During a discussion on French television on Thursday, September 12, I recounted how, during a conversation about the Mazan rape trial [the French mass rape trial is named after the Southern French town where Gisèle Pelicot was raped by her husband and 50 other men he had recruited], Laurent Metterie, my husband, admitted he felt ashamed as a man, in the face of this hideous case. The next day, journalist Karim Rissouli posted a video in which he echoed my words and added his own, claiming that this trial was, for him and many other men, a chance to wake up. Since then, in response to our posts on social media, a wave of angry messages has poured in from men loudly proclaiming that they feel no shame whatsoever.

Some respond with a level of aggression that leaves little doubt about their masculinist convictions, while many others take the time to explain. The common thread in their comments is to categorically reject this feeling of shame, claiming they bear no "responsibility" for the heinous acts of the Mazan defendants. They argue that, on the one side there is a minority of "sick," "degenerate" and "monstrous" men, and, on the other, a majority of "normal," "respectful" and "non-violent" men.

Some women add fuel to the fire, pushing the narrative that feminists are angry, bitter man-haters who enjoy playing the victim. There are even some who have expressed regret that #MeToo spreads terror and say that listening to victims, even without necessarily believing them, is already something.

Stubborn resistance

This stubborn resistance prompts me to revisit the notion of shame, which is at the heart of the patriarchal system and which we must now strive to overturn. In Femininity and Domination, American philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky describes shame as a gender-related emotion – not because it is exclusive to women, but because they are more prone to experience it and more intensely than men. Defined as a permanent sense of inadequacy, whereby women feel inferior, imperfect or diminished, shame is a veritable mode of existence in the world for women. It is the result of multiple socialization processes which, from childhood and throughout life, construct a set of negative attitudes and opinions about the self.

In the case of sexual violence, shame reaches its peak, as intimate devastation is made public within the context of rape culture, which shifts the blame onto the victims by implying that they are always to some extent responsible for what they endured. Wasn't their dress too short? Didn't they drink too much? Hadn't they agreed to the date? As a result, according to a victimization survey by the Interior Ministry, only 6% of people who suffered physical sexual violence filed a complaint in 2022.

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