I was making coffee when the Pelicot verdict came down. I remember setting the pot down without quite meaning to, as if my hand couldn’t hold it anymore.
And I remember thinking, almost involuntarily, this is not the face of a man who knows he did something. This is the face of a man who knows the script was supposed to keep running for him.
There is a particular kind of man. You have probably met one. He arrives somewhere in a tailored suit, the suit doing about two-thirds of his work for him. He owns the company, or knows who does. He has money, status, the assistant opening the door, the colleagues laughing at jokes that are not funny.
From the outside, he appears powerful.
Then someone says no.
And the entire structure shakes.
That is the crack.
Because power and entitlement are not the same thing, and we keep getting them confused.
Power tolerates limits. Entitlement cannot.
The entitled person does not experience the other’s refusal as information. They experience it as a violation.
Not she doesn’t want this.
But something is wrong. This should be happening.
The expectation was never negotiated. It was assumed, the way oxygen is assumed.
The entitled position is: "You are supposed to be this for me,” and that’s when subjectivity disappears.
The woman in front of him is no longer encountered as a person with her own choices and fears. Her own limits.
She occupies a position.
A function. A reward. A confirmation.
A thing meant to complete a script already running in his mind. A script he did not write so much as inherit.
These cases are not primarily about sex.
If they were about sex, the refusal would end the interaction. The moment the other person’s desire is absent, sex disappears from the equation.
Whatever continues, continues for some other reason. What remains is the demand.
The demand to restore a position. The demand to preserve an image. Mostly, the demand to confirm an identity.
You are supposed to give me what I need in order to continue being who I think I am.
That is why refusal becomes so destabilizing. Not because the other person mattered. Because it creates
Refusal exposes dependence. It reveals that the grand image was never self-sustaining. It required participation. Often, a great deal of it.
A child begins life assuming the world moves around him. Hunger appears, and something arrives. Distress appears, and someone comes. Reality emerges when the child discovers the other was never an extension of themselves. The other had their own mind all along.
What if entitlement is not a failure of morality, but a failure of reality?
The woman says no.
Reality says no.
And both become equally intolerable.
We tend to think reality is made of facts. But it is people who create reality. The moment another person’s subjectivity disappears, reality begins to thin.
Not all at once.
First they become a role. Then a function. Then a solution.
Eventually they become an object inside a story that exists entirely in your own mind.
At that point, the danger is not simply that you stop seeing them.
The danger is that you stop seeing the world.
Not because the rules are unknown to them. Because somewhere inside, some people still believe they create the rules.
Weinstein’s world appears organized around access and compliance. When someone refused, the refusal did not threaten his gratification. It threatened his standing in the field. The terms of his reality.
In the case of Dominique Pelicot, the collapse is starker still. A wife ceases to exist as a wife, a partner, a subject. She becomes an instrument through which an internal economy is organized. Rendering her unconscious, he is not relating to her. He is relating to the position she allows him to occupy.
This was not voyeurism proper. Watching was part of it, but watching was not it. The making was.
This was not candaulism proper. Pelicot did not offer his wife to others seeking pleasure in her exposure. That would have allowed those fifty other men to bring their own desire.
This was not a ménage à trois either. That would require three people inside one erotic relationship. Here there was one man, his instructions, and a body.
Gisèle had been removed as a subject before any of the others arrived.
What the recruits did was ratify her removal. Each one accepted the husband’s invitation as if consent were his to hand over, something a man could sign for his wife the way he signs for a package.
No one asked her.
No one could, and that was the point.
The men were not relating to her either. They were following him.
What was Pelicot doing? He was constructing a scene, using other bodies to make it happen. Inside a relational field that excluded her and the recruited men. Fifty men from all walks of life, ages, and backgrounds, for they were his actors playing a role in his fantasized sexual mise-en-scène.
In this triangulation without triangularity, bodies are props.
Erotic pleasure comes through every move of building the staging: recruiting participants, decorating the room, rendering her unconscious, directing, recording. And even later, in the care he placed in keeping a tidy archive.
Gisèle’s subjectivity was an inconvenience. In fact, her unconsciousness was absolutely necessary.
The scene was not set for an erotic reciprocal encounter. It was all done for his own sexual satisfaction.
Gisèle’s subjectivity shows up at every step of the trial, when she refused the closed courtroom, waived anonymity, and insisted the videos be shown. When she became an agent of change in her life and even in our society at large. But she also rose back up by refusing to stand for any ideal and returning to life as an ordinary person.
More than anything, her subjectivity can be said in one sentence:
I am not here to complete your reality.
And that is something we need to respect.
Something we need to learn from.
Different crimes. Different personalities. The same structural movement.
The moment someone ceases to be an I, they become a for me. And that may be one of the cleanest definitions of exploitation we have.
The moment another person’s subjectivity is no longer recognized, they become a function to their recruiters.
A solution to loneliness. A solution to shame. A solution to powerlessness. A solution to insecurity. A solution to desire.
And it scales down. The boss who needs you to laugh on cue. The friend who needs you to agree. The colleague who needs you to keep their version of events. The public who needs Taylor Swift to be pregnant.
We know these mechanisms.
The crime is what happens when they are taken all the way.
The tragedy, and it is tragic, not only predatory, is that no human being can safely occupy the position of someone else’s solution. The moment we are taken, the relationship disappears and only the role remains.
And once the role is all that is left, the person behind it becomes increasingly invisible. To others. Eventually, to themself.
Which is the strange thing about the man in the tailored suit.
From the outside, he appears to be everything.
From the inside, the suit is mostly what is holding him up.
I’m telling you all this still in my slippers, still holding my coffee. It’s cold now, and I have a whole day ahead of me.
I followed the story and wrote on it and I found it as fascinating a psychological study as it was evil behavior in practice. Deep sickness. This was, from my viewpoint, power and a desire to punish someone, as much as it was a sexual compulsion for him.
He did not care one bit about about his wife's emotions, psychological well being, protection and safety. How he looked her in the face after the fact, I have no idea. I also always wondered how the deviant participants rationalized their behavior.
If I recall, the mayor shamelessly acted the fool afterward.