Feminists have had to confront sexual violence head-on. With courage and pugnacity, they politicised individual tragedies and turned them into a collective experience to be reckoned with. Massilia Ourabah expresses her feminist gratitude, and asks men: We did Me Too, how about Your Turn?

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Massilia Ourabah

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This letter uses explicit language to discuss sexual violence. Please read with care.

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Dear feminists,

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                 Thank you.

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In 2024, during the exceptional trial of an exceptional rape case, it was evident some hard work had been done. A man from Mazan, a small town of Southern France, was trialed for having drugged and raped his wife, Gisèle Pelicot. He did so repeatedly, over a decade, and he invited men online to rape her too while she laid unconscious. Gisèle’s husband was trialed alongside 50 other men, the ones the police could identify out of her 83 assailants. All of them were convicted. An exceptional case.

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Gisèle Pelicot became a symbol of courage and dignity. She made a decision that commands admiration. She decided to make the case public. Doing so meant spending the 3-month long trial surrounded by swarms of journalists fishing for comments and reactions while every day she had to confront her violators and the atrociousness of their crimes. But it also meant politicizing the case. It meant making her exceptional case about the brutally unexceptional. Gisèle Pelicot’s case became the case of the terrifying banality of sexual violence. The terrifying banality of a violence perpetrated and orchestrated by a normal husband – 72, retired electrician, father of two. The terrifying banality of so many normal men – a truck driver, a firefighter, a salesman, a journalist, a mason, a gardener, an IT specialist, a soldier, a 26-year-old, a 34-year-old, a 43-year-old, a 52-year-old, a 68-year-old, a 74-year-old – committing a monstrosity. It became the case of the banality of this one evil which is violence against women. Evidently, we had come a long way.

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I remember quite vividly the two moments that turned my unformed and uninformed feminist intuition into a conscious feminist commitment, eventually.  The first was in 2003, I was 10. Bertrand Cantat lead singer of Noir Désir – back then the most famous French rock band – beat his partner to death, the actress Marie Trintignant. It was a tragedy, and widely romanticized as such. The scenery was in place: a hotel room in Vilnius, on a movie set. The characters were in place: a tortured singer battling his demons who, one night, in an outburst of possessiveness, extinguished the one light in his life, a beautiful and innocent actress who died in the hands of love, the two of them forever tied in this tragedy. ‘A crime of passion’ was how most media reported Marie Trintignant’s murder. A man beat a woman to death, but femicide was not a word back then. I loved Noir Désir and its charismatic singer. To this day still, the long-lasting impact of his rebellious music on a teenager in formation makes him hard to unlove. I too did not want to have to. But even as a 10-year-old the story of a tragedy with two victims felt off. Even as a 10-year-old the obscenity of the romanticization felt wrong.

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The second was in 2011, I was 17. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF and the French Socialist Party’s frontrunner for the upcoming presidential election was accused of rape by Nafissatou Diallo during her cleaning shift at the Sofitel hotel in NYC. The media treatment of this case was different. The alleged crime, of course, was different. But mostly the victim was – Nafissatou Diallo wasn’t even worthy of romanticization. Media reactions to the Sofitel case exploded in a firework of misogynoir, a true intersectional feast where commentators could indulge in sexism, racism, and class contempt. Why was Strauss-Khan taken into custody? a former minister wondered, when, after all, “no man had died.” Surely it was not attempted rape, a prominent journalist was “practically certain” of that, but more likely "an imprudence… the skirt-lifting of a domestic." Not only did those men disregard numerous previous allegations of sexual misconduct or straight-forward assault against Stauss-Kahn, but what really seemed to be bothering them, down the line, was why we should care about this one. And they could vent their discontent out loud, on national TV, secured in the feeling that their remarks were just common sense, really.

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Fifteen years later, during the Mazan case, you could tell Me Too had been around. To begin with, the words had changed. No more euphemisms, no more obscene (dis)qualifiers. Discussions were about gendered violence, sexual violence, sexual assault, and rape. And they were about the banality of it all – no more monsters. No more dark, fascinating, emo monster à la Cantat. No more repugnant, omnipotent, gruesome monster à la Strass-Kahn. Just an extraordinary number of ordinary men, and the litany of their ordinary crimes.

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This is all thanks to you, feminists. This is thanks to women like Tarana Burke, an American activist who did organizing work for years with Black women and girls before the Me Too movement she founded in 2006 eventually became a worldwide shockwave. In the US still, this is thanks to Anita Hill who, well before Me Too, in 1991, testified before the Senate during Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings and reported the sexual harassment she suffered from him for years. Hill’s testimony – its utter misunderstanding by white feminists and the backlash she received within the Black community for having testified against the first ever Black nominee  –  gave legs to KimberléCrenshaw’s argument about “the particular ways in which Black women are silenced between the rocks and the hard places of racism and sexism”. The legal scholar derived from this analysis one of the most critical and influential feminist concepts of the late 20^th century: the intersectionality of oppressions. For many of us whose “normal men” – fathers, brothers, sons – already bear the racial stigma of congenital sexual violence, the notion of intersectionality continues to work as a reminder that we shouldn’t have to pick loyalties, that we shouldn’t have to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of feminism or anti-racism. Closer to home, this is thanks to Giovanna Rincon, a trans activist who made intersectionality the foundation of her militancy. When in 2018, sex worker Vanesa Campos was killed, when again in 2020, sex worker Jessyca Sarmiento was killed, Rincon and her movement Acceptess-T tried with great pain to give the French public a lesson in intersectional feminism: the very law that criminalized the clients of sex workers in the name of women’s rights was disproportionately endangering women like Campos and Sarmiento, who were both trans and undocumented, by exposing them to increased precarity and violence. Gendered violence is not a one-size-fits-all issue, Rincon continues to assert.

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Tarana Burke, Anita Hill, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Giovanna Rincon, and so many other women and activists gave us words to think with, and courage to be inspired from. In the Fall of 2024, this work paid off. In France and beyond, sexual violence was on the agenda and you, feminists, put it there. Feminists, women, participated in debates and roundtables, wrote editorials and books. Female historians historicized, female legal experts analyzed, female sociologists contextualized, female social workers politicized. While media outlets still struggle to tick off the gender balance box when they gather experts around the mutations of NATO or the EU-Mercosur negotiations, in the Fall of 2024 women led the discussion. This isn’t right.

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Sexual violence is simple, in a way. It is men’s problem. I know from experience such a statement inevitably gets you charges of misandry. You are told it is an oversimplification, an essentialization, a caricature of a complex problem. I empathize with some of the good-willed efforts at nuancing the problem. You have to think Not All Men so that it’s possibly not your husband, not your father, not your son, not your friend – so many men terribly hard to unlove. But feminists are the messenger, not the caricaturist: in France, it is estimated that 96% of perpetrators of sexual violence are men. 96%. According to the same official report from the Ministry of the Interior, 85% of victims of sexual violence are women, 15% are men (leaving unspecified the under-reported sexual violence against trans people). Men are victims too. During the Mazan trial, the ghost of incest haunted the courtroom on both the victim and the perpetrators’ side. Many of those men were victims too. And all those men were perpetrators. And all those perpetrators were men. 100%. So truly sexual violence is simple, in a way.

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Dear feminists,

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Good job. Now how about we quit?

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***

Dear men,

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Your turn.

Sexual violence is your problem. Take it back.

Why are you everywhere chatty and here oh so quiet?

Why should we be the experts of your violence? Your violence is yours.

Why should we analyze it?

Why should we dissect it?

Why should we talk about it? Your violence is yours.

You do the analyzing. You do the dissecting. You do the digging.

You find the dirt. You chew the dirt. And you swallow the dirt, like we have.

Aren’t you a little bit troubled? Aren’t you a little bit concerned?

You’re good at math. Do the math.

1 in 3 women has been the victim of sexual violence. Gather your family around the table. Who would you rather she be? Your mother? Your sister? Your daughter? The majority of those women know their assailants. Keep looking. Who is he?

Could 96% be your father? Could it be your brother? Could it be you?

Aren’t you troubled?

Aren’t you troubled that 83 men could get hard in front of a woman’s inert body? A truck driver, a firefighter, a salesman, a journalist, a mason, a gardener, an IT specialist, a soldier, a 26-year-old, a 34-year-old, a 43-year-old, a 52-year-old, a 68-year-old, a 74-year-old, having only in common being men.

Aren’t you troubled that those 83 men got aroused by a woman’s dead-like passivity?

Is this reminiscent of anything at all?

Aren’t you troubled?

Aren’t you concerned?

Don’t you care?

We care. We’ve cared, a whole lot of care. And still this care is barely enough. It’s barely enough to help those cared for, and it’s far from enough for all the victims uncared for, including by other women.

We’ll continue caring. And we’ll try our best to unlove.

But your violence is yours. Take it back.

We’re out.

Why would the sheep talk about the wolf? Let the wolf talk about the wolf and let the sheep talk about the mutations of NATO or the EU-Mercosur negotiations.

We won’t make your violence our genesis. Your violence is yours.

The sheep’s got bigger fish to fry and somewhere else to be.

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Massilia Ourabah searches for ways to love that are nurturing instead of destructive. She thinks and writes about unloving what’s hurting us – patriarchal relations, environmentally-damaging systems of production, colonial legacies – and foster love for solidarities that sustain us. She is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and TUGraz and she lives in France.

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