SIX DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, five judges in the French city of Avignon found Dominique Pelicot guilty of repeatedly drugging and raping his now ex-wife Gisèle over the course of nearly a decade. In meticulously organized and luridly titled videos discovered on Pelicot’s computer, investigators learned that the retired electrician had invited at least seventy-two other men on ninety-two occasions into the couple’s home to participate in the abuses. Of those identified, forty-nine were convicted of aggravated or attempted rape, while two were found guilty of sexual assault. Only one of the men, Jean-Pierre Marechal, had neither raped nor tried to rape Gisèle Pelicot: he had sought Dominique Pelicot’s help in drugging and raping his own wife instead.
Pelicot confessed to the charges: “I am a rapist,” he told the court. But while the Daily Mail anointed him the “Monster of Avignon,” most of the other men denied allegations of criminal intent. The prevailing plea was that they’d been misled or coerced, lured in and manipulated by a particularly perverse Svengali. Character witnesses testifying on behalf of the accused spoke of the men’s otherwise routine and “respectful” behavior in everyday life. “At what moment,” Gisèle Pelicot asked, “were they respectful [to me]?” In the London Review of Books, Sophie Smith writes that much has been “made of how many of the accused were normal men leading ordinary lives. . . . One was quite literally the bloke round the corner: he and Gisèle would exchange greetings at the local bakery.”
After the sentencing, the BBCpublished a list of those convicted, highlighting their ages, occupations, and marital and paternal statuses. Among the rapists were a hairdresser, firefighters, truck drivers, and construction workers. One was a DJ. Several of the men were identified as “fathers of two,” and the lineup included also a “father of six,” a divorcé “with three grown children,” a warehouse worker with a three-month-old baby, and a man who “went to the Pelicots’ the same night his daughter was born.” One man’s partner attested that he wasn’t “macho” enough to be a rapist. Just five of the lot had been previously charged with sexual or domestic violence.
Normal men. Ordinary lives.
Gisèle Pelicot’s decision to waive anonymity and appear publicly throughout the trial—much of which hinged on the more than 20,000 photos and videos recorded by her husband of the rapes—made her into a post-#MeToo feminist icon. The devastating story of this former logistics manager and what has been rightly called her act of heroism in stepping forward rapidly blew beyond French media to become international news. As the trial dragged on for months, collectives like Les Amazones d’Avignon hung banners of support: UN VIOL EST UN VIOL, STOP VIOL (also the name of a French helpline for rape survivors), EN FRANCE EN 2024 94% DES VIOLEURS SONT ACQUITTES, and, simply, MERCI GISÈLE.
The hearings, Gisèle Pelicot allowed, had proved a “very difficult ordeal,” but she “wanted all of society to be a witness to the debates that took place here. . . . I want you to know that we share the same fight.” The defense, in turn, projected onto her disaffiliation from shame and subsequent celebrity the image—again, to cite Smith—of a “patriarchal grotesque: at once a woman who enjoys sex too much and a woman who speaks out against the men who wrong her.” What sort of a woman, some asked, could endure the public broadcast of these videos? Was it odd that Gisèle Pelicot hadn’t cried more? On the stand, some of the men conjured her as a kind of exhibitionist, a nymphomaniac. Liar, slut, loudmouth, killjoy: as is often true of rape trials, the best defense is one able to transform the victim into a contemptible Medusa, to make of the accuser the accused.
Like most narratives of violence, rape stories tend to clot in the fissure between the aberrant and the banal. What protections can a “normal” person expect of being in the world? How, if at all, are we to distinguish monsters from men? Who is a credible witness to an act of grievance or wounding, and—perhaps most importantly—whose damage matters? The persistence of rape culture relies on the phenomenological production of rape as an unbelievable, unchangeable, and ultimately isolatable fray in the texture of ordinary life. That an institutionalized culture of sexual violence exists at all is handled with profound skepticism, but if anything is to be said of the achievements of #MeToo, the movement—against all odds—rendered unignorable the merciless ubiquity of rape in the lives of girls and women.
And yet. Despite, or perhaps because of, a seemingly infinite deluge of first-person accounts, the trauma plots that have most captivated our shock-starved public continue to cohere around the extreme and the unfamiliar: Depp vs. Heard, Epstein, R. Kelly, Weinstein, Diddy, private jets, cabals, procuresses, pedophile islands. Who benefits when we diagnose rape as a distant disease of the celebrity class? The fantasy of rape-as-spectaclereduces both its victims and its danger to abstraction and exceptionalism; always, we try to convince ourselves, rape can be kept just over there.The Pelicot case, however, picks at an uncanny scab on our cultural imaginary: by numbers alone, it’s easy to read the story as sensational, but the context of the abuses also points to the frightening proximity of violence in even our most long-standing, intimate, and tender relations. At the dawn of a second Trump administration, and in the midst of an apparently endless anti-feminist backlash, I confess that these questions haunt me.
IN HER FINAL STATEMENT TO THE COURT, Gisèle Pelicot scorned categorizations of rape as atypical. Her assailants, she remarked, weren’t rogue actors in a population of morally unobtrusive men; they did exactly what they’d been trained to doby a “macho and patriarchal society” that systematically disenfranchises and debases women and “trivializes rape.” Her analysis arrived at a horribly apt moment. The very day of the verdicts, German broadcaster ARD reported findings from a yearlong investigation into rape chat groups on the social messaging service Telegram. These groups have more than 70,000 members, many of whom bragged of having assaulted women in their households: mothers, sisters, daughters, wives. They shared photos and videos; others offered instructions on purchasing and utilizing sedatives to subdue possible targets. This was the precise tactic Dominique Pelicot used against Gisèle Pelicot; during the trial, she referred to it using the official term, “chemical submission.”
It goes without saying that victims of sexual violence experience victimization individually. But the abiding cultural formulations of rape as unspeakable—a private and singular tragedy for which words will not suffice—serve mainly to shore up stigma and secrecy surrounding these violations, leaving rape a kind of insoluble fog saturating life under patriarchy. As a physical trauma, at least, rape is a delineable event: it happens in a particular time and place; specific, divisible bodies are involved; and presumably, at some point, the incident concludes. Either you live or you die. Your rapists are held to account or they are not. (Mostly they are not.) While the psychic aftershocks of rape are murkier, it’s nonetheless experientially intelligible; trauma does not categorically defy utterance, as is frequently insinuated or proclaimed. If narrative is at times an ill-fitting container for grief, the alternative—silence—is unthinkable.
On the animating force behind her novella This Is Pleasure, Mary Gaitskill has said that the essay is “best for making an argument that is more or less rational,” while fiction, in turn, grants breathing room to the “contradictory” feelings she has toward contemporary conversations on sex and violence. A novel won’t solve woman hating, but it might be the place where stories of trauma are able to arc toward complicatedness and the provisional, where the shifting opacities of consent, desire, and violation are less immediately intelligible.
Though instrumental to practices of consciousness-raising and coalition-building, storytelling alone cannot eliminate rape. As we see also in responses to climate catastrophe and genocide, and in rapidly consolidating apparatuses of political suppression, unembellished gestures of “bearing witness” remain inert if unoriented toward action. Eight years after #MeToo, the question remains: what now? While art in the wake of the movement is no stranger to stories concerning gendered abuses of power, fiction that explicitly reckons with #MeToo is still coming into focus. As a possible mode of redress, how should the novel be?
IN A 2019 INTERVIEW with Lauren Elkin, the writer Virginie Despentes remarked of #MeToo that something was missing from the movement, “disconcerting” stories that didn’t fit into an increasingly streamlined regime of victimhood: “I want to see an uprising of loose women,” she said. “It’s really important to give voice to people practicing a sexuality that isn’t quite—correct.” Despentes broke onto the scene with 1993’s notorious Baise-moi (Fuck Me in English, though some markets have translated the title as Rape Me instead), an unhinged fever dream of a novel following two women—one a prostitute, the other the survivor of a gang rape loosely based on Despentes’s own—on a robbery, fucking, and killing spree. The movie, when Despentes adapted it with filmmaker and porn actress Coralie Trinh Thi in 2000, was the first to be banned in France in twenty-eight years. In response to accusations that the film wasn’t art but pornography, Trinh Thi scoffed that it couldn’t possibly be porn—it wasn’t produced “for masturbation.”
The protagonists of the novel, Nadine and Manu, react to their sexual and economic victimization not with shame or paralysis, but with a shocking torrent of morally unassimilable desire and force. Their world is a Nietzschean cesspool; to be a woman living in it is to have “reality put [you] in [your] place and in the gutter.” Violence is the bedrock of the everyday, not an exception to it. Of her rape, Manu remarks that “I can’t keep assholes from getting into my pussy, so I haven’t left anything valuable in there.” If this sentiment defangs rape’s power to, as it were, ruin a life, Baise-moi nonetheless situates sexual trauma as unavoidable, a “risk inherent”—as Despentes later wrote, echoing American contrarian Camille Paglia—“to the condition of being a woman.”
Despentes returned to the novel’s inspiration and the film’s controversy in the essay “You Can’t Rape a Woman Who’s a Total Slut,” the centerpiece of her 2006 radical manifesta, King Kong Theory.Rape, she writes there, should not be understood as a metaphysical trouble but a political one: to cede our lives to the cultural presumption that we’ve been permanently unsexed and dehumanized by rape is to surrender the precise power our rapists long to hold over us. In patriarchy, women are at war, and the spoils of battle are our bodies—why wouldn’t we, she wonders, meet violence with violence? Why shouldn’t we play to win?
Her latest, Dear Dickhead (Cher Connard in French), is a mellower affair, a novel in emails that tracks the thorny correspondence between two addicts who’d grown up in the same poor neighborhood and reconnect in the present over a hateful Instagram comment one makes on the other’s account. Rebecca Latte is a middle-aged actress, a junkie, and has no illusions about the harsh realities of the industry for aging beauties or about the hazards of heterosexual desire. “If you enjoy having sex with men,” she writes, “you have to be ready to die . . . Men can kill you. This fact hovers over us like a cloud.” Oscar Jayack, her erstwhile pen pal, is a Bukowskian novelist and inveterate drunk being “MeToo-ed” by his former publicist, Zoé Katana, now a popular feminist blogger and self-proclaimed “single snowflake in the avalanche” of women’s voices against harassment and assault.
The sexual conflict precipitating Dear Dickhead is understood unambiguously as workplace harassment and has little in common with the blood-soaked horror show of Baise-moi. This is the story of two working-class artists co-opted into bourgeois life; the fact that they come from “a place that no one gives a damn about” doesn’t divest them of their current proximity to power. Besides this, Oscar’s not the flashiest predator; as a physical specimen, he’s flimsy, and in terms of gender, “the only macho thing [he] was ever any good at was getting wasted.” (Is he “macho” enough to be a rapist?) Some reviewers of the novel have attenuated the intensity of the abuse Zoé suffered, and it’s true that she never claims to have been raped—only “groped,” chased, intimidated, and relentlessly stalked. When the news breaks, Oscar protests that “this whole MeToo thing is just revenge of the sluts . . . [Zoé] wanted to take advantage of MeToo to get a little publicity for her blog.” It’s a refrain familiar to all women: any reaction to defilement beyond silence is suspect.
Of Zoé and her generation, Rebecca says they’re “easily worked up,” but she simultaneously mocks Oscar’s rationalizations as the fantasies of a boozer and a louse; after all, if Zoé wanted attention, she’d have accused Oscar of far worse. Rebecca hails from an earlier era; she’s what you might call a #MeToo skeptic, or else a rape culture pragmatist. She’s unsurprised when Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Lahaie sign what she understands as an open letter “defending the right of men to aggressively hit on women.” In her own career, she only “saw the upside” of leveraging her sexuality; there was nothing unusual about mixing business with pleasure. For beautiful women, it was just the done thing. Zoé, for her part, is familiar with and repulsed by these “traditions”: “Good old Simone de Beauvoir wouldn’t have complained about a hand on her ass,” she writes sarcastically. (It’s funny she says nothing about Beauvoir’s own hand in allegedly procuring young girls for Sartre.)
If Rebecca’s and Oscar’s voices aren’t as distinct as the form sometimes demands, the epistolary’s discursive nature grants Despentes the freedom to philosophize on knotty topics as diverse as class warfare, stan culture, incels, and the SCUM Manifesto.In this, Dear Dickhead bears some resemblance to the nineteenth-century social problem novel, though Despentes’s characteristically punk slouch and slang-ridden, darkly comic tone help keep didacticism and melodrama at bay. While the defensive and antagonistic messages between Rebecca and Oscar grow more comradely, occasional incendiary blog posts by Zoé shoot through the heart of their blossoming friendship like flaming arrows. After being introduced to Zoé by Oscar’s sister Corinne—a self-identified lesbian feminist in the tradition of Monique Wittig: “You don’t suck cocks, you cut them off,” she says, a prohibition I sadly don’t recall in Les Guérillères—Rebecca pals up with the younger woman, too.
Zoé’s pre-pandemic “cancellation” of Oscar and Paris’s “raucous” return to life after the arrival of the COVID vaccine roughly bookends Dear Dickhead. What happens in between is sparingly narrated (because recollected conversationally), but monumental in terms of plot: both addicts get clean, Zoé goes into and comes out of a psych ward, and the world functionally ends for a time, though the characters are largely optimistic about their brush with Armageddon. “Lockdown helped keep me going,” Rebecca tells Oscar; both agree social distancing had insulated them from using in the early days of their recovery.
That Oscar wins near-immediate absolution by getting into treatment before the present narration of the novel weighs Dear Dickhead’s sympathies disproportionately in his favor. Zoé’s interruptions are electric but ephemeral; tonally, they fall somewhere between Valerie Solanas and the Despentes of King Kong Theory,if these treatises were refracted through the droning memespeak of the digital age. Rebecca jabs at Oscar’s self-pitying melodrama: “I haven’t got the energy to feel sorry for you,” she tells him. “You’ve probably fucked up more than you’re prepared to admit.” Nonetheless, she continues to write to him, to rally him, to develop a companionship with him. Exile—self-inflicted or otherwise—is not the solution, she insists.
Meanwhile, the novel invests his rehabilitation with more dynamism than, say, Zoé’s stay in the ward, but surely there’s something there about how isolating sexual humiliation is, how hysterical we’re made to seem when we at last speak out, how left behind by our careers and lovers and communities we are when we’re sucked into the black hole of trauma. Eventually, Zoé’s allegations are taken in good faith by all concerned, but in the end her story has less to do with her past and more to do with the present, an all-fronts digital assault by the “masculinists” of troll communities and men’s-rights organizations. Her damage, it turns out, is one so many of us face—the perpetual self-exposure and simultaneous depersonalization of a life lived online. “We’re streetlights,” Rebecca says to Oscar of fame, although it illuminates something essential about the social media age, too, “people hang stuff off you, they piss on you, they lean against you to think or throw up.”
Despentes, of course, is no reactionary, and if she’s unconvinced by the political sustainability of #MeToo, it has far more to do with a wariness toward internet culture than doubts concerning the transformative power of women’s traumatic confessions. It’s true Zoé’s blog posts have the manic fervor of the newly born again: “I’m an online activist,” she proclaims in a post titled “The angel of vengeance.” “It’s dangerous. I don’t give a fuck. This is where I spread the word, where I respond, where I represent, where I meet people. I give precisely zero fucks about being a ‘real’ writer.” What Zoé might consider giving a fuck about, Dear Dickhead seems to argue, is making space for a “real” life in the “real” world. At the end of the novel, she’s left seeking community, solidarity, and meaningful connection. In some sense, the dull suck of trauma has ruined her life.
She must learn to leave what she knows behind, to let go, “to see whether I can heal.” Healing, of course, is nonlinear and never guaranteed, but the novel offers a horizon against which such a process might take shape. In our current climate, Oscar tells Rebecca, “Dystopia has become the only rational expectation. Believing that things can get better is proof of folly.” Fiction, Dear Dickhead posits, is one defense against doomerism; a place to imagine radical futures, lives and loves and histories beyond the dead ends of psychic damage. The novel persists as a repository for hope.
Rape is “all-consuming,” Despentes wrote in King Kong Theory:“It is a foundation stone. Of who I am as a writer, as a woman . . . it is what simultaneously disfigures me and makes me whole.” By the time of the interview with Elkin, however, her mood had shifted. “Anger,” she told Elkin, “destroys everything it touches and becomes deadly. It doesn’t create anything interesting, it doesn’t change anyone’s opinion, it only consumes people.” By the novel’s close, even Zoé distances herself from Solanas and the sound of the patriarchal “culture of death” echoing inside her words. Rebecca and Oscar allow themselves to become excited about being back in the world of other people. Where Baise-moi coiled inside the closed circuit of the rape revenge narrative, Dear Dickhead is Despentes at her most earnest. This is a novel opening outward toward reconciliation. Words are useful, even indispensable, but there are limits: “You’re right,” Rebecca admits before signing off, “these emails are starting to feel a little cramped.”
Jamie Hood is the author of how to be a good girl and Trauma Plot: A Life, which was just published by Pantheon.