More than a month ago the world was shocked by the case of Giséle Pélicotthe woman who, in November 2020, learned that her husband had drugged and made available to more than 70 men for decades so that they could exert all kinds of brutalities on his inert body. A total of 92 violations and only three men rejected their husband’s “offer”, while in At no time did they consider reporting such atrocities.
The shared rage Since the trial began it has not stopped sprouting. How is it possible that the accused could take pleasure in subjecting a unconscious body that did not show the slightest iota of desire nor, of course, consent? Who enjoys exercise violence about those who do not have the ability to express themselves?
Since the case blew up like a spring, the idea became popular, increasingly shared by public opinion, that those men were not “monsters” nor neither “insane”. They were all men with apparently normal lives, many of them with families and children, who found carrying out such activities exciting.
According to the report of Crimes against Sexual Freedomlast year a total of 21,825 events of this nature. Specifically, group (or pack) sexual assaults have gone from being the 2.1% in 2008 to represent 10.9% of attacks in 2023.
Women denounce crimes that previously remained eternally silenced
All this leads to think that the so-called “rape culture” continues to permeate the male population, responsible for 95% of sexual crimes committed throughout the world. However, it must be taken into consideration that the increase in figures linked to sexual crimes is closely related to the fact that women now report crimes that were previously eternally silenced. They also have more mechanisms to know detect and identify violence that is exercised against them, a direct consequence of the latest advances in matters of feminist rights in Spain.
According to some experts, many men find eroticizes violence. Desire, as a social construct, is learned (and, therefore, can also be unlearned). Numerous feminist authors have been busy theorizing about this concept in recent years, including the poet and novelist Sarah Torreswhose work The seduction has opened new horizons on this matter. Torres recently stated that “seduction, beautiful, happy and non-destructivehas to do with the horizontal participation of two people”.
Historically, this participation has been built based on two asymmetric extremes: man, a desiring and active subject, and women, desired and passive objectsometimes even inert, whose pleasure is almost always relegated to the background in favor of male satisfaction. This is how it determines Public Maria Esclapezclinical sexologist and author of works such as love your sex, sexual intelligence, I love me, I love you and You are your safe place.
It is, therefore, about subordination relationships from men to women that manifest themselves especially in the sexual context (which Foucault called “sexual objectification”) and that, according to a elaborate study recently for the University of London“is palpable in the requirement that women perform sexual acts, even unwanted ones, in an active, enthusiastic and emotionally engaged manner to increase the man’s pleasure.”
Several authors point out, however, to a key factor to take into account in this whole issue: consent. Since women also come to fantasize about dominating them, a desire that does not result in discriminatory behaviors in real life. Experts such as the sociologist and teacher Norma Ageitos agree that the fantasies that involve violence, as long as they remain in the field of desirethey do not have to materialize. In fact, practices like BDSM, in which both men and women eroticize violence, are fully based on the consent mutual and security.
In this line he addresses the notion of consent Clara Serra in his essay The meaning of consentwhere it precisely emphasizes the ability of women to decide what practices to carry out and show their will. Serra argues that denying the power of women when it comes to freely determining what type of practices they want to carry out implies infantilize them and judge their own desires, which can also, why not, be rugged and not very tender. These would always be contexts in which women can freely express their will, not those in which, as happened in the case of The Pamplona pack does not enjoy agency capacity because it has been previously annulled.
Practices like BDSM are fully based on mutual consent and safety
Now, how have so many young people come to accept violence as something not fantasy but a real and everyday sexual practice? Generally through imagesevery day more fast, explicit and starkwhich are recorded in our retina since childhood. The pornography It is perhaps the most obvious example of the violence of the sexual images available to everyone.
“We live in a society in which it is much easier for you to see violence than to see sexual relations normal, respectful and consenting“says the sexologist Marta Cejudo. Infants, not yet having the necessary maturity to contextualize such images as part of fiction, end up establishing all types of behaviors as normal. humiliations towards women.
Many content that children view as early as nine or ten years old includes, pederasty, humiliations, incest and all kinds of abuse towards women. Learning sex through violence, in many cases extreme and sadistichas already presented its first consequences.
The latest study of the ANAR Foundation Sexual Assault on Girls and Adolescents according to their testimony. Evolution in Spain (2019-2023) reveals a 55.1% increase in cases of attacks perpetrated on minors in the last five years. According to the type of sexual assault, this report includes five types: in-person sexual assaults (91.5%), grooming (3.1%), non-consensual sexting (2.2%), pornography (1.3%) and sexual exploitation (1.9%).
Esclapez emphasizes that, in the face of the constant flow of increasingly violent images, “the kids are no longer normalizing all this, but they are ending desensitizing and they need more and morenot only in quantity, but also in terms of more extreme contentand this is very dangerous“Thus, in the absence of references that teach sexuality to the younger generations, sexual education is forged based on scenes that represent completely unequal power dynamics, where lack of consent is normalized.
Culture, the mirror of patriarchy
But to think that porn is the only agent responsible for these figures would be cheating the solitary. The culturewhich agglomerates from the adult cinema until the cinematographic fiction, the literature, the music (and, of course, video clips) and many other disciplines, permeates the collective imagination to mold our conception of what relationships between men and women should be like.
“In our generation we have grown up seeing Paco’s men, Sarita and Lucaswhich was a story that is a romanticization of a very unbalanced relationship, or reading millions of narratives about the Lolita either Sorry if I call you loveof Federico Mocciawhich is an apology for the pedophilia that you hallucinate, that has also slipped into our minds from narratives that are very questionable,” he tells Public Lucia Delgadoactress and film intimacy coordinator.
Next to Tábata Cherry Tree founded three years ago Intimarta company that is responsible for accompany physically, emotionally, psychologically to actors and actresses during scenes that include sex or any other activity of an intimate nature. Both believe that there has been insufficient reflection on the impact of images from cinema.
He fiction cinemathey argue, immediately leads us to think that it is a simulation of reality and “gives us examples of behavior, of how to relate as a family, at workin public spaces, so cinema simply acts as a reference.” For this reason, both consider fundamental the way in which sexuality is narrated through the cultural productswhich determine “our fantasies, the norm, but also what is expected in each genre.”
Of course, not all of this learning about violence necessarily comes from of the explicit: “Porn is the tip of the iceberg but it also matters, for example, how romanticism is talked about from the romantic comedieswhich is something that is having a lot of impact on beliefs that “They can then lead to sexist violence.”they maintain.
Sexologists and educators agree that violence escalates at high speed. No child feels drive to rape at nine years old, however, as I recently pointed out Moroccan Navy“more than 80% of the girls I work with receive five or six dick pics a week from 12 years old, including messages from pedophile predators that with the networks they have found absolute protection”.
In many schools, with the rise of social networks and new communication platforms on-linephotos of naked girls generated by Artificial intelligencewhich are subsequently shared on the Internet by their classmates. “When there is violence that you do not know how to differentiate and do not know how to see clearly, it is very easy to climb on itwithin an entire ecosystem that we have perpetrated and in which we let ourselves go,” says Cejudo.
Towards new ways of representing female bodies
Inside the film industry For some years now, timid but firm horizons have been beginning to be drawn that propose new ways of representing intimate relationships from a feminist perspective. “When sex is narrated from a point of view patriarchalabove all If the directors are men, The content is born from a male gaze, however, now we see that there are a whole movement of people who are seeing the need for a change in the way we tell stories and who tells them,” Lucía and Tábata explain with hope.
Productions that have had privacy coordination, such as I May Destroy Youstart from a very different perspective on sex, through new voices and a different sensitivity. Although there is still a long way to go, they point out, “we are going to change processesincluding the type of scenes and content, new more diverse viewsboth in fiction and porn, luckily.”
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