They line up in front of a courthouse in southeastern France, from morning to evening, and have gathered in the thousands in cities across the country. They hold signs reading, “one rape every six minutes,” “not all men but always a man,” and “giving in is not consenting.”
They chant: “Rapist we see you, victim we believe you.”
Women across France are rallying in support of Gisèle Pelicot, a 72-year-old reluctant icon whose husband is on trial in the city of Avignon for systematically drugging her and inviting dozens of men, 50 of whom are now his co-defendants, into their home to rape her over nearly a decade.
The shocking case has sparked what many women in France call a long-overdue reckoning over “rape culture” and systemic sexism in the way the judicial system handles sexual violence.
I follow you, until the last part.
“Men don’t matter”, “women don’t matter” - those statements often seem to imply that the other gender is dominant and treats the other as disposable. This is not true - both men and women heavily suffer from bias, discrimination, and abuse - both in their own ways.
Traditional expectations hurt everybody, men and women, and should be thrown out the window. This includes a traditional concept that men are always perpetrators but not victims of abuse, among other things - something that is still commonly ignored, sometimes out of genuine ignorance, sometimes in bad faith.
I have never heard that, anywhere within the last half a century. A statement like that would be seen as misogyny of the highest order, and would have the speaker publicly crucified on the altar of public opinion.
I mean, sure - it might be uttered in dark, hidden, ChristoFascist corners, but that isn’t spoken anywhere in public like the statement “kill all men” is widely lauded and celebrated by female supremacists.
Then why have women been allowed to disgorge almost all of theirs, while men are being constantly nailed to the wall for theirs?
Women have been able to nearly completely release the “homemaker” status (yay! - honestly), but a man who wants to be a homemaker will nearly always remain a life-long bachelor. Having a prestigious, well-paying career (or, at least, the potential for one) is nearly always a woman’s first consideration in a man.
If a career-oriented man can (and frequently do) wife up some minimum-wage barista with oodles of student loans, why do career women almost always only look above their current economic level for mates? Because that is a reinforcement of traditional expectations.
Things along the lines of “women don’t matter” are commonly spoken by feminists much the same way you said a similar thing about men - as a statement that this gender group is a victim of modern society.
You wouldn’t hear “men don’t matter” in another context, either.
And I’m not saying that the pressure of traditional expectations is equal on women vs men, I don’t have what it takes to compare, so I won’t even try. I just state they hurt everyone, and you don’t have to sink one to raise the other.
And yet - facts and evidence. In a western society, those are severely lacking from their argument, whereas the flip side is bleeding out everywhere. Hell, a saucy jaunt through any dating service - online or meatworld - is a severe cognitive dissonance to anyone trying to shill the “women don’t matter” bullshit, as beyond the top-2% of men, women have ALL the power in the dating world.
I just thank the fates that I left the dating scene behind me almost three decades ago. From what I can see, things have gotten much, much worse for men since then, and it was already horrid back then.
Then there is the gender sentencing gap in the legal system, which is three times larger than the wealth sentencing gap, and seven times larger than the racial sentencing gap. And no, this is taking into account the exact same crime with the exact same damages.
Yes, in the dating sphere women do wield more power. They, however, are also more common victims of stalking, more commonly chased by men they never asked for.
Sentencing gap is also very real.
But then there’s a pay gap, lower representation in politics (and also patriarchal traditions of diplomacy requiring high-ranking female politicians to show themselves as rough and cold to uphold their image), the common expectation to bear and rise children almost singlehandedly (despite also having to work full-time), etc. etc.
Women still face many real issues, and so do men. It’s just that men’s rights is a newer concept and it takes a lot of effort to overcome things that are sometimes as basic as the right to refuse sex.