Book review: No ignoring of the questions raised

'Living with Men' may be the kind of book about which one never reaches a settled view, simply because the subject matter itself will never fully settle in the mind

Gisele Pelicot was raped at her home in Mazan by her husband and dozens of strangers he had recruited. Picture: Lewis Joly/ AP

• Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial 
• Manon Garcia 
• Polity, €22.00 

This a hard book to review. Perhaps any book about the Pelicot trial would be the same. 

Once finished, and as different dimensions of the case sink in, or are recalled, or are never shaken off, it’s obvious that detonations in the consciousness and conscience will continue to occur long after the time it takes to write a 650-word response.

It may be the kind of book about which one never reaches a settled view, simply because the subject matter itself will never fully settle in the mind.

The Pelicot trial, you will remember, dominated the news cycle over the last year. 

It concerned the repeated raping of Gisèle Pelicot, carried out at her home in Mazan, near Avignon in the south of France, while she was drugged and being filmed. 

The culprits were her husband Dominque, along with dozens and dozens of strangers recruited by him.

The accused were not a random sample of men plucked from the streets of France who turned out to share Dominique Pelicot’s perversions. 

The website Pelicot used to make contact with them was an utter sewer. Anybody visiting it had only bad intentions.

A large number of the defendants had faced prior charges of possession of child sex abuse imagery. Some had extensive criminal records. 

And yet, Pelicot was able to find at least 70 men within a radius of less than 50km of his house who were using that website and who were ready to take part in the abuse.

The greater Avignon area has a population of under 500,000.

The populations of other nearby towns are in the low tens of thousands. We are not really talking about one of the great metropolises of France.

Garcia found that most of the men on trial displayed “a paucity of moral reflection (…) a banal yet terrifying lack of introspection”.

The vilest suggestions could “just pop into their heads”. There were 30 other men who were videoed but could not be identified. 

There were men who were invited by Pelicot who did not go, but who did not report him. There were others who were told by a friend or brother that they went, but who also did not report. 

Many of the defendants, it appears, continued to see themselves as good family men.

Garcia concludes that, as a group, the men in the dock are a representative sample of the male kind.

What does this tell us about “the field of ruins that is male sexuality”? About the permeation of all our minds by warped attitudes to women, violence, and sex? 

Disturbing questions with disturbing answers, informed by the author’s long experience as a philosopher, a feminist, and a woman. 

I can’t say that I agreed with all of the arguments Garcia advances. But she is right, as we say, to “go there”.

While it does contain many details of events in Mazan and Avignon, Living with Men is not by any means an hour-by-hour, day-by-day, video-by-horrific-video account of the trial. 

It is something more discursive, philosophical, and impressionistic, interspersed with moments where Manon Garcia steps away from broader attempts to understand and analyse the case and examines scenes from her own life that somehow connect with it

There are even a couple of pages on ideas prompted by listening to Don’t You Want Me by The Human League. 

At one point, she finds herself finding in one of the defendants a “sadness that was already infinite”, finding him “in spite of it all, a little sexy, and above all a somewhat touching figure”.

Garcia’s concluding portrait of Dominque Pelicot attempting to assume control of the trial like some kind of patriarchal chieftain is a late thunderbolt: “King Pelicot”, she dubs him with a grimace.

So a hard book to review, yes. But harder to forget and impossible to ignore.

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