Opinion | In the Sean Combs and Dominique Pelicot Trials, the Dehumanization of Women Is Exhibit A

I was raped in college by an ostensibly nice guy who was not a stranger to me. I think that’s a banal statement of fact, but if that sentence makes you uncomfortable, I understand why. I describe it this way to point out how common my experience is. We regard rape in the public dialogue as an exceptional event, something that happens only in extraordinary situations. Pop culture — police procedurals in particular — have taught viewers to think of “real” rape as a thing that strangers do in dark alleys. But the reality is that most sexual assault happens in situations where the victims know their attackers.

I was thinking about this as friends and I were discussing the horrific case of Gisèle Pelicot, whose husband of many years, Dominique Pelicot, drugged her repeatedly and invited dozens of men over to rape her. More than 50 men are on trial — a range of ages, some in their 20s, some in their 70s — for raping her while she was unconscious.

In New York this week, Sean Combs, otherwise known as Diddy, was in court regarding sex trafficking and racketeering charges. Prosecutors say he hired sex workers to perform at parties he called “freak offs,” then coerced them, using drugs and threats, into sexual acts. This follows the revelation, in May, of a 2016 video that showed him dragging his then girlfriend Cassie Ventura by her hair and beating her in a hotel hallway. (She later brought a lawsuit against Mr. Combs that he quickly settled.)

The cases are so dramatic and their scale is so sweeping that it’s easy to miss how much they have in common: Both cases involve principals who have either been accused of or have confessed to raping or abusing women they claimed to love (a wife, a girlfriend). Combined, the cases involve dozens of men who are accused of enabling these acts and even participating when they thought they’d get away with it.

It’s also easy to miss how much these cases have in common with everyday reality.

It might seem obvious to say that men who abuse women dehumanize them, but pause for a moment to think about what it means on a literal basis: They believe women don’t have the basic human characteristics like rationality and reason. These men also objectify women, which we all understand colloquially, but some psychologists define as associating women with things — viewing them primarily as bodies, and not sentient beings with full humanity.

The high rates of abuse that sex workers suffer, and the specific crimes that Mr. Combs is accused of, require believing that clients are not paying for a service, but rather renting an object with which he can do anything he wants. In Mr. Pelicot’s case, his wife was property. In fact, some of the men who raped Ms. Pelicot offered that as their legal defense; they assumed that as her husband, Mr. Pelicot could grant them permission to violate her body.

One of the predictors of sexual violence in intimate partner relationships is whether men view their partners as having low cognition or low worth. Or to put it bluntly, whether they think their partners are stupid and have little value to society beyond their ability to reproduce and aid men.

From a distance, such views seem outrageous, even incomprehensible. But viewing women as subhuman and inferior is not just tolerated in much of American culture; it’s an integral part of it, as evidenced by double standards in the workplace, the oversexualization of women who are public figures, and the way women’s success (higher college attendance, for example) is consistently framed as a problem for men. All of these things betray an underlying belief that women’s primary value lies in their usefulness to men.

There are subcultures where this view is enshrined. I know because I grew up in one.

As a Southern Baptist I was raised to believe that women were helpmates, subordinate to men, and the Bible verse that was often interpreted as “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands” had only superficial reciprocal obligations. I was a conservative teenager but even then, it rubbed me the wrong way when my mom told me I should learn to cook because I’d need to do it for my husband one day. (I remember thinking, “Am I expected to marry someone so stupid he can’t cook?”) But I did get the message loud and clear that my value to men was exclusively as a wife and mother.

My friends and I keep going back to the case of Gisèle Pelicot. How is it possible that a man she knew deeply, loved and trusted for decades, did this to her? The easy explanation is that her husband is a psychopath, an outlier.

But what about the 50 men who are on trial now for joining him? The many, many people around Diddy who could have said something about his violence and didn’t, and whom prosecutors say participated in his “freak offs”? Such actions may violate the law, but they merely stretch the social codes that more frequently reward men for their power over women.

Every time I write about these issues, I get emails asserting that I hate men. I get called a “feminazi,” a person who will die alone, ugly and sexually unfulfilled and childless. (I have a husband and a child, but these guys don’t Google.) They call me stupid and follow up by assuring me that they could put me in my place, socially, professionally or physically.

I imagine some of the men who write those messages are psychopaths. But most of them are probably not. They just feel entitled to dehumanize women because there are few consequences for it. Their misogyny is unexceptional.

So as I think about these two shocking cases, my mind is not on Diddy primarily, or even Dominique Pelicot. I think about the men in their periphery. I think about men who go to parties and make women do things they don’t want to. About men who show up at a family home and help themselves to a woman’s body without questioning why she is unconscious. About men throughout our culture who tell themselves they are on some level entitled to use or abuse women — and that women owe them sexual pleasure and deference. And I think about the men — and sometimes women — around them who reinforce those beliefs.

I don’t believe my rapist was a psychopath. He was a guy who found a way to justify his own behavior. It must be easy to do when the men around you talk about women as things to be conquered, and even trade manipulative strategies on how to do it, all under the guise of fraternity bonding.

The stories that make the headlines are unforeseeable but the attitudes that enabled these horrors and allowed the men to get away with it for so long are not. They are ubiquitous, even among men you may know and love.

Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

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