Despite having always been firmly of the view that most men are decent human beings and that charges of sexism and misogyny levied against them by feminists are vastly exaggerated, recent events have, sadly, made me seriously question that belief.
Most obvious is the awful case in France of a 72-year-old woman, Gisele Pelicot, whose husband systematically drugged her and then invited random men into their marital bed to rape her, while he filmed and took photos.
Over the course of a decade, at least 80 men defiled her, among them a local councillor, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, nurses, a soldier, a firefighter and a civil servant.
Fifty are now standing trial, aged between 26 and 73 at the time of their arrests.
With incredible bravery, 72-year-old Gisele Pelicot in court this week after coming forward to see her rapists and husband brought to justice
These aren’t people on the fringes of society, they’re ordinary men, husbands, boyfriends, dads and sons – about as normal a cross section of society as you can get. And yet they seem to have thought it was okay to show up at a stranger’s house and have sex with an unconscious middle-aged woman, old enough in some instances to be their mother.
Some have tried to claim they were unaware Mrs Pelicot was an unwilling partner in this sick game. But how could they have been? The website where her husband recruited them openly discussed non-consensual sex, and they had strict instructions to avoid wearing any kind of fragrance or smelling of cigarette smoke, and to stop if she moved so much as a finger.
Mrs Pelicot even knew one of her alleged rapists, a man who had visited their home to discuss cycling with her husband. ‘I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello. I never thought he’d come and rape me,’ she said.
But Mrs Pelicot – whose courage facing the accused in court is nothing short of heroic – is not the only victim of dark, twisted, ugly misogyny. Last week, Ugandan athlete Rebecca Cheptegei was doused in petrol and set on fire by her former partner. She died of her injuries.
In another horrific case, a man in Poland was arrested for allegedly keeping a young woman as a sex slave for four years. He’s accused of carrying out perverse experiments on her, including removing her teeth and lips.
In India, where attacks on women are endemic, the name of a young trainee doctor raped to death during a night shift has appeared on porn sites as perverted people search for the video of her attack. A man arrested for the attack is a police volunteer.
Across the world, women’s rights and bodies are being abused.
Another example is what happened on October 7, when Hamas terrorists targeted girls and women as part of their depraved killing spree, then gang-raped them, mutilated their bodies, revelling in their debasement and filming it for their own enjoyment.
That’s why I was so shocked by Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s decision to suspend arms sales to Israel. It’s hard not to think that he is diminishing the suffering of those women, in effect rewarding Hamas for what they did and sending a message that such depraved behaviour is somehow justifiable.
Meanwhile, Britain still sells arms to Qatar, which harbours Hamas leaders in some considerable splendour. The same men who are funded and supported by regimes in Iran and Afghanistan, whose treatment of women – from the mass rape of Yazidis to the latest human rights abuses and restrictions on basic freedoms.
All this has created the dystopian hell in which women now exist in those parts of the world. All these behaviours betray a deep misogyny, whether unconscious or otherwise. But where is it coming from? There is one common threat that unites all these atrocious and, in some cases, barely fathomable abuses of women: porn.
The growing use of internet porn over the past two decades has planted an evil in the minds of men the consequences of which we are seeing more and more.
The successive failure of politicians to impose even the most basic restrictions on the likes of PornHub and co has resulted in the depraved attitudes and behaviours commonly witnessed in online porn not only becoming normalised but also being seen, by some, as legitimate. After all, if it’s not illegal, how can it be wrong? So many of the grotesque scenarios described above, and seen in cases of sexual violence against women, mimic the perverse fantasies played out in porn videos.
The fact that some of these atrocities, such as the attack on the Indian doctor, are being searched for on porn sites tells us everything we need to know about the appetite for such things.
In 2015, when I first took an interest in this problem, I spent an afternoon with a man whose job it was to monitor internet porn sites for illegal or non-consensual content. That was – and still largely is – the only way of getting these sites to take stuff down.
The level of violent misogyny shocked me to the core. Very few of the videos had anything to do with actual sex – it was all about humiliating the women involved as much as possible.
Slapping, choking, rape, prolonged and painful penetration: these were the major themes. There was no sense of enjoyment on behalf of the women – it was all violent male-directed fantasy, a sexual outpouring of barely contained loathing towards the women involved.
I remember thinking, this has nothing to do with pleasure. This is revenge, punishment, rage and a sense of women getting what they deserved. Most striking, too, was the way the nastiest videos were the ones that were most popular. The algorithm, driven by user preference, pushed them to the top of the feed.
Back then, I wondered what kind of man could possibly gain pleasure from seeing such things. Now, thanks to these recent horrific cases, we know.
Ordinary men. Family men, fathers, sons, civil servants, firefighters. It could be anyone: your cab driver, the man sitting next to you on the train, the guy at the supermarket check-out.
Online pornography is a virus that has slowly, but surely, been infecting men over the last two generations. It has de-sensitised the male psyche to attitudes and behaviours towards women which have no place in a civilised society. It dehumanises women and promotes a twisted narrative that justifies their abuse.
In the past, such dark perversions were banned. Now, they are available to anyone with access to a smartphone. There are no barriers anymore to even the most depraved content.
Boys and men now consume this stuff regularly and from a very young age. And its real world consequences are undeniable.
From Gisele Pelicot to Sarah Everard (killed by another porn aficionado, Metropolitan Police Officer Wayne Couzens) and countless victims in between, this is a genuine crisis for women and girls.
Sarah Everard, abducted, raped and murdered by Metropolitan Police Officer Wayne Couzens who was addicted to brutal sexual pornography
It must be ended.
We have the Online Safety Act but nothing has happened so far, despite ongoing attempts by various parties – including Lord Bethell, one of the hereditary peers Labour are so keen to get rid of – to bring the issue to the fore.
In America, a tenacious woman called Laila Mickelwait has run a successful legal campaign against PornHub that has led to 90 per cent of the most horrible, violent and stolen content being removed. Her book, Takedown: Inside The Fight To Shut Down Porn Hub For Child Abuse, Rape And Sex Trafficking, is an eye-opening read.
As a woman and the mother of a daughter, it’s hard to banish the sense that Germaine Greer was right all those years ago when she wrote, in The Female Eunuch: ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’
I’ve always thought that simply wasn’t true. Now I’m not so sure.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk