Hair rapes. The “dead woman” fantasy is created by presenting the woman as an object belonging to the man.

In the criminal court of Avignon, 51 men are waiting to answer for their actions. A nurse, a delivery driver, a tiler, a fireman, an electrician, a journalist, aged 21 to 68, are all accused of raping 72-year-old Giselle Pellicote. The sexual assaults were carried out on and off for nearly ten years by her husband, Dominique Pellicote, who retired to Vaucluse and was described as a loving father. A horror conductor is on trial for drugging his wife with Temesta, a powerful depressant designed to have strangers rape her without her knowledge.

And this is one of the main challenges of the Mazan rape trial: to shed light on the phenomenon of chemical subjugation, this blind spot of violence against women. In addition to the case affecting the Pélicots, there have been many sexual assaults of this type in recent years; rapes under GHB, also known as the “rape drug”, under 3-MMD during chemsex parties or through wild injections. Entitled in his investigation Men’s night (1), journalist Felix Lemaitre asks a question. Who are these men who abuse unconscious, lifeless women? Can we quantify the extent of the phenomenon? Is the abuse of chemical subjugation the work of “monsters” or the result of an overly entrenched patriarchy? Interview:

Madame Figaro .- In your work, titled Men’s night You have studied the chemical representation of cases of violence against women. What was your starting point?
Felix Lemaitre. As a music journalist, I have been to a lot of festivals a few years ago. In 2021, the phenomenon of wild bites occurred, which caused psychosis. Individuals were said to inject strangers with syringes for evening attacks. I myself have received messages from my family telling me to stay alert. At the same time, there was also much talk of the “rape drug” GHB being placed in young girls’ glasses without their knowledge. That’s how I became interested in it. I wanted to understand the panic and know who was doing it. Who drugs women to abuse them?

What did you discover?
We must first distinguish between two things: chemical exposure and chemical vulnerability. The first is the act of providing drugs to a person for the purpose of abuse. The second is the act of taking advantage of someone who is already intoxicated, either while intoxicated or under the influence of drugs they may have taken themselves. There is no such thing as consent in all cases, but it must be qualified. In 2021, ANSM, the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Healthcare Products, identified 291 cases of chemical vulnerability, 82 cases of probable chemical exposure, and about 350 cases of possible chemical exposure. Furthermore, 42.6% of these chemical rapes occurred in a private context, compared to 19.5% in a festive context.

What does this mean?
Often the victims are drugged by someone they know – a boyfriend, husband, friend of a friend, etc. – and that these attacks take place at home or in familiar places. GHB attacks on strangers do exist, but remain in the minority. Furthermore, GHB became widespread with wild injections and the hashtag #Balancetonbar in the same year, but it is actually the last on the list of drugs used to represent chemicals.

All drugs can be used for chemical submission

Felix Lemaitre

What are the most commonly used drugs when it comes to chemicals?
According to the ANSM, we find drugs: opioids, antihistamines, anxiolytics, first in 56% of cases, followed by MDMA and alcohol. Saying that GHB is a “rape drug” is a real problem because it implies that rape exists because of the drug or that it was created in a laboratory to rape women. All drugs can be used to introduce chemicals, and often not GHB is used, but drugs that can be found in many French pharmacies or on the dark web.

Why are complaints generally dismissed in these types of cases?
There are already very few women applying to the police. In the festive context, they often feel guilty. They have blackouts, inconsistent memories that lead to doubt and shame. For those who do file a complaint, police also often mis-test, focusing on GHB when many other products have just been proven to be in use. Furthermore, some drugs, including GHB, have the characteristic of disappearing from the bloodstream very quickly. If a woman takes two or three days to complain, urine tests will not give anything. Hence the importance of the democratization of hair tests, which make it possible to go back into a victim’s consumption history.

“Dead Woman” Fantasy

How to explain the abuse of unconscious people?
The fantasy of a lifeless woman, a “dead woman” itself, arises from this representation of a female object belonging to a man. It is used to establish male dominance. Moreover, we only have to look at the world of porn, where we find a number of keywords around these topics, such as “sleeping woman”, “wife proposed by her husband”… In particular, in Japan there is a genre called “time freeze”: the idea of ​​stopping time and using a woman’s body like a doll. Imagine all kinds of things in this allotted time, some of them disgusting.

Can we say that these images trigger potential sexual assaulters?
This is a difficult question to answer, but what we can say is that in several cases, chemical sex offenders have been shown to have done this type of research.

You write that beyond the shame of the “Maza” case, men are encouraged to take advantage of women’s vulnerability from adolescence. You specifically talk about “conditioning voyeurism, stalking and predatory”…
At the beginning of adolescence, the attitude towards young girls changes. At my level, I remember us trading techniques between friends to find hiding places to see under girls’ skirts. We even followed up to find their addresses so we could return to their homes later, feigning randomness and surprise. What is viewed as play as a child becomes highly toxic as an adult, yet it reproduces. I also cite the influence of “teenage sex comedies” as American Piewhich marked a generation of teenagers. The characters, who are introduced as handsome guys, always have this goal of getting laid and use all kinds of tricks to do so, even making the girls drink to distract them and take advantage of them. Consent is often secondary and rape is used as a comedic element. All of this contributes to a rape culture where attackers are often unaware of their actions. They will say that it was part of the seduction game, that it was a misunderstanding or a miscommunication.

Whereas you mention specific strategies that are passed down between men. Especially the sweeper car…
Yes, depending on the region, men will also call it “playing trash”. The act of targeting the most vulnerable girls, the drunkest or drug addicts, is the act of ‘picking up’ – bringing them home at the end of the evening. There we are in chemical vulnerability, but the idea remains the idea of ​​benefiting the unconscious person.

Does the culture of privacy that you talk about in your book allow this kind of aggression?
Rapes against unconscious people are allowed due to a certain male solidarity. At parties, people often don’t want to see what’s going on, they don’t want to know, they don’t want to be confronted. The men do not encourage each other to rape the women, but there is a balance of horror, as if everyone has something to reproach themselves for and would rather remain silent. In the same case, during the Mazan rape trial, Dominique Pellicote explained that 3 out of 10 men rejected his offer. However, they did not alert anyone.

Is the “sexual misery” argument used by some drug users?
Sexual misery is a highly contested term to the extent that people believe they are entitled to a certain amount of sex. Therefore, it would justify this desperation and encourage deviant behavior. This is not a valid argument, obviously.

At parties, people often don’t want to see what’s going on, don’t want to know, don’t want to confront each other.

Felix Lemaitre

Originally used by men, the hashtag “NotAllMen” has been parodied by women since the start of the Mazan rape trial. For what?
We like to make “monsters”, but it is dangerous. The myth of the aggressor and this tropism of the media to talk about them as separate entities risks losing sight of the intelligence of evil. Mazan’s trial proves to us that there is no epinal image of a rapist or a drug addict. There are monstrous acts, but no monster per se. The idea is that not all men are aggressors, but that all types of men, regardless of their social class or family status, can be.

Among the defendants in the trial we actually find fathers of families and all social groups…
It is in this sense that this trial is historical, because all these people are socially integrated, they are “gentlemen”. We can no longer use as a defense the “strategy of the other,” as the essayist Valerie Rae Robert calls it, which consists of blaming the other, the “monster,” and by extension the foreign, the marginalized, the racialized. or those with disadvantaged backgrounds. Thinking like this keeps the problem at bay and calms us down, but Mazan’s rapes bring us face to face with reality.

Do you think Mazan’s rape trial could serve to raise awareness about chemical exposure?
I hope so, but at this stage I remain confused. On the one hand, the case clearly shows the scope of the phenomenon and that it can be the case of so-called “ordinary” men. However, Giselle Pellico represents the perfect victim in the eyes of public opinion. She is a retired mother. He wasn’t a free spirit or a swinger, in fact he had to explain that at trial. She wasn’t a party girl either. But the thing is, the victim doesn’t have to be perfect. You may be a victim and like to party or have sexual practices that are different from the norm.

(1) Men’s nightFélix Lemaître, ed. JC Lattès.