Amy Winehouse called a song, “What is it about men?”. My question exactly as the summer ends.
We need to talk about Mohamed Al Fayed, who is alleged to have raped female employees; Monsieur Pelicot, the rapist who drugged and pimped his wife Gisèle to dozens of men; that charming man who chopped up his beauty queen wife and mother of his children then puréed her body parts; the one who incinerated Rebecca Cheptegei, the Ugandan Olympic athlete; and oh yes, let’s not forget the Taliban in Afghanistan. Not content with preventing women and girls from working and studying, the beardy mullahs are now bent on the erasure of females. On it goes. In 2024.
What is it about men that makes them obliterate, dominate and violate women? What makes them even want to? I’ve never understood why men don’t make more of a fuss about it because let’s face it — it’s truly terrible PR for them.
And where are the protest marches over this war against women across capitals and campuses? Where is even the random tweet of allyship against gender apartheid from Lefty podcasters, celebrity wokerati, the Emmys? From our new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, who has espoused the limp strategy of quiet engagement with the Taliban, and has only tweeted about the appalling new laws once?
But then evidence of industrial-level rape emanates from a Provençal hamlet in France, and people pay attention. Or at least those without a Y chromosome do.
My male friends, to a man, refuse to discuss the Pelicot case, as if it’s feminazi even to mention it
Every woman I speak to is traumatised yet admiring of Gisèle Pelicot’s composure and courage. My male friends, to a man, refuse to discuss it, as if it’s feminazi even to mention it.
At the weekend, women rallied in 30 cities across France in support of Gisèle Pelicot, who was allegedly raped by dozens of “normal” neighbours while she was unconscious. Among the banners saying “Support to Gisèle”, it was this sign that got me most: “Not all men,” it said, “But always a man.”
Not all men, though, is no longer the firewall it was, ditto the “one bad apple” defence. The Pelicot case has been the second plane hitting the tower — evidence that you don’t have to be a psychopath to rape. You can be a firefighter, a brickie, an average mechanic, a neighbour — a normal guy, who thinks so long as he can get away with it, he will do it.
Pelicot didn’t have to cast his net wide to find blokes eager to rape his elderly insensate wife “without her knowledge”. He harvested these local predators from the coco.gg website which until it was shut down this summer boasted half a million visitors a month.
Fifty men allegedly took him up on the invitation, many from his home village of Mazan. Given this has a population of about 6,000, and the men were aged between 18 and 65, that would mean quite a proportion of the adult male population abused the drugged grandmother as a “body bag” or a “rag doll”, to use her own words.
Some of the male perps have whined that they were “victims” too, and argued that as the rapes took place in a marital bed, by invitation of the husband, it was what the police would call a domestic.
Actually, I’m going to stop here. The truth is, I don’t want to read me on this subject. I want to read and hear men.
Until I do, I will conclude that men don’t rat on other men, and that there must be some atavistic chamber of the male brain that craves the domination and exploitation of women.
That is the conclusion I will reach until I see evidence to the contrary, and men rising up for their wives and sisters and daughters against the Taliban.
This is the conclusion I will reach until the Silence of the Lammys ends, and I hear men analysing the Pelicot case and rape culture both out loud and in print.
So, what is it about men? “Women have very little idea how much men hate them,” said Germaine Greer. I don’t agree. I think it’s more this: men have a very good idea of how much women love them, and need them, and depend on them, and they exploit that emotional and biological asymmetry — coming from millennia of female submission and suppression — to take things from there.
