France has been rocked by the case for some time Giselle Pellicot, a woman who accused her ex-husband of drugging her for more than a decade, recruiting men to rape her over the Internet and filming it all. For her rape more than 50 men, aged from 26 to 74, were charged.
Dominic Pellico admitted that he drugged and raped her for more than ten years. He also admitted that he "offered" his wife on an online platform, while he himself filmed the rapes.
Although she has the right under French law to have the trial closed to the public, Giselle is decided to be public that "when other women wake up with no memory, they can remember Mrs. Pellico's testimony."
It is no surprise that this case caused a storm in the French media. On Wednesday, October 16, the famous French magazine Charlie Hebdo published a drawing linking the Pellicot case and the cinema premiere of the romantic drama "L'Amour Fou" (Beating Hearts) by director Gilles Lelouch.
Na drawing a woman, who represents Giselle Pellicot, is seen lying in bed. He seems to be sleeping. There are naked men standing in a row next to the bed, waiting to molest her. On the armchair in front of the bed, Dominique Pellico is shown, also naked, with a phone in his hand. Above is written "L'amour ouf" and below: "Film by Dominik Pelik".
The illustration caused stormy reactions on social networks.
"What were you thinking?"
Charlie Hebdo shared the drawing on social media, with a simple caption: "Today's drawing by #Felix."
However, internet users did not like the joke on such a sensitive topic.
“There are no words strong enough to describe the disgust I feel for you. "You must have sunk really low to survive through such disgusting drawings," wrote one of them.
Another reminded that in this case it is not about fiction, but about reality, with real victims.
"This is rubbish and completely inappropriate." It makes no sense except to insult the victims. Provocation, when done well, serves to raise awareness, not to play false revolutionaries. This is just pseudo-rebellion to make you look smart. Honestly, what were you thinking?” he asked.
Other users had similar reactions.
"Are you normal?" Don't you think she's going through enough horrible trauma? Do you really think something like this can be laughed at?'
The negative comments continued. If the goal was to condemn the events experienced by Giselle Pellicot, according to netizens, the magazine seriously failed.
It's not the first time
This is not the first time that Charlie Hebdo has published a drawing on the subject of the rape of Giselle Pellicot. On September 4, the magazine published a drawing linking President Emmanuel Macron's prime ministerial negotiations with the trial that rocked France. The picture showed the president of France, naked, camera in hand, filming a line of men waiting to rape Marianne, symbol of the French Republic. With a Phrygian cap on her head, she lies on a table.
"Consultations continue," read the drawing, which also did not go down well with the public.
"This is a horrible, disgusting caricature. I am appalled. This is rape culture, period. It is an attack on women in a broader sense, including Giselle Pellicot," said Blandine Deverlange, a member of the "Osez le Féminisme 84" association.
The page had 500.000 visitors per month
However, while the French public is appalled by the fact that Charlie Hebdo is making jokes about rape, the fact is that the page where Pellicot invited men to have sex with his wife "without her knowledge" had over 500.000 visitors a month last year. This begs the question: how normalized has rape culture become?
Many in France were surprised by the mere the number of men involved in the case. The police were able to identify only 50 suspects, out of the 83 who appear in Dominique Pellico's videos.
"I was even more shocked that so many men could do it - more than 50 'normal' men, all of whom lived nearby. Pellico didn't even have to look very far for them. It really scares me, because it is a reflection of the whole society. This is not the norm, but there are still too many of them," said Karolina, a 43-year-old doctor from Paris, in September, writes the BBC in Serbian.
A fireman, a painter, a journalist, a few businessmen... each week, as the trial progresses, a new group of ordinary men stumbles into the courtroom in Avignon and makes flimsy excuses: how they thought it was all consensual, that Giselle was in the loop, that she just pretended to sleep. However, as Dominique Pellicot testified, he told the men in advance not to use perfume or smoke for fear that Giselle would smell someone else's scent when she woke up.
As "The Spectator" writes, "these men understood exactly the importance of consent, which actually carried an erotic appeal to continue without it." The lack of consent is the point. And it's not the patriarchal structure that's to blame, but pornography."
Monetization of taboos
American author Mary Harrington recently wrote about the Pellico case and "the extent to which these horrific events are connected to and symbolic of the central operation of the porn industry - the monetization of taboo".
As Harrington explains, pornography, that whole big, growing, metastasizing industry worth a hundred billion dollars, is not so much about selling sex as it is about selling infractions. The dopamine hit that brings people back to their computers again and again is the result of breaking taboos, and because of this, a positive feedback loop occurs. When a taboo is normalized, it loses its power, which is why there is a need to find a new one. And some men chased that feeling until they ended up in a chat room with Dominic Pellico.
While the police arrested the abusers of Giselle Pellicot last year, a report was published in France that revealed that as much as 90 percent of online pornography depicts violence against women.
"Women are humiliated, objectified, dehumanized, assaulted, tortured, subjected to treatment that is contrary to both human dignity and French law... Women are real, sexual acts are real and violence is real. Suffering is often completely visible and at the same time eroticized," the report says.
