SD

Female. Mid 30s. Here for the fanfic

[smsomah]

Assrou N'Swoul counterweight veil pendants made of brass, iron and copper are received by a girl as a gift from her mother. Their size indicates the wealth of the girl’s family.

The method of laminating used on these pendants is known as the “sandwich” technique, which involves very time consuming and delicate work by the Mauritanian smiths. From: Africa Online Museum; Niger; Tuareg Wedding and Bianou Celebration.

[newguineatribalart]

Aboriginal Art Symbols and Meaning

[jabberding0]

tree grafting techniques

[movementnudge]

Movement nudge!

[meusole]

[wifehaver103947]

the new york times is now charging money for my favorite chocolate cake recipe so i bought a subscription and screenshotted it and canceled my subscription and now it's here for you for free

i do a mixture of red wine and fresh squeezed navel orange juice for the liquid, plus the zest of one large orange. now you make the cake

[kaijuno]

[evilwizard]

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: Super practical and beautiful stitching techniques (Mending holes and altering lengths)

[st-just]

Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.

[booksandchainmail]

#you want to know a sentence that rewrote my brain:#most people have never been 20#more than half of humans ever born never made it to 20#which. is so crushingly sad to me i can't think about it for too long and also weirdly tempering when i'm angry at the state of the world#most people have never been 20! is it any wonder we're bad at being people sometimes! it's so new. we're young to it#anyway#i'm so stupidly grateful to live in the present and for modern medical technology (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

[zenosanalytic]

XKCD: Degree Off

Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.

[burninglights]

The two most powerful words in the English language, owed entirely to the efficacy of vaccines, are thus;

“Smallpox was.”

For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.

Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.

The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.

The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.

Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.

In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.

If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.

After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.

Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.

We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.

With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;

“Tuberculosis was.”

[crazy-pages]

“Smallpox was.”

Fuck. That hit me hard.

[duckbunny]

death and the stars

[hedwig-dordt]

I'm quite fond of the heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse

[dykepuffs]

One of my friends was a university lecturer who had worked in the lab where the final smallpox case escaped from a lab and killed Janet Parker, a medical photographer who worked in the room upstairs. He was a very funny man, always "on", but once a year when he taught the lecture about smallpox and about 'swiss cheese' risk management, he looked like a dead man walking.

[perfectlyvalid49]

I’m sure I’ve reblogged this before, and I’m sure I’ll reblog it again.

But scroll up and look at that first graph. Really look at it. For 2000 years, for every society for which we have data, roughly 1 in every 2 kids died. I have two kids – statistically, one of them would have died (to be fair, my daughter was medically complicated in utero and the medication that saved her was developed in the 1960s, so in my personal case, there’s no “statistically” about it). Do you have a sibling? One of you probably would have died. Are you from a big family with lots of siblings? Your parents would have probably buried more than one of you, assuming that both of your parents had managed to make it to adulthood in the first place.

And to be entirely fair, there are reasons beyond modern medicine why childhood death rates have dropped in the last 200 years. Obviously, medical care is not the only place where we’ve made significant advancements in ways to reduce mortality rates in children. Like, 100 years ago children were still sent to go work in mines and factories in an era where OSHA did not exist. The fact that we don’t do that anymore also helps.

But medicine is a HUGE contributing factor to the childhood mortality rate plummeting. And some of it is big, exciting stuff, where a child is obviously dying, and a doctor gets to be a hero with a life-saving medication or procedure. That’s what happened with my daughter. And in cases like those, it’s super easy to draw a line of cause and effect. Child’s life was in danger -> medication given -> child’s life no longer in danger. Medicine saved the child.

But it’s actually much more common for a child’s life to be saved by the quiet, everyday work that primary care pediatricians do. Some of that is education – SIDS rates were cut nearly in half in the first ten years of the “Back to Sleep” campaign, which was just doctors telling parents that it’s safer to put your infant to sleep on their back rather than their stomach. But a lot of it is vaccination. Like, A LOT a lot.

I went looking for exact numbers, and I found this study from 2024. And I just want to quote the findings section of their abstract:

Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years of whom 101 million were infants younger than 1 year. For every death averted, 66 years of full health were gained on average, translating to 10·2 billion years of full health gained. We estimate that vaccination has accounted for 40% of the observed decline in global infant mortality, 52% in the African region. In 2024, a child younger than 10 years is 40% more likely to survive to their next birthday relative to a hypothetical scenario of no historical vaccination. Increased survival probability is observed even well into late adulthood.

Those numbers are huge. 154 million lives saved. 10.2 BILLION extra years of healthy lives. And the study didn’t even account for smallpox. Because as mentioned above – smallpox was. But the cause and effect line is much harder to draw. It’s easy to see how stabbing a healthy baby with needles makes the baby cry, and potentially get a little sick for the next few days and these things all seem negative. It’s much harder to see how stabbing a healthy baby with needles will keep them safe from a disease that they may or may not get in the future. And it much harder to see how stabbing my healthy baby with needles helps protect that other baby who is too sick to get stabbed.

But we are all being chased by a very slow tiger called “vaccine preventable disease.” And getting yourself/your children vaccinated is how we build tiger proof shields before the tiger ever gets close enough for us to notice him. Because if you can see the tiger, it’s already too late.

[vaspider]

[reasonsforhope]

Without modern medicine, all four of the past four generations of my mom's family would have either died young, or never even been born. Including me.

--

My Great-Grandmother

I don't know much about my great-grandmother's childhood.

But I do know that when my grandmother was born, in 1934 in rural Eastern Europe, something went very, very wrong. Specifically, I believe, it was uterine rupture during childbirth, where the uterus tears open. Today, the risk of death is approximately between 1% and 6%. Then? It was much, much higher.

Luckily - very luckily - they managed to save both my great-grandmother's and my grandmother's lives. They then told my great-grandmother that she could never, ever get pregnant again, or she and almost certainly the baby would both die.

--

However, this was the 1930s in rural, extremely Catholic Eastern Europe. Birth control and condoms were not exactly widely available. This is why birth control is healthcare.

And tubal ligations ("tying your tubes") had only been invented 50 years earlier, in Ohio, and had not spread widely to rural Eastern Europe.

So, two years later, however it happened, she became pregnant again. The doctors told her, "If you have this baby, you will not survive, and the chances the baby will survive are incredibly, incredibly small."

This was the 1930s in rural, extremely Catholic Eastern Europe. Abortion is technically possible, but not legal. (Well, as far as I can tell. Regime changes, national borders moving, I don't speak the language, etc. etc.)

Her doctor convinces her, just barely, that she has a husband and a two-year-old daughter that need her. And that the baby almost certainly would not survive, either - she could not give her life to save the child, it would not work.

This is why abortion is healthcare.

As a result of that doctor, my great-grandmother's life is saved. She is excommunicated from the Catholic Church for choosing to save her own life. She gets to raise her daughter, my grandmother.

--

My Grandmother

If my great-grandmother had not survived, there is a significant chance that my grandmother would have died as a teenager, before my mom could ever have been born.

This is because, during the Communist takeover of the country, both of my great-grandparents were arrested and thrown in jail as political prisoners. It is the late 1940s, and the country is just barely out of WWII, during which it was subject to an incredibly violent and bloody Nazi takeover and puppet regime.

My grandmother had no family she could stay with. She was 14 years old, and alone in a boarding house.

My great-grandmother was held for two years (before she forced the regime to let her go in a story of massive badassery), at which point my grandmother is able to go back and live with her. My great-grandfather is held for seven years, before the brutal conditions and hard labor paralyzed his legs (temporarily, thankfully), and he was dumped on the roadside, eventually to be helped home by a series of passersby.

Would my grandmother have survived seven years by herself in a time and region of great political upheaval, most of those years as a teenager? I hope so. But there's no way to know for sure.

--

My grandmother, thankfully, managed to give birth to my mom and my aunt without any major complications, so far as I know. My mom is the first person in her family to be born in the United States.

Then, when my mom was oh five years old or so, I think, in the 1960s, my grandparents went to a neighborhood barbecue. There, due to an incredibly, incredibly shitty accident, an entire can of propane caught fire and was quite literally dropped on my grandmother's lap.

My grandmother was covered in severe third-degree burns all over her body. She was rushed to the hospital, where none of the doctors expect her to survive.

But, amazingly, amazingly, thanks to modern medicine, she did.

Thanks to burn care and surgical techniques and IV rehydration and antibiotics and high-grade anesthetics - none of which had existed even a hundred years prior - my grandmother survived, and would live for another forty years.

--

My Mom and My Grandmother

Unbeknownst to almost anyone at the time, the sleepy suburban community my grandparents have moved to was the site of a highly classified, highly experimental nuclear reactor with absolutely horrific safety practices, and the surrounding area is filled with radioactive contamination and cancers to this day.

My grandfather died of liver cancer in the early 1980s.

My grandmother was diagnosed with uterine cancer in the early 1990s. Thanks to modern medicine, they were able to (a) know what cancer is, (b) detect internal cancers like uterine cancer, and (c) safely perform the hysterectomy that saved my grandmother's life.

My mom was diagnosed with brain cancer in the early 2020s. And thankfully, thankfully, with state-of-the-art modern medicine, they were able to diagnose her cancer early and remove it completely.

We are celebrating one year cancer free for her tonight.

--

My Mom and Me

When I was born, I missed my due date by three weeks.

When my due date came around, my parents were waiting and waiting. And nothing happened, for three whole weeks. No water broken, no false contractions, no signs of labor - nothing.

After three weeks, when it was no longer safe to wait, they induced labor in my mom. Which worked to start labor, but not to induce childbirth. 40 hours later, I had still made little if any progress toward being born.

Ultimately, three weeks and forty hours late, I was delivered by C-section.

Cesarean section, or childbirth via abdominal surgery, has been around for at least two thousand years.

But it wasn't until the 1900s that Cesarean sections became something that the mother could also survive.

If it wasn't for modern medicine, my mom would not have survived - and depending on how things ultimately went, I might well not have either.

--

My Mom and My Sister

If my mom had died giving birth to me - one of the most common causes of death for women throughout all of human history, until the past hundred years or so - my sister would never have been born.

When my sister was born, just under three years after I was, she missed her due date by two weeks.

Once again, no sign of childbirth. So once again, they induced labor. And once again, inducing labor did not induce child birth.

This time, my mom was only in labor for 20 hours before they performed the C-section that delivered my sister into this world.

My mom and my sister are both alive and healthy today.

--

Me

When I was less than a year old, I came down with a 104 degree fever.

Fevers become fatal between 105 and 107 degrees, in humans.

So, my parents took me to the hospital, and the doctors rushed to treat me, with IVs and fever reducers and rehydration therapy and possibly antibiotics (I don't know if it was viral or bacteria) - none of which had existed just 100 years prior.

Thanks to modern medicine:

I survived.

--

This, or something like it, is the story of millions and millions of families all around the world.

In a world without modern medicine, far, far more than 50% of the people alive right now would never have been born.

Because survival is cumulative. For every single person saved - by modern medicine, by OSHA requirements, by the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and so much more - not only is their life preserved, but the lives of every single one of their descendants are able to come into being.

--

What Diseases Will We End Next?

I follow a lot of news for this blog, including medical news. I work in science communication, among other things. I was trained in research methods by a professor who specialized in the history and ethics of science. One of my closest friends has a degree in genetics and a master's in public health from one of the world's leading medical schools.

So, trust me when I say this:

We have regained and in fact exceeded the losses in public health, disease elimination, and vaccination rates caused by the COVID-19 pandemic across almost all ranges, diseases, and sectors. Less than six years after COVID-19 first appeared.

Barring a catastrophe on the scale of WWIII, it is incredibly, incredibly likely that in the next 50 years - if not much sooner - we will be able to say not just smallpox was, but also:

Polio was

Guinea worm disease was

Cervical cancer was

And, if we're very lucky

Tuberculosis was

and

HIV was

(HIV elimination sources: x, x, x, x, x, x, x - there are so many different recent breakthroughs and avenues of hope I couldn't find just one link to summarize them all)

And, with the medical revolution brought about by the development of genetic sequencing, CRISPR, fMRI, MRNA vaccines, electron microscopes, immunology advances, and so much more,

Who knows how much more progress we will some day make?

There's no way to know, yet. And I so, so look forward to when we get to find out

[lucy8675309]

OK Tumblr Geriatric Ward, let’s talk about your posture-

there are things you should be doing now to prevent yourself from starting to look like 🥀

Why does it matter? Future you would like to avoid the pain, limited motion, and fall risk that goes along with worsening posture.

What’s the focus?

1. Keep the flexibility in your spine

2. Stretch the muscles in the front

3. Strengthen the muscle in the back

Here are some simple things you can do daily while sitting and when you get up to go into the bathroom or the kitchen

Keep the flexibility by doing these repeated movements: 10 repetitions several times a day

The goal is to give yourself a double or triple chin. Keep your nose pointing forward, don’t let it tip up or down

Thoracic extension- use a chair with a seat back that comes up to the level of your shoulder blades. Try to bend back over the top of the chair without arching away from the seat back and without extending your neck. If the pressure from the top of the chair is uncomfortable you can place a towel there

Stretch the muscles in the front by using a door frame. This one will feel good afterwards

If this isn’t enough of a stretch you can do one side at a time. If you have the right arm up step forward with the right foot and turn slightly to the left. Then do it on the other side.

Strengthen the muscles in the back by squeezing your shoulder blades together for a count of 10 and then repeating 10 times. You can do this several times a day Hint: Don’t lift your shoulder blades up

There are lots more exercises for strengthening your back muscles but this is a good starting point and easy to do. I like doing it while driving

Tips:

Do the best you can

If it hurts stop

Envision future you saying thank you each time you do one of the exercises

[brightlotusmoon]

NOTE: I can do most of these with the cerebral palsy. In fact, a lot of these little exercises are automatically part of my physical therapy. My problem is I already have hyperlordosis, spine arthritis, and cervicogenic headache. These have helped me at least try to have a posture.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH HOW GOOD THIS ADVICE IS

[umrna]

I sat in court at the Gisèle Pelicot rape trial. This is what I saw

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.

[majchic]

[boycritter]

thinking about anastasia trusova paintings again

[boycritter]

CAN ANYONE HEAR ME

[traditionalclothing]

A Maasai woman wearing her finest clothes. (Image credit) 

[delicious-dream-before-the-storm]

Vivaldi played by the South African elementary school Goede Hoop Marimba Band

Turn ON the sound

[sarahduke]

Virologist Beata Halassy has successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses sparking discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/5tfVn8nEFH

[touchn2btouched]

Safe deposit lockers manufactured during 1840. One of the engineering marvel of our ancestors. Great !