Radfems Respond: Lily Phillips and Giselle Pelicot (part 2)

“The men in Lily Phillips’ story are the same perpetrators as Gisèle Pelicot’s. Men who get both pleasure and stature by violating.”

Read Part 1  by Sharon Byrne→

Lierre Kieth, WoLF Founder and Special Envoy:

The story of Gisèle Pelicot is all of patriarchy condensed into a single woman’s life. The horror is barely speakable. The miracle is that she not only survived it but spoke it—in public, in court no less, standing in all her humanity before a world of men who had proven once again how much they hate women.

Her husband—his name is Dominique Pelicot—found 83 men on a full forum of men who were happy for an invitation to rape an unconscious woman. And not just any woman. Not the already used, the discarded, the “sexually disappeared,” as Andrea Dworkin named the prostituted, the women relegated to the gutter of sex. Gisèle Pelicot was a wife, mother of three, and grandmother of seven. Dominique said he “was very happy with her.” In fact, he claimed, “I loved her immensely and still do.” (Gozzi, 2024) Are the rest of us—the women—mistaking the meaning of the word “love”?

A brief rundown of the numbers say someone is getting it wrong. Battering, for instance: in the United States, a man beats up a woman every nine seconds. One-third of battering starts when a woman is pregnant and male violence—a man’s willful fist or foot—is the number one cause of birth defects. Eighty thousand American children are sexually abused every year and eighty percent of the time, “a parent” is the perpetrator: Reader, you know it’s not their mothers.

Globally, all of the above happens and more. There are 60 million child brides, 200 million survivors of FGM, and 126 million girls aborted for being female. These are the daily, normal actions of the men—fathers, husbands, brothers—who stake a claim to the word “love.” There is a deep devotion here, but not of the “affectionate and concerned” kind. The ardor is to ownership, to control. Psychiatrist Erich Fromm defines sadism as “the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being.” (1973, p. 332) He drugged her unconscious: was that not enough? No, because as Andrea Dworkin saw, “The power of sex is ultimately defined as the power of conquest.” (1979, p. 332) That conquest is bottomless because living beings—including women—are always self-willed, always in the end their own. The sadist’s victory ends not just Pyrrhic but empty, and so more must follow: more rape, worse rape, younger rape. Dominique was caught upskirting women in a grocery store—every encounter, every public place was there for him to prey on more women. He also may have murdered a woman in 1991. Just one? Would anyone be shocked if there were others?  

He dressed Gisèle in “lingerie she refused to wear”—the object refusing, against all odds, her object status—and subjected her to sex acts “she never would have accepted.” (Gozzi, 2024) That she was only (“only”) drugged and not dead may well be because he preferred the sadism of inflicting on the living what the dead are beyond knowing.  Men would torture kitchen chairs instead of women if our sentience didn’t matter to their thrills.

His computer held over 20,000 videos of Gisele’s rapes. It also had photos of his daughter, Caroline, drugged. If you didn’t know that, add it to the horror: his daughter. There’s the sadist’s “more” again. And there were at least 83 other men in those videos, men who wanted to rape an unconscious woman and didn’t care that it was filmed. Why? Why would any marginally intelligent criminal film himself committing a crime? Ah, some of you say, they didn’t think it was a crime. Porn has so normalized violation that any distinction is gone. Maybe. But I think it’s worse. They know that filming is an added violation, and that makes it sexier. It’s more of a thrill knowing that a woman will be captured forever in her debasement.

During the trial, many of the other rapists said it was not rape because Dominique “said it was ok.” (Chrisafas, 2024) The ownership was clear to every man who participated: he owns her and he loaned her out to this band of brothers, fighting together their eternal battle against the humanity of women.

The story of Lily Phillips is a grim parallel to Gisèle Pelicot: the endless number of men—100 vs. 83 is an accounting error in the business of patriarchy—fucking the barely conscious woman. Lily Phillips, who couldn’t hold back tears when interviewed about the experience, can only remember “the first five encounters”—everything after that she “attempted to blank out.” (Bindel, 2024) This is how women everywhere survive rape, especially the endless assault that is the sex industry: by dissociating, leaving behind a persona as a stand-in. The trauma still wounds, and sexual trauma is always the deepest, which is why prostituted women the world over show rates of PTSD that match combat soldiers. (Farley, 1998) It’s just a different war.

The men in Lily Phillips’ story are the same perpetrators as Gisèle Pelicot’s. Men who get both pleasure and stature by violating. He is the victor in the cosmic battle of male supremacy, the battle to prove he is not her. He is the hero; she is the conquered, the used, the despised other. Never mind that women aren’t going to war when we marry mates or get born as daughters: war is what we get, and as long as we fail to recognize that, the battlefield is our slaughter. It’s hard; it breaks our hearts if not our spirits, but until we face it, nothing changes. Know this: if the woman whose husband had her raped by 83 men can face it, so can the rest of us.

Pornography lays bare the basic law of male supremacy: all women are whores, every girl is a slut waiting to happen. That some women resist is only more proof that indeed she wants it (whatever the current debasement of “it” is). And most crucially, when he gets to show her how much she did, indeed, want it, the extra added humiliation is guaranteed to add to her sexual pleasure. Ten minutes on the internet will show this story in its billions of hits, endlessly replicating across the bodies of real women who are really human and who are really hurt. This is the universal law of male supremacy and no one escapes. The grandmother couldn’t. The 23-year-old, with her girl-next-door looks, has learned to survive it by nonchalantly agreeing to the “more” that she can’t stop men from doing to her. The good girl will be wrecked along with the grandmother. As long as men train themselves to the rancid thrills of sadism, this is the only world women have.

In Lily’s case, her mother is her pimp. Do I need to know anything else about her childhood? Do you? That her own mother could offer her up to violation rather than move heaven and earth to protect her, grizzly-style? Mary Daly identified the Sado-Ritual Syndrome as the pattern that appears across all patriarchal cultures. One main feature is “the use of women as Token Torturers.” (Daly, 1979) It’s the girl’s mother who binds her feet. It’s the girl’s mother who holds her down while another woman slices off her clitoris. It’s the girl’s mother who arranges for a hundred men to rape her one by one for 24 hours straight. We use words like “grooming” and “abuse” but they are shadow puppets of the psychic damage that women carry, condemned to wander a world primally broken by our mother’s betrayal.

What Lily Phillips endured was torture. And man after man was happy to inflict it. Andrea Dworkin, in an essay everyone woman should risk her life to understand, urged:

I ask you to think concretely about your own bodies used that way. How sexy is it? Is it fun? The people who defend prostitution and pornography want you to feel a kinky little thrill every time you think of something being stuck in a woman. I want you to feel the delicate tissues in her body that are being misused. I want you to feel what it feels like when it happens over and over and over and over and over and over and over again: because that is what prostitution is. [. . .] It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after . . . because too much is taken away when the invasion is inside you, when the brutality is inside your skin. (1988, p. 140)

This is what Gisèle Pelicot survived, and though she said she is “in ruins,” she made the court use her name. She also forced the court to show the rape videos, all of them, declaring that the shame was not hers but the men’s.

It’s what Lily Phillips is still surviving, as she prepares to increase the abuse—to give the endless “more” to a thousand men.  This is grotesque. It’s torture and clearly a socially sanctioned form of self-harm that will damage her as well as degrade every woman alive. We are not an empty collection of orifices and we don’t exist so men can use us.

If her own mother won’t protect her, we will. We have to stand between every vulnerable woman and any man who is excited to hurt her. We need to get between her and the men. It’s time to stop being “pick-mes” and start being “fight-mes.” We need to pull those men off her, whoever she is, using everything from lawfare to our bare hands. It has to stop being profitable to hurt women. It also has to stop being so much fun. So fight me.

 

References

Bindel, J. (2024) ‘Shame on the men exploiting Lily Phillips,’ The Spectator, 11 December. Available at: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/shame-on-the-men-exploiting-lily-phillips (Accessed 18 December 2024).
Chrisafas, A. (2024) ‘Pelicot rape trial: “It is Gisèle’s name that will be remembered,”’ The Guardian, 23 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/23/pelicot-trial-it-is-gisele-name-that-will-be-remembered (Accessed 22 December 2024).

Daly, M. (1979) Gyn/ecology: the metaethics of radical feminsm. Boston: Beacon Press.

Dworkin, A. (1979) Pornography: men possessing women. New York: Putnam.

Dworkin, A. (1997) Life and death: unapologetic writings on the continuing war against women. New York: The Free Press.

Farley, M., Baral I., Kiremire, M., and Sezgin, U (1998). ‘Prostitution in 5 Countries: Violence and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,’ Feminism & Psychology, Vol. 8 (4): 405-426. Available at: https://prostitutionresearch.com/category/library/health-mentalphysical.

Fromm, E. (1973) The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Gozzi, L. (2024) ‘” I am a rapist”, admits husband Dominique Pelicot in French mass rape trial,’ BBC News, 17 September. Available at:  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2kdd3n7yqo (Accessed:  29 December 2024).

Gozzi, L. (2024) ‘New name, no photos: Gisèle Pelicot removes all trace of her husband,’ BBC News, 14 December. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgx7xy77ydo (Accessed: 29 December 2024).

 

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Radfems Respond: Lily Phillips and Giselle Pelicot (part 1)