i low key love it when women straight up go “i wear makeup because i feel ugly without it and people treat me better when im more feminine” or “i shave before going to the beach with my family because i’m not ready to defend myself against them”.
admitting that your actions are influenced by patriarchy is so much better than pretending it’s your own unique feminist girlboss impowering choice. i’m tired of “if a woman chooses to do it then it’s feminist” bullshit.
in italy the police found out that the killer of giulia cecchettin, filippo turetta, has stabbed her 75 times. he will be sentenced to life imprisonment, but the court did not take into account the aggravating circumstance of the 75 stab wounds because that’s “an inexperienced person’s mistake”. this murderer is currently a meme for high school male kids who write his name on the walls almost as praise. meanwhile giulia cecchettin’s sister is being insulted and attacked by the media because she is “using her sister’s death as a moment of fame” when in fact she is bravely using her situation to raise awareness about the situation of feminicides in italy.
tell me how the fuck am i supposed to believe that men don’t hate women in this society and that’s “just an humanity problem”. fuck you male defenders, i won’t stop saying they’re our disgrace.
Gisèle Pelicot became a symbol of courage when she waived her anonymity to attend the trial of her husband and 50 other men accused of rapin
There is no collective noun for rapists but spend a week at the Pelicot trial and you wonder why. As the early morning queue of women who’ve come to support Gisèle Pelicot passes through security at the Palais de Justice, Avignon, you spy men with downturned faces scurrying across the lobby past the press. In court they sit on the left, clustered around a glass box containing more men, those in custody for the gravest crimes. Since there are 50 in total, the alleged rapists have been tried in batches and I’m just here for the final seven: Boris, Philippe, Nicolas, Nizair, Joseph, Christian, Charly.
Plus Dominique Pelicot himself, who invited them all into his marital bedroom, where he had his wife waiting, drugged and naked, and who joined in and filmed it all. Pelicot, 71, crumpled and fat now, but with a residual bulky power, sits sullenly alone with his guard in a separate glass box, protected from the other men who blame and detest him. Often after lunch he appears to doze off.
Such nondescript men. Grizzled, middle-aged (the mean is 47 years old), smart-casual in windcheaters or leather jackets and their best trainers, like minicab drivers waiting for fares. Ordinary men in many respects, not vagrants, junkies or career criminals. This week’s seven includes a fireman, an electrician and a journalist; several are fathers, two were keen weightlifters, one bred dogs. French trials helpfully begin with a personality profile formed from interviews with the men, their friends and colleagues. Poverty, domestic violence and mental breakdowns feature, but also that a man is “kind” or “gentle”, had a lovely childhood, adored his grandparents or is devoted to his mum.
Yet each one had sex with an unconscious woman, that is beyond doubt, thanks to Pelicot’s camera mounted on a tripod beside the bed, and by his own admission. “I am a rapist,” he has declared, “like the others in this room.”
From the Pelicot affair have come demands for reform to French rape law, for sexual violence to be treated more seriously, for an investigation into “chemical submission” — the coercive use of sedatives. But one question overshadows all others. How many men would have done the same? If Pelicot could recruit at least 70 willing participants (a number could not be identified) within a 25-mile radius of Mazan, the Provençal town where the couple retired, how many in the whole of France? As I walk through Avignon with Juliette Campion of radio station France Info, who bears the strain of reporting this case since September, she gestures to a bureau de tabac: “You think, ‘Would a guy in there have raped Gisèle? Or men in the boulangerie or those on the street?’ Women are looking at men differently: they’re asking, ‘Could you or you or you?’ ”
On the right of the court, behind her counsel of three serious, dark-haired young men, is Gisèle Pelicot with her female companion from victim support, leaning on the wall, as far from the men as the room allows, but facing her ex-husband. Her composure is remarkable. Although clearly tired and strained, she retains a quiet vivacity reflected in her clothes. Instead of shrinking away in black, she dresses each day as if meeting friends for drinks on a sunny terrace. A chic scarf, a faux fur bag, patent leather boots. Clothes that say, “I still have a life.” Every evening, when women line up to clap her out of court, she speaks to them warmly, neither reticent nor relishing the attention. Every day she walks through the cobbled streets past graffiti saying, “Gisèle, les femmes te remercient” (Gisèle, women thank you) to lunch at the same excellent brasserie, and people turn to gaze at her in awe.
The extraordinary woman who refused to be silenced
The humiliations of Gisèle Pelicot have a mythic quality. This is a woman who discovered the man she married aged 20, with whom she had three children and seven grandchildren, waited until she was deeply asleep before removing her pyjamas, dressing her in “sexy” underwear or writing on her buttocks, “I am a good submissive bitch,” then he let a stranger penetrate her inert body, filmed it, washed her intimately and replaced her pyjamas. This is a woman who thought she was going insane, had Alzheimer’s or a brain tumour, whose children thought she was dying, who stopped driving and going out alone, who slept all day and once woke puzzled why her hair was shorter. “But madame,” said her hairdresser, “you came in yesterday.” This is a woman who had mysterious gynaecological problems, including a swollen cervix (and still lives with four STDs), who thought her husband wonderful for accompanying her to medical tests, including an MRI.
This is a woman who, when her husband was arrested for “upskirting” in a Leclerc supermarket and police found the contents of his phone, discovered her whole 50-year marriage was a travesty, that he’d raped her in a service station car park, on Valentine’s Day and on her 66th birthday, and may have raped their daughter too. This is a woman who has listened to legal arguments about whether a man put his tongue inside or merely kissed her vagina, who heard another man say he’d only returned to rape her a second time because he couldn’t find anyone better, who sits in a courtroom while three giant TV screens show clips of her body being coldly humped by yet another “ordinary” guy.
Yet this is a woman who gathered up every scrap of her humiliation and with it constructed a mirror that she holds up defiantly to the court and to French society itself. “Shame must change sides,” she said, and in insisting the entire trial be conducted openly, that the worst men can do to women is witnessed by the whole world, she has done exactly that.
I ask many women I meet in Avignon how men in their lives regard the accused. They say they call them losers and freaks, that these are men on the margins, with no relation to themselves. But, along with the testimony I hear, the people I talk to believe this case raises many questions about French sexual mores. Whatever the decision later this month by five judges — there is no jury — Gisèle Pelicot will never be forgotten.
The court turns to Christian L, a fireman with a straggly castaway beard, who speaks from the glass box because after he was arrested, police found 4,000 child sex abuse and zoophilic images on his hard drive. We hear from his girlfriend, Sylvie, a small blonde in a grey hoodie, who says he’s a wonderful man, and is suspected of destroying evidence. Christian L recalls the victims he watched die in fires, the coffins of 11 colleagues he carried, the mental breakdowns that ensued. He was married but after his two daughters were born says he went off sex with his wife and turned to libertinisme. Strange, I think, that the French have coined this noble, philosophical concept, with its whiff of the barricades, to describe what we call swinging or dogging.
Like all the men, Christian met Pelicot through coco.fr — the murky, unmoderated site since closed down and now the focus of many major police investigations — on a forum called À son insu (without her knowledge). Christian L had already enjoyed “Sleeping Beauty” encounters with ten other couples. He spells out the rules: that you only dealt with the husband, sending him photos for approval, and during the sexual encounter he ran the show. Sometimes the wife woke up, other times not. How did he know, asked Gisèle’s lawyer, Stéphane Babonneau, that she consented?
“In a libertine encounter,” Christian L explained, “it is the husband’s responsibility to ensure consent.”
But how could you be sure?
“Are we expected to sign a contract?” Christian L spluttered.
“You could ask the woman,” Babonneau suggested.
How the case could change French law
Given the overwhelming video evidence, the defendants can only claim Pelicot deceived or drugged them, or they believed Gisèle was collaborating in a game. If this case were before a British court, rape would be decided by two tests: whether Gisèle had “capacity to consent” (tough to argue given Pelicot admits to drugging her) and whether the men had “reasonable belief” in her consent. Unlike most European countries, French rape law has no concept of consent. Rather, it is defined as penetration “by violence, constraint, threat or surprise”. (The prosecution case rests on a convoluted definition of surprise.)
But rather than demand consent be added to the law, French feminists are divided. Some agree with President Macron, who supports change; many others argue that consent would put the onus on the victim to prove her conduct was not an invitation. This seems an odd objection, especially as the whole purpose of the video evidence is to show no one could believe Gisèle capable of consent, given she was so lifeless one man asked Pelicot, “Is your wife dead?”
Alice Géraud is the author of Sambre, an investigation into how, due to the indifference and cruelty of police, a caretaker called Dino Scala in northern France managed to rape 54 women over a period of 30 years. “The Pelicot case with 50 defendants and one victim feels a strange inverse of Sambre.”
Géraud believes the Pelicot affair could provide the same impetus for change as a famous 1974 case of two Belgian tourists, Anne-Marie Tonglet and Aracelli Castellano, who, camping near Marseilles, were brutally raped by three local men. As was normal practice, the crime was downgraded from felony to misdemeanour on the basis the victims eventually stopped resisting. But the women, a lesbian couple, persisted and thanks to their feminist lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, it became the first rape case to be heard in the higher assizes court. Like Gisèle Pelicot, the women waived their anonymity. “We believe that it’s one thing for a man to rape,” said Halimi, “and another to know it’ll get around his village, his work, the papers.” Shame changed sides: the men were jailed and the French criminal code was rewritten defining rape as a serious offence.
For Géraud, the greatest current injustice is that whether a man has raped one women or 50, the maximum sentence is 20 years (here a serial rapist can be jailed for life). “This is law made by men,” she says, “with a grave lack of knowledge of rape culture.” She is scornful too about libertinisme as a universal excuse for male sexual exploitation. “Libertinisme was why Coco existed for so long,” she says. “It is the justification for prostitution, for the porn industry.”
Charly A is the youngest of all the defendants, just 22 when he first entered the Pelicot house. Small, bearded, now 30, we learn his childhood was chaotic, his father an alcoholic, his mother had many sexual partners; there are hints of abuse. “This is a family of secrets,” concludes the personality profiler. A psychiatrist adds he is immature, struggles to sustain relationships and instead consumes porn, “especially the Milf [Mother I’d like to f***] category with mature women”. In 2016, he made contact with Pelicot via Coco: “He said his wife would be lying there pretending to be asleep, he doesn’t tell me more.”
Over time Pelicot asks Charly if he knows anyone they could drug for sex and he proffers the only woman in his life — his own mother. Pelicot gives him pills (which Charly claims to have thrown away), shows him how to crush them, keeps pressing him to use them. “When can I come and we f*** your mother?” he asks in one video, but Charly keeps stalling, saying his brother is at home. Yet he returns to violate Gisèle, always with Pelicot, once with another man, a total of six times. “Did you feel like you were in a porn film?” asks Babonneau. Charly shakes his head.
Until this point, very late in the trial, the influence of internet pornography has barely been explored. The court only notes paedophiliac images, not “normal” usage. Yet Mathieu Lacambre, a psychiatrist who evaluates Charly A, remarks how porn sites not only push users to more extreme content but to enact porn fantasies in real life. “Until now Charly A was behind the screens,” he says. “Now [in Gisèle] he has an object served up on a platter a few miles from home. The sleeping princess Milf, voilà.”
A rented home in a quiet cul-de-sac
I drive out to Mazan, a lovely honey-stoned French village set in the vineyards below Mont Ventoux, where the Pelicots retired from Villiers-sur-Marne, a Paris commuter town where he was electrician and she was a manager at EDF. I imagine Gisèle browsing the little boutique, dropping into the beauty salon, sipping an aperitif outside the bistro. The home they rented for ten years is five minutes away in a quiet cul-de-sac of four houses behind tall cypress trees. It is lemon yellow with blue shutters, a pool, a very prominent alarm system, and new tenants. Given how many men knew her address, Gisèle fled four years ago for her own safety, with just a suitcase and her dog.
Today an immense cloud of migrating starlings swoops over the house like pixels in a photograph. This was where their grandchildren loved to visit in the summer, but also the centre of Dominique Pelicot’s porn operation. For what else was this grotesque man but a pornographic auteur?
We leave our car, just as Pelicot instructed the men, in the sports ground car park, by the bottle bank. I think of them texting their arrival, then creeping down the lane. (One man made his girlfriend wait in the car.) Pelicot would meet them at the door by the light of his phone, tell them to undress in the dark living room and warm their hands on a radiator. (They’d been instructed to be clean, not smell of cigarettes or wear cologne.) Then they were led into a bedroom with a TV, a chest of drawers, a bed with a naked Gisèle motionless on white sheets, and a mounted camera.
Whatever followed next was carefully orchestrated by Pelicot, a director urging on actors in stage whispers, since the objective was to do what they desired without waking Gisèle. Pelicot would tell them how and when to penetrate her, or hold his wife’s gaping mouth to facilitate oral sex. Given four Temesta (lorazepam), a powerful anti-anxiety drug he’d crushed into her wine or ice cream, his wife was like a patient on an operating table. Even so, if her arm gave an involuntary spasm,the men would scuttle from the room. A friend who has sat through many court videos says it was Pelicot ordering the humping men to go doucement — softly — that upset her, since she knew this was not out of tenderness for Gisèle.
All the while the camera rolled. Why did these men agree to have their crimes recorded? They say it was part of the deal, that Pelicot told them Gisèle was shy and liked to watch the sex later. But perhaps also because, in taking part, these men were promoted from porn consumers to creators. Filming was central to their fantasy. When Christian L finally climaxes he turns to give the camera a cheery thumbs-up.
For Pelicot, each film added to his oeuvre. Police discovered a carefully curated archive of 20,000 images and videos on hard drives and memory sticks showing 200 rapes. He gave each film a title like “Squirt on the ass”, “Cock in mouth” or “Jacques fingering”. This man, once caught by his daughter-in-law masturbating at his computer, was now a porn impresario.
The question at the centre of the case
Why did Pelicot do all this to a wife he professed to love, whom he called “a saint”? Was it to punish Gisèle for an affair early in their marriage (although he was serially unfaithful himself)? Or because when he’d asked her to join him in the libertinisme scene she’d refused — so he devised a way to make her. But Gisèle was not his first victim: Pelicot has admitted to the rape of an estate agent, using ether to drug her, in 1999, and will be tried for the rape/murder of another young estate agent, Sophie Narme, in 1991. The French police cold case bureau is investigating his possible links to many other unsolved crimes.
But as the “Without her knowledge” forum suggests, his was not a unique fantasy. The Pelicot case has illuminated the issue of “chemical submission”, not only drinks being spiked by strangers in bars, but drugs used to control partners within relationships. The French health service is noted for being blasé about prescribing heavy-duty medications, which is how Pelicot stockpiled his vast stash of Temesta.
Documentary-maker Linda Bendali has made a film for French TV about chemical submission, featuring seven cases, including a 13-year-old girl drugged by her father with medicine supposedly for her allergies, put in lingerie and raped over two years, and a 60-year-old woman drugged then raped at home by a man she was mentoring at work. “I’ve looked back at 30 years of press reports of rape,” says Bendali, “which includes dozens of women saying they woke up — mainly with men they know— unable to remember what happened.”
The Sleeping Beauty scenario, she says, is not merely a means for a man to get easy sexual access, but a way to enjoy absolute domination. “You are not even giving her the chance to consent,” says Bendali. “You can do anything you want to a drugged woman, for as long as you want. You can dress her how you want. These men want total power.” Pelicot is typical in filming his crimes: “Pictures are trophies. He was driven by a mix of desires for blackmail and voyeurism.”
Gisèle’s daughter, Caroline Darian, who was also drugged and photographed naked by her father, is heading a campaign on chemical submission, demanding police take samples of hair from rape victims, the only way sedation can be proved.
In court, I hear another psychiatrist tasked with assessing whether each of the final seven defendants has the profile of a sexual abuser. One by one, he exonerates the men, saying they are not dangerous or likely to reoffend, to the growing exasperation of Gisèle’s team. Then he reaches Charly A. “He doesn’t search [for victims] systematically,” says the psychiatrist. “He’s not a predator.” Finally, Babonneau explodes: “Six times with a sleeping woman and he’s not a sexual abuser?” The men do not identify as rapists because, like this psychiatrist, they define rape as frenzied sexual violence, not an opportunistic act performed to whispers in a private home. As one defendant put it, “It’s her husband, his house, his room, his bed, his wife.”
Women unite in the town of Mazan
Both in religious and political terms, Mazan is a conservative town: for 500 years it was part of a papal enclave and in the recent French election voted heavily for Marine Le Pen. Villagers regarded the Pelicot case with horror and sympathy which turned quickly to resentment when press named it l’affaire Mazan. Amid longstanding families who’ve known each other for generations, the Pelicots were outsiders who’d brought disgrace into a rural community. Tired of inquiries, the mayor, Louis Bonnet, 74, told the BBC, “It could have been far more serious. There were no kids involved. No women were killed.”
At the Lucky Horse Ranch outside Mazan, women victims of sexual violence receive equine therapy. I’m sceptical at first about how grooming and riding horses could help rape victims, but somehow these large, placid animals are calming and restorative. Here I meet Latika, 33, who at first was too timid to touch a Shetland pony, but now sits high on a saddle for our photograph.
Latika was separating from her husband, the father of her two children, but still sharing a house. He was violent, hitting her daughters, putting her in hospital with cuts and a broken rib. Two years after they’d last had sex, she woke to find him inside her. She believes the sweet tea he often gave her was laced with sedatives, but that night she hadn’t drunk it all. She realised he’d been drugging her for years — her mother recalls finding her deeply unconscious early in her relationship — and, worse, she was pregnant with a third child. She told the police, who addressed the domestic violence but ignored the rape. Her husband fled to Guadeloupe and she was left traumatised, fearful of leaving the house.
“I didn’t feel people really believed what had happened to me until Gisèle Pelicot spoke out,” says Latika, who has since made the police reopen her case. In October, as women across France holding white flowers protested in support of Gisèle, Latika headed the local march into Mazan and the next day Gisèle herself visited the ranch. “She said it is almost unbearable to return to this place where terrible things happened,” says Latika, “but she wanted to thank us. She told me, ‘I didn’t know the meaning of my life before this happened — but I do now.’ ”
Watching Gisèle take such sustenance from her supporters, you wonder how she will cope when the trial finally ends. She is writing a book and could, if she chose, become a global campaigner. “There is something particularly powerful,” says Linda Bendali, “about her being an older woman — she represents all our mothers. All generations identify with her.” But those close to Gisèle say that, at 72, she may just return to a quiet life of friends, grandchildren and her garden, in the secret location where she now lives.
But she is already an icon of courage for the women who come from across France and beyond just to watch the trial on a screen in an overspill room. Some want to witness history, a few enjoy the sensational evidence like tricoteuses at the guillotine, but many have risen at 5am, taking a day off work, to support a woman they deeply admire. Marion Spiteri and Amélie Planche, both 24 and law graduates, feel the case opened their eyes. “How can it be,” Spiteri says, “that so many men did this without her consent?” “It is terrifying,” Planche adds, “that a woman cannot even trust her own husband.” They tell me, astonishingly, that neither they nor their friends ever go to the toilet in a bar or club alone.
But then the nation of libertinisme lags behind in its attitude to violence against women. Until 2021, France did not even have an age of consent, effectively decriminalising even incestuous relations between children and adults, allowing several high-profile child abusers, including firemen who groomed a 13-year-old girl, to evade rape charges. Each time a prominent Frenchman is accused of rape — whether politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn or, currently, actor Gerard Dépardieu — famous French actresses leap to defend him. This is the nation that convicted child rapist Roman Polanski fled to from America, and is still fêted. The #MeToo movement was regarded by many as a wave of Anglosphere prudishness, contrary to the spirit of French seduction. So what can the Pelicot trial achieve?
I meet feminists from Les Amazones d’Avignon, the creators of graffiti across the city supporting Gisèle. (So as not to spoil the city walls, they write slogans on paper that can be removed.) Their latest reads “20 ans pour chacun” — 20 years for each one. I suggest a drink in a café nearby: “Not in there,” says one Amazone, “that’s where all the rapists go.” Blandine Deverlanges, 56, is part of the Coalition Féministe Loi Intégrale putting 130 proposals about sexual violence before the French parliament, including a ban on lawyers harassing victims in court. They are disgusted the defence asked Gisèle why she swam naked in her own swimming pool.
“This is a trial,” says Deverlanges, “of one extraordinary man, the monster Pelicot, and many ordinary men.” And as we talk I see a group of them emerge nervously from their favoured café and head back to the court. A collective noun for rapists? A violation, a banality, a shame.
Once you see it you’ll see it in all anthropomorphic cartoon characters. Males might have a tuft of hair somewhat adapted from the animal they’re based on whereas female characters will have full heads of hair (as seen above) and given breasts and hips like humans.. (as seen on the duck woman) and usually of course lipstick and eyelashes.
Sonic. Naked but gloves and shoes. Amys gotta wear a dress tho. And have eye lashes.
Bat boobs?? Why does she have human breasts. Do the female characters have to cover up because they have genitalia… But the males don’t??
Or are the creators just sick men who see a naked female animal and feel… arousal? So they had to put clothes on them.
Why is this mouse so busty. If you’re gonna give her boobs she should have 6 or 8 or whatever. SHES A RODENT. How did she get that hair also.
How did the dog in the green dress get that hair. Why is the dog in the pink dress posed like that. Why are the male dogs allowed to be pantless.
Why do the girl chipmonks have hair like that? Their noses and mouths are all small th A their male counterparts, they’re lighter in colour and they have more human looking teeth.
The 80s versions are even worse. (This movie had panty shots of the underage girls too, who essentially look like little girls with animal noses).
I hate that this happens so often. And it seems like it’s happening more now? Are there any modern movies and shows with animals like in The Land Before Time, The Fox and the Hound, Lady and the Tramp, Spirit? Or are they all this weird now?
Like, this is Mama wolf from Disney’s Jungle Book:
Granted she’s on screen for just a few seconds, but why can’t female animal characters not be depicted this way?
"i used to hate femininity as a teen but now i realize im just like the other girls!!" you are a grown ass woman who once had enough sense of dignity to see how oppressive femininity is but then as you were forced into increasingly strict standards you simply folded and accepted your subjugation. and now you're trying to repackage this as some fun thing to do that brings you closer to other women when in fact it's only building a wall between you because you're hyperfocused on vanity and fixing non-existent imperfections that patriarchy convinced you that u have. but sure keep acting as if conforming to femininity is revolutionary
friends wanted to buy another friend (man) a feminist book for his birthday (i thought it was funny but i was like well it can't hurt) and they chose the books before i got there. turns out the one feminist book they got was written by a fucking TIM😭
i love that quote that’s like “gender isn’t a binary, it’s a hierarchy” because it fundamentally changed the way that i approach issues of gender and socialization. men and women are not treated as two opposite-but-equal ends of a spectrum; women are not given some forms of power that men cannot access and vice versa. female socialization is not an arbitrary process that ‘accidentally’ makes women weaker, it has a goal to make women easier to control. which also means that male socialization seeks to empower men in all of the ways that it disenfranchises women.
so how can i ever see gender identity as something…equal or neutral
Sadly this is where most people will say shit like “well women have power over males because they ~seduce them with their feminine wiles and sex appeal~”. Which is so fantastically ignorant, because apart from ignoring the fact that the vast majority of women aren’t young or sexy and that it’s shitty to pressure them to strive for such a cheapening “ideal,” all this is is that patriarchy makes females believe that the only way they can have value is if they’re young and sexy– and thereby can serve as sex vessels for males to use and then toss out.
Males are still the ones with the power and the superior financial resources, the fact that females have to try to passively solicit the attention of males by becoming sex objects– with the end goal being that the male in question will agree to give them a small quantity of the much larger amount of money and power that he has - is telling enough about who actually has power here. The sexiest woman only has “power” insomuch as she has managed to please her master (ie, patriarchy) and he decided to pat her on the head for pleasing him: that’s the “empowerment” she feels for attaining the correct beauty standards or sex appeal. But a pet is never more powerful than the master, don’t kid yourselves into thinking for a moment that “women have power over males due to being sexy.” Either way, the myth of “women being sexy and males having a desire for sex” is such complete bullshit, women are not inherently any “sexier” than males and being sexy is in actuality something degrading and demeaning because of the intense scrutiny being placed on one’s most intimate private parts. It’s no coincidence that the role of the “seductress” is tossed on women while males feel extremely uncomfortable when their most vulnerable and private parts are made the focus of attention (you don’t see straight macho males bragging about getting prostate orgasms, do you, even though it’s supposed to be very pleasurable for them).
At any rate, back on topic: you would think that the phrase “gender isn’t a binary, it’s a hierarchy” is not only straightforward but also very logical and so it would make people at least start to understand what is going on– but no, sadly it seems that most people just don’t really use their brains, I think I mentioned once before that I said to my idiot cousin that gender isn’t a binary but rather a hierarchy– and in response he mansplained to me that “he’s sorry I feel that way, but gender is a spectrum” before proceeding to pat himself on the back for educating me.
The Seductress stereotype has always made my blood boil. Powerful women throughout history have been reduced to this idea of a semi-mythological, semi-evil figure (like Cleopatra) who supposedly used their bodies to manipulate men into doing things they would never have otherwise done. But this idea is not just a lie—it’s an insidious tool of patriarchy that reinforces women’s subordination and strips them of their humanity and agency.
The concept of the “Powerful Seductress” frames women’s power as inherently illegitimate, as if a woman could only achieve influence by deceiving men, who are presented as the true arbiters of strength, intellect, and leadership. Cleopatra, for example, is often reduced to her romantic relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, her political acumen dismissed as secondary to her supposed “seductive wiles.” This not only diminishes her extraordinary intellect and skill as a ruler but reinforces the notion that men must have been under some unnatural spell to treat her as an equal.
Yet even in the myth of the Seductress, the power dynamic is glaringly one-sided. The seduction is never for the woman’s direct benefit; it’s always framed as her “pleasing” a man in order to gain access to resources, protection, or survival. A seductress does not control a man—she exists within the confines of his desires, granted “power” only so long as she maintains his attention. Once the game is over, the mask of her so-called dominance falls away, and the man reasserts his authority, often by brute force. In reality, women cast in these roles are rarely the architects of their own destinies; they are pawns in a system that weaponizes their own bodies against them.
This is why the Seductress trope is not just dehumanizing but actively dangerous. It perpetuates the belief that women have innate, manipulative sexual power over men, which in turn justifies male violence and entitlement. If women are seen as wielding this mythical power, then men can frame their violence as a necessary act of reclaiming control. It’s no coincidence that men who commit acts of violence against women often accuse their victims of being “temptresses” or “asking for it.” The trope provides a moral justification for oppression: if women can control men with their sexuality, then patriarchy is framed as a righteous act of containing this imagined threat.
Even in modern contexts, we see this dynamic playing out. Women are conditioned to derive their value from their ability to conform to beauty standards and attract male attention, but this is not empowerment. The moment a woman steps outside the bounds of desirability or asserts agency beyond pleasing men, her so-called power is stripped away. The “sexy woman” celebrated in media is only empowered because she is sanctioned by the patriarchal system as acceptable, much like a court jester is “allowed” to mock the king.
This is why the role of the Seductress ends the moment a man decides it does. History is filled with examples of women who wielded sexual or relational power within their limited means, only to be crushed when men no longer found them useful. Anne Boleyn, for instance, was courted by Henry VIII and rose to become Queen of England through their relationship. But as soon as she fell out of favor, she was executed on charges of adultery—her “seduction” reframed as treasonous manipulation. The message is clear: women can have power, but only the kind men allow them to have—and only for as long as it serves their interests.
The seduction myth also glosses over the reality of coercion and violence. In countless historical and modern examples, women didn’t “seduce” their way into proximity to power—they were forced into relationships with men who held more resources, influence, and physical strength. The suggestion that women like Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn were “powerful seductresses” ignores the oppressive structures that shaped their circumstances and assumes a level of agency they never fully possessed.
Finally, it’s crucial to dismantle the idea that female sexuality is inherently dangerous or more potent than male sexuality. This belief perpetuates shame, scrutiny, and control over women’s bodies while simultaneously excusing men’s actions as unavoidable responses to temptation. The myth of the Seductress is just another way patriarchy teaches women that their bodies are both their only source of value and a source of blame for their own oppression.
In reality, women’s power has always been in spite of these constraints, not because of them. When women achieve greatness, it is often through extraordinary resilience and ingenuity in navigating systems designed to keep them powerless—not through some imagined supernatural ability to “control men.” Recognizing this is essential to breaking down the false narratives that perpetuate gender hierarchies and keep us blind to the true mechanisms of power.
hate that the conversation around women’s clothing is always modesty vs immodesty, when these are male-created concepts. “oh that shows skin that’s what men want” “oh that hides skin that’s what men want” i don’t care. men want control. is it comfortable and is it practical? thick, dark, heavy fabric is not safe in hot weather, nor does it allow you to get vitamin d. inadequate coverage in the name of fashion is not safe in cold weather. i don’t care if this pleases men or pisses them off. if your mode of transport is foot, bike, or horse, pants are more practical. if your lifestyle asks for none of that, you may find a skirt more comfortable. many types of fashion force you to constantly monitor yourself — never comfortable or practical. clothing or shoes that damage your ribs, ankles, lungs — never comfortable or practical. i do not care what men want, nor do i care what men don’t want. comfortable. practical. we are animals.
She was intimate w a transfem and showed allyship and her reward is being sexually degraded and mocked in public without her consent. If this is how they treat the women that sleep with them and support their identity, then what's the benefit of not being a TERF.
Notice that "transwomen are women" but they always go out of their way to specify "cisgirl" when bragging about "pounding" or being sexually degrading. They know exactly who the real women are.
seeing a woman call themselves tme is so fucking embarrassing…. girl grow a spine, you may as well have mens rights activist in your bio. “ohhhh sir im sooo sorry i only experience regular boring ole misogyny and not the super special extra terrible misogyny that bepenised people experience🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 here ill label myself so everyone knows im lucky enough to be exempt from REAL oppression” holy god where is your dignity…
how some women get onto the romance of being abused, they think they’re special for it, that their ‘rough relationship’ is a unique challenge, they can fix him, etc.
but really you’re just disposable, and there’s nothing interesting about any of it at all. it’s boring
The Five Love Languages has cooked our generation. Wow you’re a straight couple and the man’s love language is physical touch (sex) and the woman’s love language is acts of service (waiting on him hand and foot)? Revolutionary.
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
kianamaiart
