Louise El Yafi is a lawyer and host of the Youtube channel Jezebel.tv. She is the author of
Letter to my generation - Youth facing the extremes
, published by L'Observatoire.
On March 15, 2023, in the program "C ce soir", devoted to censorship in the world of the arts, the writer Marc Weitzmann, wishing to denounce the said censorship, had the misfortune to affirm that "rape is part
of the sex drive
.
A moment of television immediately followed, of which there are now too many.
Cut off from all sides by activists offended by so much machismo, the author found himself unable to explain his thoughts in the face of the new creed of neo-feminism: rape would only be a social construction.
Nothing else.
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Why so much indignation on their part?
Because, thinking too quickly (or too little), these activists consider that what is natural is necessarily legitimate, and that the fact of affirming that rape is also part of a natural sexual drive amounts to legitimizing it.
According to them, rape is therefore only the result of a society subject to relations of domination between the sexes.
The rapist in search of his prey, would then rape not to satisfy a sexual drive that he has decided not to control, but by pure conscientized project of domination of the other.
It is ironic to note the logical contradictions in the conceptual fog: those who consider the man as a potential rapist (innate, by nature) in the morning, are unanimous in the afternoon on the fact that rape does not
is that the fruit of our patriarchal society (everything is built).
Freudians or Foucauldians?
It's to get lost.
But maybe they are as lost as we are.
By sweeping aside any character desiring to the rapist and limiting himself to explaining his act only by the influence of society, some activists only half understand the phenomenon of rape.
Louise El Yafi
So, is a man born a rapist or does he become one?
We can attribute two sources to sexual desire: an internal component, the drive, whose general sexual manifestation can be associated with the libido and with which every human being is biologically equipped;
and an external component, object of this drive, person chosen to sexually satisfy the drive and the libido in question.
Every individual of our species is born naturally subject to these impulses, which are sometimes violent.
To deny it is to deny desire itself.
But to deny desire is precisely to no longer know where to place the cursor of consent.
A drive, in this case sexual, will only become bad and coercive, in the eyes of a civilized society, when it is not contained in relation to the other's own desire.
If sexual desire necessarily comes from an impulse, rape is the fact of not controlling this impulse.
If a sex drive is not a choice, an uncontrolled sex drive is.
Moreover, if the rape originates from a sexual drive, the lack of control over this drive may indeed result from a dubious social construct.
The child comes into the world endowed with sexual urges, an environment that does not teach him to tame them can indeed contribute to making him a rapist.
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In other words, even if it is the alliance of the two that makes the rape so effective, the drive precedes the construction.
However, by sweeping away any character desiring to the rapist and by confining himself to explaining his act only by the influence of society, certain activists only half understand the phenomenon of rape.
Suppose a socially constructed man in a society where a total "rape culture" is running at full speed, enjoining him to dominate and rape the woman.
He will obviously be more incited to rape, with equal sexual drive, than a man in a "deconstructed" society.
The fact remains that a woman will always have less risk of being raped by a "constructed" man without any sexual desire than by a "deconstructed" but sexually desiring man.
Without sexual arousal, no rape.
By considering that rape would be "only social construction", these activists lock themselves into a Rousseauist vision consisting in believing that Man is necessarily born good and that it is society that corrupts him.
Louise El Yafi
It is therefore not surprising that criminal law, in order to characterize rape, seeks the sexual nature of the attack.
French case law, for example, consistently considers that an attempted rape can be demonstrated by the existence of an erection, or that an assault could only succeed because the man suffered at the time an erectile disorder.
In both cases, the accused was convicted of rape.
It is because at the beginning of any sexual relationship, consented or not, there is desire and therefore a sexual drive, that the question put to the judge must be that of knowing whether this desire was reciprocal or not.
Why do our texts insist so much on demonstrating this sexual character?
Because the criminal law enshrined within a state governed by the rule of law is precisely that which says:
"You did not control your urges, so you behaved anti-socially and that is why we must punish you to protect society from this same behavior."
To dare to affirm to all raped women that this infamous act, consisting of a forced penetration of their body by another sex or object, is not part of a sexual drive, is at best the most crass stupidity, at worst indecency.
And rather than going to question those men and women, psychiatrists in prison, magistrates, lawyers and police officers who, every day, meet rapists and their victims, the latest converts of neo-deconstructivism prefer to continue to believe that wet fingers and empiricism are synonyms.
To hell with psychiatric expertise, police custody, hearings, interrogations and hearings, to expert criminologists, these activists prefer the ideology of “almost”.
However, it is this same dogmatism which can contribute to the continuation of rapists.
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By considering that rape would be "only social construction", these activists lock themselves into a kind of Rousseauist delirium consisting in believing that Man is necessarily born good, without any animality and that it is society that corrupts him.
Human beings are born animals endowed with impulses and it is indeed civilized society that will regulate them with a concern for harmonious cohabitation between individuals.
This is how the human-animal being becomes human-man.
To assert that rape is only the result of an immoral society is in reality to find extenuating circumstances for the rapist.
Let's imagine for a moment if justice followed this neo-feminist "logic".
No more men would be convicted of rape, since each rapist could argue that he
is in no way responsible for his actions.
Each lawyer could then draw this unstoppable defense: “
Yes, my client raped but it's not his fault, it's because of society
.
Strange feminist militancy that consists in advocating loud and clear that he defends the raped woman, while striving only to seek excuses for the rapist.
Louise El Yafi
If all rape is only the result of a social construct and not that of the individual responsibility of a man, then why condemn Guy Georges, Émile Louis or Michel Fourniret?
Besides, does this social construct only concern men?
Michel Fourniret's wife, Monique Olivier, was she only under the influence of her husband?
Did the killer and rapist of little Lola only act because her irregular situation was too painful for her?
Did Irma Grese, “the blonde angel of Auschwitz” only torture and kill other women because Weimar society had been too decadent?
We could finally explain everything by this incredible sleight of hand, consisting in passing the cursor of criminal responsibility from the individual to society as a whole.
The infanticides?
It's the mental load's fault.
Terrorism ?
It is the fault of the racist society.
Rape?
It's the culture's fault
patriarchal mainstream
.
Strange feminist militancy that consists in advocating loud and clear that he defends the raped woman, while striving only to seek excuses for the rapist.
It is in this way that under the pretext of going to fight against rape, some only feed, unconsciously but surely, the fertile ground of sexual violence.
To consider that no section of our society escapes this "continuum of violence" and of which rape would be the ultimate result, is also to consider all sexual relations between a man and a woman only from the angle of coercion.
However, not all sexual relations are the product of domination.
But if we accept, as this neo-Foucauldian bric-a-brac asserts, that all heterosexual relations are subject to a social construct of domination,
how then to distinguish between desire and non-consent?
By refusing any link between rape and sexual drive, these activists blur the very definition of consent.
Read alsoWhat primate observation tells us about the difference between the sexes
Since the intervention of Weitzmann, some activists cite paleoanthropological studies explaining that the human species would be the most coercive towards its “females” which would prove that rape is therefore only a construct of our sexist society.
The primatologist Frans de Waal, author of
Different, the gender seen by a primatologist
, considers not only that our species is not the only one to rape, but that in certain primates,
“feminine solidarity is an essential weapon against rape. »
Our time shows that the human species, although more evolved, is still sometimes very far from it.
Doesn't the fight against sexual violence deserve better?
