Change starts with all of us

“I am a rapist,” Dominique hashtag#Pélicot finally admitted.

These words mark a red-letter day. They mark the admission of guilt from a man who drugged his wife and filmed as other men raped her motionless body.

The story of hashtag#GisèlePélicot triggers immediate horror: how could anyone, in their right mind, for years exploit a drugged, unconscious woman?

Our instinct is to distance ourselves. “Those men are sick, but not all men are like that,” we think.

By doing this, we push these acts into the realm of the abnormal—no man we know could possibly do such a thing. Not our husband, cousin, brother, or neighbour.

But the Pélicot case forces us to ask an uncomfortable question: how could 80 seemingly ordinary men—firefighters, drivers, nurses—living in the same community all be “exceptional” cases of sexual predation?

Was there something wrong with the Mazan village water?!

By labeling them as sexual predators, we absolve them of responsibility, implying their behavior stems from a rare form of deviance, a pathology.

These men weren’t diagnosed as mentally unstable. More disturbingly, their lawyers argued they acted without malice, without “intent to rape.”

What does that say about the average man’s understanding of sexual interaction? That for some, a woman’s participation, pleasure, or even conscious consent is irrelevant.

By labeling these cases as extreme outliers, we ignore the patterns that occur far more often than we admit:

🚨 Some 70% of rapes occur within the family, according to multiple sources including the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Women.

🚨 Marital rape accounts for about 25% of all rapes reported, according to most studies.

These figures tell us that rape is banal – not an exceptional deed. Or that the so-called “pathology” is omnipresent.

Consider the everyday reality where a man regularly demands sex from his partner, regardless of whether she is willing, or indeed awake.

Many women give in to the pressure to avoid conflict, to meet expectations about their “marital duty”.

It is time we admit that this is the result of a broader culture—a culture that teaches men to disregard women, while media, porn, and pop culture normalize and eroticize sexual domination and violence.

While men are conditioned from birth to dominate women, women are taught to endure silently. If we admit that a masculinist culture exists, we must admit that men are also in a way victims of it. Women, of course, are even in a worse position, being at the losing end of the stick.

We need to realize that rape isn’t about “those people over there.”

We, as a society, created the conditions that allowed Dominique Pélicot and others to do what they did.

Thanks to Gisèle, we can no longer look away.

We can dismantle this culture of sexual violence.

Change, in any field, begins when we recognize our complicity and take action.

Change starts with all of us.

Let’s do our part to hashtag#EndTheRapeCulture.

hashtag#JeSuisGisele