Boys Will Be Boys
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in April 2026.
Gisèle Pelicot is the French woman who invited the world into the court room where she was facing down 51 men and their lawyers who were defending themselves from charges of raping her while she was drugged senseless by her husband.
Gisèle’s goal in so doing was to survive the ordeal. The strength she acquired and has shared generously with women everywhere is to change the direction of the shame blame: men should be ashamed for raping rather than women being shamed for having been raped.
The question left hanging in the air is why it has taken so long and been so hard to make that shift. What lies beneath?
Pelicot’s memoir, A Hymn to Life, is pre-occupied with that question. She sifts through her entire life, including the fifty years she lived with her rapist husband under the impression that theirs was a loving and fairly well-functioning relationship, to understand her sustained naivety. She unpacks her husband’s life to begin to understand how he developed and lived two distinct lives, literally under her unsuspecting nose.
Even though I tend to be psychoanalytical in my perspective on humanity, the slings and arrows of their respective lives do not adequately explain, for me, the rot at the heart of their relationship. Clearly Dominique, her husband, was fatally injured by his father’s cruelty and the failure of others to recognize or challenge it. Evidently (eventually it became evident), Gisèle took refuge in unfinished childhood grieving to see unconditional love, aka ‘mother love’, as the solution to all life’s challenges. As the court case wended its four-year journey to and through the courts, she falls in love – again: absolutely she was madly in love with Dominique when they got together as very young adults – with a new man, Jean-Loup, and negotiates a more reciprocal relationship.
So maybe those childhood beginnings, Dominique relentlessly bullied by an angry father, Gisèle losing at age 9 a loving mother who is replaced by a harsh and critical step-mother, begin to explain their marital relationship, where she reproduces her perception of her mother’s model of motherhood and wifehood, and he is the kind and supportive father/husband she thinks her father was.
It explains Dominique’s bent toward dominating women sexually – his father’s marital model – but it does not explain his intent and capacity to recruit 50 identified men and maybe half again as many who could not be identified and brought to justice who thought it was a good idea to rape a comatose woman in whatever way their fantasies suggested. And the countless people, presumably men, who vicariously shared their fantasies via the videos Dominique took of the men at lust and shared generously on the internet.
It also does not explain how ten years of medical investigation of gynecological problems, memory loss, injuries to mouth and rectum, other inexplicable physical symptoms, were never hypothesized as rough sex, if not rape.
The crack in the curtain that allows us to glimpse the magnitude of the evil, and its nature, is when Gisèle unambiguously, crisply, unapologetically severs a relationship with Pascale, her work companion and confidante, her best friend, when Pascale advises Gisèle to keep an eye on Dominique because her was sexually suggestive to her. This clarity, in a relationship that accommodated Gisèle having an affair, Dominique living with another woman while he punishes her for her ‘mistake’, suggests that the monster behind the curtain is patriarchy. An unshakeable, maybe desperate, belief that men take care of their women, that a loving husband-father would not harm their dependent women by poaching their best friend. (Or children: the ghost of incest is everywhere in the book.) A belief so fundamental to believing how the world works that it cannot be questioned, even mildly.
It seems irresponsibly reductive to put the evils of this story at the feet of patriarchy. But I cannot find a better explanation.
What comes to my mind is the way in which ‘Boys will be boys’ is interred (buried deep within) our culture. We say it to dilute bad behaviour, to subtract agency from activity. They know not what they do. In fact, they’re just doing what there is implicit permission to do, even as the behaviour is acknowledged as ‘bad’. The behaviour is bad but the person who does it cannot be held responsible.
How is that? What undermines the soundness of a mind that neutralizes responsibility for known wrongs? Patriarchy privileges maleness. It gives it special status intended to be interpreted as putting the person above the rules that apply to the lesser.
In Gisèle’s case, women.
In the broader world? Women, yes. But also …???
Why does a civilized world need patriarchy? That is the question I am left with.
