Manon Garcia, a leading French feminist philosopher, has had a profound effect on the discussion surrounding the trial of Dominique Pelicot. This case caught the public eye because of its shocking claims of mass rape. In her recent book, “Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial,” Garcia explores the complexities of this trial, which is intrinsically linked to what she terms “the Mazan affair” after Pelicot’s home village. Her reflections go below the surface of what played out at trial. They take aim at broader public issues, including conceptions of masculinity and societal violence against women.
Luis Garcia is junior professor at Freie Universität in Berlin. Prior to coming to NIH, he served in leadership roles at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. His scholarly training and philosophical wisdom have shaped his thoughts on the trial, especially as it comes to a close in its final days. Garcia argues that the men’s behavior in the trial reveals an unsettling truth about their perception of entitlement to women’s bodies.
Of the seven trials that he’s seen, the Pelicot trial has been the most revealing to Garcia, who attended Pelicot six weeks into the process. She noted that Gisèle Pelicot’s experience in court seemed to replay and amplify her violation, raising critical questions about the efficacy of criminal trials. “If a criminal trial works the way it should, it will not do the work that you’re expecting it to do,” she stated, highlighting a fundamental flaw in the justice system’s ability to address such heinous acts appropriately.
Garcia draws parallels between the Pelicot trial and Hannah Arendt’s influential work, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil.” Yet she is critical of how historians, too, have viewed Eichmann’s defense. Next, she contrasts it to the responses of the defendants in the Pelicot trial. The important difference is there are historians who argue Arendt fell for Eichmann’s defense hook line and sinker – that he was feigning ignorance. These dudes in Mazan, they’re not pulling a fast one, instead they have extremely little to show for their actions. This, for me, was terrifying,” she remarked.
The philosopher’s reflections go far beyond courtroom theatrics. She’s interrogating the roots of masculinity and culture at large. It is this almost comical realization that Garcia finds alarming, as most if not all of these defendants seem bereft of any self-awareness about their actions. In victim-centered justice, if perpetrators understand what they did, if they reflect on it in a positive way, they will spend less time in prison. So these men have had a huge financial motivation to do this work and still they can’t,” she said.
Through her work, Garcia addresses the ways in which societal constructs around masculinity can foster an environment where male entitlement goes unchallenged. “There’s something about what it is for them to be a man… that makes them deeply convinced that they haven’t done anything wrong,” she stated, elucidating the psychological barriers that prevent accountability.
Inflected with both Garcia’s sharp humor and deep intellect, her book wrestles with the discomforting truths involved in sexual fetishes and consensual bondage. She makes a distinction between forced unconsciousness and fetishes like somnophilia. She warns against an overly simplistic understanding of these issues in legal spaces. Her revelations highlight the stunning disconnect between the way our culture talks about sexual violence and the way it talks about consent.
What stands out is that Gisèle Pelicot’s voice has been key to this story too, though. On the stand during the trial, she detailed feelings of degradation and revictimization. “I have felt humiliated while I’ve been in this courtroom,” Pelicot recounted, underscoring the emotional toll of reliving her trauma in a legal setting. She emphasized that her accusers in the case branded her an alcoholic and a conspirator. This aligns with the judgmental and victim-blaming attitudes commonly seen in judicial processes.
The impact of Garcia’s observations are not restricted to the courtroom. Their reach extends to broader societal implications. She ascribed shocking attitudes she has observed in her travels around the world about men’s sense of entitlement that women’s bodies are at their call. “At the end of the trial, German journalists found a Telegram group where 70,000 men were sharing recipes for chemical submission and pictures of how they were raping their wives,” Garcia highlighted. She referred to one of her own research projects, in which 32,000 Italian men posted photos of their sleeping wives to tech-influenced bait-and-switch media.
These bad news stories reveal a deeper problem across many cultures that enable and even encourage violence against women. Garcia encourages society to look at these uncomfortable realities and not write them off as unfortunate, random acts of violence or as cultural outliers.
Additionally, Garcia’s philosophical musings lead us to reflect more profoundly about the implications of our engagement with ideas of evil and masculinity. “There are two reasons why I had to make the analogy with Eichmann,” she explained. “The first is that I’m a philosopher who goes to a trial… and the second is that ‘evil’ and ‘male’ are the same sound in French.” This linguistic observation was the catalyst for a running joke throughout her analysis. It illustrates just how inextricably linked these ideas are in the stories we tell as a nation.
As a result, Garcia finds herself caught between her role as a philosopher and that of a trial observer. This hints toward her profound emotional struggle. “But I was seeing things that the journalists were not seeing… It felt like I couldn’t do anything else,” she shared. And seeing that level of injustice has truly changed her outlook on everything. Perhaps most importantly, it has continually shaped her perspective on gender dynamics and justice in a profound manner.