Pierre (first name changed), 33, must have told this story hundreds of times over the last 10 years. "Something crazy happened to me," he would say to men who listened, laughed and then envied him. This "completely crazy" girl who forced him to penetrate her after obligatory fellatio, when he was 19, was his exploit. At the time, he was a bartender in Toulouse, in an environment where you would do shots during service and women afterward. Back then, he recalls, women were talked about "as if they were meat." With his tattoos, tousled brown hair and silver rings on all his fingers, Pierre felt a bit like a rock star when, long after closing time, girls, like groupies, begged the bouncer to let them in for a last drink with the handsome bartender.

The young man was faithful to his girlfriend of the time. One evening, at a party at a friend's house, a woman his age complained of not having a sexual partner, and Pierre offered, "in a joking tone," to volunteer. "I must have sent the wrong signals because she complimented me and then kissed me," he recounted. He relented to get rid of her. Later that evening, she grabbed him by the collar, looked him in the eye. "Now, let's fuck," she ordered, before leading him into a separate room. He followed her "without thinking." She blocked the door with a dresser, pulled down his pants and began fellatio. "She lifts her dress, gets down on her hands and knees and penetrates herself. I had an erection but I didn't feel like it at all. It must have lasted five or 10 minutes, I'm not sure. I was there without being there," said Pierre, describing a moment of dissociation that many victims of sexual assault recall.

Women are the main victims of sexual violence. According to the "Violence and Gender Relations" (VIRAGE) report carried out by the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), 15% of women have experienced at least one form of sexual assault in their lives, four times more than men. For the latter, three-quarters of rapes and attempted rapes took place before they came of age. The assailants are almost exclusively men.

Launched on February 22, in the wake of actor Aurélien Wiik's revelations of rape when he was a minor, the #MeTooGarçons movement is in line with this data. Under this hashtag, hundreds of internet users are recounting the sexual abuse they suffered as children, and a few – much rarer – are reporting assaults by women they met at parties or on dating apps. The cases of men sexually assaulted by women constitute a "statistical minority," said Lucie Wicky, the only sociology researcher working on sexual violence suffered by men in France. Pierre belongs to that minority. But he has never considered himself a victim: This story was just a "party trick" that he turned into a "show of strength."

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