Trigger warnings: discussions of rape, gender violence, and sexual abuse against both children and adults
Most of you by now have heard about the incomprehensibly vile stories surrounding motherless dot com and its rape culture offshoots.
You may have heard about the French gang rape story, too, which is how I first heard that people were sexually assaulting and/or raping their wives while they sleep. Those aren’t words that even make sense to write down. For Gisèle Pelicot, the French survivor at the heart of the French rape story, it was hard, too.
Another warning. Graphic, ugly details ahead. Proceed with caution.
One quiet day in the South of France, police officers visited Ms. Pelicot. One of them asked them what type of man her husband was. What an odd question, she must have thought, but it was part of a longer set of other questions about him. She replied that he was a great guy. The BBC describes what happened next:
The officer showed her two photos of a lifeless woman lying on a bed. They were among thousands of pictures and videos her husband had taken of her while she was drugged.
“I didn’t recognise myself,” she says. “This woman was lying on the bed as if she were dead. There are men next to her. I didn’t understand who they were. I didn’t know them. I’d never met them.”
Police told Ms Pelicot that she had been repeatedly raped by dozens of men. Although her husband had recorded, labelled and neatly catalogued the videos of the rapes on a hard disk, many of the men could not be identified.
That part of the story is bad enough that it makes for a difficult read. But then I learned that Ms. Pelicot had to endure a trial that revealed she had been raped at least 92 times by 72 different men. Her husband, like the motherless dot com goons who did the same thing, filmed and photographed all of it.
My immediate reaction to this story when it emerged was to assume that it was a one-off. How could it not be? It was too crazy to contemplate. When it was also revealed that her husband was also wanted for murder in a separate case, I felt a sense of restrained relief.
Then news of “motherless dot com” and its 80 million+ monthly views broke.
There has, strangely, been an online argument about the number of people visiting motherless, which Snopes describes as a kink site that…
…hosts videos organized in more than 100 different pornographic categories including “Asian,” “Brunette” and “Lesbian.” The top of the website displayed links with labels including “Videos,” “Images,” “Categories” and “Chat,” as well as an external link reading, “18&Abused.”
The alarms about motherless began to spread when CNN broke a story about a Telegram chat group that French lawmaker Sandrine Josso called an “online rape academy” that was linked from motherless.
CNN built its story on top of prior work done by German investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh, who produced several YouTube documentary videos on something that the mainstream media, in its paternalistic zeal to sanewash videotaping your wife getting raped while she sleeps, calls “sleep content.”
You may have noticed that I used the word, “strangely” in describing the online debate over the number of views. This is because one view is too many. How is law enforcement supposed to come to grips with millions, which is a number that isn’t in dispute? German investigators found "dozens of Telegram groups with up to 70,000 members and rape videos reaching millions of views,” according to Snopes. (h/t to Linda Caroll on the Snopes story).
We don’t need to spend time piecing together what part of motherless is a problem or how many views each section gets. Besides, if there’s a “motherless,” we all know about, aren’t there dozens more that we don’t know about? What about the Dark Web? What kind of ghoulish activities do its denizens partake in?
Gender violence is a global problem.
In Nigeria, a community named Ozoro recently held what is referred to by human rights advocates as a rape festival. The festival, which is technically called the Alue-Do fertility festival, an annual event, made headlines, mostly outside of the United States, when videos emerged showing what the BBC describes as:
Groups of young men chasing, stripping, grabbing and assaulting women in public spaces, in some cases while people are filming… Among those detained is a community leader widely named as the organiser of the event.
Local officials deny that it was a “rape festival,” but arrested 15 people anyway.
The South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have experienced deep levels of gender violence for ages. In India, the outcry over the famous (outside of the U.S.) 2012 Nirbhaya rape, which involved the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern on a moving bus in South Delhi, triggered a huge outcry and strengthened rape laws in India after women flooded Indian streets in protest.
Caste-based sexual violence remains rampant in India. We don’t hear about it because mainstream media is still dominated by men. We don’t hear stories like that of an eight-year-old Muslim girl gang-raped and murdered as a message to Muslims to stay away from Hindu areas of Jammu, an area around Kashmir.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, led by its fanatical Republican Guards, relies on state-sponsored gender violence to crush dissent, especially when women had the audacity to rally against rules about wearing the hijab.
According to Amnesty International:
Security forces in Iran used rape and other forms of sexual violence, amounting to torture and other ill-treatment, to intimidate and punish peaceful protesters during the 2022 “Woman Life Freedom” uprising.
The report reveals that perpetrators of rape and other forms of sexual violence included agents from the Revolutionary Guards, the paramilitary Basij force, and the Ministry of Intelligence, as well as different branches of the police force including the Public Security Police (police amniat-e omoumi), the Investigation Unit of Iran’s police (agahi), and the Special Forces of the police (yegan-e vijeh). Survivors included women and girls who had defiantly removed their headscarves, as well as men and boys who took to the streets to express their outrage at decades of gender-based discrimination and oppression.
This violence included girls as young as 12. The Iranian regime has also been cited for raping virgins before political executions, so that they couldn’t enter heaven, just to name one of the most heinous of the regime’s atrocities against women.
Rape is considered such an integral part of warfare that the media doesn’t bother reporting on it.
In America, women know enough about gender-based violence that they’re forced to think about things that would never occur to a man. An obvious example: Make sure the pepper spray is handy whenever you go outside.
Back in the days before key fobs, many women I knew held the edge of their key between their fingers when approaching their car, because unlocking a car, at any time of day and no matter how many people were around, was a moment of vulnerability.
When women aren’t being hassled online, they’re re-experiencing abuse when cases get thrown out of court or when guys like Harvey Weinstein keep catching “legal breaks.”
Some of those breaks come at the hands of the prosecutors who are supposed to be protecting women. Consider how one of the charges against Weinstein was dismissed. One survivor said she was forced to perform oral sex on him, but the case was dismissed when a friend said that the survivor told her she did it for the promise of getting acting roles. Sounds like sexual assault to me.
Meanwhile, he keeps slipping through the legal cracks, most recently via a mistrial over the alleged rape of aspiring actress Jessica Mann. This was after a rape conviction was overturned by the New York Supreme Court in 2020.
Weinstein will probably remain behind bars thanks to other convictions and the simple fact of how he lived his life. He’s sick, old, and decrepit, but he keeps fighting criminal charges anyway because his desire to abuse women is absolute, and this is the only way he can keep doing it: Keep putting them through the ringer, make them relive the assault in a public forum, over, and over, and over again. It’s a form of sickness that we simply don’t address in our society.
And I haven’t even mentioned Epstein, who, by many accounts, grew a billion-dollar rape empire that left no age untouched. The survivors in that case are struggling to find justice, but the mainstream media is obliging one of Epstein’s protectors and friends, Trump, by accepting every deflective parry the Predator in Chief thrusts their way.
The bear and the forest
The choice between a bear in the forest and a man is a real one. Most women choose the bear. Those who don’t are probably well-trained in the martial arts.
The shocking revelation that women can’t even sleep safely in the same residence as their partners has stunned women who have heard about motherless into a cold rage that men will not overcome without a lot of self-examination. This would need to include a new kind of peer pressure that, for now, seems implausible, and a new kind of mentorship among young boys and men that, unfortunately, has mostly been left in the hands of rage podcasters like Andrew Tate and chest-thumping imbeciles like Joe Rogan.
Most men aren’t doing the hard work of teaching grace and dignity toward the girls and women in a young man’s life. We’re all just leaving it for others, but the others are fostering an insufferable rape culture that is ruining the trust and lives of the women we care about.
When men are young, they’re eager to brag about their sexploits. Many men, especially when they’re young, have no sense of boundaries. And nobody is teaching them.
When women try to raise the subject, they’re shouted down. Change needs to happen, and it has to come from parents on a personal level and from men more generally and more specifically.
The problem is reflected in everyday conversation
If women knew how we talked about them in the locker room (it’s just locker room talk!), they’d hate us. So why talk that way about them? Why do we call what women (at least when I was young) refer to as a nice romantic evening a score?
Men have, for as long as I’ve been alive, looked upon all kinds of relationships with women as a sport.
Speaking of sports…When a sports chat group is devoid of women, what does that say about the men in the sports chat? The dearth of women isn’t because women hate sports. Many, many women like sports as much as men do. The reason you won’t find women in your sports chat is that, unless it is moderated by someone who insists on treating women with grace and respect, women find the chat repugnant.
This is where I will get hit with “exceptions” to the rule. “Not the sports chat I’m in. Women are welcome in mine. They’re very active.” That’s great. I already know that some are cool, so no need to drop that comment. But leave men to their own devices, with no formal moderation, and it’s usually a different story.
Gamergate, in 2014-15, was an online 24/7 attack on women launched by some male gamers determined to root out any concept of feminism in the online videogame community.
There isn’t one man in this world who hasn’t, at one point in his life, engaged in victim-blaming. “Shouldn’t have worn that skirt” might as well be a T-shirt for some of us. If it’s an honest shirt, it should include a graphic of a knife.
I could rattle off a dozen more examples. But enough torture for one day.
Is there any hope of changing it?
One potential solution is simple, and it’s one all men can participate in
Kamala Harris didn’t win one age group in the male demographic. So the first thing men need to do is hire more women to run things. Not because they’re better, or smarter, or any of that. Some are, and some aren’t. But because they bring a much needed feminine perspective to the art of living.
I swear this next passage is not a sales pitch. The novella I cite is only 99 cents. It’s not a price point designed to make money. I don’t care if you buy it. My novel, Restive Souls, which my next several paragraphs also discuss, hasn’t been published and may never be. I bring the plot line forward to illustrate the point behind the urgency of including more women in leadership positions, even if it “feels like it’s too much.” It’s not too much if rape culture continues to dominate and women can’t feel safe.
In my novella, The Trial of Summary James, there’s a scene where a woman waits for a man she doesn’t know in his hotel room. She does so without fear.
She’s there to help the story’s protagonist recover from an injury.
It was not designed as social commentary. She just happened. The character introduced herself to me. All I did was relay her brief part of the story (as told by the protagonist):
When I entered, a woman was kneeling at my bed with a small roll-up in front of her. When she heard the door, she rolled the device up, set it aside, and looked at me. All I could do was shake my head. I couldn’t even muster the energy to ask who she was. She was a young white woman with red hair and a wild nest of freckles highlighting pink globes on each cheek. “Hi,” she said calmly.
I waved with the hand that didn’t hurt.
“Your friend Trace sent me. He said you might need me.”
Finally, I asked, “Who are you?”
“You can call me Dr. Feelgood.”
I sighed. “That can mean a lot of things. Feelgood can, I mean.”
“Understood. Tell me what hurts.”
“Mostly my ego.”
“Can’t help with that. What else?”
I glanced at my shoulder. “I think it’s separated.”
“Perfect.” She smiled as she sat on the bed. She patted part of the bed and signaled for me to sit next to her. I didn’t move, so she said cheerily, “Come on, I don’t bite and it will only hurt for just a few seconds!”
“Worse day ever,” I groaned as I sat next to her.
“Good Golly Malloy you are a tall one,” she said cheerfully. She stood up. “You’re almost too tall to fix!” she giggled. Then she grabbed my arm viciously and fixed my separated shoulder in less than a second, I thought. I didn’t even have time to let out a whoop.
“Wow,” I said.
“I know, right? I’m good. Anything else?”
“Well, my hand was busted up but somehow it’s better.”
“Let me see.”
I gave it to her and she kissed it. “Better?”
I laughed. “Much.”
“Excellent.” She got up and headed for the door.
“That’s it?”
“Anything else hurt?”
I laughed again. “No, I’m just tired.”
“Can’t help with that. Get some sleep. Bye!” and she opened the door and left.
The weird part about writing this is that I can’t imagine writing something like that based on our world. Not without, at least, adding an element of fear or suspense to the episode.
But the nature of the novella’s world primed the scene to write itself, almost without my input, it seemed. That’s because the novella’s worldbuilding had already been accomplished.
The novella is based on a timeline of my somewhat utopian, and much longer, novel called Restive Souls, which leverages alternative history to comment on our paternalistic, racist society. In the Restive Souls timeline, women maintain pivotal roles in political, religious, and societal leadership.
The influence of First Settler nations helps establish a maternalistic society instead of the kind we live in today. There is also no First Nation ethnic cleansing in Restive Souls, so the indigenous culture of the Americas spreads and blends and influences.
Women become revered leaders and caretakers rather than the second-class citizens they were in Europe at the time of the Revolutionary War.
In Restive Souls, the British win the Revolutionary War and immediately emancipate the slaves. The novel leaves open to debate a key question for would-be fictional historians:
Do the British do this to reward slaves for their help in turning the war around through Lord Dunmore’s proclamation (by which some historians estimate 80,000 to 100,000 colonial slaves fled to the British armed forces in exchange for freedom)?
Or is it a form of punishment to the colonies administered by an angry king?
The novel doesn’t definitively answer that question. Instead, it focuses on a thriving, emerging nation that blends African, Native American, and, to a lesser degree, European cultures.
A strongly theological nation emerges. But since one of its leaders is a priestess, the egalitarian nature of Christianity’s original intent is nourished, as proclaimed by Acts 22:44–45 from the Bible:
And all the believers were together and had all things in common; and they would sell their property and possessions and share them with all, to the extent that anyone had need.
In Restive Souls, there is no African colonialism, in large part because the newly formed, mostly African-American North American state in the Carolina low country builds a formidable navy. A powerful ally of the new North American nation forms in Africa called The Kinlaza House. It, too, is heavily influenced by a female leader.
A congregational economy develops on both sides of the ocean that sort of shares the egalitarian spirit of original Marxism with the competitive spirit of capitalism. Women play key roles, too. The Tsărăgĭ Congregational Union, led by a woman named Ahyoka of the Ani’-wa’`ya, becomes one of the richest Christian congregations in the world.
This kind of worldbuilding is easy when you can throw out norms on a whim. That’s the advantage of being a writer. We get to play God.
The imagination runs wild when we ask what might have happened if the vast quantities of kinetic creative energy that so many different groups of people were forced to suppress during the struggle to survive had been unleashed for the good of society instead.
What if American Blacks had been able to learn and teach and create beginning in the late eighteenth century? What if the political influences of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that were loosely borrowed by the United States’ Founders had instead seeped into the very essence of the body politic and society?
What if women had become spiritual and political leaders during the eighteenth century?
Humans being human, conflicts would arise in any kind of world. The world of Restive Souls is no exception, if for no other reason than fiction stories often require a good villain or two to keep the reader interested.
But if there is anything we’ve learned over the eons, you’d think that people could agree that it would be nice to see a feminine response to villainy.
Through Restive Souls, I also addressed my craving for a world where a woman can feel safe, or, at least, safer than she does now.
But the problem remains.
It’s still fiction. What would it take to make it real?
We all have distinct philosophies. Mine says that we are all connected. Maybe if enough of us just wish for it to be so, it will become so. Maybe someday, a woman can knock on a stranger’s door, and not cower at the man behind it.
As we wrestle with the ghastly atrocities committed by men, I wonder what the world might look like if it were decorated more by a woman’s touch.
Thanks for reading!
Talking about a woman knocking on a stranger’s door is an echo of a situation I faced just yesterday. My son in law had a birthday, and I ordered a gift for him online. Unfortunately, it was delivered to the correct address in the wrong town. There are two streets with the same name in two adjoining towns, and they also have the same zip code. I considered going to the house in the other town to ask about the gift, but since I was alone, I was uneasy about knocking on a stranger’s door. The really funny part of this is that it is absolutely true, and it happed yesterday.