Essay: What Does a Rapist Look Like?
Gisêle Pelicot, centre left, leaves the Avignon courthouse with her sons, David, left, Florian centre background, and her lawyer Stephane Babonneau, right, in Avignon, southern France, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP photo: Lewis Joly)
First published on October 29, 2024
tw: rape
What does a rapist look like?
One of the most harrowing rape scenes I’ve seen in a television show lasted just a few minutes. The rape of Dr. Melfi in The Sopranos was in the stairwell of a parking lot. We did not see what her rapist looked like and the anonymity, speed and efficiency with which he attacked her made his violence even more horrific.
The bruises on her face and her hypervigilance during a session with Tony made clear what a victim of rape looks like. But her rapist was anonymous perp in a stairwell.
We know what a victim/survivor looks like. A popular refrain to counter men’s violence–be it verbal sexual harassment or sexual assault–asks “What if it was your mother/sister/daughter?” It’s an appeal to men that’s meant to kick in their protective instinct. And it makes it easy to see that the victim can be any woman you know. She is everywoman.
We joke that men discover feminism when they have a daughter. But why do I need to establish my relation to a man in order to be safe from another man?
It’s an appeal to men’s sense of protection for their female relatives as a way of reminding them their victim is someone else’s mother/sister/daughter. We joke that men discover feminism when they have a daughter. But why do I need to establish my relation to a man in order to be safe from another man?
What we should be doing instead is remind everyone that a rapist could be your father/brother/son. That would make it easy to see that a rapist could be any man they know. He is everyman.
And that is what Gisèle Pelicot has done by insisting on a public trial for her now ex-husband Dominique and 50 men he invited to rape her after he had drugged her “almost to a state of coma.”
What we should be doing is remind everyone that a rapist could be your father/brother/son. That would make it easy to see that a rapist could be any man they know. He is everyman.
Dominique had no trouble finding those men online. Between 2011 and 2020 they came to rape his wife and he filmed them. Those men on trial are grandfathers, fathers, brothers, partners. In fact, one of them missed the birth of his child because he was raping Gisèle at the time.
Who chooses rape over being at the birth of his child?
Someone’s father, brother, husband.
Over the past seven weeks since the trial began, Giséle–who has attended the sessions–has taken the stand twice. She insisted on a public trial because, as one of her lawyers Stephane Babonneau said at the start of the trial, “Shame must change sides.”
What she is doing is rare and brave. The world would be a better place if victims/survivors of rape did not have to remain anyonymous because of the shame and stigma associated, still, with sexual assault. It is difficult enough to report rape, be taken seriously by the police, and then go through a trial. Feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman accurately likens the trial to being sexually assaulted again.
“The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men,” she writes in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.
Until that changes, we should hope, as Giséle said, that more victims/survivors of rape look to her as an inspiration, but we should not demand it.
“I wanted all woman victims of rape – not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels – I want those women to say: Mrs Pelicot did it, we can do it too, Giséle said. “When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.”
We should listen to her words carefully. We should accept them for the rare gift that they are–an awful, ugly, terrifying gift. A gift that forces us to sit–as she has over the past seven weeks of horrific evidence–in the horror wrought by her husband and the men—fathers/brothers/sons—he invited to rape her.
A rapist is not just “someone met in a car park late at night” but “can also be in the family, among our friends,” Giséle said.
As she heard the evidence against one of her rapists after another, Giséle connected the mother/sister/daughter to the father/brother/son/partner, moving the former from the foreground to the background, because shame must change sides.
“When I saw one of the accused on the stand last week, who came into my bedroom and house without consent,” she said. “This man, who came to rape an unconscious, 57-year-old woman – I am also a mother and grandmother ... I could have been his grandmother.”
We should listen to her words carefully. We should accept them for the rare gift that they are–an awful, ugly, terrifying gift. A gift that forces us to sit–as she has over the past seven weeks of horrific evidence–in the horror wrought by her husband and the men—fathers/brothers/sons—he invited to rape her.
The reality of rape beyond what films and television shows portray is far more horrific than that of the anonymous, efficient in his violence rapist of Dr. Melfi. The reality of rape, in the U.S. for example, is that 8 out of 10 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim, according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the U.S.
And the horror of knowing it is our fathers/brothers/sons/partner raping means a reckoning, long overdue, with how ordinary rapists are. As I write in every essay, it is in the interests of patriarchy and the ways it enables and protects male violence to portray rapists as monsters or psychopaths, rather than the ordinary men that they are.
The more men can distance themselves from the reality of what a rapist looks like, the more they benefit from the violence that patriarchy enables and protects. All men benefit from some men’s violence against women.
A rapist is not just “someone met in a car park late at night” but “can also be in the family, among our friends,” Giséle Pelicot
Whether any individual man has ever raped a woman is besides the point at this stage because such violence--enabled and protected by patriarchy--helps maintain a social construct (women’s fear of men, and subservience to them) that privileges all men.
They are beneficiaries of that violence because that violence upholds patriarchy. It is foundational to patriarchy.
Women’s fear of that violence demands her constant deference, to all men. Not all men might be rapists, but enough are to fuel women’s constant deference and fear.
The more men can distance themselves from the reality of what a rapist looks like, the more they benefit from the violence that patriarchy enables and protects. All men benefit from some men’s violence against women.
Reporting from the trial in Avignon for The Guardian, Angelique Chrisafis has done an outstanding job profiling many of the men accused of raping Giséle. It is chilling and horrifying to read how the men who readily accepted Dominique’s invitation to rape his drugged-out-of-her-mind wife were perfectly ordinary, aged between 26 and 74. They include a nurse, a journalist, a prison warden, a local councillor, a soldier, lorry drivers and farm workers.
They are not anonymous perp of the parking lot, pouncing on Dr. Melfi. It is chilling to read about their occupations and hobbies, mundane details that sharpen the horror of what they did. It is chilling to read that they are loved, that the women in their lives showed up to defend fathers/brothers/sons/partners.
Take Cyril B, 47, whose tearful older sister told the court: “It’s my brother, I love him. He’s not a mean person.” His partner insisted that he isn’t “macho” and that he had never forced her to do anything sexually that she wasn’t comfortable with.
Cyril B’s sister and partner were among the women–mothers, sisters, partners–who told the court–despite video evidence to the contrary–that their men were not capable of rape. Again, because it has been hammered into our minds that rapists are monsters, not the ordinary men we live with.
Just as shame must change sides, a shift must take place in the profile of the rapist that women are taught to fear and be wary of.
Take Patrice N,
“A longtime female friend, who worked as an education expert, told the court that Patrice N had always been a ‘teddy bear’, ‘wasn’t even a skirt-chaser’ and wasn’t the type to rape,” Angelique Chrisafis wrote. “A care-worker, who 16 months ago became Patrice N’s girlfriend despite knowing he was charged with rape in the Pelicot case, said: ‘He treats me like a princess.’”
Beyond her refusal to accept the shame that patriarchy hangs around the neck of rape victims, beyond her bravery on insisting on a public trial and sitting in a courtroom where she is traumatised again and again by evidence of her rapes by men who in their majority deny they raped her, despite video evidence, Giséle Pelicot’s biggest gift to us is the unmasking of what a rapist looks like.
Just as shame must change sides, a shift must take place in the profile of the rapist that women are taught to fear and be wary of.
The profile of a rapist is long overdue an update.
He is not the anonymous rapist of Dr. Melfi in a stairwell, efficient in his speed and violence, faceless, unknown.
He is somebody’s father/brother/son/partner. He is the face we see every day across from us at our breakfast table, next to us in our beds, sitting next to us on the couch watching television. He is Everyman.
And he will treat you like a princess.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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I bought Giséle Pélicot's book today. I expect that it will an upsetting read.