Last year I threw a party when I was leaving New York for a few months, after which a female acquaintance remarked, “I knew you were going to be a useful friend to have in the city because your party was 80 per cent men.” Partly this was because I initially got to know New York through dating and staying friends with a lot of the guys who it didn’t work out with, some of them only brief little flares of friendship, a handful becoming core platonic loves of my life, people who I am incredibly close with half a decade on from our failed watery martini flirtation.
But even aside from dating I have always had more male friends than women, and I have always not much liked this about myself. I was never a woman or girl who prided herself on this, or bragged about being one of the boys. If anything, I felt vaguely ashamed about it, afraid that it indicated an unspecified personal failing. It isn’t, to be clear, that I have no women friends. My best friend in the world is a woman, as are a decent proportion of my inner circle. But I’ve always had a disproportionately weighted gender disparity in my life towards men and always felt uneasy about it.
This is ironic because for the past ten years or so as I have written occasionally about gendered violence, there has been a chorus of responses accusing me of hating men. In my own case that always seemed completely farcical; my politics are if anything compromised by a personal weakness for men. Yet I am also aware in hindsight of a kind of crass, misandrist linguistic and cultural tendency that was prevalent in the past decade and that I was not innocent of. It was not materially substantial, nor did it approach the actual social evil of misogyny but it was often childish and unhelpful – the rhetorical equivalent of glittery “Kill All Men” notebooks.
And, leery of the inadequacy of such reductive renditions of more complex feminist thought, I have tried to be less imprecise in my language around male violence and denouncing it. There are crimes, however, whose horror is so total and so apparently indicative of a broader hatred of women that one can’t help but see them as beyond individual action. A crime such as the mass rape case being tried in Mazan, a sleepy medieval town in France, where Dominique Pelicot has admitted to drugging his wife Gisele over a period of ten years into a state of unconsciousness and inviting men to rape her. He videoed the crimes – partially for sexual gratification and partially for insurance over the men – which allowed more than 50 of them to be identified and put on trial alongside Pelicot himself. Gisele Pelicot waived her right to anonymity so that the perpetrators too could be named, in an astonishing act of bravery that has, it seems, fundamentally rocked France, which has been slow or sometimes aggressively opposed to addressing its regressive sexual mores.
There are many layers to the unspeakable horror of this case. There is the longevity of the predation, and the fact it was only halted after 71-year-old Dominique Pelicot was caught trying to film up the skirts of women in a supermarket. How long would it have gone on otherwise? Would Gisele have been violated until the end of her life, suffering mysterious ailments and blackouts and feeling divorced from her own physicality but never knowing why? Then there is the reaction to it: the mayor of Mazan suggested that Gisele Pelicot’s lack of memory makes the experience more palatable than other, “even more serious” rapes. But I think what most women are most justifiably frightened and disgusted by here is the number of the men who were eager to participate in the brutality.
Remember that we are not talking about a major city here. In a fairly small population, more than 80 men of various professions, and in all age brackets, were happy to rape a woman on camera. How much more banal, more ordinary, can misogyny get than that? This trial followed other acts of femicide so outlandishly barbaric they genuinely seem to me like horror films, too extreme and ugly to be real: the Ugandan Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei, set on fire and murdered by her boyfriend; the former Miss Switzerland Kristina Joksimovic who was killed and then dismembered by her husband, parts of her body put inside a blender. These actions go beyond the wish to end someone’s life – they announce with theatricality the wish to punish the woman for existing at all.
When thinking about the Pelicot case, I mentioned it to a few male friends who asked what I was working on at the moment. None of them had heard of it, which struck me as odd because it had felt inescapable in my world, a thing tearing at the fabric of something crucial. When I explained, briefly, what the circumstances were, my friends all said some variation on the same thing: “God, men are the worst, you must hate men.”
How to tell them that the profound sadness and anger I feel in such moments is not about hating men at all, but rather because I love men so much? I love men. I love my father’s resolute decency and dedication to the underdog and attendance of every funeral in town. I love the care and acceptance and the laughter of my male friends. I love my brothers’ fragilities so expertly concealed beneath horseplay and bravado. Part of why I love men so much is just that I love people so much and that men are sometimes less allowed to be people, to be vulnerable and open, and I find this moving. When monstrosities like the Pelicot case are revealed, the general love I feel seems suddenly, starkly absurd. I feel like I am in Rosemary’s Baby, looking around and realising I have been trusting and confiding in all the wrong people, not knowing who is conspiring and who isn’t. It is the uncanny feeling of men, the individuals, and men, the abstract threat, merging and not being able to tell which is which.
[See also: Progressive realism shouldn’t mean cheering a thuggish regime’s crimes]