Rape culture, or why I'd rather meet a bear than a man if I'm ever lost in a forest

Published on 9 June 2024 in Vademecum - Lire en français

Article updated on 13/04/2025: I added the video Scandale dans le porno français : « Dans ces vidéos, on nous a totalement déshumanisées ».

For this second vademecum, after fascism and the far-right, I’m going to tackle a new light and easy subject, rape culture!

In theory, everyone is against rape, this horrible act committed by barely human monsters. In practice? In addition to some masculinists who place no value on consent (and women in general) and claim loud and clear their support for rape, there is the rape culture. We live in a society where sexual violence is denied, minimized and the victims become the suspects while excuses are made for the perpetrators.

If the expression “rape culture” seems exaggerated and makes you incredulous, let me explain everything in this vademecum, with studies and figures to support it.

1. The figures of sexual violence in France or the consequences of rape culture
2. The myths of rape culture
3. The rape culture in everyday life: from jokes to rape
4. Resources to go further
   1. Books
   2. Articles
   3. Podcasts
   4. Videos
   5. Documentaries
   6. Fictions

Partie 1 The figures of sexual violence in France or the consequences of rape culture

Let's start with some legal definitions, so we're all talking about the same thing, with the same precise and nuanced vocabulary:

Rape: « Tout acte de pénétration sexuelle, de quelque nature qu’il soit, commis sur la personne d’autrui, par violence, contrainte, menace ou surprise, est un viol. » // « Any act of sexual penetration, whatever its nature, committed on the person of another by violence, coercion, threat or surprise is rape. » Article 222.23 of the French Penal Code.

Sexual assault: « Constitue une agression sexuelle toute atteinte sexuelle commise avec violence, contrainte, menace ou surprise. » // « Sexual assault is any act of violence, coercion, threat or surprise. » Articles 222.22 and 222.27 of the French Penal Code. This includes touching, exhibitionism or sexual harassment.

« Of whatever nature » means that any penetration (vaginal, anal or oral) is considered to be rape, whether performed with a penis, finger or any other object.

These definitions are not perfect. They exclude people who are forced to penetrate someone. The wording of the definition of rape means that it is not considered to be rape because they themselves have not been penetrated.

Moreover, the conditions « violence, coercion, threat or surprise » are both too precise (and therefore limiting) and too vague, since they leave room for interpretation and thus threaten victims with a disqualification of the facts

Sexual harassment: « Is considered to be sexual harassment any form of serious pressure (even if not repeated) for the real or apparent purpose of obtaining a sexual act, for the benefit of the perpetrator or a third party. » Definition from Service-Public.fr.

Concretely, the transition from sexual harassment to sexual assault occurs when the harassment becomes physical, particularly through misplaced caresses (buttocks, thighs, chest, crotch) or the famous « stolen kisses » which are sexual assaults, whether on the mouth or elsewhere.

Main numbers for France

To summarize :

• Rape is common: in France, 1 out of 6 woman and 1 out of 20 men report having been raped or attempted to be raped during their lifetime.
• Rape is rarely reported: only 10% of victims file a complaint following the rape or attempted rape they have suffered.
• Rapists go unpunished: only 1% of rapes lead to a conviction.
• The victims are implicated: for 4 out of 10 French person, the responsibility of the rapist is mitigated if the victim had a provocative attitude in public or flirted with him.

Source : association Mémoires Traumatiques, 2016.

Victimization studies

Every year, in France, there are 256,000 victims of rape or attempted rape: 208,000 women including 124,000 minors and 46,000 men including 30,000 minors (INSEE – ONDRP, 2014 – 2012 and CSF, 2008).

Among those aged 18 to 69 interviewed in the survey “Contexte de la sexualité en France” in 2008, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 14 men reported being victims of sexual assault.

Complaints and convictions

In France, only 10% of rapes (and less than 2% of marital rapes) are the subject of complaints (INSEE – ONDRP, 2010 – 2015). And not all complaints lead to convictions, far from it: it's the case for only 1.5% to 2% of all rapes.

Furthermore, a sociological study conducted by Véronique Le Goaziou in 2011 showed that those sentenced for sexual crimes are mostly from disadvantaged social classes.

There is therefore a real problem of impunity for rapists, especially those from the wealthy classes. Moreover, the questioning of victims is a second violence towards them: they are both made to feel guilty while they are not, and punished.

Rape is indeed a mass phenomenon.
The fact that there is so much sexual violence and so few convictions shows that our society tolerates or even encourages it. How?

Partie 2 The myths of rape culture

Rape culture was defined in 1994 by Lonsway and Fitzgerald as « generally false, but widespread and persistent attitudes and beliefs to deny and justify male sexual assault against women. »

#1 « Real » rapes and « pseudo »-rapes

Failure to recognize the legal definition of rape

• 1 out of 4 French person considers that forcing a person to perform fellatio is not rape, but sexual assault. False.
• 1 out of 4 French person considers that performing an act of penetration with the finger on a person who refuses it is not rape. False.
• More than 1 in 5 French person believe that there is no rape when the person gives up when forced. False.
• 17% of French people believe that forcing their spouse to have sex when she refuses is not rape. False.

Source : association Mémoires Traumatiques, 2016.

We have a global misrepresentation of rapists and rape situations.

In the popular imagination, rape is perpetrated by an unknown person in an alley or on a deserted parking lot at night; the victim is a pretty girl; the rapist uses physical violence or even a weapon.

Our education as girls (or perceived as such) is strongly influenced by this myth: « Don’t go out dressed like that », « Don't come home alone too late », « Ask someone to walk you home », « Stay in a group »…

All of these tips support the myth. These cases exist, but they only account for 20% of sexual assaults. In fact, 80% of the rapes (94% if only minors are taken into account) are committed by relatives, family members or partners. Most occur at the victim’s home, workplace or school, and most occur during the day (source: Zucker, 2005; CFCV, 2003).

In France, police officers, when they consider that « circumstances are unclear », use the word « miol » to mark the difference with what they consider a « legitimate rape ». For example, a victim who has been drinking, dating her rapist or agreeing to follow him home may be challenged by the people who are supposed to accompany and protect them.

Yet the law is clear: if there is violence, coercion, threat or surprise, it is rape. Period.
And incidentally, if the victim has been drinking, it is an aggravating circumstance, not an excuse.

So I repeat for the police officers (and others) at the back of the class who did not follow and « tend not to believe the victims »: it is never the fault of the victims, absolutely nothing justifies ignoring the consent and the absence of “no” is not consent.

#2 The myriad of false accusations

Try to engage in a discussion about rape, and the argument of false accusations will come up very quickly. And if you think it’s because there are many, you’re wrong.

One of the oldest clichés in the world is that of the venal woman, ready to do anything to achieve her ends, especially to use her sexuality to trap men. As for children, it is well known, they are disastrous, their memories are not reliable, they are manipulated by a parent after a separation…

And then, this man they're accusing, everyone loves him, he is « a good guy »; he is not a « monster », a rapist. It is hard to accept that someone close to you, someone you love and admire can be an aggressor, especially when you have a false image of what a rapist is.

No, a rapist is not a « monster », it is a human being like the others.
No, a rapist is not « crazy » or « sick », this is a psychophobic remark, mental health has nothing to do with it. Only 4% of offenders suffer from mental illness.
A rapist is someone who has committed rape. Nothing more, nothing less.

To go back to the false charges, I’m not going to give you an exact percentage. Because nobody knows. The different studies conclude that between 2% and 8% of rape charges are false, but there is a very important element to consider: rape complaints that are withdrawn by victims (due to pressure or threats for example) or dismissed without further action (because the police consider it to be a « miol » for example) are often counted as « false accusations ».

There are very few false accusations, in part because there's absolutely nothing to be gain in inventing a rape: to denounce your rapist (whether or not one files a complaint) is to take the risk of having your word questioned, being accused and having provoked the rape, of « to ruin the life » of your rapist (remember Brock Turner who spent only 3 months in prison, not to « risk his future »), to see your romantic and sexual life exposed as « proof » that you couldn't possibly have been raped, to be threatened and assaulted in retaliation (see the documentary Audrie & Daisyem> on the subject)…

It should be noted that in a patriarchal society, the value of a woman is, among other things, directly related to her sexuality – her sexual history as well as her behaviors, whether supposed or real (cf. the myth of virginity). Rape is therefore «the supreme stain» in this toxic imaginary: another reason that not only makes the victims silent, but that invent a false story of rape (the myth of revenge in love or the « myth of the woman who regrets because the man was a bad shot ») is therefore highly unlikely, since from the point of view of the issuer it would be equivalent to sacrificing her own respectability in the eyes of the world. There is also a problem of cultural representation: countless plots are based on false accusations of rape; almost as much if not more than real accusations. Seeing many machiavellian women destroy the reputations and lives of poor innocent men (Gone Girl to name but one example) confirms that it is something common, while it is an outdated narrative element and not a faithful representation of reality.

#3 Victim blaming

Accusations of rape victims

• For 27% of the French, the responsibility of the rapist is mitigated if the victim wore a «sexy outfit» (mini skirt, low neckline): victim-blaming.
• For 15% of French people, a victim is partly responsible for their rape if they have agreed to go alone to an unknown place: victim-blaming.
• 4 out of 10 French people believe that if we really defend as much as we can and scream, we most often can run away from the rapist: victim-blaming.
• 1 out of 4 French person considers that if one respects certain simple rules of precaution one has almost no risk of being a victim of rape: victim-blaming.

Source : association Mémoires Traumatiques, 2016.

Victim-blamingis assuming that a victim is partly, if not entirely, responsible for what they have suffered. This means, for example, that a victim of rape « asked for it », having adopted a « provocative » behaviour or by lack of caution.

Even when it is admitted that the rape did happen, it’s still going to be blamed on the victim. Was the victim drunk? Did they follow their aggressor home? Did they have a provocative attitude? Were they naive? Did they found themselves in the « wrong place at the wrong time »? Are we really forgetting that nothing can justify rape?

Showing cleavage or wearing a lot of make-up is not an invitation to rape, it is a fashion choice, which may or may not be made for seduction purposes, but which does not allow the presumption of sexual mores or consent. Nothing more. Walking alone at night should not be reserved for men. And so many other things.

This victim blaming mechanism can be explained as a way of distancing oneself from the victim in order to feel less exposed. As sexual assault can happen to anyone, we will have a tendency to blame the victim to reassure ourselves and say that it will never happen to us. Thus, victim blaming is used as a protection mechanism, a way to keep control.

This phenomenon is explained in psychology by the « belief in a just world ». This theory, highlighted by Dr. Melvin Lerner in 1965, is a cognitive bias that consists of thinking that good things happen to good people and therefore bad things happen to people who have deserved it. This bias of thought allows us to reduce our discomfort when we face unjust situations. While the denigration of victims makes us feel better through the supposed restoration of a more just world, we must not forget that it is a distorted view of reality that only increases the suffering of the victim.

When the victim is very young, some people tend to give him an attitude of seduction while he only expresses tenderness totally devoid of ambiguity; this is what Sándor Ferenczi called the « confusion of language between adults and children, the language of tenderness and passion » in 1932, when he described the trauma suffered by a child who receives sexual behaviour from caring adults in response to an innocent tender request.

#4 The « right » and « wrong » response to a rape

Yes, some people think they know the right way to respond to rape. The one, the true, the unique, the homologated. In some cases, a person who does not scream, struggle, and immediately file a complaint and cease all contact with their abuser is not a real rape victim.

This is completely wrong. Everyone reacts differently, and all reactions are valid. Some victims will indeed scream and struggle, but many are unable to react, mainly because of the phenomenon of psychological sideration.

#5 Men and their « pulsions »

Among the many clichés that we are fed, there is one that is particularly dangerous, that of the insatiable sexual appetite of men.

It is a common idea that men have great sexual needs, that they have impulses difficult to control and that they physically need to satisfy them (cf. the myth of « blue balls »).

Besides, women have a reputation for not particularly liking sex and practicing it mainly to satisfy their partner or get something from him (cf. the myth of the venal woman I talked about above). This is particularly visible in the cultural representations of adolescence, with on one side boys obsessed with girls and sex-hungry and on the other girls lacking romance and love gestures. While, let’s be clear, the interest or disinterest of teenagers in sex has nothing to do with their gender.

In short, we are taught to please men while they are taught to be satisfied. And that is dangerous. Some men feel that sex is due to them, especially in a couple. All of this rape-culture-oriented education is producing frightening results. 75% of men interviewed who admitted to rape say they did so because they felt the sex was due to them. (Source: UN, 2013; Jeweks R., 2013).

Lasting sexist stereotypes

• Two-thirds of the French believe that men have a simpler sexuality than women: sexism.
• 63% of French respondents consider that it is more difficult for men than women to control their sexual desire: sexism.
• 3 quarters of the French believe that women are more likely to consider violent events than men do not perceive them as such: sexism.
• 1 out of 4 French person considers that in the sexual field, women do not really know what they want compared to men: sexism.

Source : association Mémoires Traumatiques, 2016.

#6 The myth of the no that is really a yes:

With our entire childhood cradled by ideas such as « one must insist to get what they want », « silence means assent » and other « tough love » bullcrap, it is no wonder that we incorporate these ideas. « You say no but we all know that you do want to in fact », « Oh it’s okay it was just a kiss for a laugh, you’re not going to make a scene for that »... Well, yes. A scene for sexual assault is cheap.

In addition, the vocabulary used to talk about sexual intercourse maintains this violent image of sexuality: « to rail someone », « to bang a chick » or even « to destroy ». It is proof here that sex is considered in an aggressive way.

When we know that the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity was banned 5 years from the Yale campus in 2011 after their new recruits sang in front of the girls' dorms « No means yes, yes means anal », there is still a lot of work to be done.

Strong adhesion to rape culture

• 1 out of 5 French person considers that many women who say «no» to a proposal for sexual relations actually mean «yes»: rape culture.
• 40% of the French believe that if the victim had a provocative attitude in public, this mitigates the responsibility of the rapist: rape culture.
• 1 out of 5 French person judges that during a sexual relationship, women can take pleasure in being forced: rape culture.
• 29% of French people think that at the origin of a rape, there is often a misunderstanding: rape culture.

Source : association Mémoires Traumatiques, 2016.

Partie 3 The rape culture in everyday life: from jokes to rape

This rape culture has its roots absolutely everywhere, spreading across all social classes and all branches of the media.

Its omnipresence trivialises rape and creates favourable conditions for sexual assaults to be numerous and their perpetrators to go unchallenged.

The expression ‘rape culture’, singular, can be misleading, because it is multifaceted. It is made up of hundreds of very different types of behaviour:

• female MPs whistled at in the assembly for daring to wear a skirt or dress
• the use of sexual or rape vocabulary to talk about sporting or electoral defeats: ‘My team lost 5-0, what a rape!’, ‘That politician fucked us all up the arse’, the highly inspired drawings of Marianne being raped by this or that reform...
• the election of a notorious sexual abuser to the US presidential election
• actors and directors accused of rape who continue their careers as if nothing had happened
• jokes about rape that make fun of the victims
• the distorted representation of rape in culture
• the vocabulary used, particularly in the press, to talk about sexual crimes and domestic violence
• teaching girls ‘not to be raped’ rather than teaching boys not to rape
• the questions asked of rape victims: ‘What were you wearing?’, ‘But didn't you fight back?

It is all of these behaviours, and the hundreds of others that I don't have the space to cite as examples, that make up the culture of rape. To break out of this culture of impunity, we need to eliminate them all, one by one. It will be a long and trying process, but it's necessary. So that rape is no longer the only crime in which the victim is almost systematically accused.

Partie 4 Resources to go further

Books

De mon plein gré

(Litt. Of my own free will)

by Mathilde Forget (2021)

«  I didn't eat anyone's hand. I didn't kill anyone. But I'm going to have to defend myself because I'm guilty. Without declared victims, crimes don't exist. By revealing this, I am guilty of making crime happen. »

This book is brilliant, read it.

Published by Grasset.

Les Orageuses

by Marcia Burnier (2020)

I'd like to extract a thousand quotes from that book, but what struck me wasn't the great phrases or the ‘ready-made quotes’. It's the infinite accuracy of the details, the little things that conjure up memories.

I don't need a lot for a few tears to flow when I'm reading of watching something; the slightest melodramatic scene in a series can bring tears to my eyes. But here, I cried. The avalanche of tears, the sobs that make it impossible to breathe, the stomach churning.

Les Orageuses gutted me.

Published by Cambourakis.

Not that bad – Dispatches from rape culture

by Roxane Gay (2018)

A collection of essays on rape, sexual assault and all those things that society tries to persuade us are ‘not that bad’. Not that bad is a powerful and important book, probably the hardest I've read in my life.

Published by Harper Collins.

Chavirer

Litt. To Capsize

de Lola Lafon (2020)

Huge slap in the face. I was very scared before I started it, given the subject (and the surprisingly pedantic back cover, which was very different from the book, thankfully), but the author doesn't need to describe it for us to understand what happened to Cleo and the others. There is no voyeurism. We don't focus on the horror or the culprits. We follow Cléo, Betty and the others, and what has become of them. It's about me too, family silence, social struggles and racism, but also sisterhood.

Published by Actes Sud.

La Deuxième Femme

Litt. The Second Wife/Woman

by Louise Mey (2020)

Very beautiful novel, very hard to read. I was completely drawn in and couldn't put it down until I'd finished it.

TW rape, physical and psychological violence, hold, mentions of Eating disorders.

Published by JC Lattès.

Impunité

Litt. Impunity

by Hélène Devynck (2022)

If you're living in France, it's almost impossible to ignore the ‘PPDA affair’. It's also almost impossible to ignore all the attacks on the women who spoke out, and the excuses made for the man who raped them. And it's hard to remain calm in the face of the realisation (or confirmation, as the case may be) that everyone knew and no one did anything about it. In Impunité, Hélène Devynck looks at the mechanisms at work to protect ‘France's favourite news anchor’, and at all that is involved in speaking out or pressing charges.

Published by Points.

Recommanded by not read (yet):

• Une culture du viol à la française by Valérie Rey-Robert, published by Libertalia
• Mémoire de fille by Annie Ernaux published by Gallimard
• Je suis une sur deux by Giulia Foïs published by Flammarion
• Les grands remplacés, enquête sur une fracture française by Paul Conge published by Arkhé

Focus on incest:

• Triste Tigre by Neige Sinno published by P.O.L.
• Le Berceau des dominations, anthropologie de l’inceste by Dorothée Dussy published by Pocket

In addition to this short list, I suggest you consult the ‘Collection of literary works in the fight against denial’ published by the Ciivise. You can consult it on the Ciivise website (.pdf, 1.9 MB).

I'd like to make a comment about Gabriel Tallent's book My Absolute Darling, which is included in the Ciivise collection. This is what I wrote just after starting to read it:

« I'm not going to finish this book. Firstly, because I find it atrociously badly written. [...] But above all, the incestuous rape scene at the beginning of the book is atrocious. All the descriptions of the abuse Turtle's father puts her through seemed... gratuitous? I couldn't finish the scene.

In the last 18 months, I've read a lot of books on the subject of sexual violence, in quite different genres, from fiction by Louise Mey (La Deuxième Femme, Embruns, Les Ravagé(e)s and Les Hordes invisibles) or Lola Lafon (Chavirer) to Not that bad, the collection of essays on rape culture coordinated by Roxane Gay, not forgetting De mon plein gré by Mathilde Forget and Les Orageuses by Marcia Burnier.

All these books were difficult to read, some more than others. But they were never hard because of gratuitous descriptions. Not That Bad is horrible because rape culture is horrible and we're taught from a very young age that we'll just have to deal with it, that it's not that bad, and that it's probably partly our fault. Les Orageuses made me cry until I choked on the resonance of certain sentences.

But none of these authors has ever repulsed me the way Gabriel Tallent did.

If I needed another reason to read women, here it is. I don't know if I'll only read them, but on these subjects it's definitive.

I don't ever want to read another rape scene written by a man. »

I know that this book is universally loved, but I wanted to make this comment because this scene really disturbed me and I believe in the importance of content warnings and trigger warnings.

« A lot of men interpret politeness from women as flirting because they themselves would never show even the barest courtesy to a woman they found unfuckable. »

Articles

Assassinées // Une femme sur six // Après le viol

Throughout 2023, Les Jours has devoted a series of articles to feminicide. Each month there are two articles: the first listing the previous month's feminicides, and the second investigating a particular aspect of these murders. It's a difficult read, but necessary.

In 2024, Les Jours begins a new series of articles, this time focusing on domestic violence, which affects one woman in six in France.

Finally, in the obsession Après le viol, Jeanne Casez and Louise Vallée take a look at women who have been victims of sexual violence in the face of gynaecologists. How can they be examined without re-traumatising them? How can they be helped to heal?

I'd like to highlight the quality of the work done by Les Jours. Their ‘obsessions’ format allows them to deal with their subjects in depth, to dwell on certain points skimmed over elsewhere, to carry out real investigative work. Support Les Jours if you can.

« For a long time, we talked about ‘crimes of passion’. Then society gradually came to understand that there is neither love nor passion when a man kills a woman. »

Podcasts

C’est quoi l’amour, maîtresse ?

« Since Lolita Rivé became a primary school teacher, she has often been confronted with sexist comments, homophobic insults between pupils, and even aggression. She has also noticed that her pupils are fairly ignorant about their bodies and how they work. In an attempt to remedy this, she set up and recorded educational sessions on relational, emotional and sexual life in her CE1 class.

In ‘C'est quoi l'amour, maîtresse?’, she investigates: what should teaching about emotional life look like for children aged 7 or 8? Why are so few pupils taught about sexuality in France, even though it has been compulsory from CP to Terminale since 2001? Why is there so much resistance?

Lolita Rivé has given the floor to those who are completely opposed to this teaching in schools, as well as to shrinks and researchers who explain why offering comprehensive education in relationships, emotions and sex could change our whole society… »

I highly recommend listening to this 5-part podcast.

Videos

Comment le masculinisme menace les femmes et toute la société

Litt. How masculinism threatens women and society as a whole

« At a time when women are speaking out, the masculinist movement is gaining strength. Anti-women rhetoric is proliferating on social networks, stating that women should be submissive and stay in their place, that men need to ‘reassert their virility’, and sometimes even trivialising the rape or even… murder of women. You can fall into the masculinist algorithmic loop by watching videos of seduction or bodybuilding classes, or by simply doing a Google search. This hatred is not confined to the Internet. In the United States, the phenomenon is so powerful that it sometimes leads to attacks on women, murdered simply for being… women. How has hatred of women become so widespread on social networks? How can we combat this phenomenon? To answer these questions, Salomé Saqué interviews Pauline Ferrari, a journalist who has spent over a year investigating this issue. »

Inceste, pédocriminalité : « La réalité la plus déniée de l’histoire »

Incest and pedophile crime: ‘The most denied reality in history’.

Édouard Durand, the guest on this programme, is a children's judge and co-president of Ciivise (Commission Indépendante sur l'Inceste et les Violences Sexuelles faites aux Enfants)*. In this interview, he proposes solutions that are not individual but collective, and explains what doctrine(s) the government could put in place to identify child victims, and above all to help them once they have been identified.

This is by far the best I've heard on the subject, so please don't let the clickbaity title and thumbnail stop you. The video is freely available on Blast's YouTube channel.

* He was ousted by Emmanuel Macron on 11 December 2023.

Adèle Haenel

If you haven't already done so, I urge you to listen to the long interview Adèle Haenel gave on Mediapart in November 2019. To quote Titiou Lecoq, « she combined the power of testimony, the lucidity of her position and the synthesis of analysis, it was as if what had been repeated for years had been summed up, condensed, carried, embodied, illuminated. »

Scandale dans le porno français : « Dans ces vidéos, on nous a totalement déshumanisées »

Litt. French porn scandal: ‘We were totally dehumanised in these videos’.

The trial of those responsible for the so-called ‘French Bukkake’ videos is due to take place in a few days' time, while the preliminary investigation into the ‘Jacquie et Michel’ affair is still under way. These two producers of pornographic videos have more or less the same methods: targeting young women in precarious and isolated situations, lying to them, destroying them psychologically, then filming their rapes and torture. The videos are then distributed in France (contrary to initial promises that they would only be distributed in Canada), and are put back online after each request to remove them, after each action taken by the victims to try to regain control over their image. The result is that, years later, the victims are left alone with their traumas, and they can't turn the page, because every day there are men who recognise them in the street, and who take advantage of the situation to insult, harass and even assault them.

On the set of À l'air libre, Valentine Oberti and Lénaïg Bredoux invite 5 of these women to talk anonymously.

The video is freely available on Mediapart's YouTube channel.

To go further:

• Enquête « French Bukkake  » : pourquoi le porno français est complice (litt. French Bukkake’ investigation: why French porn is complicit), Mediapart's investigation
• Sous nos regards (litt. Under our eyes), published by Seuil, the stories of 15 of these women, written by 15 female authors.

Documentaries

Audrie & Daisy (2016)

Available on Netflix

This documentary looks back at the Audrie Pott and Daisy Coleman ‘cases’, two American teenagers who were raped by teenagers, then had photos or videos of their attacks widely circulated, and experienced cyber-harassment campaigns that, in the case of Daisy Coleman, even included an attempt to burn down her house. From the police to the courts to local councillors, not a single adult in a position of responsibility helped these teenagers. The sheriff in charge of Daisy's case is the epitome of rape culture.

« You have no idea what it’s like to be a girl »

Athlete A (2020)

Available on Netflix

This documentary follows the team of investigative journalists who led the enquiry into Dr Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics team doctor accused of sexually assaulting dozens of athletes over a 25-year period. The documentary takes an in-depth look at the entire system that protected Larry Nassar and allowed him to assault children and teenage girls with impunity from 1992 to 2017, claiming more than 265 victims.

La fabrique du mensonge : Affaire Johnny Depp/Amber Heard - La justice à l’épreuve des réseaux sociaux (2023)

Litt. The fabrication of lies: The Johnny Depp/Amber Heard affair - Justice put to the test by social networks

This is perhaps the best example of the influence of masculinism on our societies: the defamation suit between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Journalist Cécile Delarue looks back at the media frenzy and the campaign of hate and denigration that targeted Amber Heard, in an excellent 1 hour 40 minute documentary. A must-see if you are interested in the affair, and even more if you have not been following it, because the masculinist rhetoric has infiltrated absolutely everywhere, even among those who thought they could avoid it by staying away from that case.

MASCUS : Infiltration chez les hommes qui détestent les femmes

Litt. MASCUS: Infiltrating men who hate women

Available on YouTube

« ‘Women manipulate you’, “How to get the balls of the alpha male”, “Be tough and demanding with women”... These provocatively-titled videos are a hit on social networks, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. In the form of a cyber-investigation, this documentary aims to decipher the manosphere and show its dangers. Our journalist, Pierre Gault, has ‘infiltrated’ the forums, Telegram or WhatsApp groups and private conversations of masculinist (or mascus) groups. Trivialising sexual assaults, calls for rape, misogynistic and racist comments, harassment... his dive into the heart of masculinist communities is breathtaking, revealing a culture of hatred for women. »

The Invisible War (2012)

Not the best documentary, but it does look at the US Army and how victims of assault and rape are mistreated by the system while their attackers continue their careers, some of them even being named ‘Soldier of the Year’ during the investigation.

Recommanded but not seen (yet):

• Brainwashed - Le sexisme au cinéma (2022) (litt. Brainwashed — sexism in movies), available on Arte until 25/07/2024
• The Hunting Ground (2015) by Kirby Dick

Fictions

How to have sex (2023)

This is a perfectly ordinary story about 3 teenage girls who go on holiday together. We see the seduction, the lack of self-confidence, the jealousy and the low blows; and then we see the boy who pretends not to understand the lack of consent, and we see the one who suspects but prefers to ignore his friend's behaviour.

It's all quite ordinary, and it's chilling. The lead actress is wonderful.

Recommanded but not seen (yet):

• Promising Young woman (2020) by Emerald Fennell

As I said in the introduction, this article is intended to be expanded as and when I come across new articles, new videos or have time to read new books. Don't hesitate to recommend interesting sources in the comments!