Feminist philosopher Manon Garcia’s new book, “Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial,” is an account of the extraordinary legal case of Gisèle Pelicot, a 71-year-old woman in the small town of Mazan, France. She had what she thought was a wonderful life with the man she’d met and fallen in love with at the age of 19, until the day police told her that her husband, Dominique Pelicot, admitted he had, for almost a decade, been drugging Gisèle and recruiting men — more than 70 of them — to rape her while he recorded the assaults. When the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 of those men began in September 2024, Gisèle waived her right to have a closed trial.
Garcia, whose previous books on sex and philosophy include “The Joy of Consent,” was one of the people who showed up at a courthouse in Avignon every day to bear witness, writing that during the 4 months it lasted, “The other women here are just as caught up in the trial as I am, and feel just as strongly as I do that something of their own lives is at stake in these daily hearings.” For Garcia, the trial was about more than the profound betrayal of Gisèle Pelicot by her husband of 50 years; “Living With Men” breaks down elements and themes of the trial — judgment, normal vs. pathological masculinity and what makes a good victim.
Women are socialized to believe that they need men. They have been encouraged from a young age to imagine themselves as brides and mothers, and to yield to the careers, choices and decisions of men. But many of them just aren’t buying into the premise that their lives will only be complete with a husband
“One question keeps nagging at me, haunting me, returning when I least expect it,” she writes. “Can we live with men?” And if so, at what cost? Garcia is right in suggesting that the question “may irritate, offend, or upset people.” But it’s a question that women all over the world have been asking more openly and more publicly. The best-known example is South Korea’s 4B movement, which arose in the mid-2010s as a reaction to the country’s persistent sexism, gender discrimination, and anti-feminism. 4B is “not about rejecting men for the sake of it,” writes South Korean journalist JiHye Jeong. “From a female perspective, it is about rebalancing power in a world where power is skewed against women.”
And though 4B’s radical organization hasn’t spread to other countries, its precepts have — and are particularly noticeable in marriage rates. An estimated 89% of the world’s population lives in a country whose marriage rates have been on the decline in the past decade; the reasons for this are numerous and not all driven by women, but news stories (“Why more women are choosing to stay single now,” “Craving freedom, Japan’s women opt out of marriage,” “The Indian women calling themselves ‘proudly single,’” and “Is [South Korea’s] 4B movement’s vision for life without men the next political protest?”) highlight why many women are increasingly uninterested in heterosexual marriage — and are choosing to decenter men entirely in their lives. It’s not the reason you think.
Women are socialized to believe that they need men, that they have to please men, that men are smarter and more capable and knowledgeable. They have been encouraged from a young age to imagine themselves as brides and mothers, and to yield to the careers, choices and decisions of men. But many of them just aren’t buying into the premise that their lives will only be complete with a husband, and aren’t cowed by carefully maintained stigmas about old maids, spinsters, cat ladies, and what online incels charmingly call “empty egg cartons.” Choosing to decenter men is not about hating men; it’s about the freedom born of the recognition that they are enough.
“People assume you hate men, but I don’t,” says Gina, 31. “I’m open to a relationship. But I have friends, I have faith, I have a life that I’m happy with. I’m putting my energy into that, not waiting for someone that might not exist.” It’s not an easy or angst-free process: Marriage is still a social norm, and one that, for women, is framed as a life-defining achievement. “I spent most of my childhood with my mother and grandmother, watching them try to be domestic goddesses and perfect mothers and getting exhausted and depressed,” says Ivanne, 36. “They went to college, they had careers, but they were also taught that your husband and family come first, so that’s what they did.”
The response to this growing number of domestic resistors, particularly from men themselves, is a different story. Politicians and pundits tend to focus on the danger of birth rates falling below replacement levels and wring their hands over the fate of marriage as an institution. But this is a bigger, broader panic, and the genie the authors of Project 2025 intend to jam back in the bottle is women having the freedom to say no in the first place. Saying no to men has always had political and personal consequences and, too often, mortal ones. The question that Manon Garcia’s book poses is this: Given everything we know and everything we don’t, is living with men worth it? The way many men have responded to the mere idea of heterosexual refusal that comes up in hypotheticals like choosing the bear goes well beyond irritation and upset into fury.
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There’s the apocalyptic fury of political machers like Steve Bannon, who organized bitter young men on Twitter and in video-game forums and leveraged them as a powerful voting bloc; Bannon has been vocal in his concern for the health of the patriarchy. There’s the straw-woman fury of familiar masculinity influencers like Andrew Tate, as well as new ones who are frame-mogging him out of the picture. And there is the reactionary fury of a new generation of allegedly regular guys who have come of age seeing and hearing feminism blamed for their epidemic loneliness, like the just under one-third of Gen Z men globally who believe women should obey their husbands.
Most inescapably, there is the fury of the men (and quite a few of the women) of the Trump White House. In 2024, pollster Daniel Cox reported on a curious gender gap among putative Trump voters: 56% of divorced men planned to vote for Trump, contrasted with 42% of divorced women: “The voting divide between men and women is larger among the formerly married than [among] any other group,” he wrote. The resulting Trump administration, Andrea Pitzer recently wrote, reeks of an unhappily divorced man both figuratively and — in the case of Trump, Pete Hegseth, Russell Voight, and RFK Jr. — quite literally.
The question that Manon Garcia’s book poses is this: Given everything we know and everything we don’t, is living with men worth it? The way many men have responded to the mere idea of heterosexual refusal that comes up in hypotheticals like choosing the bear goes well beyond irritation and upset into fury.
It’s easy to see, in other words, why men have taken the concept of women decentering men as a personal attack and centering their own anger, and why some seem to prefer the idea of being hated to being an object of indifference. Lane Moore, a writer and musician who hosts the touring comedy show Tinder Live — in which she, an audience and a panel of guests scroll the app — says she’s seen a rise in men who are ostensibly looking for women use their profile bios to lash out rather than introduce themselves; on Threads, she posted one screenshot (with name and photo redacted) that started out with “No LGBTQHV+ pedo groomers, no annoying loud-ass blacks, and no fatties. No dumb whores looking for a free meal” and somehow got worse from there. In her Threads replies, men protesting that this was surely an anomaly, if not an outright fake. “It’s just so classic,” she says. “I’ve been doing this show for more than 10 years and seen 10,000 of these profiles. And they’re still like ‘wow, it’s crazy, she found the one Bad profile.’”
The belief — the insistence, often — that women are not accurate observers of their own experience means that straight women who are decentering, refusing or perhaps just going Boy Sober are fooling themselves into thinking they can have a satisfying single life. Gina decided not to tell anyone in her family about her decision because, she says, “They would treat it like their full-time job to change my mind.” She also doesn’t talk about it on social media, though she understands why it’s important to make sure others know it’s an option: “Someone has to talk about it, I get that. But…. the whole point is that caring less about men is not the end of the world. People are still getting married. They’re still having babies! That’s not going away.”
This is important, writes Garcia in “Living With Men,” because despite the deeply unsettling revelations of the Pelicot trial, women like her were going home to their own husbands every night with images from Dominique Pelicot’s meticulously logged and titled cache of videos where he directed strangers as they raped his sedated wife. They were going home knowing that what looked to the rest of the world like a singularly horrifying case had revealed that Mr. Pelicot’s crimes and those of his accomplices were not as unique as we want to believe. “If a single man in a small town like Mazan can manage to find at least 70 others living within a radius of less than fifty kilometres” — about 30 miles — “then how many men are there in France who would be prepared to rape an unconscious woman if the opportunity arose? . . . [C]ould it be that the average ‘guy next door’ would willingly rape his neighbor’s sleeping wife?”
She found the answer both during the trial, which ended with Dominique Pelicot and all 50 men found guilty of either rape or sexual assault, and beyond it, via a Telegram channel with 70,000 users who, Garcia writes, “help one another out with tips for drugging the women around them, share photos of their sedated partners, and describe the abuse they plan to inflict on them.” Not everyone would do this; the problem is that there is no way for women to know who would and who wouldn’t.
In the days when women had no economic or social power, finding a husband was a matter of survival, and a cursory flip through Project 2025 suggests that fulfilling all its policy recommendations will ensure that it will be again. There is an unbridgeable rift between the women who are choosing a life without a man at its center and the men who would apparently rather be needed than be wanted. To look at the current administration is to see that lack of consent is not only its standard operating procedure, it might also be its only coherent throughline. In this context, what could possibly make more sense than refusal?
