No, not every man. But men who aren't must vent fury at ones among you

It eases my guilt at always assuming the worst. You may be a decent, hard-working chap, as entitled to enjoy the autumn gloaming as me, I say to myself. Reaching for my car keys may be a besmirchment of your fine character.

But statistics, experience and the faces of murdered women splashed across newspaper front pages tell me there is no way to be sure, and nothing about your presentation that can neutralise your threat: not your briefcase, not your friendly smile, not your aura of respectability, and certainly not your uniform.

Read more: 

• What Dominique Pelicot trial tells us about 'normal' men

A steady job is no proof of harmlessness; nor is forming a relationship, telling someone you love them, or being married to them for 50 years. This is not news. We are aware women are more likely to be attacked and killed by their partners than by a stranger.

But rarely has it been so starkly illustrated than with Gisèle Pelicot, the pensioner from the French town of Mazan, drugged and raped by her husband and 90-odd others he invited to her bedroom like some depraved roll-up, roll-up carnival sideshow.

Dominique treated Gisèle like an inflatable doll tossed from man to man for money. That he is a monster is a given, but not what shocks. There have always been monsters: freakish degenerates; the stuff of nightmares. We console ourselves by pegging them as aberrations, exceptions to the social norm.

The Pelicot case is shining a spotlight on male violence and the men who think they’re ‘ordinary’ Image: Derek McArthur

Horror downplayed

What the Pelicot case is exposing is far more terrifying. Dominique may be monstrous, but he was not treated as an aberration by the “ordinary” men who enthusiastically availed themselves of his offer; nor the men who stumbled across the “Without her Knowledge” chat forum, and did not report it; nor the defence lawyers trying to strip Gisèle of her remaining dignity; nor the Telegraph headline writer who framed her waiving of her right to anonymity as a pursuit of “revenge” not “justice”; nor those in power who have sought to downplay the horror unfolding in front of their faces.

Gisèle’s ordeal proves that the social norms we like to think exist are a mirage on the red hot sands of misogyny.

How much do you have to hate women (and arguably yourself) to have sex with them when they’re as good as dead? Or to not much care that others are doing so? Yet the 50 other men, aged 26 to 74, on trial in Avignon, are just your average butcher/baker/candlestick-maker cross-section of any small town (Gisèle was on nodding terms with at least one of them). Evan Tuvignon, a local caterer, told the BBC: “Honestly, no-one here gives a damn.” And the 74-year-old Mazan Mayor, Louis Bonnet, who should have been providing moral leadership, said: “It's not that bad, no kids were involved, nobody died."

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The enlightenment Gisèle is offering by going public is multilayered. She is showing us the shame of rape does not lie with the victim; that it is possible to walk with your head held high, even when every effort has been made to rub you out: physically, mentally, spiritually.

She is showing us that, though it’s not all men, it’s far more men than the men it isn’t are prepared to admit; and that the men it isn’t often provide cover for the men it is. She is showing us that issues my generation once considered resolved - that wives are not chattels, that non-consensual sex within a marriage is rape - are as contested as ever.

Finally, she is exposing, on a small stage, the forces that are legitimising male violence across the globe. Is Bonnet’s Gallic shoulder shrug so surprising in a world where being accused of multiple sexual assaults is no barrier to becoming US president; where, on the contrary, turning contempt for women into your personal brand, can play to your electoral advantage?

This month, as every month, has produced fresh victims. Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei died days after being doused in petrol and set on fire by her former boyfriend, more than 20 women accused Mohammad Al-Fayed of sexual assaulting them while they were working at Harrods, and two women in Georgia died as a result of the US state's restrictive abortion laws, brought in after the overturning of Roe v Wade by a Supreme Court Trump stacked in the favour of social conservatives.

Still, Pope Francis - a religious leader too liberal for some Catholic tastes - told US voters that, in the battle between Trump and Kamala Harris, they should choose the “lesser of two evils,” as if the election presented a tough moral toss-up between the man who “chases away immigrants” and said of a recent alleged gropee: “She wouldn’t have been my first choice,” and the woman who wants to shore up abortion rights so no-one else dies.

Donald Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

Diddy's 'freak-offs'

That the market for sex with unconscious women is not confined to France was underlined by claims that - post-Pelicot - Pornhub was deleting videos with “sleep or sleeping” in the title, and by the arrest and indictment on charges of sex trafficking of Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is alleged to have held “Freak offs” — events in which victims were drugged and raped for days on end.

All this without touching on the women who are undergoing systematic, state-enforced erasure in Afghanistan, their bodies, skills and voices all eliminated in the pursuit of male supremacy. Or the incels, who blame women for their own inadequacy and murder them en masse.

Gisèle’s bravery has emboldened local women, who brought flowers and applauded her as she left the court after Dominique admitted rape. Across England last week, campaigners put up plaques on houses where women had been murdered to mark the fact that men who kill in the home serve shorter sentences than men who kill outside it.

But even in acts of solidarity, women have to watch their backs. Each time they raise their voices - post Weinsten, at the peak of #MeToo, and then again after Sarah Everard’s murder - it provokes a backlash that topples younger men down rabbit holes towards the likes of Andrew Tate, and drives older men to reassert their long-standing dominance. A degree of female pushback is tolerable; but then they go too far, you see? They become too shouty. Sometimes they forget to add the “not all men” caveat.

Influencers like Andrew Tate have been blamed for an increase in sexist, misogynistic and explicitly sexualised language among male pupils in Scotland's schools.

'Not my husband'

When the police broke the news to Gisèle, she effectively said: “Not my husband.” Forty of those filmed raping her could not be identified, which means there will be other wives out there telling themselves the same thing. Those men will be holding down jobs, popping to the shops, taking their kids to the park. And all the women who share the same streets will be wondering: “ Is it you? Or you? Or you?”

Male violence diminishes everyone. It creates a binary world of potential predators v potential victims, curtailing the lives of all. This is no way to exist. But it will not end until the men it isn’t turn their fury on the men it is, instead of the women whose scattergun fear is born of bitter history.