’s trauma, into this space — it can lead to intrusive thoughts for readers who may also be survivors.

I’m very sorry about your mom and sister. I hope they find peace.

it's not like I'm trying to be gratuitous here, it's just my closest frame of reference to this case as a male poster.

I realize that and I should have said something sooner so you didn’t feel personally targeted.

I’m asking people to please be mindful of the language they use whether they intend to be gratuitous (hopefully not) or not.

What Calzino wrote was not more graphic than reported details of Pelicot case, as linked and discussed on here. He may not be "personally targeted" but seems like he's being included, or not clearly excluded (and because he's talking about other family members, unnamed, doesn't seem gratuitous here, any more than other posters talking about male sexist behavior, their own or other guys'). This whole thread could be triggering to someone, so hopefully they would have avoided it altogether after reading the title.

Such an array of responses, people thinking out loud, trying to find their way in a shitstorm, for lack of a better term---it can be upsetting yes.

anyway, agree w "please be mindful of the language they(/we) use" in dealing w all this for sure---

And with that in mind, I probably should have let my whole first post be:
"What Calzino wrote was not more graphic than reported details of Pelicot case, as linked and discussed on here."
With the rest of what I said left to be inferred or not.

I am so sorry about your mum, sister and family Calzino.

Agree w your last post dow. I get the defensiveness and acknowledgment that it was a simple and earnest (and imo reasonable) request to be mindful of the language we use itt and everywhere.

It was hard for me to speak up about this but I did it anyway and am actually sort of mildly proud of myself.

all love to you calz

ILX has hide tags that let you hide certain paragraphs in your post - they can be very helpful when you need to share things with a CW so that people can choose whether or not to read it

ll i'm proud of you for speaking up! it was a reasonable thing to request, and sometimes, you know, people get upset...

this is one of those situations i can only really talk about in therapy speak, basically nobody's _wrong_, it's more like... the hidden text tags are pretty new. i can't remember when they were added, only that i requested them. (and they only work on a per-paragraph level, btw, so if you're using the hidden text tags on multiple paragraphs, putting a line with a single blank space between paras should work). it is definitely one of those... ilx has been around for something like 25 fucking years here and it's kind of new ground! things get awkward, like you said dow, talking about these upsetting things. i think it's... for me i think upsetting stuff _is_ worth talking about and it's taken me a long time to figure out how to talk about upsetting things. i wouldn't expect it to be any easier for anyone else!

I shared the Caroline Darian interview and on both Facebook and Instagram the first comment was from (different) women saying thanks for continuing to talk about it and for being the only man they've seen actually post about it. I'm not sharing this detail because I think I deserve a pat on the back for doing the bare minimum, but because it plays into exactly why this thread and this discussion are necessary - it's not just here that the conversation hasn't been happening. I think out of everyone I know, only one straight man interacted with the post.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I felt a bit grossed out that Law and Order SVU's latest episode that aired this week was very clearly based on the Pelicot trial/happenings. It felt a bit "too soon" to be using it for "ripped from the headlines" crap, really exploitative.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Local news reported that a similar case had happened in my region originating from 2008: same type of profile ("successful entrepreneur"), used sleeping pills/ether, also filmed the acts, admitted everything, number of victims is not revealed but include close family members including his daughter. He was sentenced in 2019 to (a paltry) 12 years, after four years of investigation.

Sounds almost like a model / recipe. In France last year there was a also a pretty big case about a young guy (named Salim Berrada) on Tinder attracting women to his studio and spiking their drinks. 17 women brought accusations, 13 for rape. He got 18 years.

and those were just the ones you've heard about. just the ones who were caught, publicized, and prosecuted.

l&o svu:

https://i.redd.it/y7rrl8c6q7ga1.jpg

content warning for more uspol doom

if i had a nickel for every time my country elected a proven sex offender over a vastly more qualified woman, i'd still feel empty

"Starting on Monday, based on that discovery, Dr. Le Scouarnec will be tried on charges of raping and sexually assaulting 299 people over 25 years — almost all his patients, almost all children at the time of the suspected abuse."

"Dr. Le Scouarnec had been convicted of possession of child sexual abuse imagery in 2005 — years before the raid at his home. Yet he was allowed to continue to treat children unsupervised until his arrest in 2017."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/france-doctor-rape-trial-children.html

Thought it might have been revived to link to this.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/coco-the-chat-room-behind-the-dominique-pelicot-rape-trial

xp everything about that is horrific

jfc that story. And he'd been convicted of having child porn 12 years earlier, but was still examining kids. Not saying anything great about the U.S. justice system, but I hope that at least would have been stopped here.

Yeah it's the systemic failure of the French healthcare system here which is particularly haunting. So much damage that could have been prevented by the bare minimum of due diligence

Gisèle Pélicot among Time's twelve women of the year - out 10 March

As my colleague the French philosopher Manon Garcia said, when leaving the trial, “I really would not want to be raped without videos.”

so i just saw a video talking about the masahiro nakai scandal. the video source wasn't what i consider to be reliable so i'm not linking to it, but this is what wikipedia says about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiro_Nakai_scandal_and_channel_hostilities

i'm bringing it up here because the only thing i can do is keep pointing out that there is a larger pattern here, that it's not just one guy in france or one guy in japan or one guy in new zealand but this _larger pattern_. that this stops when enough of us change our behavior to the point where things don't _get_ as far as they did in france and new zealand and japan. and that we _can_ do this, lots of people _are_ doing this. i've been working to do this, not because i'm a woman or because i'm taking estrogen or anything like that, and it is _hard_ and things _can_ and _will get better if we keep working at this.

part of me doesn't want to know about this stuff, doesn't _like_ knowing about this stuff, particularly now, because it seems so hopeless, so futile, to see these awful things happen over and over again but it's _not_ hopeless or futile, it's being, i don't know, i try to be a woodpecker about it. to say "this is still happening" whenever i see it happen no matter how much shit i get for it, no matter how much people try to blame the messenger or blame the victims or anything else.

i'm not here to blame anyone or shame anyone. i just want to say this keeps happening, and things _can_ be different. every time somebody stops talking to one of their shitty awful relatives or former friends, the world changes. every time somebody _starts_ talking again to one of their relatives or friends because that relative or friend has learned that _being shitty has negative consequences_, the world changes.

this is happening _in my life_, _right now_. the world is becoming a better place, and i see it, but i can't talk about that without first talking about how bad things truly are right now, how bad things have been for a very, very long time. i can, honestly, genuinely, see past the horror, past the despair, sometimes, when i talk about it. but i _have to talk about it_.

i always do find myself thinking about medical options for people who are arrested for abuse/child porn/etc. but i realize that is a slippery slope and can you trust the state to do something like that? chemical castration, testosterone blockers? i don't really know what would work. people would have to go to a medical office or hospital and have it given to them...but again...slippery slope.
like, after that french doctor was tried for having scary child photos or videos...what could they have done to make him stop doing what he was doing? i do blame testosterone. can't help it. its so strong in some people and it really can make you go nutzo. as world wars have shown us. i thought about this seven years ago when i was put on lexapro. pretty much 100% chemically castrated! for awhile it was kind of a relief. i'd never felt such disinterest before. i was dead down there and in my brain. but then it started to bother me. it felt weirdly wrong. it wasn't why i was taking a medicine. but it did make me think: hey, they should really give this to sex criminals.
I don't know how else you stop stuff like this. i don't think it matters how you are raised. some people are just going to end up wanting to do horrible things to people. and i don't know how you end it.

there is a list of countries on here and i didn't know that about california! shows what i know.

"California was the first U.S. state to specify the use of chemical castration for repeat child molesters as a condition of their parole, following the passage of a modification to Section 645 of the California penal code in 1996."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_castration

(xp) very slippery slope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Homosexuality_and_indecency_conviction

xp Yeah California was a leader in all forms of sterilization and eugenics, very 'progressive' ideas at the time

Always happy to hear about your experiences, Scott. Wow, you've been down a lot of different roads on this journey. I'm so happy for you that it seems like your current meds and life choices are working better for you. <3

I don't think that's quite how testosterone works, from what I hear from trans men who take it who know what it was like both without and with. Despite what's depicted in movies like that one from last year (which is part of why people had problems with the movie).

i've actually heard the opposite from trans men. that it made them more aggressive/angry. but this is just anecdotal from a couple of people that i know. everyone is different of course and will react differently.
i have definitely felt like my sex drive/whatever you want to call it has been a true hindrance to me in the past. maybe being an ocd-type person with repetitive/looping thoughts plays a part in that. there were definitely times when i did not want to think about or obsess about sex and wished that i could just be more placid. it can really tear you up. i managed to keep most of this to myself when i was younger. i never wanted to make people uncomfortable and i was never someone who went out looking for sex. its just not who i am. getting older does help but its still there! that's the crazy thing. you would think it would die at some point. those thoughts or impulses. which is why you still have these ancient weinstein types preying on people. i made the mistake once of reading about how horrible and abusive male monkeys are to fertile female monkeys and i kinda can't not think about that when i see these news stories. maybe we just don't have enough evolutionary time to get beyond our monkey roots.

Do people genuinely think that it’s testosterone that turns people into pedophiles/rapists? Not something more fundamental about our culture? Idk.

(Our = human, not any specific culture)

sure, the culture, but who is the culture built by? a bunch of hopped up dudes, that's who.

i don't know. i just try to understand all this madness. probably a dumb idea for me to try at this late date.

personally i don't think it's the hormones driving it -- it's more likely the entitlement that comes with cultural supremacy for men, who also have testosterone.

i don't agree. but i am not a scientist. i only know how it feels to be a man and have violent feelings for decades. not all the time thankfully. only men do these things. only male apes and chimps do these things. rape and beat and abuse. rape 300 children and take meticulous notes about EACH AND EVERY one? wtf? that is more than entitlement and culture. its a brain thing and a chemical thing. it sucks. its horrible.

(i have never even been in a fight or hit someone. never forced anyone to do anything. but i know how irrational those feelings are. sexual feelings. violent feelings. it ain't pretty. i control my brain, thank god. it comes out of literally nowhere. and its a lot worse for other men. i don't know if you could really understand unless you felt it.)

(not to say that culture doesn't play a HUGE role in what happens in the world. of course it does. and it does give people license to do horrible things. i wish it would change faster. but i don't think it will. that's the sad part. tradition gets so ingrained. but what men can do in the meantime is not let any festering thoughts they have get bigger. don't allow them to take over. some people lose that battle. you have to ignore them. you have to recognize them for what they are and move on. that's what has worked for me over the years.)

(i'm sure culture does create differences when it comes to rage and anger and hatred. women feel rage and anger but they don't tend to take that anger out on strangers for instance. men will.)

i should really read a good book about this stuff. what's a good book? its kinda incomprehensible to me and i'm sorry for thinking out loud.

my stance in a nutshell: there is something inherently flawed in men - and i don't know if it comes from the dawn of time when violence was the only way to survive and i don't care - and there is nothing inherently flawed in women. and that's it. and that's what the world of people has had to deal with forever.

my stance in a nutshell: there is something inherently flawed in men - and i don't know if it comes from the dawn of time when violence was the only way to survive and i don't care - and there is nothing inherently flawed in women. and that's it. and that's what the world of people has had to deal with forever.

― scott seward

I've seen this view among certain people, but speaking for myself, I don't think my experience as a trans woman bears this out. I certainly have changed since transition, I believe for the better, but when I look back and who I was in the past, the ways I've changed have far more to do with changing social standards and expectations than they have to do with hormones. Indeed, since starting transition I've come to think a lot more highly of men. My problem, in retrospect, wasn't with men, it was with the things I was supposed to do in order to "be a man".

One of the reasons I do have such a hard time trusting men, even though I find men attractive and admire them, is because of just how ignorant I was about SA before transition. Not only did I have a very black-and-white understanding of consent, I had this idea that it wasn't possible for women to have sexual desires, that it was my "job" as the man to convince a woman to give me something of great value. I'm not saying that this is a problem with masculinity because one, I'm not a man and never was, and two, I'm only one person. The thing was, I tried the best I could to be a "good man", and somehow I wound up with that bullshit, despite trying really hard and being taught by people who wanted to teach me consent.

Did testosterone make me sexually driven in a different way than I am now? Absolutely. Yeah, T gave me this very strong sex drive to where I just _needed_ to cum sometimes. I resolved this need by masturbating. Personally, the process did cause me a great amount of dysphoria and left me feeling pretty gross and bad, but at the same time a male orgasm _is_ pretty physically pleasurable and it _was_ a relief. Having had this experience I've never understood the argument that testosterone somehow predisposes men to sexual assault.

-

The thing is, Scott, to me one of the strongest factors in a culture of SA is this sense of guilt and shame a lot of men have about being men, that being a man is somehow "bad" or "wrong". It's easy for narratives like these to become justifications, for these beliefs to become self-fulfilling prophecies. That's why it's so important to me to say that these men _did not have to do_ the things they did. They could have chosen not to. Rape culture is promoted by patriarchy, but SA is not a gendered act, something that men do to women. Indeed, this idea I had that, as a "man", I couldn't be a victim of sexual assault, well.... didn't do me any favors, let's just say.

Having said that I'm really glad that you are expressing your views on this! The things you say aloud are unspoken assumptions carried by so, so many people. This idea that men are bad was an assumption that I carried too. And it's not something I can address if people won't admit it's what they believe! I hope you can listen to what I say and hopefully start to change your mind about men. Men are really quite wonderful.

I love a lot of men! And I didn't say bad, I said flawed. There is a fly in their...uh...ointment. I also think some people have way too much testosterone and it causes them a lot of problems. But, oh gosh, of course nobody ever needs to hurt anybody. But men DO most of the hurting. It's just the way it is. So I try to think about why. And what my own experience is. And how I have felt as a man. I never felt pressured to be any way as a man. Which is why so many different kinds of men feel so comfortable around me. They feel like they can be themselves around me and I wish they could feel this way all the time but they are afraid to. And fear breeds frustration which can breed anger and confusion. And I do know that sexual assault can come from men AND women. But the vast majority of truly horrible crimes do not come from women. There are so many things I respect and love about women I can't even count them. I feel fine as a man. I really do. But so many men never ever look at themselves or what they do. And what they have inside them. They need to start right now.
Thanks for your post, Kate! You rock . I really do love and respect trans men and women so much. They are also the best record store customers! Curious, serious, funny. A pleasure to talk to.

scott, I agree with the impulse to try to make sense of these things, know you are doing this in good faith and I wouldn't want to make it seem like I'm dismissing your struggle

nonetheless it is concerning to me that what you've posted itt is stuff I mostly otherwise hear from one, men's rights activists and two, terfs. I hope that doesn't sound incendiary, I am not accusing you of being either tbc.

the idea that men are all labouring under this heavy cloud of testosterone rage - you call it a flaw, men's rights activists call it an advantage, but either way it leads down a path where a man not succumbing to violence is struggling against his own nature, and that's not something I ever feel, but it sure as hell is an excuse that gets trotted out all the time. the scientific evidence for this is (from what I've gathered mostly watching female feminist youtubers, so I'll admit I may not be up to date) scant, and I think thousands of years of social conditioning are a hard enough yoke to throw off without making it a biological conflict as well. again I know you don't mean it like that, but so much of the MRA movement is about viewing male violence as "natural".

we then get into the murkier waters of what men and women even ARE if we're talking about biological categories and not social categories. there's been so much work in the past couple of decades to debunk the simplistic binary that's been set up around this, to the point where I don't know if speaking in those terms makes any sense at all. if we attribute the behaviour of "men" to chemical issues, well, there's a hell of a lot of people who fall between your categories of "men" and "women".

I'm also frankly at a loss as to how one could think of testosterone in relation to the case discussed in this thread, which is bone chillingly premeditated and cold blooded in execution.

I would associate the case of the French doctor (Joël Le Scouarnec for reference) with any profession that provides ideal conditions for potential offenders to launch into a string of physical and/or psychological abuse: clerics, carers, teachers and trainers, dance/theater, musicians etc, anyone with authority, proximity, access to young and vulnerable individuals. The French doctor made it painfully clear that he had transformed his job/status into a weapon, just like Pélicot did with his marriage, or Abbé Pierre with his philanthropy for another prominent case in French news.

I believe we all accept that a surprising number of men could reveal a capacity to harm when given the opportunity / impunity through ignorance, lack of ethics and education, or being unclear about the law. The changes around consent / rape definitions in legal texts and their stricter application are a case in point. These things take time to learn collectively, and the change is partly brought about by setting examples. There is not really a need to illustrate but there was a case reported last week in the French news about a young man who introduced his fingers in his female friend's after they shared a couch after a party. It was clear in their exchange of texts in the aftermath that the young man didn't realize he would be sentenced to four years in prison (that's the final sentence, after appeal).

I would set apart the men who consciously seek out the opportunity to harm, who know what they're doing but still do it. Sure, they associate it with "pleasure" and pleasure is physiological, but we also know what their urge, their drive, is borne out of pathological reasons. Hate, resentment, alienation, trauma, depression. A little like terrorists who are brainwashed, radicalized, switch, and become permanent threats.

thanks Daniel, for eloquently stating what i was thinking while reading scott’s posts

gyac
Posted: 7 January 2025 at 23:25:54
we seem on the whole to be amoral monsters who would basically do anything we please once the fear of getting caught is removed, and the lack of empathy and compassion that implies is just so alien to me


It isn’t that complex, it’s structural oppression, if women held the structural and historical power that men have then we would be talking about us, women are not naturally better people. It’s more useful to think about the comments you may let slide or the stuff you look away from cos you don’t want to get awkward than engage in this kind of doomerism imo.

i'm so sorry, gyac.

you guys make a good case for it being all about society and not about the sex of the person or chemistry. (though the idea of having too little or too much of something in your body or brain seems pretty normal to me as someone who takes medicine every day...) i will defer to you all. i don't know anything about MRA people. i only know what i have read about other animal species and that the only people who have ever hurt me were male and that i don't trust a lot of men. whereas i totally trust women. but, again, i guess that is society or just my own experience. if women had hurt me i would probably be saying something different. i still can't believe that if we lived in a society ruled by women that they would be anywhere near as cruel as men. but that's my own experience talking again probably. again, if there is a good book to read, let me know!

i also don't want anyone to think that anything i have said is in any way an excuse for anything ever. i really need to say that. it really is just me trying to understand why men do what they do. because its so fucking insane and scary.

"women are not naturally better people"

i am just never going to believe this i don't think. i'm sorry! maybe its like being Christian. you just believe what you believe even if it isn't true.

I guess I’m going to be reposting this till I go blind.

gyac
Posted: 7 January 2025 at 23:25:54
we seem on the whole to be amoral monsters who would basically do anything we please once the fear of getting caught is removed, and the lack of empathy and compassion that implies is just so alien to me


It isn’t that complex, it’s structural oppression, if women held the structural and historical power that men have then we would be talking about us, women are not naturally better people. It’s more useful to think about the comments you may let slide or the stuff you look away from cos you don’t want to get awkward than engage in this kind of doomerism imo.

I will take my thoughts off-thread. i took this thread at face value. it was aimed at "chaps". but maybe it was just meant to be a poll and nothing more.

if there is a good book to read, let me know!

I dunno if that's quite what you're looking for but Cordelia Fine's Delusions Of Gender I found a good primer on how early socialization starts and how the "biological differences" most of us take for granted are a lot more complicated to suss out.

yes, recommendations are good!

sorry for being so obtuse everyone! love you all.

it can be hard when you have believed something for so long. but i want to learn more. i shouldn't stop at primatology.

"women are not naturally better people"

i am just never going to believe this i don't think. i'm sorry! maybe its like being Christian. you just believe what you believe even if it isn't true.

― scott seward

i mean not to be rude but... saying that women are naturally better people than men is literally a bigoted statement! to be clear i'm not judging you for believing bigoted things, like, i think it's important for us to challenge bigoted beliefs we have and i really want you to do that. and i don't know how to challenge bigoted beliefs without acknowledging that one has them. it's just, like, not ok to say bigoted things in public like that.

saying that women are naturally better than men is... i hate to talk about this because what i'm talking about _isn't_ a trans thing, but saying women are naturally better than men is transphobic. i couldn't be trans if i believed there was a _fundamental biological difference_ between men and women. what are the implications of saying "women are naturally better than men"? either i was born a woman, i have some kind of "feminine essence", that made me different from other AMABs and... some trans women believe that about themselves, and I believe them. If they say that about themselves, they're right. I don't believe that about myself. There's no empirical evidence that I was in any way, in terms of biological sex, any different from you, Scott, when I was born.

And if that's the case, if women are better people than men but there's no biological basis for that... why would anybody choose to be a man? Why say like, you know, women are better than men but I'm going to be a man? I grew up my whole life trying to be a man because I figured, you know, I just had to be a man, there was nothing I can do about that, and I mean. I didn't. Nobody does. If you don't want to be a man, fucking don't. Gender is free.

Of course if you look at trans guys that makes it all the more obvious, like, either they were somehow born _worse_ than other AFABs, in your words "flawed", invisibly, in ways that women aren't, or they're somehow deciding they _want to be worse_, they want to acquire this biological flaw. Which is bullshit. I look at trans guys and transition doesn't make any of them _worse_. In general I find transition tends to make people happier and more comfortable with themselves. Not necessarily better-adjusted, but that's pretty much entirely, IMO, due to how patriarchy treats trans people - because I do think transphobia is fundamentally a patriarchal phenomenon, no matter how much transphobes claiming to be "feminists" may claim otherwise.

-

gyac, I do want to say I particular appreciate your perspective and wisdom here... I do find it parallels my own, as an SA victim. It's fucking _complicated_. I see graffiti that says "kill your rapist" and I get where that's coming from and I don't want to kill my rapist, or send my rapist to prison, or even quite honestly _name_ my rapist, because to me, it's fucking _not about them_. It's not about them being a bad person or evil or anything like that. In fact, their belief that they were a bad person only served to _justify and perpetuate the things they did_. I'd tell them not to do something, and they'd respond by saying "I'm not a good person", and it frustrates me so much because it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER, just don't fucking DO that. How hard is it to ask first? Like to me it's the same mindset where people mess up my pronouns and then are like "oh but it's so HARD", yeah, I mean, tough shit. People are responsible for their words and actions. If you treat people poorly, you should have to face the consequences of that.

Except that men, like, aren't held accountable for their words and actions, a lot of times. I mean, I look at what Luigi Mangione did, and how people are treating him, and how the fuck do you think people would be treating him if he was a trans woman? If a trans woman did something like what Luigi Mangione did? I can tell you. I can tell you in detail, because people are already making up lies, saying that cis people who commit acts of violence are trans, and then using that lie to say things about _all trans people_. There's a pretty strong double standard when it comes to... well, when it comes to white cis men, particularly.

Violence by white cis men is not only _tolerated_, but _encouraged_. That's my experience. I mean, you think women don't feel rage? That's one of the things that's difficult, and again, it's not about me being trans, not about hormones, because I talk to cis women, as a woman, in women's spaces, and a lot of us are VERY FUCKING PISSED. Of course. Women's anger, women's rage, is just policed in such a fundamentally _different_ way than white men's anger is. Luigi Mangione does what he does and he's a hero to millions. A woman raises her voice and we're shrill, bitchy, hormonal, _emotional_, _hysterical_, maybe we're on the rag. That's how we get treated when we express anger, when we express rage. And yes, hormones make a difference, yes, I cry a fuck of a lot more since starting E, and it doesn't mean I'm not _mad_. "Tears of Rage", that song was written by a white cis man.

Women aren't accorded the right to anger, and men, my experience is that white men aren't accorded the right to any emotions _but_ anger. (The way anger is policed under white supremacy is also _very_ racialized, that's why I specify "white men".) Being sad, being afraid, that gets treated as weak. Being angry gets treated as strong. That's fucked up, that's fucked up, and it makes things worse. And when you have this idea that men can't _ever_ be weak, can't _ever_ be vulnerable, fuck, that men can't ever be _emotional_...

A friend of mine said this to me last night, and I think it's such a beautiful, wonderful thing, and I don't think it has anything to do with gender, with gender identity.

Every day I'm learning more that I need to be able to sit with a thing, let it happen, but not react
Let it unspool naturally without forcing
Anticipate and deescalate in advance
It's an uncomfortable muscle
And it strains and make me feel so dumb to flounder and not UNDERSTAND immediately what I'm perceiving. Or not perceive it at all, but grasp that I should

This friend for so long wanted to THINK, wanted to ARGUE, when I would try to talk with them about feelings they would feel insulted, like I wasn't taking what they were saying seriously, and I related so hard to them because I used to be the same way, because I had to learn, am _having_ to learn, to do exactly what they're doing. AMABs just... just aren't taught to _do_ what my friend is talking about learning, to _value_ that, and I think it is absolutely one of the greatest, best things a person can learn. AMABs are taught that they have to be _aggressive_, that they have to _force_. And nobody _has_ to.

Scott, I more or less am right there with you. I don't post about it because I tend to not post on these more complex topics because I'm scared of putting my foot in my mouth. It's hard when personal experience shows that one group of people is Trouble and we internalize that and accept it as fact when the entire truth is so much bigger than what one person can see with their limited point of view.

Still, my therapist and my doctor are both women because in my experience they are better listeners and I am more comfortable with them and I regularly think Bad Thoughts about men in general. It's not fair and may be self-damaging but that's where I'm at and I should work on it. My 15 year old daughter, who has up to now maintained that she was 100% lesbian, recently came out as straight and I think I've managed to hide how disappointed I am, but it's hard.

Anyways, my point is that you're not alone in this and we all have a lot of work to do. Thank you to all of the smart people above (Kate, Daniel, gyac) for reminding me of that.

but you ARE a woman, kate. you always were. i am sorry to have offended you. i really am. that's why i likened how i felt to Christianity which is likewise a batshit insane idea. i RECOGNIZE that me choosing women over men is nuts. and i'm sure it has everything to do with me being terrorized all through my childhood by someone who was being hurt by a man has a lot to do with that. i am just trying to be honest. but i will refrain from posting my opinions here. this is what men don't do though. they never ever tell people how they feel about being a man and their feelings about women and i really wish they would but they are afraid to and the wheel goes round and round. i really want things to change in the world for people but sometimes i think it IS easier for me to give up and say "well, animals are animals and are gonna do animal things sometimes" instead of looking deeper. and i don't want to give up. i don't actually believe, like gyac does, that people are immoral monsters. i think they are truly and deeply scared and that this makes them lash out in horrible ways (and that some people have an overabundance of chemicals in their body that makes it easier for them to lash out in horrible ways but you folks think i'm all wrong about that and maybe you are right). sorry again though.

x-post

I don't actually believe, like gyac does, that people are immoral monsters.

"Except that men, like, aren't held accountable for their words and actions, a lot of times."

for the record, my partner is a strong queer woman who identifies more as masculine then feminine and was raised by strong queer women. i am held accountable for my words and actions.

i was gonna write a long post myself about how like, yes testosterone is my personal enemy, removing it from my body has made my brain smooth as a rock in a fucking riverbed, but even then it's not necessarily something i associate with "aggression" or "evil." i certainly had fewer ways to deal with my emotions when i was treated as a man, and this led me to occasionally throw my head against the wall. fits of self-harm. i was never aggressive toward anyone else other than myself. all of this has disappeared since transitioning, but not entirely. but i also think it's just... transitioning has made me more myself, given me greater access to my emotions, even without the hormones, so i'm able to regulate all of this to a greater degree. people, men, women, are put at such a distance from themselves by society, by the conditions in which they grew up, by the abuse they suffered or continue to suffer. this is not to excuse them from harming others but to say that there are multiple forces at work that create these systems of calculated abuse, but it is ultimately not because of the evil cooking in some man's head. men are encouraged to think that women aren't people, for their entire lives, not just by parents or authority figures: it seethes from the entire world around them. the power structure confirms it. and mental architecture shifts to reflect the world around you. this is all to say that "fixing" this, to the degree that it's fixable, isn't through forced feminization, though that sounds really fun tbh (i'm kidding i'm really kidding); it's more about remaking the world so that no one thinks for a single second that one of us isn't a person

i'm so sorry if that's redundant!!!

i misread your above post, gyac. sorry. i didn't know you were quoting or paraphrasing someone. sometimes i read too fast. i don't think i connected the first bit and the last bit about lack of empathy.

thanks, ivy. i do wonder if hormone blockers were around for me when i was younger if i would have gone that route. its very possible. my brain tortured me for so long. i am a little envious of the current young generation that they have that option. when they have that option. if they have that option.

oh and finally, since transitioning i have experienced even more instances of men touching me without my consent than usual, just casually at bars or at clubs or whatever. happened on sunday! i went to karaoke and these drunk (ok don't even get me started about alcohol) dudes up front were talking at me and one of them grabbed me by the wrist! and i said "no no, please, let me go," and he did let me go, but every time i think what if he didn't!!! he did not think of me as a person

scott, my testosterone blocker is exactly the same as the acne medication i took when i was 12, it's really fucking hilarious to me. it's just out there, kids are taking it already without knowing it's also used for hrt

my new medicine definitely helps me with intrusive/looping thoughts and i will take what i can get. at the height of my bleakness/depression of the last however many years i would lay in bed before i went to sleep and daydream about fighting people on the street. hurting them badly. every night. for about...two years. for the first two years after i quit smoking it was every morning. the same thoughts. for two years. its maddening. and exhausting. just one of the reasons that i relate to maria bamford so much!

!!! i did not know that. about the acne medication.

i told you that someone close to me is going through something similar and i am really happy for them to be doing something that feels so right but it does open up all kinds of emotions/feelings in me that i am still dealing with. its a lot! its cool though. it really is.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who had objections to the “testosterone is to blame for men’s behavior” argument.

i'm really not trying to be a troll or a jerk you guys. i'm just wrestling with stuff. i think the young folks out there now are awesome and its easy to say: they will save us all and be the better people that we wanted to be but were too lazy to be. but i don't want to do that. i really don't. i want to be a better person too. man. whatever. its only recently that i have even thought of myself as a man. i never thought about it much. i'm okay with considering myself one. i don't often feel like one. i've lived such a solitary life. i was raised by a kind and quiet person who never talked to me about power or getting ahead. she just drove with me to fields and woods and painted barns and trees and i watched her. my dad was never around. and when he was i knew i didn't want to grow up to be like him. staring at asses on the street and making fag jokes. i never understood how he came from HIS father who was more like my mom. quiet. gentle. in love with nature. i vowed to never show my own kids that side of me. the side that ogled asses. the seemingly endless capacity to think about sex and women. but now i feel like i should have. i should have talked to them about it. i crossed my fingers. hoped for the best. they are both awesome and in many ways just more well-rounded and compassionate people then i was at their age. kinder for sure.

i don't think male hormones are ALL to blame. i think an overabundance of male hormones can do a number on the old noggin though. that's basically what i think. 80% of suicides are men. and, true, that might also be entirely societal, but its still an awfully high number.........

when i read about the trepanning kooks years ago i actually thought it sounded like an okay idea because i thought it might let some of the steam out of your head. true story! :}

Scott, if you're not careful you're going to be made ILX Health Czar.

I know you’re not TRYING to be a troll or a jerk — but still maybe think twice before posting. Do you think testosterone is causing suicides now? That’s not correct.

I gave it some thought before sharing a highly painful part of my life in this thread. I haven’t even posted about it on here even on seventy seven because it’s still something I’m dealing with.

I did so not to say anything other than to underline exactly how common this is. I think people who are lucky enough for this to be something they can discuss as something that has happened to others don’t realise that. I wish that we all that that innocence, and that we could think that only people clearly marked as evil do bad things, but that’s not what happens.

Seeing what this thread has devolved into, I wish I hadn’t bothered sharing that story.

"Do you think testosterone is causing suicides now?"

I think chemical imbalances can make people want to die. Sure. Sure made me want to.

Can we not have this conversation in this thread?

I am glad you shared, gyac, and I am sorry if I made you feel bad about doing that. And I don't think that only people clearly marked as evil do bad things. I don't think that of the people who hurt me. I never thought they were evil. They did change who I would become though. I don't really believe in evil. I don't even like using the word "bad".

I promise I won't come back. I'm obviously upsetting people. I don't talk about this stuff with anyone and I don't always approach it in the right way. I'll educate myself on current sexual politics too. There is a lot I have to learn!

I won’t speak for anyone else but for me, it’s not so much that you shouldn’t come back as much as it is this conversation could move to another place where the people who want to follow can participate and the people who don’t want to can disengage without also disengage from the specific conversation about the Pelicot case.

What Dan said. No one said “get out of here” but a few people have said please listen and think before you post.

I have nothing insightful or helpful to contribute to this conversation at this point but I would just like to say that I am incredibly humbled (for want of a better word) by gyac sharing her story here. I am sorry that it happened and you have to live with it, but I thank you for your bravery in sharing it and the strength that it must take for you to not be shamed into not sharing it with us and remaining silent.

(I hope this does not seem condescending or patronising but I worry it may read that way)

Thanks, that’s kind. I didn’t post to solicit sympathy because I’ve done the pain and anger by now and some of that has been a very long time in the works. It’s simply a sad fact of my life that shapes who I am along with the rest of my life experiences. It’s what it is, and sadly that’s the case for far too many people in this world. I thought about posting it but decided to because I think persisting in these misunderstandings is not good for anyone and because sometimes this is not a hypothetical discussion to some of us.

It’s painful to think about the fact that rape is this common, this unremarkable, and yet still this many people do not understand it. I could think of ten women I’m friends with and at least half that I know of have similar stories. I guess I wanted to say something about my own very unremarkable case which is far more common than the Pelicot case though both come from the same place; disregard for female autonomy and indifference to our suffering. These things are societal and structural in nature, and if we’re not talking about them we aren’t even approaching a useful discussion imo.

As I said before, I regret sharing that on here and will ask a mod to delete that post.

I think chemical imbalances can make people want to die. Sure. Sure made me want to.

Seeing what this thread has devolved into, I wish I hadn’t bothered sharing that story.

― triste et cassé (gyac)

Gyac, I'm glad you shared what you did.

I hear and appreciate what people are saying here about the turn this thread has taken recently. I do want to continue to talking about the things that have come up lately, because I think it's important. I think that there are a lot of assumptions individual people have and that it's important to address them individually, but I do agree that this isn't necessarily the right place to do that. I'm going to pick things up over on Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread . Scott, I do want to continue talking about this stuff - would you join me there?

What a horror.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/may/13/diddy-trial-cassie-ventura-testimony-takeaways

i think the last conversations related to that are in this thread:
Is anyone anticipating the new Diddy album?