It is reported that:
‘Over a period of nine years, from July 2011 to October 2020, Dominique Pelicot, a man from Mazan in south-eastern France, repeatedly drugged his wife, raped her, and invited strangers to rape her while she was unconscious. Gisèle Pelicot, who was unaware of the abuse being perpetrated against her, was raped 92 times by 72 men while her husband filmed them’.1
But what if Pelicot had been Muslim? We would have had an immediate Western analysis of the dreadful nature of Muslim culture. Already in the UK, there had been tropes suggesting that rape was peculiar to Muslim cultures. (see the question ‘For future discussions and potential programme-making we would like to investigate reports that 60% of males in prison convicted of rape are Muslims.‘2 It was utterly untrue.)
However, the Pelicot event has happened in the depth of Western culture and society, but there is no reflection on this fact. Wherever and whenever such appalling behaviour is discovered in the West, it is claimed to be a symptom of a universal malaise.
The most glaring hypocrisy has been from parts of the Western women’s movement. They manage to interpret this behaviour, without a second thought, as merely a reflection of men’s behaviour towards women at all times in all places. Misogyny becomes a universal phenomenon that needs no scrutiny to discover whether its roots have anything specifically European about it so that we can at least describe a ‘western style misogyny’. Dali Gebrial exhibits this in spades3. Her friend Helena commits near defamation by associating groups of people she dislikes as complicit in these events with absolutely no evidence. Her suggestion that this was an example of the exhibition of power is breathtaking. Having to drug someone to get one’s way is not evidence of power. Power would be exhibited when the person uses their position to obtain ‘apparent consent’.
What should be borne in mind here is the deep racism exhibited by these women and also men who support this presentation. They are saying all the evils of the world were universal in place and time until the Western women’s movement in the West started a change movement. According to this point of view, there cannot have been any ancient society that gave women equal rights to property, legal personality, and a right to divorce at will. Such rights were only created by the modern Western women’s movement. Not only is there no truth to this claim as African women in ancient Egypt had right to property, legal personality and right to divorce at will. But also this was at a time when in ancient Greece women could not own property , had no legal personality and had no marriage rights.
As Janet Johnson states:
‘But in the legal arena both women and men could act on their own and were responsible for their own actions. This is in sharp contrast with some other ancient societies, e.g., ancient Greece, where women did not have their own legal identity, were not allowed to own (real) property and, in order to participate in the legal system, always had to work through a male, usually their closest male relative (father, brother, husband, son) who was called their “lord.” Egyptian women were able to acquire, to own, and to dispose of property (both real and personal) in their own name. They could enter into contracts in their own name; they could initiate civil court cases and could, likewise, be sued; they could serve as witnesses in court cases; they could serve on juries; and they could witness legal documents. ‘4
But more important than the above, if possible, is to compare these modern Western women’s statements with the fact that currently, there is a genocide going on in Gaza, that sexual slavery of women was rampant in the US Old South, that it was reported that there were almost zero rape cases against a White man by a Black woman in New York, that towards a million Ukrainian men have died in the Ukrainian conflict, yet in spite of all this ‘violence against women’ must be brought to an end? If violence against women can be brought to an end, why cannot war, human trafficking, and racial oppression also be brought to an end? Another point of view might be that we are dealing with the evil in human nature, and the idea of eradicating it is usually a prelude, taken historically, to the outbreak of another form of human atrocity. While we might agree that we must all fight against evil, to suggest that one form of evil, violence against women, has a higher status than another, genocide, might appear as a first step to denying the atrocity going on in Gaza or at least make it play second fiddle.
This denial that these events have anything to do with Western society and culture is not only breathtaking but morally defunct.
We end where we started with the question: what if Pelicot had been a Muslim?
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazan_rapes ; ↩︎
- Freedom of Information Request, UK Ministry of Justice – 91212 June 2014 ‘As at 31 March 2014, the latest point in time for which data is available for public use, the male prison population in England and Wales for all offenders serving immediate custodial sentence for rape was 5,682. Of this, there were 676 offenders who self-declared their religion as Muslim (12% of the total) ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXamcV4ntkM&t=932s ↩︎
- https://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/1/777777190170 ↩︎