There are some days when I read the news and all I can think is: What is wrong with men?
There have been a lot of those days lately. A flurry of recent headlines include lawsuits against the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs for a plethora of alleged sex crimes, the arrest of former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries on sex trafficking charges, and a grotesque trial in France in which a husband spent years drugging his wife and inviting dozens of men to rape her. What’s particularly stunning about all of these cases is that they don’t just involve a single sociopath or abuser; they involve dozens if not hundreds of rapists and abusers—and more still who knew what was happening and did nothing to stop it. This is not a problem of a few bad apples. This is pervasive, systemic sexual abuse.
The allegations against Combs are wide-ranging—according to federal prosecutors, Combs “abused, threatened, and coerced women and others, and led a racketeering conspiracy that engaged in sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice, among other crimes.” A federal indictment alleges that Combs held “freak-offs” in which he would force or coerce women “to engage in frequent, days-long sexual activity with male commercial sex workers” in “elaborate sex performances that Combs arranged, directed, and often electronically recorded.” He would then use those recordings to threaten victims into continued compliance, and would physically abuse them as well.
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More than a dozen people have brought lawsuits against him in both civil and criminal courts, largely for rape and other acts of sexual violence. (Combs continues to deny the charges and accusations.) Many—mostly women, but some men, too—said they were minors when the assaults occurred; many allege other men partook.
On the other side of the Atlantic there is Dominique Pélicot, who spent nearly a decade drugging and then raping his wife—and soliciting other men to do the same, while he filmed the attacks. Gisèle Pelicot, 71, has become a feminist hero in France and around the world for her refusal to remain anonymous during her husband’s trial, insisting (rightly) that any shame falls on him, not her.
Her husband has admitted what he did. Many of the other accused men—50 are on trial—have not. Instead, they insist that they were tricked by Dominique; that they were told the sex was consensual and she was only pretending to be asleep. Some suggested that they didn‘t believe it could be rape because of Dominique’s involvement. “She’s his wife,” one of the men said. “He can do whatever he wants with her.”
We’re talking about at least 50 men who had sex with a woman who never offered her consent or even any indication that she was conscious. One has to ask: What, exactly, is pleasurable about sex with someone who is limp and unresponsive? What is it that these men—these many, many men—were actually enjoying?
Because it’s not really sex. It’s treating a woman’s body as a malleable object of male pleasure, and not seeing her as an actual human being.
The law must have hard lines, and forcing oneself on an unconscious person should be one of them. It is worth noting, though, that US law does not always draw such should-be-obvious boundaries. Courts, for example, have overturned rape convictions because rape victims got drunk voluntarily, even if they didn’t have sex voluntarily. Many Americans believe that marital rape isn’t possible. During Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run, for example, allegations that he raped his first wife resurfaced. In response, his then-lawyer Michael Cohen told The Daily Beast that “by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”
Cohen was wrong: You absolutely can rape your spouse, and some men do. The act is illegal, but it wasn’t outlawed in all 50 states until the 1990s, and there are still loopholes, including ones that essentially allow people to rape their partners if those partners are drunk, drugged, or otherwise incapacitated.
France is hardly any better. Despite widespread public perception (or stereotyping) that the French are sexually liberated sophisticates, French feminists have repeatedly pointed out that this sexual freedom has largely been male sexual freedom. When the #MeToo movement hit the country, prominent men and women alike tarred it as a moral panic wrought by prudish scolds intent on clamping down on natural human behavior.
Many women, I suspect, have encountered men like this in the bedroom. Many women have certainly had sex that feels awful with men who are indifferent to their cues or who bulldoze their requests. Many women have had sex with men whose actions make them question where the line is between “bad sex” and assault.
I find it outrageous that the world knows Gisèle Pelicot’s name, but not those of the men who raped her. As defense lawyers cross-examined Gisèle, they displayed explicit photographs; according to reporting in The New York Times, “Most showed a woman’s intimate body parts, at times with a protruding sex toy. Some showed Ms. Pelicot’s face, her eyes open.” These same lawyers then fought against showing footage of their clients—the Times quotes one lawyer arguing that doing so, “would impugn the dignity of the men involved.”
All of these men—those who raped Gisèle, those who raped or otherwise abused women, girls, boys, and men at Combs’ or Abercrombie CEO Jeffries’ behest, those who knew and said nothing—should very much have their dignity impugned.
And frankly, so should the broader public. While the Pelicot case has dominated French media, the cases against Combs have received comparatively muted coverage in the US. (So seems to be the case with the new revelations about A&F’s Jeffries.) It’s difficult to know why. Is it because the #MeToo momentum has passed? Because Combs’s victims are mostly Black? Because we’ve now been so inundated with so many stories of depraved men that even this one, repellant and sprawling, fails to stand out?
Or is the reason something darker? Perhaps there is a subconscious understanding that it would simply be unbearable to accept the reality that so many men—men we know, men we trust, maybe even men we love—are capable of this kind of behavior.
Perhaps we don’t really want to reckon with the nightmarish reality that there are scores of men out there who date, marry, raise, and claim to love women, but who deep down don’t actually believe that women are anything more than objects built to inflate their egos, absorb deliberate degradation, and withstand infinite sadism.
