Remember when women were told to be careful to cover our drinks in nightclubs in case we were slipped Rohypnol or “roofied”? Well, now it seems we are being asked to keep an eye on our nightly cup of tea in our own bedroom. Last month, CNN reported the results of their in-depth investigation into a website and chat group training men to drug and sexually assault their wives and girlfriends. Since then the story has run through feminist social media like wildfire. It has, however, been largely ignored in the mainstream media.
We all watched the Gisèle Pelicot case in horror, wondering how 72 men from Mazan, a small French town, and its surrounds could possibly have gone looking for such an advertisement on the notorious site Coco.fr and found her husband’s forum, called "à son insu" ("without her knowledge"). Those same men answered the ad, made plans to travel to a stranger’s home, put their shoes on, got in their cars, arrived and raped a comatose woman while her husband watched. Seventy-two men had to make dozens of decisions to commit this crime. Mazan only has about 3,000 male residents, and even given that some men came from surrounding areas, that feels a very high percentage of a small population who wanted to do this enough that they risked going to prison for it. I discussed with female friends whether there was something in the water there. Surely that couldn’t be standard? What about the men who didn’t see the ad but would have gone, or those who were tempted to go but didn’t dare? How many men have a desire to commit this horrific crime? And why?
The CNN investigation seems to provide answers to some of these questions. Maybe there is nothing special about Mazan. The report featured a pornographic website called motherless.com which allows what is known as "sleep content", in which men post videos of themselves carefully lifting the closed eyelids of their sleeping partners, to make sure they are truly sedated, before assaulting them. These “how-to guides” are hashtagged "eyecheck" and titled “passed out”. Motherless is home to almost 20,000 “sleep content” videos uploaded by users, which have hundreds of thousands of views. CNN also showed how men profit from "sleep content" by selling sedation drugs and posting livestreams of these unspeakable crimes behind paywalls. The report featured three women who explained firsthand how their husbands drugged and raped them in their sleep, in the same way Gisèle Pelicot had been abused.
The website, which is home to some of the most horrendous pornography categories I’ve ever seen – something I recommend you do not check yourself – had around 62m visits in February alone. Not all of those were for “sleep content”, and this has sparked a debate on social media about false reporting. “Not all men” who go to motherless.com are there to find out how to drug their partners, we are told, and many of those 62m visits will be from repeat customers, not unique users. While I’m all for checking stats, I am not sure this is any less alarming news.
Photo: Getty
Perhaps the answer to why this is happening at least partly lies in what many boys and men have been exposed to for too long
I am far more interested to know why men are going to this site at all, when the internet is hardly short on “regular” porn addresses, and this one declares itself to be a "moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever". That’s pretty frightening, especially as drugging and raping women is obviously not legal and nor is it amoral. It’s highly immoral. Even if men aren’t going to this website for “sleep content”, they’re going there for something sinister they can’t get elsewhere.
The brain is patterned and changed by what it routinely watches. Perhaps the answer to why this is happening at least partly lies in what many boys and men have been exposed to for too long.
Most of motherless.com’s users are in the US, but CNN credited the German investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh with discovering and reporting on the online world of tranquillising and raping women, in an investigation broadcast on the documentary YouTube channel STRG_F.
Lutz Ackermann, who is the editor in chief of STRG_F for the German current affairs show Panorama: die Reporter, said: "I think the CNN reporting represents only a small part of a much larger international rape network." He said that Beer and Ströh’s investigation had uncovered “dozens of Telegram groups with up to 70,000 members and rape videos reaching millions of views”, something that had "triggered a political debate in Germany”.
French lawmaker Sandrine Josso was drugged by a former French senator. She has since campaigned about drug-facilitated sexual abuse, and calls the online groups and sites "schools of violence". She said: "I would even call them an online rape academy, where every subject is taught. There are all the 'subjects' and 'disciplines' needed to become a good rapist or sexual predator.”
We are made to feel like every gendered problem is ours to fix, but we cannot fix this
You may have heard of a British case similar to Gisèle Pelicot’s last year, in which a husband was convicted of rape arising from the “chemical control” of his wife. And Rape Crisis issued a statement in response to the “Rape Academy” headlines, saying: “Across England and Wales, one in four women have been raped or sexually assaulted since the age of 16. Statistics show that two in five rapes against women are carried out by their partner or ex-partner.”
Amelia Handy, Rape Crisis’s head of policy and public affairs, said: “This CNN investigation confirms yet again that women and girls live within a rape culture, where predatory men perpetrate extraordinary harm and support others in doing so. So-called sleep pornography is quite simply rape: obtaining consent from someone who is asleep is obviously impossible. The platforms which are used to proliferate such extreme misogyny and sexual violence must face considerable penalties and be shut down for doing so.”
International regulation is needed and it’s needed now. We need our male lawmakers, political leaders and judges to speak out. We need influential men in every sphere of society to speak out and say “Enough!” Women are already saying it all the time. We are made to feel like every gendered problem is ours to fix, but we cannot fix this. Some men who would never do such a thing tell us it is “not all men”. We already know that. Do you know who doesn’t know that? Men who hurt women. There is much research that tells us those men truly believe that all men hurt women, or want to but just “aren’t man enough to do it”.
Decent men need to show their outrage now. They need to express their abhorrence to the men who are watching this vile material online, fantasising about it and doing it. There is no way of knowing who these men are, so they need to talk about it publicly. Express their abhorrence. Shut down edgy jokes. Fight for regulation of pornography and “rape academy” sites. Run programmes and conversation circles for teenage boys. They need to tell those men: “it’s not all men”; “it’s not normal”; “it’s not acceptable”; and “you need immediate help”.
Deborah Frances-White hosts The Guilty Feminist podcast. Her latest book ‘Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have’ has just been published in paperback by Virago.
The Nerve is collaborating with the Guilty Feminist for an evening of conversation and entertainment - at the Leicester Square theatre on Thursday 30 April. Deborah will be joined on stage by Lucia Osborne-Crowley and Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr to talk about our post-Epstein world, why no men have been prosecuted and how we can use this moment to effect change. Line-up includes soulful duo Geejay, poet-rapper Dan Whitlam and comedian Ria Lina. Get tickets here.