Gisele Pelicot – in sympathy of “not all men”

Please check on the “not all men” today. They are likely to be highly distressed, exhausted and very dehydrated and need our thoughts and prayers. You see, today the news has been dominated by the sentencing of the 51 men who raped Gisele Pelicot while she was drugged unconscious by her own husband.

If you aren’t up to speed on this particular news event, you can read a little synopsis of each man found guilty here and please be warned, even the most sterile treatment of the facts is truly upsetting. But back to the real victims; the “not all men”.

Selfishly, today, as when the news breaks of any major act of male-on-female violence, I and many other women found ourselves consumed with thoughts of our safety, with a saddened distrust and questioning of men as a whole. Grimly, Gisele’s husband had managed to find 50-plus ‘ordinary’ men within a 30 mile radius of their quiet pastoral home, all without “personality disorders, particular deficiencies or psychological pathologies”, but whose single commonality was a willing desire to seize the opportunity to have sex with an unconsenting woman.

‘When you stack up the stats, does this mean that in a 30 mile radius of my home are 50-plus ‘ordinary’ men who would happily – and repeatedly – rape me given the chance, and not grass on the whole sick schtick to the police?’, us women cruelly pondered. The answer in my case is of course not! I live in London – a far more densely populated area than the Pelicots lived – you can probably triple that number at least, she boasts misandristically.

It really is too cruel that bad luck would fall upon the 50-70 men lured by the siren call of a [checks notes] comatose grandmother and give the rest of the male population such a statistically-based bad name. Really, us girlies need to remember that sure, these crimes were committed against Giselle by ‘ordinary’ men who walk and live among us largely undetected, but who is really suffering here?

When yet another Sarah Everard, Gisele Pelicot or Louise Hunt causes a wave of fear to sweep the world’s silly females up in a “is this the one who kills me?” hysteria, how are the “not all men” meant to feel comfortable interacting with women online, when his flirting might be interpreted as threatening? How is he meant to feel safe walking the streets knowing a woman could, at any moment, think he might be one of those kinds of ‘ordinary’ men? How is the “not all men” supposed to enjoy having a girlfriend or wife when she might lie awake in bed worrying he is statistically a danger to her? It just isn’t fair for him to live under that kind of constant stress every minute of every day of his life.

So ladies, in the wake of the atrocities done to Gisele Pelicot, as you feel unsafe, not just on the streets, in your workplace and in your own home, remember; “not all men”.