Opinion | The Defendants in Frances Rape Trial Are Telling Us Something Horrifying

It’s the case that has transfixed France.Prosecutors say that for almost a decade, Dominique Pelicot repeatedly drugged his wife and invited strangers to join him in raping her.

The prosecutors say that she was assaulted by dozens of men as she lay unconscious and that her husband filmed most of the encounters and then filed the videos in digital folders, including one titled “abuse.”When Mr.Pelicot’s trial opened last month, his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, waived her right to anonymity and spoke with remarkable, withering poise.

She has become France’s feminist hero: Women at protests in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux yell, “We’re all Gisèle.” Mr.Pelicot has pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him and has said, straightforwardly, “I am a rapist.”But there are 50 other men in the dock with Mr.

Pelicot.Most of them are charged with the aggravated rape of Ms.

Pelicot.More than a dozen have pleaded not guilty; some have argued that they were tricked or were told that Ms.

Pelicot was pretending to be asleep because she was shy.Feminism has long been interested in the relationship between knowledge and power, in how women deprived of knowledge are deprived of power.In the past few weeks, we have been brutally reminded that ignorance or the claiming of it can also be a convenient tool of the powerful.

Consent requires an effort to know the desires of the other, while rape requires the complete disregard — the cancellation — of the other, of allowing oneself to have awareness of only one’s own pleasure.Indeed, drugging a woman into complete submission seems like a particularly obvious manifestation of a man’s desire not to know.“I don’t accept being called a rapist,” one defendant protested in court.

“I’m not a rapist.It’s too much for me to bear,” he said.

He went on to explain how much he’s learned about consent since his arrest: “The magistrate told me: Even if you’re married, a woman doesn’t fully belong to ...