SARAH VINE: The dystopian hell suffered by so many women is due to pornography

While I have always believed that most men are decent people and that the accusations of sexism and misogyny leveled against them by feminists are grossly exaggerated, recent events have unfortunately made me seriously doubt that belief.

The most striking example is the horrific case in France of 72-year-old Gisele Pelicot. Her husband systematically gave her drugs and then invited random men into their marital bed to rape her, while filming and photographing everything.

Over a period of ten years, she was raped by at least 80 men, including a city councillor, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, nurses, a soldier, a firefighter and a civil servant.

Fifty suspects are now on trial, ranging in age from 26 to 73 at the time of their arrest.

These are not people on the fringes of society, they are regular men, husbands, boyfriends, fathers and sons – about as normal a cross-section of society as you can get. And yet they seem to be okay with turning up at a stranger’s house and having sex with an unconscious middle-aged woman, in some cases old enough to be their mother.

Some have tried to claim that they were unaware that Mrs. Pelicot was an unwilling partner in this sick game. But how could they be? The website where her husband recruited them openly discussed non-consensual sex, and they had strict instructions not to wear perfume or smell of cigarette smoke, and to stop if she so much as moved a finger.

Mrs. Pelicot even knew one of her alleged rapists, a man who had come to their home to talk to her husband about bicycles. “I would see him in the bakery every now and then; I would say hello. I never thought he would come and rape me,” she said.

But Ms. Pelicot—whose courage in court against the accused is nothing short of heroic—is not the only victim of dark, twisted, ugly misogyny. Last week, Ugandan athlete Rebecca Cheptegei was doused in gasoline and set alight by her former partner. She died from her injuries.

In another horrific case, a man was arrested in Poland for allegedly keeping a young woman as a sex slave for four years. He is accused of performing perverted experiments on her, including removing her teeth and lips.

In India, where attacks on women are endemic, the name of a young trainee doctor who was raped during a night shift has appeared on porn sites, as perverts search for the video of her attack. A man arrested for the attack is a police volunteer.

All over the world, women’s rights and bodies are being violated.

Another example is what happened on October 7, when Hamas terrorists targeted girls and women in their perverted killing spree, then raped them and mutilated their bodies. They enjoyed their humiliation and filmed it for their own pleasure.

That’s why I was so shocked by Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s decision to suspend arms sales to Israel. It’s hard not to think that he’s covering up the suffering of those women, and in effect rewarding Hamas for what they’ve done and sending a message that such depraved behavior is somehow justifiable.

Meanwhile, Britain continues to sell arms to Qatar, which hosts Hamas leaders in considerable pomp and circumstance. The same men who are funded and supported by regimes in Iran and Afghanistan, whose treatment of women – from the mass rape of Yazidis to the latest human rights abuses and restrictions on fundamental freedoms.

All of this has created the dystopian hell that women in those parts of the world now live in. All of these behaviors betray a deep misogyny, whether unconscious or not. But where does it come from? There is one common threat that unites all of these horrific and in some cases barely comprehensible forms of abuse of women: porn.

The increasing use of Internet porn over the past two decades has planted an evil in the minds of men, the consequences of which we are increasingly seeing.

The successive failure of politicians to impose even the most basic restrictions on sites like PornHub and co. has led to the perverted attitudes and behaviours often seen in online porn not only being normalised, but also seen by some as legitimate. After all, if it’s not illegal, how can it be wrong? So many of the grotesque scenarios described above, and seen in cases of sexual violence against women, mimic the perverted fantasies played out in porn videos.

The fact that some of these atrocities, like the attack on the Indian doctor, are being searched for on porn sites speaks volumes about the demand for this kind of thing.

In 2015, when I first became interested in this issue, I spent an afternoon with a man whose job it was to monitor internet porn sites for illegal or non-consensual content. That was – and still largely is – the only way to get these sites to take things down.

The level of violent misogyny shocked me to my core. Very little of the videos had anything to do with actual sex – it was all about degrading the women involved as much as possible.

Beating, strangling, rape, prolonged and painful penetration: these were the main themes. There was no sense of pleasure in the women – it was all violent, male-directed fantasy, a sexual outburst of barely contained disgust for the women involved.

I remember thinking, this is not about pleasure. This is revenge, punishment, anger and a feeling that women are getting what they deserve. The most striking thing was that the dirtiest videos were the most popular. The algorithm, driven by user preference, pushed them to the top of the feed.

At the time I wondered what kind of man could take pleasure in seeing such things. Now, thanks to these recent horrific cases, we know.

Ordinary men. Family men, fathers, sons, civil servants, firemen. It could be anyone: your taxi driver, the man sitting next to you on the train, the man at the supermarket checkout.

Online pornography is a virus that has been slowly but surely infecting men for the past two generations. It has desensitized the male psyche to attitudes and behaviors toward women that have no place in a civilized society. It dehumanizes women and promotes a twisted narrative that justifies their abuse.

In the past, such dark perversions were forbidden. Now they are available to anyone with access to a smartphone. There are no more barriers to even the most perverted content.

Boys and men are now consuming this stuff regularly and from a young age, and the real world consequences are undeniable.

From Gisele Pelicot to Sarah Everard (murdered by fellow porn enthusiast, police officer Wayne Couzens) and the countless victims in between, this is a real crisis for women and girls.

This has to end.

We have the Online Safety Act, but so far nothing has happened, despite continued efforts from across the party line – including Lord Bethell, one of the hereditary members of the House of Commons that Labour is so keen to get rid of – to push the issue.

In America, a tenacious woman named Laila Mickelwait has led a successful legal campaign against PornHub, resulting in 90 percent of the most horrific, violent and stolen content being removed. Her book, Takedown: Inside The Fight To Shut Down Porn Hub For Child Abuse, Rape And Sex Trafficking, is an eye-opener.

As a wife and mother of a daughter, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Germaine Greer was right years ago when she wrote in The Female Eunuch: “Women have little idea how much men hate them.”

I always thought that was just not true. Now I’m not so sure.