LONDON — The commissioning editor for The Spectator, the U.K.’s leading conservative magazine, has published a sensationalizing editorial blaming adult content for a rape case currently being prosecuted in France.
The Spectator’s Mary Wakefield seeks to link the media-spotlighted prosecution of admitted rapist Dominique Pelicot — who drugged and raped his wife, Gisèle, for years, and also invited other men to participate in the abuse — with porn. As justification for her theory that porn fueled the crime, she offers broad generalizations and cites debunked notions about the supposed effects of watching adult content.
Wakefield’s piece, “Pornography and the Truth About the Pelicot Case,” presents no new evidence or context about the case itself. Instead, it appropriates the victim’s suffering as ammunition for a diatribe in which she likens porn to a social cancer, compares porn viewers to bonobos, and expresses her personal distaste for sexuality she considers deviant.
The conservative Wakefield lambasts French feminists for targeting France’s systemic patriarchy and the lack of proper sexual education at home and in schools as the culprit. According to Wakefield, the real target for outrage should be porn.
“Pelicot is a monster,” Wakefield declares. “But what has shocked France most is how very many normal Frenchmen he was able to find, in and around his Provencal village, who were up for having sex with an unconscious woman.”
If the feminists of France really want to stand with Gisèle Pelicot, Wakefield argues, they should teach their sons to abstain from all porn, which she contends spurred the perpetrators’ actions.
“It’s porn which leads a human down into the sludgy gutters of his own psyche,” she proclaims. “If the feminists of France really wanted to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain. Not just from the obviously illegal stuff, but from all of it.”
Wakefield’s central claim is that Dominique Pelicot’s actions “are bound up in and emblematic of the porn industry’s central operation: the monetization of taboo.” She also perceives all of pornography as a “whole great, growing, metastasizing, $100 billion mess” devoted to selling transgressive content to make cis men — whom she considers the entire viewership of porn — “keep chasing that feeling until they end up in a chat room with Dominique Pelicot.” Her principal evidence is a 20-year-old article by a conservative writer who claimed that he had “lost control” over his porn use and concluded that “most male sexuality is designed by evolution to be an unscratchable itch; a desperate, unsatisfiable urge.”
Wakefield wraps up her tirade by condemning Pride events and kink communities as somehow complicit in Pelicot’s crimes.
Wakefield is a controversial figure due to her involvement in one of the key scandals that undermined the Conservative government of Boris Johnson in 2020. Wakefield and her Tory politician husband Dominic Cummings — Johnson’s top advisor and one of the architects of Brexit — were pilloried by much of British society when it was revealed that they had used their influence to bypass the country’s extreme social isolation protocols during the COVID pandemic.
