from âthe case against the sexual revolutionâ by Louise Perry

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Aqua Utopiaď˝ćľˇăŽĺşă§č¨ćśăç´Ąă
hello vonnie
dirt enthusiast
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NASA
trying on a metaphor
Jules of Nature
cherry valley forever

Kaledo Art
will byers stan first human second
almost home
I'd rather be in outer space đ¸

pixel skylines

oozey mess
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
noise dept.
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
occasionally subtle
seen from United States
seen from France

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Morocco
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from TĂźrkiye
seen from Russia

seen from Germany
seen from United States

seen from Canada
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States

seen from Germany

seen from TĂźrkiye

seen from United States

seen from France
@doconaut
from âthe case against the sexual revolutionâ by Louise Perry

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I'm so proud of the UK, the fight to squash this nonsense is far from over but UK feminists have been not standing from this nonsense from day 1. đŹđ§
Women are female human beings, not a concept in a male brain. Amen
I hate organised religion and I'm tired of pretending that I don't.
beauty rituals are so mundane. theyâre not just normalised, theyâre expected of us. and it makes them a hundred times more humiliating.
painting a new face on your own, perfectly normal face? humiliating.
wearing clothes that donât let you sit comfortably, bend down, walk up the stairsâŚ. degrading
paying other women to apply wax on your intimate parts and armpits and then rip your hair out? wtf even is that.
no matter how much time i spend around women i canât get used to it: glued eyelashes, lip fillers, fake nails, exposing clothes, hairless, often malnourished bodiesâŚ. the thoughts about humiliation women put themselves through never leave my mind

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Lesbian Book Club
Iâm always seeing a ton of posts going around asking for lesbian fiction recs for some light reading. Would there be any interest in a Tumblr lesbian book club? Does this already exist and Iâve not seen it?
Iâm a member of a local lesbian book club that meets monthly. I was thinking that, if thereâs enough interest, I could post our monthly book on a dedicated side blog along with some basic info. People could read along as they like and reblog or use the comments to discuss. The great thing about tumblr is even if you donât necessarily âkeep upâ, you can always go back to the OP and add your thoughts later.
The books we read have three basic rules they must follow: 1) they must be written by women (though not necessarily always lesbians), 2) they must be about lesbians or have a lesbian main character, and 3) no YA fiction. Weâre all adults, some of us into our 70s, and YA has no interest to us. But we read all sorts of genres and authors, thereâs always a great mix.
Ideally Iâd post twice a month, once to announce the monthâs book with some basic info. Title, author and her orientation (if I can find it), genre, and a basic blurb summary. Then towards the end of the month Iâd post my thoughts and maybe some points from our book club meeting (pending approval of the members, I want to get their consent first). Discussion would be open to everyone regardless of their orientation; Iâd encourage everyone to follow along and at least add some of the titles to their reading lists. We read some great stuff! And some real stinkers, but thatâs to be expected.
Soooo, thoughts? Tagging a few ladies in hopes that theyâll help me boost this. @nansheonearth @bookwyrmbutch @drachenstochter @butch-reidentified
ever since i was a little girl iâve been awkward and embarrassing
me af
no offence but I hate when people my age start projecting their own fears and ideas about aging and youth onto me. girl sorry but Iâm young and beautiful if you think women in their late 20s onwards are worthless old hags who have run out of time thatâs a personal problem
Are the âwomenâ in the room with us right now? Why should FEMinism, a movement about FEMale liberation and rights, include males? You know, the very group of people that oppressed us in the first place?
Also this is unrelated to the point but I hate?? when people?? talk like this???

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Hot take but "nice" catcalling (e.g those "wholesome" videos where a guy yells some variation of "I like your shoes" or "you're a badass" or whatever the fuck) completely misses the point about why catcalling is bad
Yeah, sure, you're not being sexually inappropriate with a stranger, but you are still infringing on her (let's not pretend it isn't always "her") ability to move through the world unimpeded. You are still demanding her attention. You are still deciding that you having something to say to her is more important than her right to be left alone.
It's exactly the same kind of bs as all those jumpscare stories where the punchline is "haha I made you THINK I was a bigot but AKSHUALLY I'm an ally!" (E.g "when my son came out I told him I refused to let him live under my roof...until we got him a boyfriend!!" etc)
Every woman's fight or flight reflex kicks in when she's catcalled, and your "nice genuine compliment" triggers that just as much as some douche saying "hey sexy"
More to the point, she still has no way of predicting how you're going to react if she doesn't engage with you the way you want, which is, crucially, *why* catcalling triggers the fight or flight reflex in the first place
Tl;dr you are never entitled to women's attention even if you think you're being nice. Leave women in public alone.
why are women worse at driving compared to men?
They aren't.
Most Recent Statistics
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a USA-based "independent, nonprofit scientific and educational organization" about "motor vehicle crashes" [1]:
73% of motor vehicle crash deaths were of men/boys in 2022
In fact, men have outnumbered women in crash fatalities for every year since 1975 (when data started being collected)
Male crash fatalities were significantly more likely to be intoxicated than female fatalities
Male crash fatalities were also significantly more likely have been speeding than female fatalities
More Data
In a 2023 report, the World Health Organization [2] looked at crash data worldwide, and found men are 3 times more likely than women to be killed in a car crash.
A 2021 study by researchers in England [3] found "men pose higher per-km risk to others than women". To be clear, this means that even after adjusting for amount of distance driven, men are more dangerous drivers than women.
A 2024 report by the French government [4] found 78% of road fatalities were male and 75% of those seriously injured were male
This 2023 study by researchers in Spain [5] found "the results point to Spanish women paying closer attention to traffic regulations, behaving more carefully." (Where "traffic regulations" refers to things like speeding, seat belt use, phone use, "overtaking offenses", etc.)
This Turkish study [6] found that men self-reported less driving safety behaviors than women.
This Texas (USA) study [7] also found men self-reported less driving safety behaviors than women. (And despite the fact that "males reported more behaviors than females that would put them at higher risk of collision ... men have more confidence in their driving skills than women." We should note here, that this is clearly false confidence.)
This study [8] interviewed young drivers in nine European countries and found "the main difference between [young male and female drivers] is not strictly related to judgment of the perceived risk probability but rather to the level of concern experienced about the consequences of the risk." In other words, young men (the highest risk group) are aware of the risks to themselves and others ... they just don't care.
This study of data from 32 countries in "8 cultural cluster" [9] found "men [value] crash risk behaviors more than women do in all cultural clusters observed". They also found "the greater acceptance of risky behavior by males is observed in all cultures."
It's also important to note that these higher fatality rates for men are in spite of the fact that car safety standards are designed and tested only on a male-standard [10, 11]. Women are, in fact, at higher risk than men of injury and death when they are in a crash. This makes the fact that men still outnumber women in crash fatalities all the more significant.
Stereotype Threat
I talk about stereotype in a few posts, including this post and this post.
So, we should also note the effect of the (false) "women are bad drivers" stereotype.
This study [12] found that inducing a stereotype threat "reduced [female driver's] state driving self-efficacy, and further increased mistakes in driving tasks" as compared to a control group.
This study [13] found that "women under stereotype threat ... doubled the number of mistakes" as compared to a control group. They also found the women believed they drove poorly in all conditions.
This study [14] found the same using a driving simulator.
This study [15] found "significant differences in how female drivers were evaluated ... in groups where stereotypes were emphasized or countered ... [but not] in the group where stereotypes were neutralized."
So, not only are women already better drivers than men, we would be even better if society stopped perpetuating this stereotype.
References below the cut:
Abby Wambach for the ESPN Body Issue.
I love these photos. I love these photos because itâs the first time I can think of when I havenât had to see a female athlete be overly sexualized and objectified. Sheâs naked, yes thatâs the point of the issue (and the men are just as nude), but sheâs powerful. Sheâs athletic and strong in both of these photos.
They just make me happy, okay?
This is like, Classical Greek Olympian style. Less, âHurrrrr, sheâs nekkidâ and more âHOLY SHIT LOOK AT HOW AWESOMELY BADASS HER BODY IS GODDAMNâ.
I like it.
I had to have a closer look to realize the photos were of a female athlete, because of how non-sexual they are. Absolutely stunning!
@corporate-terf
Gisèle Pelicot became a symbol of courage when she waived her anonymity to attend the trial of her husband and 50 other men accused of rapin
There is no collective noun for rapists but spend a week at the Pelicot trial and you wonder why. As the early morning queue of women whoâve come to support Gisèle Pelicot passes through security at the Palais de Justice, Avignon, you spy men with downturned faces scurrying across the lobby past the press. In court they sit on the left, clustered around a glass box containing more men, those in custody for the gravest crimes. Since there are 50 in total, the alleged rapists have been tried in batches and Iâm just here for the final seven: Boris, Philippe, Nicolas, Nizair, Joseph, Christian, Charly.
Plus Dominique Pelicot himself, who invited them all into his marital bedroom, where he had his wife waiting, drugged and naked, and who joined in and filmed it all. Pelicot, 71, crumpled and fat now, but with a residual bulky power, sits sullenly alone with his guard in a separate glass box, protected from the other men who blame and detest him. Often after lunch he appears to doze off.
Such nondescript men. Grizzled, middle-aged (the mean is 47 years old), smart-casual in windcheaters or leather jackets and their best trainers, like minicab drivers waiting for fares. Ordinary men in many respects, not vagrants, junkies or career criminals. This weekâs seven includes a fireman, an electrician and a journalist; several are fathers, two were keen weightlifters, one bred dogs. French trials helpfully begin with a personality profile formed from interviews with the men, their friends and colleagues. Poverty, domestic violence and mental breakdowns feature, but also that a man is âkindâ or âgentleâ, had a lovely childhood, adored his grandparents or is devoted to his mum.
Yet each one had sex with an unconscious woman, that is beyond doubt, thanks to Pelicotâs camera mounted on a tripod beside the bed, and by his own admission. âI am a rapist,â he has declared, âlike the others in this room.â
From the Pelicot affair have come demands for reform to French rape law, for sexual violence to be treated more seriously, for an investigation into âchemical submissionâ â the coercive use of sedatives. But one question overshadows all others. How many men would have done the same? If Pelicot could recruit at least 70 willing participants (a number could not be identified) within a 25-mile radius of Mazan, the Provençal town where the couple retired, how many in the whole of France? As I walk through Avignon with Juliette Campion of radio station France Info, who bears the strain of reporting this case since September, she gestures to a bureau de tabac: âYou think, âWould a guy in there have raped Gisèle? Or men in the boulangerie or those on the street?â Women are looking at men differently: theyâre asking, âCould you or you or you?â â
On the right of the court, behind her counsel of three serious, dark-haired young men, is Gisèle Pelicot with her female companion from victim support, leaning on the wall, as far from the men as the room allows, but facing her ex-husband. Her composure is remarkable. Although clearly tired and strained, she retains a quiet vivacity reflected in her clothes. Instead of shrinking away in black, she dresses each day as if meeting friends for drinks on a sunny terrace. A chic scarf, a faux fur bag, patent leather boots. Clothes that say, âI still have a life.â Every evening, when women line up to clap her out of court, she speaks to them warmly, neither reticent nor relishing the attention. Every day she walks through the cobbled streets past graffiti saying, âGisèle, les femmes te remercientâ (Gisèle, women thank you) to lunch at the same excellent brasserie, and people turn to gaze at her in awe.
The extraordinary woman who refused to be silenced
The humiliations of Gisèle Pelicot have a mythic quality. This is a woman who discovered the man she married aged 20, with whom she had three children and seven grandchildren, waited until she was deeply asleep before removing her pyjamas, dressing her in âsexyâ underwear or writing on her buttocks, âI am a good submissive bitch,â then he let a stranger penetrate her inert body, filmed it, washed her intimately and replaced her pyjamas. This is a woman who thought she was going insane, had Alzheimerâs or a brain tumour, whose children thought she was dying, who stopped driving and going out alone, who slept all day and once woke puzzled why her hair was shorter. âBut madame,â said her hairdresser, âyou came in yesterday.â This is a woman who had mysterious gynaecological problems, including a swollen cervix (and still lives with four STDs), who thought her husband wonderful for accompanying her to medical tests, including an MRI.
This is a woman who, when her husband was arrested for âupskirtingâ in a Leclerc supermarket and police found the contents of his phone, discovered her whole 50-year marriage was a travesty, that heâd raped her in a service station car park, on Valentineâs Day and on her 66th birthday, and may have raped their daughter too. This is a woman who has listened to legal arguments about whether a man put his tongue inside or merely kissed her vagina, who heard another man say heâd only returned to rape her a second time because he couldnât find anyone better, who sits in a courtroom while three giant TV screens show clips of her body being coldly humped by yet another âordinaryâ guy.
Yet this is a woman who gathered up every scrap of her humiliation and with it constructed a mirror that she holds up defiantly to the court and to French society itself. âShame must change sides,â she said, and in insisting the entire trial be conducted openly, that the worst men can do to women is witnessed by the whole world, she has done exactly that.
I ask many women I meet in Avignon how men in their lives regard the accused. They say they call them losers and freaks, that these are men on the margins, with no relation to themselves. But, along with the testimony I hear, the people I talk to believe this case raises many questions about French sexual mores. Whatever the decision later this month by five judges â there is no jury â Gisèle Pelicot will never be forgotten.
The court turns to Christian L, a fireman with a straggly castaway beard, who speaks from the glass box because after he was arrested, police found 4,000 child sex abuse and zoophilic images on his hard drive. We hear from his girlfriend, Sylvie, a small blonde in a grey hoodie, who says heâs a wonderful man, and is suspected of destroying evidence. Christian L recalls the victims he watched die in fires, the coffins of 11 colleagues he carried, the mental breakdowns that ensued. He was married but after his two daughters were born says he went off sex with his wife and turned to libertinisme. Strange, I think, that the French have coined this noble, philosophical concept, with its whiff of the barricades, to describe what we call swinging or dogging.
Like all the men, Christian met Pelicot through coco.fr â the murky, unmoderated site since closed down and now the focus of many major police investigations â on a forum called à son insu (without her knowledge). Christian L had already enjoyed âSleeping Beautyâ encounters with ten other couples. He spells out the rules: that you only dealt with the husband, sending him photos for approval, and during the sexual encounter he ran the show. Sometimes the wife woke up, other times not. How did he know, asked Gisèleâs lawyer, StĂŠphane Babonneau, that she consented?
âIn a libertine encounter,â Christian L explained, âit is the husbandâs responsibility to ensure consent.â
But how could you be sure?
âAre we expected to sign a contract?â Christian L spluttered.
âYou could ask the woman,â Babonneau suggested.
How the case could change French law
Given the overwhelming video evidence, the defendants can only claim Pelicot deceived or drugged them, or they believed Gisèle was collaborating in a game. If this case were before a British court, rape would be decided by two tests: whether Gisèle had âcapacity to consentâ (tough to argue given Pelicot admits to drugging her) and whether the men had âreasonable beliefâ in her consent. Unlike most European countries, French rape law has no concept of consent. Rather, it is defined as penetration âby violence, constraint, threat or surpriseâ. (The prosecution case rests on a convoluted definition of surprise.)
But rather than demand consent be added to the law, French feminists are divided. Some agree with President Macron, who supports change; many others argue that consent would put the onus on the victim to prove her conduct was not an invitation. This seems an odd objection, especially as the whole purpose of the video evidence is to show no one could believe Gisèle capable of consent, given she was so lifeless one man asked Pelicot, âIs your wife dead?â
Alice GĂŠraud is the author of Sambre, an investigation into how, due to the indifference and cruelty of police, a caretaker called Dino Scala in northern France managed to rape 54 women over a period of 30 years. âThe Pelicot case with 50 defendants and one victim feels a strange inverse of Sambre.â
GĂŠraud believes the Pelicot affair could provide the same impetus for change as a famous 1974 case of two Belgian tourists, Anne-Marie Tonglet and Aracelli Castellano, who, camping near Marseilles, were brutally raped by three local men. As was normal practice, the crime was downgraded from felony to misdemeanour on the basis the victims eventually stopped resisting. But the women, a lesbian couple, persisted and thanks to their feminist lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, it became the first rape case to be heard in the higher assizes court. Like Gisèle Pelicot, the women waived their anonymity. âWe believe that itâs one thing for a man to rape,â said Halimi, âand another to know itâll get around his village, his work, the papers.â Shame changed sides: the men were jailed and the French criminal code was rewritten defining rape as a serious offence.
For GĂŠraud, the greatest current injustice is that whether a man has raped one women or 50, the maximum sentence is 20 years (here a serial rapist can be jailed for life). âThis is law made by men,â she says, âwith a grave lack of knowledge of rape culture.â She is scornful too about libertinisme as a universal excuse for male sexual exploitation. âLibertinisme was why Coco existed for so long,â she says. âIt is the justification for prostitution, for the porn industry.â
Charly A is the youngest of all the defendants, just 22 when he first entered the Pelicot house. Small, bearded, now 30, we learn his childhood was chaotic, his father an alcoholic, his mother had many sexual partners; there are hints of abuse. âThis is a family of secrets,â concludes the personality profiler. A psychiatrist adds he is immature, struggles to sustain relationships and instead consumes porn, âespecially the Milf [Mother Iâd like to f***] category with mature womenâ. In 2016, he made contact with Pelicot via Coco: âHe said his wife would be lying there pretending to be asleep, he doesnât tell me more.â
Over time Pelicot asks Charly if he knows anyone they could drug for sex and he proffers the only woman in his life â his own mother. Pelicot gives him pills (which Charly claims to have thrown away), shows him how to crush them, keeps pressing him to use them. âWhen can I come and we f*** your mother?â he asks in one video, but Charly keeps stalling, saying his brother is at home. Yet he returns to violate Gisèle, always with Pelicot, once with another man, a total of six times. âDid you feel like you were in a porn film?â asks Babonneau. Charly shakes his head.
Until this point, very late in the trial, the influence of internet pornography has barely been explored. The court only notes paedophiliac images, not ânormalâ usage. Yet Mathieu Lacambre, a psychiatrist who evaluates Charly A, remarks how porn sites not only push users to more extreme content but to enact porn fantasies in real life. âUntil now Charly A was behind the screens,â he says. âNow [in Gisèle] he has an object served up on a platter a few miles from home. The sleeping princess Milf, voilĂ .â
A rented home in a quiet cul-de-sac
I drive out to Mazan, a lovely honey-stoned French village set in the vineyards below Mont Ventoux, where the Pelicots retired from Villiers-sur-Marne, a Paris commuter town where he was electrician and she was a manager at EDF. I imagine Gisèle browsing the little boutique, dropping into the beauty salon, sipping an aperitif outside the bistro. The home they rented for ten years is five minutes away in a quiet cul-de-sac of four houses behind tall cypress trees. It is lemon yellow with blue shutters, a pool, a very prominent alarm system, and new tenants. Given how many men knew her address, Gisèle fled four years ago for her own safety, with just a suitcase and her dog.
Today an immense cloud of migrating starlings swoops over the house like pixels in a photograph. This was where their grandchildren loved to visit in the summer, but also the centre of Dominique Pelicotâs porn operation. For what else was this grotesque man but a pornographic auteur?
We leave our car, just as Pelicot instructed the men, in the sports ground car park, by the bottle bank. I think of them texting their arrival, then creeping down the lane. (One man made his girlfriend wait in the car.) Pelicot would meet them at the door by the light of his phone, tell them to undress in the dark living room and warm their hands on a radiator. (Theyâd been instructed to be clean, not smell of cigarettes or wear cologne.) Then they were led into a bedroom with a TV, a chest of drawers, a bed with a naked Gisèle motionless on white sheets, and a mounted camera.
Whatever followed next was carefully orchestrated by Pelicot, a director urging on actors in stage whispers, since the objective was to do what they desired without waking Gisèle. Pelicot would tell them how and when to penetrate her, or hold his wifeâs gaping mouth to facilitate oral sex. Given four Temesta (lorazepam), a powerful anti-anxiety drug heâd crushed into her wine or ice cream, his wife was like a patient on an operating table. Even so, if her arm gave an involuntary spasm,the men would scuttle from the room. A friend who has sat through many court videos says it was Pelicot ordering the humping men to go doucement â softly â that upset her, since she knew this was not out of tenderness for Gisèle.
All the while the camera rolled. Why did these men agree to have their crimes recorded? They say it was part of the deal, that Pelicot told them Gisèle was shy and liked to watch the sex later. But perhaps also because, in taking part, these men were promoted from porn consumers to creators. Filming was central to their fantasy. When Christian L finally climaxes he turns to give the camera a cheery thumbs-up.
For Pelicot, each film added to his oeuvre. Police discovered a carefully curated archive of 20,000 images and videos on hard drives and memory sticks showing 200 rapes. He gave each film a title like âSquirt on the assâ, âCock in mouthâ or âJacques fingeringâ. This man, once caught by his daughter-in-law masturbating at his computer, was now a porn impresario.
The question at the centre of the case
Why did Pelicot do all this to a wife he professed to love, whom he called âa saintâ? Was it to punish Gisèle for an affair early in their marriage (although he was serially unfaithful himself)? Or because when heâd asked her to join him in the libertinisme scene sheâd refused â so he devised a way to make her. But Gisèle was not his first victim: Pelicot has admitted to the rape of an estate agent, using ether to drug her, in 1999, and will be tried for the rape/murder of another young estate agent, Sophie Narme, in 1991. The French police cold case bureau is investigating his possible links to many other unsolved crimes.
But as the âWithout her knowledgeâ forum suggests, his was not a unique fantasy. The Pelicot case has illuminated the issue of âchemical submissionâ, not only drinks being spiked by strangers in bars, but drugs used to control partners within relationships. The French health service is noted for being blasĂŠ about prescribing heavy-duty medications, which is how Pelicot stockpiled his vast stash of Temesta.
Documentary-maker Linda Bendali has made a film for French TV about chemical submission, featuring seven cases, including a 13-year-old girl drugged by her father with medicine supposedly for her allergies, put in lingerie and raped over two years, and a 60-year-old woman drugged then raped at home by a man she was mentoring at work. âIâve looked back at 30 years of press reports of rape,â says Bendali, âwhich includes dozens of women saying they woke up â mainly with men they knowâ unable to remember what happened.â
The Sleeping Beauty scenario, she says, is not merely a means for a man to get easy sexual access, but a way to enjoy absolute domination. âYou are not even giving her the chance to consent,â says Bendali. âYou can do anything you want to a drugged woman, for as long as you want. You can dress her how you want. These men want total power.â Pelicot is typical in filming his crimes: âPictures are trophies. He was driven by a mix of desires for blackmail and voyeurism.â
Gisèleâs daughter, Caroline Darian, who was also drugged and photographed naked by her father, is heading a campaign on chemical submission, demanding police take samples of hair from rape victims, the only way sedation can be proved.
In court, I hear another psychiatrist tasked with assessing whether each of the final seven defendants has the profile of a sexual abuser. One by one, he exonerates the men, saying they are not dangerous or likely to reoffend, to the growing exasperation of Gisèleâs team. Then he reaches Charly A. âHe doesnât search [for victims] systematically,â says the psychiatrist. âHeâs not a predator.â Finally, Babonneau explodes: âSix times with a sleeping woman and heâs not a sexual abuser?â The men do not identify as rapists because, like this psychiatrist, they define rape as frenzied sexual violence, not an opportunistic act performed to whispers in a private home. As one defendant put it, âItâs her husband, his house, his room, his bed, his wife.â
Women unite in the town of Mazan
Both in religious and political terms, Mazan is a conservative town: for 500 years it was part of a papal enclave and in the recent French election voted heavily for Marine Le Pen. Villagers regarded the Pelicot case with horror and sympathy which turned quickly to resentment when press named it lâaffaire Mazan. Amid longstanding families whoâve known each other for generations, the Pelicots were outsiders whoâd brought disgrace into a rural community. Tired of inquiries, the mayor, Louis Bonnet, 74, told the BBC, âIt could have been far more serious. There were no kids involved. No women were killed.â
At the Lucky Horse Ranch outside Mazan, women victims of sexual violence receive equine therapy. Iâm sceptical at first about how grooming and riding horses could help rape victims, but somehow these large, placid animals are calming and restorative. Here I meet Latika, 33, who at first was too timid to touch a Shetland pony, but now sits high on a saddle for our photograph.
Latika was separating from her husband, the father of her two children, but still sharing a house. He was violent, hitting her daughters, putting her in hospital with cuts and a broken rib. Two years after theyâd last had sex, she woke to find him inside her. She believes the sweet tea he often gave her was laced with sedatives, but that night she hadnât drunk it all. She realised heâd been drugging her for years â her mother recalls finding her deeply unconscious early in her relationship â and, worse, she was pregnant with a third child. She told the police, who addressed the domestic violence but ignored the rape. Her husband fled to Guadeloupe and she was left traumatised, fearful of leaving the house.
âI didnât feel people really believed what had happened to me until Gisèle Pelicot spoke out,â says Latika, who has since made the police reopen her case. In October, as women across France holding white flowers protested in support of Gisèle, Latika headed the local march into Mazan and the next day Gisèle herself visited the ranch. âShe said it is almost unbearable to return to this place where terrible things happened,â says Latika, âbut she wanted to thank us. She told me, âI didnât know the meaning of my life before this happened â but I do now.â â
Watching Gisèle take such sustenance from her supporters, you wonder how she will cope when the trial finally ends. She is writing a book and could, if she chose, become a global campaigner. âThere is something particularly powerful,â says Linda Bendali, âabout her being an older woman â she represents all our mothers. All generations identify with her.â But those close to Gisèle say that, at 72, she may just return to a quiet life of friends, grandchildren and her garden, in the secret location where she now lives.
But she is already an icon of courage for the women who come from across France and beyond just to watch the trial on a screen in an overspill room. Some want to witness history, a few enjoy the sensational evidence like tricoteuses at the guillotine, but many have risen at 5am, taking a day off work, to support a woman they deeply admire. Marion Spiteri and AmĂŠlie Planche, both 24 and law graduates, feel the case opened their eyes. âHow can it be,â Spiteri says, âthat so many men did this without her consent?â âIt is terrifying,â Planche adds, âthat a woman cannot even trust her own husband.â They tell me, astonishingly, that neither they nor their friends ever go to the toilet in a bar or club alone.
But then the nation of libertinisme lags behind in its attitude to violence against women. Until 2021, France did not even have an age of consent, effectively decriminalising even incestuous relations between children and adults, allowing several high-profile child abusers, including firemen who groomed a 13-year-old girl, to evade rape charges. Each time a prominent Frenchman is accused of rape â whether politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn or, currently, actor Gerard DĂŠpardieu â famous French actresses leap to defend him. This is the nation that convicted child rapist Roman Polanski fled to from America, and is still fĂŞted. The #MeToo movement was regarded by many as a wave of Anglosphere prudishness, contrary to the spirit of French seduction. So what can the Pelicot trial achieve?
I meet feminists from Les Amazones dâAvignon, the creators of graffiti across the city supporting Gisèle. (So as not to spoil the city walls, they write slogans on paper that can be removed.) Their latest reads â20 ans pour chacunâ â 20 years for each one. I suggest a drink in a cafĂŠ nearby: âNot in there,â says one Amazone, âthatâs where all the rapists go.â Blandine Deverlanges, 56, is part of the Coalition FĂŠministe Loi IntĂŠgrale putting 130 proposals about sexual violence before the French parliament, including a ban on lawyers harassing victims in court. They are disgusted the defence asked Gisèle why she swam naked in her own swimming pool.
âThis is a trial,â says Deverlanges, âof one extraordinary man, the monster Pelicot, and many ordinary men.â And as we talk I see a group of them emerge nervously from their favoured cafĂŠ and head back to the court. A collective noun for rapists? A violation, a banality, a shame.
âitâs another culture, be respectfulâ idgaf đ if itâs oppressive to women, itâs a problem, i donât care if itâs ur customs. girls having to cover themselves, not being allowed to go to school, being violated, not being allowed to be heard, literally being all around disrespected but you expect me to just be cool about it because âitâs cultureâ.
women do not deserve to be treated as lesser than in the name of anything. idc if itâs your religion, i donât care if itâs tradition, itâs a bunch of bullshit.

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Sooooo as someone going into fields that contain biology I think it's time we talk about how we see it from a fully male perspective. It's gotten to the point for me that I cannot listen to men talk biology, specifically reproduction. When we talk about male competition, we talk about it as "the right to mate". However this sees reproduction as a sentient, default specimen (male) doing to the secondary, inanimate vessel (female). In reality males fight for the CHANCE to win female attention. Females will forever be more selective sexually in the majority of animals. This is because females expend more energy in reproduction (the simple fact eggs are the larger gamete). Even in most fish, where care is commonly paternal, you will find heavy selection on the female side. Females are not fought over like an object to earn or "inseminate" the pure attention we give is what's fought over. Females almost always control their species. Look at tiger endlers. It may seem like the males harass females, but females actually CHOOSE exactly which sperm they concieve with and retain sperm for up to a year (trust me I have SEEN it myself). There's also this notion that males are all about genetics while female is about love or is about being a vessel. That's laughable. Females want their genetics to succeed just as much as males. They just dont have to fight as much because they have the limited gamete, its not a competition to be chosen when the other sex is unlimited. And the way we talk about paternal vs maternal. Paternal animals are all about "self preservation" but maternal animals are robots to their love. Dont get me started on how people act when I tell them my betta males do the incubating. We like to see it as a male competing to spread his genes and not a female choosing to complete her genes with the perfect individual. Every time someone tries to symbolize sex this shit comes into play. Male is the default that uses female as his tool. Be it describing it as penetration, fertilization, and much more. On the topic of "fertilization" did you know that the egg chooses the sperm? Did you know eggs are more complex than sperm? Did you know that eggs are not infertile without a sperm they just arent a embryo? We see female as defined by male, made valueable by male. A vessel filled by male. I think it's time for females to realize that nature is actually quite female centered. Hopefully as we get more women in this field, that will change. Because right now I'm starting to learn that a lot of science is worded in a way so males can cope with actually being quite lesser than females and at our disposal.
Edit: thanks for all the attention everyone! I've always wanted a space I could talk about this sort of thing. Glad to know I'm not alone on this. Trying to be in this field as a feminist can be insufferable
radfem youtubers
a list of small radfem/lesbian/feminist adjacent & anti sw youtubers/content creators, rb with additions if you have more!:
đŚ Grace Adetoro (african radfem commentator/video responses)
đ¤ feminist vhs archive (a hidden gem, old 80s-90s feminist content reuploader, andrea dworkin & radfem/edits memes!)
đŚ Elly Arrow (focuses on anti porn/prostitution content, video essays, commentary)
omg there used to be another version of this ages ago that I'd saved and the link stopped working, so I'd posted a few months back asking if anyone had it and nobody did. SO glad to stumble across this!