The triumph of Gisèle Pelicot She refused to be stripped of her humanity

Ten years. It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the betrayal. The discovery has devastated the Pelicot family, sending shockwaves of horror in all directions. Much has already been written about its connection to misogyny, and to the slippery slope pornography follows toward atrocity, especially once turbo-charged by online competition for clicks. Women all over the world share a sense of horror and outrage at Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse. But while Dominique Pelicot’s actions are mercifully not common, what he sought in engineering the violation of his unconscious wife represents an amplified and sexualised pattern that pervades our modern world. The only reason this is difficult to see is that, more often than not, such violence is more humdrum than grotesque.

There is a distinctive form of violence inherent in treating people, animals, and the world as mere objects, in order to use them to our own ends. The philosopher Martin Heidegger characterised this as a kind of epistemological violence which he called Gestell, usually translated as “enframing”. Far more than a set of tools or techniques, for Heidegger, enframing represented the essence of technology: a mindset in which the world is not encountered in its full being, but merely a set of resources standing ready to be used. To Heidegger it was an aggressive act to re-order the world conceptually in this way. He called it a “challenging-forth”, that obliterates that thing’s ability to be fully itself.

This enframing, combined with the camera’s more literal framing, is what produces the pervasive objectification feminists have long protested against in the porn industry as a vector for violence against women — even when all performers are consenting. By definition, someone filmed or photographed taking part in sexual acts is not in relationship with you, but is rather reduced to a resource for you to use. The result is a form of media content that normalises intimate objectification and abuse, even before you get to the industry’s many abusive and exploitative practices.

For one of its second-order effects is to normalise a parodic model of relations between the sexes, polarised between pure agency (typically the male performer, often subjecting his female partner to violent or degrading acts) and a psychically evacuated, vacant passivity now conflated with “femaleness”. On this model, being a woman isn’t a distinctive way of being a human person, but a state of radical psychic emptiness and de-personalisation from or with which relationship is impossible.

And to the extent that this model then shapes real-world relations and identifications, it further forecloses the possibility of relationship. Women trapped in this model embrace their own objectification. The OnlyFans porn star Lily Phillips, for example, recently filmed herself being perfunctorily gang-banged over a 14-hour period by 101 strangers. Phillips seemed to embrace her own experience as object: she told YouTube documentary-maker Josh Pieters that she was “only good for one thing”, dissociated for much of the stunt, and could only remember about five of the men who had sex with her. Men, meanwhile, are encouraged to act out violence and domination — or still darker explorations, as with Pelicot and his fellow-rapists.

Other men again fetishise this parodic femininity for themselves, with many then arguing that this is simply what being a woman is. The transgender writer Andrea Long Chu notoriously made this argument, proposing that femaleness means enframing oneself: “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another”. Chu acknowledges that these views and desires are shaped by porn, declaring: “sissy porn did make me trans”. To become “female” in this sense represents, for Chu, a kind of “suicidal ecstasy” of psychic evacuation: pure identification with one’s own enframing, metonymically represented by “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”.

Even where this mode of relating is supposedly consensual, it provokes deep unease. We only need look at the furore that has surrounded Phillips’ stunt. As for Phillips herself, she claimed the event was her fantasy and that she enjoyed it — but broke down in tears afterwards. Even the men who turned up to use her begged for relatedness, Phillips reported, but were briskly sent on their way. Thus Phillips’ enframing of herself even extended to the male participants, creating an industrial conveyor-belt of impersonal rutting for the hungry OnlyFans camera frame.

But if this seems shocking, we should consider that perhaps it’s only the extension of this logic to humans that is at all new. Industrial factory farming has enframed and objectified animals like this for a good half-century, viewing living creatures as mere production units. Such unfortunate animals lead only short, miserable lives of fear and pain, with little or no scope for natural behaviour, before they are slaughtered on another conveyor belt. The same objectifying principle applies, too, to animals used as test subjects for medical or other experiments: a practice that usually occurs behind many layers of security, obfuscation, and meticulous cognitive dissonance, for the straightforward reason that if conducted in the open, it would be recognised as monstrous.

The closest I’ve ever come to this world was a temp job in my twenties, as an administrator in a university science laboratory that included animal research subjects. The “BRU” or “Biological Resources Unit” was always spoken of in hushed tones in the office; I recall the atmosphere during one monkey experiment (I made sure not to learn the details) was an indescribable, repressed horror. We all knew something terrible was happening, but saying so was impossible. We all sensed the violation entailed by “challenging-forth” a sentient primate as mere thing — as “biological resources”, stripped of sentience and reduced to usable living matter.

And if we recoil from the use of monkeys or other laboratory animals in this way, we rightly recognise that to enframe a human is an atrocity. Those totalitarian regimes whose political project entailed the reduction of political prisoners or ethnic outgroups to slaves, things, broken minds, mere “resources” or dead bodies rightly call forth the term “evil”; perhaps nowhere more grimly than in Nazi Germany. The Austrian philosopher and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, for example, has described his own experience of the thoroughness with which the concentration camps were designed to erode prisoners’ ability to think of themselves as human beings rather than things. And in the laboratories of Josef Mengele, imprisoned humans were vivisected as mere “biological resources”. If the technological mindset has a heart of darkness, that is surely near its core.

It is not my intention to claim direct moral equivalence between factory farming, vivisection, concentration camps, and the crimes of Dominique Pelicot and his co-rapists. But the type of violence is the same across all these, for all that it differs in degree, and in how tolerated it is culturally. In each case, some kind of value is extracted from living beings — a value released by ignoring, deliberately eroding, or chemically suppressing that sentience and refusing what the philosopher Martin Buber would call an “I/Thou” relationship, in favour of an “I-It” one in which there is only the agentic self and the passive object. Once enframed as an “it” in this way, factory-farmed pigs cease to be pigs, with their own instincts and behaviours, and become merely potential kilos of meat. Monkeys become “biological resources”. A woman becomes a sex toy. A man’s wife — a relationship with all the richness and complexity and trust accrued over 38 years — becomes an unconscious thing, to be used by strangers.

And perhaps what is most unnerving about the Pelicot case is how clearly it reveals that for some, this violence itself is the point. For that laboratory, using the monkey as a thing was regarded as an unfortunate necessity in research. We look away from factory farming as a regrettable trade-off for affordable protein. But Dominique Pelicot exposes the reality that for some, foreclosing relationship and reducing a “thou” to an “it” is not a means to an end, but the end itself, with its own thrilling charge of power and pleasure. If Mengele’s laboratories represent a dark heart to the technological mindset, this must surely be its cold loins.

Against this moral economy of loveless violation, Gisèle Pelicot’s extraordinary heroism lies in having rejected the framing, and her own enframing. Throughout the trial, she held onto her own human personhood. She refused anonymity. She insisted that all the videos of her rape should be played, and that her rapists should face her. And she told reporters: “When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.”

The monstrous crime of Dominique Pelicot, and of the men who joined him, was to engineer Gisèle Pelicot’s dehumanisation for their own sexual enjoyment: chemically reducing her to the pure passivity and cognitive obliteration required for parodic “femaleness” on the Andrea Long Chu template. They sought to make her a thing. It was a profound evil, and their punishment is richly deserved. But Gisèle Pelicot would not be enframed. She would not be made a thing. She survived her violation; she insisted on being seen; she remains defiantly human. What she has endured is beyond imagining. That she has endured, while remaining fully a person, is her triumph.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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