Such ordinary men (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism

Dear readers old and new. I am writing this edition of The Backlash from Larnaca in Cyprus, where I am hoping to encounter some winter sun. Wish me luck—and I wish you a wonderful weekend, wherever you are. Now to the reads…..

The view from my hotel window

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1) Such ordinary men

On Thursday, all 51 defendants in the mass rape trial of Gisèle Pelicot were found guilty, including her ex-husband Dominique, who repeatedly (over many years) drugged her and invited strange men he met on the internet to violate her. The case is so horrific that it’s hard to believe it’s real. Aside from the scale of the abuse—dozens of perpetrators, some of whom were never even identified from the copious videos Dominique made of the crimes—it is the ordinary nature of the men who took part. One of the defendants, a father of six, lived next door to the Pelicots. Among the guilty was an ambulance driver, a journalist, an electrician. The French media referred to them as Mr Everyman. For Prospect, I wrote about Gisèle’s heroism and the horror (and reality) of such ordinary men carrying out such monstrous acts. Here is a snippet:

In bearing witness to her own abuse, partly in the name of other victims, Gisèle herself has been justifiably lionised, transforming from an “anonymous grandmother”, as some headlines put it, to a figurehead for victims. Outside the courthouse on Thursday, she said she was thinking “of the many victims who are not recognised, whose stories often remain in the shadows.” She wanted them “to know that we share the same battle.”

What Gisèle Pelicot has done takes astonishing bravery, but courage should not be a requirement for justice, nor for “shame to change sides”. Still, with hers Pelicot has gifted others with hope for real change, for real action, finally, against banal monstrosity, against the ubiquitous violence inflicted by such ordinary men.

This case has deeply affected many women, if the plethora of writing by women about Pelicot is any indication.

Anna Wharton

asks this question: What would a woman do to an unconscious man if she thought no one would find out?

Sian Norris

has a very powerful piece that captures so much of what has been going through my mind since this case started making the news. She writes:

But most of all, anger at the whole horrific culture that tells men - yes, all men - that they are entitled to women’s bodies. That does not mean that all men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies, nor does it mean that all men would commit these horrendous acts if they thought they could get away with it. Of course not. But all men live in a culture that excuses, denies, normalises and sexualises violence against women. And all women have to live with that. That matters.

And The Persistent has a piece by Monique El-Faizy looking into the fact that under French law a charge of rape comes down to the intent of the perpetrator, rather than the consent of the victim.

2) OnlyFans and Lilly Philips

Another story I haven’t been able to stop thinking about is that of Lilly Philips, the 23-year-old OnlyFans creator who recently slept with 101 men in a day. Philips has been all over the internet of late because of a video where she breaks down in tears after the experience. “It’s not for the weak girls, if I’m honest,” she says of the stunt, “it was hard. I don’t know if I’d recommend it. It’s a different feeling. It’s just one in, one out, it feels intense”.

The sex was filmed for content to use on Philips’ OnlyFans page, and she has announced that she will try to have sex with 1,000 men in 24 hours in February. Incidentally, Philips’ mother manages her finances.

The online response to Philips splits fairly neatly in two. There are those who see her as a victim, who think she has been exploited, and those who think she wanted to do it so it’s all on her. In a very interesting piece for Rolling Stone, Jessie Sage, a sex worker, argues that what the clip shows is a person overwhelmed by emotion, but not necessarily traumatised, and that sex workers are never allowed to express anything complex about their jobs, as they are immediately judged. She writes:

While she self-deprecatingly calls herself a slut throughout the documentary, she also makes it clear that what she is doing is work. “I do [porn] because I enjoy it,” she says. “I’ve only ever felt empowered by the fact that I’m making money off something that all guys are going to do anyway; all guys are going to sexualize me anyway.” While Pieters sweetly, and perhaps naively, responds, “Not all guys …,” Phillips remains steadfast in the refrain I’ve heard from many sex workers (and that I’ve also, at times, said myself): The sexual objectification of our bodies is something that we can cash in on only if we are willing to live under the public scrutiny that choice provokes.

Still as the cliche goes this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Philips has made certain decisions about her life and income in a world where a woman’s greatest currency very much remains her body and how attractive she is. Philips also happens to have made these decisions in a world where a high proportion of men consume pornography that is exploitative and degrading of women, and where men (as Norris puts it, see above) feel entitled to women’s bodies.

These juxtapositions make for much confusion, certainly for girls and young women as they grow up. A friend pointed out to me that there is something chilling about this happening at the same time as the Pelicot trial. Who are the men who would take part in something like this?

Then there is OnlyFans itself, which enables creators to make money independently, building a fanbase. A high proportion of these creators are women producing sexual content for male fans. In September, OnlyFans states that it saw record-breaking user spend on the site last year, totalling $6.6bn.

Maalvika

has a fascinating piece on what the growth of OnlyFans tells us “about the market value of male desire”. She writes:

As Bell Hooks presciently noted, male anger often masks a deeper existential crisis of relevance – and nowhere is this more evident than in the OnlyFans economy. Here, men face a paralyzing contradiction. Their collective desire generates billions in revenue, yet their individual sexuality has been rendered powerless, transformed from a tool of social control into mere consumer behavior to be harvested, analyzed, and monetized.

As the writer of this piece points out too, however, most OnlyFans creators don’t make the big bucks that the likes of Philips do, and there has been much reporting on the abuse and exploitation prevalent on the platform. Reuters has an extensive investigation.

3) Women’s rights after Assad

Given the fact that the sudden overthrow of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group formerly linked to al-Qaeda, there has been some concern about women’s rights in post-Assad Syria. The day after the Assad regime fell, the group’s leader posted on social media that it wouldn’t impose dress codes on women, though question marks remain. In Foreign Policy, Sajjan M. Gohel writes about the repression of women as characteristic of authoritarian regimes and extremists. As Lina Khatib recently told us on the podcast I co-host, Syria is not Libya or Afghanistan—you can’t assume anything about Syria’s future based on what happened in other places. It is also the case that HTS has a record of restricting women’s freedoms in territories that the group controlled. “The true test of HTS’s commitment to reform lies in its treatment of women,” writes Gohel. Here’s more:

HTS’s influence in Idlib and beyond Syria threatens to reintroduce authoritarian rule, reinforced by deeply ingrained misogyny. If the international community ignores these issues, Syria risks following in the footsteps of other failed states, such as Afghanistan and Libya, where the collapse of governance has led to the normalization of violence and oppression of women. To prevent this, it is essential that global counterterrorism strategies prioritize women’s rights as a key component of stability and security. Misogyny is not a cultural issue—it is a driver of extremism. By empowering women, the international community can help ensure that Syria’s future is not defined by violence and oppression. There should only ever be recognition of a new Syrian government that agrees to renounce terrorism, destroy stocks of Captagon and chemical weapons, and protect the rights of minorities and women. Removing HTS as a proscribed terrorist group must be judged on those metrics.

4) A feminist argument against assisted dying

A big story in the UK in recent months has been the debate over assisted dying. A bill to legalise it under certain conditions passed a first reading in parliament in November. I went to watch the five-hour debate in the chamber, and it was extremely moving, with many members of parliament, whether for or against assisted dying, sharing deeply personal, often very painful, stories. Watching them debating so respectfully, with so much thought and care (for the most part), was good for my faith in our democratic systems. But I digress. On her newsletter,

Caroline Criado Perez

writes about a report on “Safeguarding women in assisted dying”. Here’s a snippet:

The report highlights that most countries that have legalised assisted dying don’t even consider domestic abuse in their safeguards (which are mostly concerned with will beneficiaries), let alone collect or publish any data on the issue. Meanwhile, assisted dying campaigners in the UK have championed two male mercy killers with a history of domestic violence, one of whom had previously been imprisoned for bludgeoning his second wife with a mallet.

The result of this data gap on domestic abuse and assisted dying is that it’s hard to quantify exactly how widespread the problem is. We do have some indications, however. We know that in Canada, women “seem 2 times more likely to seek MAID track 2—which allows for those with non ‘reasonably foreseeable’ deaths to die” — that is, women who are not terminally ill. We know in Belgium that women dominate the figures of those given “psychiatric euthanasia.” Why are these psychologically troubled women so much more likely to seek death than their male counterparts? The data is silent on this issue, and the states in question seem in no hurry to uncover the reason behind the sex discrepancy.

5) Iran “pauses implementation” of new hijab law

On Friday, new legislation was due to go into force in Iran that would have imposed “prison terms of up to 15 years and possible death sentences for failing to wear the hijab”, as UN News reports. However, the government has “paused implementation” of the law, according to the BBC. Iran’s president Massoud Pezeshkian has said that the legislation was "ambiguous and in need of reform". The law has been heavily criticised, with rights experts and activists calling for it to be repealed.

Bonus: Femicide protests in Kenya | “What Alice Munro knew”

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.