I read Gisele Pelicot’s book yesterday. And I will absolutely be churning that around in my mind forever after. It’s stunning and to me it’s more about patriarchy and rape culture than the horror story I expected.
She talks a lot about how she struggled to make sense of who this criminal man is, how he feels like a different person entirely to her from the husband of many years.
That really resonated with me - that feeling that once the penny drops, it feels like that good guy died. That you need time to grieve him and what you had before you can confront this new reality.
I caught a partner trying to cheat once. I found a stack of messages to internet strangers, inviting them in lurid and graphic detail to participate in various fantasies I had not indulged for my partner. I found searches for happy ending massage parlors, I found message boards for places they go to for work, searching for cheap anonymous hookups. I found messages that said it was needed because I, the woman, wasn’t willing to engage in this kind of play. I saw the dates and knew that I was sitting right next to them when they were having these chats, trying to spend time together with them.
I even picked up a stalker of my own, who continued to sext him and then send me the chats time and time again. It was to taunt me, not to give me a heads up.
And I read this book and I realized something:
For me, my partner died when I found all that stuff. The good guy I thought I had just perished in my mind. I knew I would never see him again. I had to grieve for him, and I had to grieve for the time we had when I had been happy. And I had to spend a LOT of time feeling dreadfully stupid, like I should have seen it so long ago.
I wanted to find my man and cry about my tragedy, but he’s the one who did it. And in front of me now isn’t my good guy, it’s this asshole I didn’t know until today. I don’t know him. He’s a second person and he feels like a stranger and a bad man.
Here’s the real thing though:
He sees it exactly backwards from me.
In his mind, the old him was the bad guy. The first man is the one who is doing all the lying and sneaking and gaslighting.
This second guy, though, he is chastised. He is ashamed. He is born again and never going to do hurtful things. He’s the good guy, guy number two. Good Guy Two wouldn’t hurt me and can’t understand why I would act like he’s the monster.
When I was about seven or so, I was at the park with my little sister and cousin. A man on a bench was weeping and we were worried he was hurt. We asked if he was okay and he said his son died and could he take us in his car to go get ice cream up the street where they used to go? He was sure three cute little blonde girls could cheer him up.
We ran home and told adults, and got told we shouldn’t be at the park without an adult anyway, what were we thinking?
When I was in high school, my assistant coach lost his job for grooming me. He knew I was two years younger than anyone else, that my parents were domestically violent, that I was meek.
When it all blew up finally, my mom met with the head coach and the offender never came to school again. It was all hushed up.
My mom said, “Let’s not tell your dad. He wouldn’t understand.” And she was right. And I was relieved because I was scared I had done something wrong somehow, that I had (at 12) done something to encourage him and now ruined his life.
When I was married and an immigrant, my ex had some tax trouble. I opened the scary envelope and told him, “You owe several grand.” He gaslit me and said I was too foreign to understand. That the letter (in English) said THEY owed HIM several grand.
And then he waited until I was home to bury a relative, and took out a loan in OUR name for the difference between the two amounts. He didn’t tell me. I only found out because I got suspicious and started locating the hidden mail.
There was the student teacher my second year of college that I knew from High School. He said the parking lot was too dark and he’d come with to get my music before the concert. And at my car he grabbed me and pinned me and wouldn’t stop trying to bite my lip. Out of nowhere. He was also a football player and huge. I weighed 100lbs. I managed to wiggle away and hit him in the eye with my elbow.
I didn’t tell my professor because we had a concert in twenty minutes. And maybe they wouldn’t understand.
When I was 16 I babysat three kids. Until the dad kissed me. I felt so panicked because I needed the money and his wife would probably kill me. He was twenty five years my senior. I had to give up a hobby I loved because that’s how I knew their family and it was the only way to cut ties because he kept showing up.
In my early twenties, I made the mistake of having a one-nighter with a guy who had previously dumped me. Lying in bed after he posited getting back together, and I declined. I said we had a nice night and let’s leave it there.
Two days later I got an “anonymous” email (surely from him) pointing me to a message board post of nude photos of me. I didn’t put them there. They used my real life full name. It was the first thing that showed when you googled me.
This was before me too. This was before we had revenge porn as a concept, let alone as a criminal offense. I couldn’t take it to the cops. I would just get asked why I took naked photos in the first place.
I asked the admin to take it down, if not out of decency then because it’s my copyright. They’re my selfies. Well, he declined. He thought it was funny.
And I watched for days as men I never met ever before commented under it, saying the usual vile things one can expect from a herd of animals on the internet.
But the scary thing was that they started saying I had slept with them, too. They started describing things I didn’t ever do with anyone and claiming I did them everywhere with them.
They started posting headless nudes of other women and saying they were me. We didn’t need AI deep fakes for men to be disgusting and lie. They were doing it back when I bought my Gmail address from eBay.
I resolved it by signing up an account on every single possible site I could and flooding the internet with my real name. Filling them up with generic content. And when I married, I took the name of the man who would one day gaslight me about the tax bill, and felt relieved to give mine up. Not to join our houses, but to escape.
I could keep going and so could every other woman I know. And that was also what I was thinking about, reading this book - That although the crime against Gisele Pelicot was so enormous, the feelings she felt and the pushback she got were NOT different from what all women have experienced in their own offenses. The crime against her is unfathomable and hard to relate to, but her self-doubt and grief and people blaming her somehow, dismissing her somehow, are extremely familiar.
