We have not ended patriarchy. This is the main lesson of Mazan case. For a decade, a husband drugged his longtime wife to film himself raping her and having her raped by strangers, fifty of whom are on trial with him. “She is his wife, he does what he wants with his wife,” declared one of the accused during the investigation. Patriarchy is not only the symbolic and physical violence that women suffer; It is also the complicity between the men who share them, the recipes for drug cocktails that they exchange, their connivance in sexist insults, the homoerotic touching that makes them feel good and the images that they circulate as an invitation or souvenir.
The only thing they have in common is that they are men. However, the eternal man does not exist, nor does the eternal woman exist. Male domination has a history that is currently being crossed by feminism. In 2003, the first national survey carried out by the National Institute for Demographic Surveys on violence against women in France (Enveff) revealed that, in some couples, in case of unemployment, lower qualifications or income, “the man tried to ensure a dominant position in his private life, resorting if necessary to violent acts.” But the problem is not just the reversal of usual inequality. It is also the demand for autonomy: a woman who is about to leave her husband is more exposed to his violence.
A “reactionary” domination
“In effect, the survey reveals a conception history of domination”, I explained at the time in Liberté, égalité, sexualité (Belfond), a book of interviews with Clarisse Fabre. “Along with ‘traditional’ domination, a form of ‘modern’ domination appears, which is no longer based on the perpetuation of an immemorial patriarchal order, never questioned, but, on the contrary, like a reaction to the questioning of this order, in the face of demands for freedom and equality. In other words, we could speak of ‘reactionary’ domination, rather than conservative domination.”
It affects one’s own desire. This is reflected in the development of a new form of prostitution, with the influx of sex workers from the East and South. What makes them desirable “isn’t it precisely their dominated condition, their almost absolute submission?” It is “because they have few or no rights – not even the right to speak, some of them do not know three words of French – that they are coveted. This desire can be explained as the counterpart to the growing sexual equality within couples.” The new prostitution would thus be “a refuge for the modern frustrations of male domination.”
This historical and theoretical framework sheds light on the increasingly frequent use of chemical submission. On October 9, 2024, a man was convicted in an appeal court of filmed sexual assaults committed between 2019 and 2022 against his wife, whom he had drugged. The husband tried to explain his actions like this: “I didn’t control anything at home; At that moment, I felt like I controlled something.” Dominique Pelicot, for his part, he said of his wife: “She was the opposite of my mother; “She was totally insubordinate.” He punished her for it.
In a chilling story, Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa (And I stopped calling you dad) (JC Lattès, 2022), Caroline Darian, their daughter, highlights the inequality in this couple: “My mother had a stable job as a manager. That is what allowed him to get a company home in a luxury area on the outskirts of Paris.” Her husband, on the other hand, with his electrician diploma “regretted not having studied” and embarked on disastrous businesses. However, “the height of perversity: my father, always entangled in money problems, did not do business with mother. So he acted for his own pleasure.” I enjoyed putting her downas if to compensate for social reality: “Bourgeois whore”…
Turn a rebellious woman into a submissive doll
But as soon as he retired, far from Paris and his children, Gisèle Pelicot was at his mercy. Weakened by drugs and rape, she was totally dependent on him. Furthermore, it was when her husband was arrested that the extent of her financial liabilities was revealed: she no longer had any control over anything. It’s all about mastery. In 2016 he painted a naked woman. Four years later, when her daughter angrily tore up the painting, she discovered its title: L’Emprise (The domain). remember to The stolen letterby Edgar Allan Poe, displayed in the hallway of the marital home.
The fact is that dominance can be an expression of weakness, not strength. When he was arrested in 2020 for filming up some women’s skirts, “he pretended to be the poor bastard, saying that he had not done anything,” says a complainant: “A victim attitude.” His daughter challenged him: “You are Calimero, the one who is always complaining.” “It is very unfair”: this could also be the motto of the incels“involuntary singles” full of resentment against women who avoid them. In reality, male supremacists want “Stepford women.” In 1972, Ira Levin imagined this scathing fable about the anti-feminist reaction: in the United States, in a wealthy neighborhood, men have found the solution of turning their rebellious wives into submissive dolls.
It is true that sex should not be confused with rape: for the victim, it is not sex, because it is rape. On the other hand, the rapist does enjoy it. The images of the trial show that it is the woman reduced to a thing that excites these men. So it is no longer about “random rape”, but “sexual misery”. Many of them also have pedophile fantasies. You can see the difference between “archaic” rape and its “reactionary” or “anti-modern” version. In both cases, the absence of consent is undoubtedly the driving force of desire. But chemical submission adds unconsciousness: sex “without her knowing” is what rapists find desirable. Isn’t that the name of the forum on the Coco website where the husband recruited his accomplices?
In the old model, a woman who shakes, screams, or struggles is a source of arousal; In the new model, the source of excitation is its inertia. Of course, “archaic” rape has not disappeared, nor has “traditional” domination. Two figures coexist: omnipotence and impotence.
On the one hand, there are “men of the rue du Bac”, a club of powerful figures from the media and cultural world; These potentates accused of sadistically abusing children were able to live with total impunity. The terrible file published in June by Liberation was received with a disturbing silence: could it have anything to do with the fact that, along with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, such eminent personalities as a press chief, Claude Imbert, and a right-wing intellectual figure, Jean-François Revel, were involved?
On the other hand, there are the ordinary men of Mazan, anonymous people whose age and profession are better known, trapped by justice. Because, today, domination no longer consists only of absolute power; It is the political desire for revenge against demands for emancipation. Wanting to humiliate your wife is, in fact, an anti-feminist gesture of helplessness. There is a daytime Dr. Jekyll, who apparently complies with egalitarian norms (at home he takes care of everything), and a nighttime Mr. Hyde, who enjoys the acts imposed on the woman for whom he continues to affirm having “felt nothing but love””. Psychiatrists have talked about split personality. In any case, it is a political unfolding that runs through our society: behind the good feelings, resentment.
It is true that we are very far from the Aix trial that took place in 1978: “You make love and you end up in court, can you believe it?” exclaimed a police officer. “It is difficult to imagine today the violence of the Aix trial,” recalls Agnès Fichot, who at that time was a young collaborator of Gisèle Halimi, “and all the phallocratic and patriarchal archaism it contained.” But that does not mean that male dominance has disappeared; It has been rebuilt against an ideal of sexual democracy. Instead of despairing, let’s reverse the perspective: isn’t this desire to subdue at all costs the sinister reverse of the rise of a feminine, and also masculine, desire for equality as well as freedom?
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This text was originally published in French on Le Nouvel Obs.
Translation of Paloma Farré.
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