Why aren't more men talking about this?

Because too many are living lives of secret woman-hatred

This week, as the trial of Dominique Pélicot (and 50 other men) has begun for drugging his wife Gisèle and offering up her unconscious form to be raped, many of my female friends have been exchanging quiet messages of solidarity with one another. These are friends who have suffered the capacity of men to harbour secret lives of extreme women-hatred, and who see Pélicot, not as a monstrous outlier, but on the same spectrum that their (ex-)partners occupy.

Off the top of my head, I can list numerous women among my acquaintances - or acquaintances of acquaintances - who have discovered that their (male) partners were living secret lives. It’s common knowledge that my late husband was secretly pursuing multiple court cases entirely unbeknownst to me, risking my and my children’s financial security and home. I know several women who have discovered husbands were maintaining long-running affairs; and one who found out that her husband had an entirely separate family: a secret second home, second wife, second daughter. There are women who have discovered their partners’ secret gambling addictions and serious debt, and their concealed alcoholism and cocaine addictions. I know women whose husbands outwardly performed respectable pillar-of-the-community roles, but in the home were abusive, violent tyrants. By far the majority of the secret lives that I’ve come across have been in the realm of sexual behaviour. I know of a woman whose, again, outwardly respectable husband was convicted not just of accessing child pornography but of creating websites through which to distribute it. I know another woman who discovered that her husband was sexually abusing their infant child. Another woman discovered that her husband had made literally thousands of bookings with prostitutes, including arranging for prostitutes to visit him when she was in the same house, asleep in the room above.

The discovery of men’s secret lives is devastating for women on multiple fronts. Such malevolent secrecy is not just a betrayal of trust, love and the terms on which relationships are agreed. It’s a way of men sabotaging the very foundations of every aspect of women’s lives, and I think that many men gain a great deal of satisfaction from undermining their wives like this. There’s a sense of gloating, in which men get off on their wives innocently going about their day-to-day business, thinking everything is fine and stable and sturdy, whilst, behind their backs, those men are working hard to bring everything crashing down. It’s a form of secret power. I think it’s important to recognise this: that many men’s secret lives are not conducted by trying to ignore their wives’ existence, or proceeding as if they don’t exist, but that some men literally get off on secretly hating and sabotaging their wives. Disregarding their wives isn’t enough; such men enjoy actively hating them. The woman I know whose husband was a prolific punter had a fetish for sexually undermining his wife. She discovered messages on his phone in which he had hired two prostitutes, one of whom to play the role of ‘the wife’. The man and the other prostitute strapped ‘the wife’ to a chair and ridiculed her ‘ugliness’ and ‘crap tits’ while they had sex in front of her. He literally got off on his secret hatred for her.

Women who have seen these darker sides of men recognise Dominique Pélicot’s behaviour. I’ve seen a number of women on social media reflect, in astonishment, that, out of the 92 men who responded to Pélicot’s messages on an online forum and came to his house to rape Gisèle, not one of them called the police - not even the men who decided they were uncomfortable with the scenario and left Pélicot’s house straight away. But calling the police would have required these men to bring their secret lives into the open: even if they didn’t want to rape a drugged woman, they clearly weren’t on that online forum for reasons that they were happy to share.

My suspicion is that many more men than we realise are living lives of secret woman-hatred. (By ‘we’, I mean ‘women’). I think it’s statistically likely that ‘not all men are like this’, and I hope that the men who are reading this, who are not like that, will be secure in the knowledge that they’re not the men I’m talking about, and therefore won’t mind if sometimes I refer to ‘men’ and not ‘some men’. But I do think that the strong desire for living secret lives is a contemporary male pattern, which some men pursue in malevolent forms while others pursue it in innocuous ways - but this is why I’m going to refer to ‘men’ without always offering the caveat that not all men are like this.

Invisible Women: not all men...but how many?

Caroline Criado Perez has written an excellent newsletter this week on this very subject, and she urges men to start talking about the Pélicot trial, and the sickness in the male community, as a matter of urgency. In response to her newsletter, I would suggest that men aren’t talking about this in significant numbers because very many of them recognise a portion of themselves in Pélicot’s secret abuse (she herself implies this in her newsletter). How could those men initiate a conversation with other men, when the necessary secrecy of their behaviour means that they have no idea whether they’re outlying individuals, or whether all men are doing this? It’s a high-stakes conversation if it goes wrong: ‘mate, can I talk to you about something? Do you also get off on the idea of secretly and violently abusing your wife and destroying her whole life?’

What makes it particularly hard for men to bring their secret malevolent lives out into the open is that the men in question often nurture outward reputations in which they’re upstanding pillars of the community. I don’t think this is an accident. I think that these men are driven to create and intensify those virtuous personae, precisely to offset the depraved behaviour they’re getting up to in private. They need to have a sense of themselves as ‘good people’ - at least in part - so that they’re not crushed by guilt for the bad things they’re doing. But this is incredibly psychologically harmful, because it creates a splitting in personality, in which there’s an outward saintly selfhood concealing a secret bad self. For many men, this splitting probably happened very early on in life, but it becomes more intense and more necessary the more that their secret abuse ramps up. The worse the acts are that they’re committing in secret, the more they need to exaggerate and show off their apparent public virtue. And, to further assuage guilt, it also becomes necessary for these men to demonise their wives even further than they’re already doing. Those wives often reside at the heart of these men’s public sense of themselves as virtuous ‘family men’, ‘kind and gentle fathers and husbands’, but those men need to develop a belief that, in secret, their wives are evil and fully deserving of the hatred that is being inflicted on them. And so a psychological about-turn happens, in which men come to believe that it’s their wives - not them - who are really harbouring secretly evil selves, which justifies their own behaviour.

Some men keep their secret bad selves isolated, but others seek communities for them. I’m interested in the ways that men have perennially tried to ban women from certain spaces, such as pubs; and, in interviews in the 1970s, men justified the exclusion of women on the basis that it allows them to express certain views ‘that women wouldn’t like’ (ie. woman-hating views). Men have always created their own private spaces to air their hatred of women, and the internet provides men with unprecedented opportunities for living secret lives, ramping up secret fetishes and hatreds, and for finding other men who are perpetrating comparable behaviour, to make them feel less monstrous and deviant as individuals (eg. punternet).

I don’t think that enough women want to look at men’s online behaviour, and to properly see what it is that they’re doing. For all the guff that’s talked about women-friendly porn, this is not what most men are accessing: by far the majority of online porn is aggressive and violent in nature, and by far the majority of that again is violent towards women. Boys are literally having their sexuality moulded around violence towards women. Even if boys and men start off by accessing less violent images, they are quickly encouraged to access more extreme forms. The internet also makes it dead easy to transition from viewing free porn, to paid forms, and then to websites such as adultwork, where men can start by accessing private galleries, then paying cam girls, and then paying for prostitutes in-person. Before the internet, men with secret sexual lives had to deploy very different means to access prostitutes than to buy top-shelf magazines - but now it’s the same basic activity: visit a website, click, enter credit-card details, and the deal is done. It takes far less psychological and physical effort for men to cross certain red lines than it used to do.

This means that men’s sexual secrecy also has far more serious ramifications for their less secret lives. Prolific use of pornography trains male sexuality to get off on more and more violent acts, and this spills over into their sexual lives with their real-life partners. I think that one of the biggest lies I was encouraged to believe in the cool-girl 1990s was that sexual fantasy is just fantasy, and that sexual fetishes have no impact on someone’s broader life: that a man might enjoy fantasising about raping women, and might enjoy scenarios in which he hurts, chokes and domineers women, but that this doesn’t say anything about his attitudes towards women in other aspects of his life. It’s only as I’ve got older that I’ve realised what patent bollocks this is. Of course, if men are given scenarios in which they’re not just permitted but encouraged to act out their woman-hatred, then this makes it easier for them to act in woman-hating ways more generally. In my second book A Revolution of Feeling, I wrote about research that had just been published, which demolished the ‘safety valve’ argument for taking a relaxed attitude to men using prostitutes. Research conducted by Melissa Farley, Jacqueline M. Golding, Emily Schuckman Matthews, Neil M. Malaluth and Laura Jarrett shows that, instead of giving men an outlet to let off misogynistic steam, using violent pornography and buying sex is more likely to make men more - not less - woman-hating in other aspects of their lives. Arenas in which men live out secret sexual lives aren’t safety-valves: they are more like stages on which men rehearse and refine their misogyny.

The internet provides one answer to the question that I haven’t properly asked in this post, of why so many more men seem to be living secret lives today than in the past. Why is Dominique Pélicot an extreme version of a male type that so many women recognise, rather than a completely unprecedented monster? Of course I can’t answer the question of how many men are doing this? I wish I knew. But I do know that it’s far more than most women realise. Remember, although Pélicot was the ring-leader, there were 92 men in that particular area on that particular niche website (ie. those 92 men must have been a significant proportion of the website’s users around Avignon) who raped Gisèle. In a 2015 study in the US, a third of male university students said that they would rape a woman, if there were no consequences.

‘The internet’ (partly) answers the question of how men nurture such evil secret lives. The why - why do men hate women so much, and why do some cohorts of men try and bring us down secretly, whereas others do so openly - is much more complicated; far too complex for a substack post. But my personal sense is that a certain group of men - especially those who prize their reputations as lefty and/or women-friendly family men - act outwardly as if they condemn Andrew-Tate-esque notions of masculinity, but, deep down, still feel some regret that they don’t have the tyrannical power over domestic and public spheres that men used to hold. In some respects, these men enjoy playing with their children and hanging out with their wives, but they also harbour a secret suspicion that domestic life doesn’t give them kudos among other men, so they don’t fully engage with their families. They don’t entirely prize domestic “success”, and their ambitions are mostly geared towards their professional lives or towards more stereotypical markers of masculine acceptability (buff body etc). But, in all their worlds - both professional and private - they see women doing the same work as they’re doing, but much better. These men become resentful of the women who somehow juggle extraordinary careers with ultimate domestic competency, and who also manage to look good and do voluntary work in their community (but are often too tired and ill-inclined to sexually service their husbands, who aren’t very interested in reciprocal pleasure). These men and boys start to hate women for overtaking them everywhere, but they can’t admit to it to their lefty friends. So they drive their hatred into secret lives in which they can act out their resentment and misogyny. Of course, women also worry about not living up to standards of femininity and being inadequate, but we tend to just roll up our sleeves and get on with what needs to be done, wiping kids’ bums, mopping the floor, creating a powerpoint presentation for work, and occasionally popping to the gym or slapping on some make-up. We don’t absolve ourselves of our domestic responsibilities, hole ourselves up in ‘man caves’ where we wank to porn revolving around violence against men and gamble away the family savings, all the while resenting and blaming men for the fact that our lives are less powerful than we’d been led to believe. But this is what very many men are doing.

I have no advice about how to spot men who are living out these secret, destructive, women-hating lives. I wish I knew. But from talking and listening to other women, I’d simply say this: women, trust your instincts. If something feels off in a man’s behaviour, take it seriously. Men maintain their secret lives by gaslighting women who become suspicious, by denying that any suspicion-arousing behaviour occurred, and by turning the blame back on women, suggesting they’re paranoid, controlling, mad. Pélicot encouraged Gisèle’s heart-breaking belief that she was suffering from dementia. I’d advise women to be aware of this tactic. I’d also recommend wariness if a man is performing a public act of virtue, or playing up his ‘family man’ role. Don’t necessarily see this as an indication of virtue through-and-through: it might well be the opposite, an attempt to over-compensate for secret malevolence. And I’d also be extremely cautious about men who spend a lot of time online, and are secretive regarding passwords and access to his phone.

The bigger question, though, is not about women’s behaviour, but about men and for men. How can you - men - let go of your sense of entitlement to power and domination? How can you stop resenting and hating women when your power is thwarted; when you don’t get your own way all of the time?