The astonishing bravery of Gisele Pelicot (and four other stories)

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

Dear readers old and new,

It’s cold outside, so let’s get straight to the reads;

(which are America-heavy, my apologies in advance)…

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1) The astonishing bravery of Gisele Pelicot

This week, Gisele Pelicot, the woman whose husband drugged and raped her over a decade, inviting dozens of other men to take part, gave her closing statement in the trial of more than 50 men who abused her while she was unconscious. I am filled with endless admiration for Pelicot. With astonishing bravery, the 71-year-old asked for the trial to be held in public to show other rape victims that they should not feel ashamed, and to encourage others to speak out against abusers. This involved her sitting through weeks of testimonies and “video recorded by her husband… shown in court” which “repeatedly featured her motionless, sometimes snoring, while the accused, including her husband, abused her,” as Reuters reports. Addressing the French court this week, Pelicot said that “it is time for society to look at this macho, patriarchal society and change the way it looks at rape.” Le Monde has an interesting report on Pelicot’s lawyer’s closing statements, in which they made the point that it was important for the trial to be public in order to raise awareness of how victims are still treated in rape trials:

Making this trial public also made it possible, he stressed, "to see how rape is still defended, in France, in 2024": Gisèle Pelicot was jostled, treated rudely, and humiliated by the co-defendants' lawyers, who sometimes suggested she had colluded with her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot. As late as Tuesday, some were still attributing direct responsibility to her for her ex-husband's actions, accusing her of failing to interpret the first "signals." It was further implied that she could not have been completely ignorant of what was taking place for 10 years. Camus denounced this as "a form of courtroom abuse": "Certain defense strategies no longer have any place in a courtroom in France, in the 21^st century. If the defense is free, it also reflects who we are."

The verdict and sentencing in the trial are expected on 20th December. On Saturday, there were mass protests across France over violence against women.

2) The end of MeToo?

The election of a “court-adjudicated sexual abuser” as US president, as Peter Baker describes Donald Trump in the New York Times, is enough to raise questions about whether the MeToo movement has had its day. The fact that various picks for Trump’s cabinet have faced accusations of sexual misconduct (which, like Trump, they all vehemently deny), makes this an even more urgent theme. As Baker reports:

“It really feels like that’s part of what makes this cabinet appealing” to him, said Leigh Gilmore, the author of “The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women” and a professor emeritus at the Ohio State University. “Credible accusations of sexual assault aren’t a red line, because those are a feature of Trump’s own biography.”

Indeed, she said, Mr. Trump may be seeking out those who have been accused so he does not stand out. “The more people he can surround himself with that are not in any way slowed down by their rise to power by these kinds of allegations, it normalizes his own behavior,” Ms. Gilmore said. “He’s creating a worldview. He’s shifting norms as he moves.”

And also

Mr. Trump’s election and the nominations “show that the work of the movement is woefully incomplete,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, the author of “Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers” and a former prosecutor who is now at Northwestern University’s law school.

“The electorate shrugged aside a finding of civil liability for sexual assault, so it comes as no surprise that the president-elect feels entitled to nominate men who have also been accused of sexual misconduct,” she added. “For victims of abuse and those who care about them, this is yet another sign of a collective willingness to elevate the interests of accused men over their accusers.”

The 19th has a handy guide to the allegations. Relatedly, the internet delighted in dunking on the so-called “literary scoop of the year” this week. For Vanity Fair, Vincenzo Barney had an exclusive about the novelist Cormac McCarthy’s “secret muse”, a woman called Augusta Britt who he got to know when she was a 16-year-old in foster care and he was in his forties. Much of the vitriol was about the writing of the piece, which is replete with descriptions of the weather, and somehow manages to obscure Britt’s fascinating life story. Some also accused Barney of glamorising what sounds like grooming and manipulation. The writing bothered me far less than the fact that a writer in his twenties could hear this woman’s story, the fact that she had suffered abuse, that she spent years in deep depressions, that McCarthy forged her birth certificate in order to take her to Mexico, where the two had sex, aged 17, that his letters to her when she was young were so sexual that it seems she can now hardly bear to read them—that he could hear all this and not think it more worthy of exploration than the mountain view or the clouds, I found unsettling. I mention this here because on reading it I thought about Trump’s win, and his cabinet, and the fact that it feels like abuse of women and girls is more often than not treated like a side issue, like it doesn’t matter, despite the change brought by the MeToo movement. I think these things connect.

P.s. Speaking of Trump’s anti-feminist allies, Kim Kardashian has published photos of herself posing with a Tesla bot and Cybercab, pictures that are like “dystopian thirst traps”, writes Arwa Mahdawi—and also serve as a reminder that Trump’s “number two” has regressive attitudes towards women, just like many of the president-elect’s cabinet picks.

P.p.s Back in Britain, one of the right-wing Reform party’s MPs was jailed for repeatedly kicking his girlfriend in 2006, though he had told the press he was jailed for “pushing” her, as per The Times’ George Greenwood.

3) The future of abortion in Trump’s America

On

Can We Still Govern?

, the academic Pamela Herd digs into the trend of so-called “split ticket” voting in the US election, where voters chose to cast their vote for Trump as president and also to protect rights to abortion in referendums, as happened in Arizona, Nevada and Missouri. In fact, overall, she notes, abortion protection was more popular than Kamala Harris in the ten states where there was a vote on abortion protections. Herd also looks at the ways in which reproductive rights may be at risk from the federal level under Trump, drawing “on a playbook that has worked in the past”. She writes:

Access to abortion and reproductive health care is not just about legislation or legal rights. In practice, even when abortion was legal across the United States, in most Republican controlled states, a wide array of administrative burdens made it, in practice, difficult to impossible to access services. Waiting periods, requiring ultrasounds prior to the procedure, and imposing costly and unnecessary regulations on abortion providers are just a few of the ways that anti-abortion proponents worked around the legal right to abortion, ensuring that many women couldn’t actually access it. While they claimed these practices would protect women’s health, in reality the consequences of those laws were deadly, for both women and infants.

After the Dobbs decision, burdens in states where abortion was outlawed didn’t as much go away, as reemerge in ways that affected much broader swaths of the public. For example, physicians are required to provide abortion procedures to protect the life of the mother. But those experiencing a miscarriage, and the physicians that care for them, ran into a quagmire of unclear rules and requirements, as well as legal threats, if they couldn’t document their decisions. This restricted care and hurt women. Further, doctors are fleeing those states, further limiting broader access to any reproductive health care. Indeed, maternal and infant mortality are up. The legal right didn’t translate into actual care. 

P.s. ProPublica reports that Georgia dismissed all 32 members of a committee on maternal mortality after the outlet obtained “internal details” about the deaths of two women linked to the state’s abortion ban.

4) “Cis or subhuman”

One of the trends of the 2024 campaign was Trump’s weaponising of anti-trans sentiment for votes. The Republican party spent millions of dollars on anti-trans ads. This week House Speaker Mike Johnson banned transgender people from using bathrooms in “the House side of the Capitol complex” that don’t correspond with their biological sex. This means that Sarah McBride, the first (and only) transgender member of Congress, is being banned from using the women’s bathroom.

But, as Axios reports, “this goes far beyond Washington. There was a huge spike in anti-trans legislation at the state and federal level last year, and a record 665 such bills have been introduced this year, per the Trans Legislation Tracker.”

In the journal Liberties, Celeste Marcus writes about her “civic duty” as a liberal “to condemn this nastiness, to be unabashedly, brazenly kind and supportive of trans people, and of every other vulnerable minority that Trump and his gang go after. That is our civic duty regardless of what we think about their gender or religious or political or ethnic identity.” Here is another snippet:

Earlier this week, Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace introduced a bill to ban transgender women from the Capitol’s female bathrooms. The bill was designed to target one trans woman in particular: Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person elected to Congress. Mace bloviated that the bill was an effort in “standing up for women, protecting their spaces, and restoring a bit of sanity to Capitol Hill.” Standing up for women? The hypocrisy is nauseating. She said this the same week that Pete Hegseth was named as Donald Trump’s pick to helm the Pentagon, the same day that Matt Gaetz withdrew as Trump’s pick for attorney general, and the same month that the first ever convicted felon and rapist was elected president of the United States. No one believes that Mace is motivated by female solidarity. She was doing it to target one of the most visible and powerful trans people in the country in order to send a message to every other trans person, as well as to the rest of us: conform or be humiliated. If McBride can be harassed in this manner then anyone can be.

P.s. Vladimir Putin has banned adoption of Russian children “by citizens of countries where gender transitioning is legal”.

5) “Becoming-feminist”

On

Philosophy Publics

,

Mona Mona

has written about Sandra Bartky’s essay "Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness", published in 1976, which “would have been one of the earlier essays of feminist philosophy”. Here is a snippet:

In this work, Bartky brings together the Marxist analysis of class-based oppression and a phenomenological interpretation of becoming-feminist — no small feat. Phenomenology is a method that seeks to uncover the structures of subjectivity, in this case the structures for a feminist consciousness.² How does a woman — and here the focus is on women — become a feminist, what are the conditions for the possibility of becoming-feminist, and how is her subjectivity different from that of the not-yet feminist subject?³

And also, something forward-looking:

Feminist consciousness is a consciousness of one’s victimization set against a horizon of liberatory politics, a shrewd idealism, and a nearly delusional hope for the future. There is no consciousness of being victimized without an idea of injustice; no idea of injustice without justice; and no idea of justice without idealism. Our victimization as part of an underclass of women, in the context of a misogynist culture and patriarchal institutions, is not acceptable. We can say that with our whole mouths.

Realizing one’s victimization as such gives one access to beginning to understand other forms of oppression, the logics of which are the same in spite of different histories and material realities.

Bonus: Iranian woman detained for undressing ‘won’t face charges’ | “Conservative Psychiatry” | 4B reaches America

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