Tox Report 65. The toaster theory of sexual debasement

A different kind, not a different degree, of evil

I’ve written two pieces for the Times this week: on the extremely casual attitude to suicide contagion in the coverage of Ruth Perry’s death (and why schools need more, not less, inspection), and a review of two books about women and sex.

This weeks’s Tox Report is about the trial of Dominique Pélicot, who is accused of drugging his wife Gisèle Pélicot and recruiting more than 80 other men to rape her (50 of whom are on trial alongside Pélicot). If you’d rather not read about this, I suggest waiting for next week when normal trash culture service resumes. And if you do want to read about this, please also read what Caroline Criado Perez and Hadley Freeman have written on the case.

---

Photo by Daniel Salgado on Unsplash

The most important meme for understanding what the internet has done to humans is the toaster meme. If you are unaware of the toaster meme: congratulations on living a life free from the worst depravity of being too-online. Now, allow me to ruin that for you (it’s originally from an image board, so be warned that the language is inevitably very offensive):

Source: Reddit

Of course, for “toaster fucking”, you can substitute any bizarre and potentially damaging fixation, and not only sexual ones. One of the big promises of the internet was that it would help you find your people. One of the questions that didn’t seem to occur until it was too late was: what if “your people” are better left unfound?

It’s one thing for the internet to put you into contact with, idk, an enthusiastic community of knitters or music fans.¹ It’s another when it pulls together a cannibal and his victim, or a eunuch maker and wannabe eunuchs, or — as is currently being described in a horrifying rape trial in France — a man who is aroused by watching other men have sex with his drugged, unconscious wife, and men willing to have sex with his drugged, unconscious wife. (A verdict in that trial is not expected until December.)

In all these cases, I think it is fair to say that much less harm would have occurred if the internet hadn’t been involved. Pre-internet, networks for extreme, illegal sexual interests did exist, but they were inefficient: privately printed magazines and small-ad carrying specialist newsletters, often distributed through sex shops.

Without the technology that allowed them to find each other, the men who participated (and it is almost always men who are inducted into the toaster-fucker dynamic) might have lived lives of quiet desperation with their unrealisable fantasies, but better that than bleeding to death while you watch a man trying unsuccessfully to eat your penis (which is what happened to the voluntary victim of cannibal Armin Meiwes).

But there is something the toaster-fucker meme doesn’t capture. What if step one of the process isn’t the equivalent of “I want to fuck toasters”? What if the extremity comes later? Think about Huw Edwards, who appears — from the available evidence — to have embarked on a secret, snowballing sexual rampage that consisted in private communications which eventually (but seemingly not initially) involved images of child sexual abuse.

In one of these conversations, on WhatsApp, Edwards was sent indecent images of children by a paedophile called Alex Williams. Having sent several of these images, Williams asked Edwards how he felt about them, and their exchange was summed up in the BBC’s report of the trial as follows:

The court was earlier told that, on 2 February 2021, the other man asked whether what he was sending was too young, to which Edwards asked him not to send any underage images.

The final indecent image was sent in August 2021 — a category A film featuring a young boy.

The man told Edwards the boy was quite young looking, and that he had more images which were illegal, the court was told.

Edwards told him not to send any illegal images.

No more were sent, and the pair continued to exchange legal pornographic images until April 2022.

This exchange struck me, because I suspect it’s typical of (what I suppose I’m going to call) sexual radicalisation. Edwards does not appear to have solicited child sexual abuse imagery or to have shared any himself. When he was confronted with the reality of what he was receiving, he drew a line, of sorts. (Because he didn’t find this material arousing? Because he was scared of the consequences? Who knows.) But he didn’t report Williams.

That’s because, as Williams had surely calculated, by the time the question was put point blank, Edwards had already allowed himself to become too compromised. Williams’ “best case” would presumably have been for Edwards to announce himself as an enthusiastic participant. Williams didn’t get that, but his worst case scenario — being turned in — was already precluded by Edwards’ willing receipt of the images so far.

Similarly, only three of the men recruited by Dominique Pélicot to rape his wife in the French case elected not to go through with it, and none of them reported Dominique Pélicot to the police. Even if they did have moral qualms (rather than simply not being into the actuality of what they’d signed up for), they were too implicated to act on them.

And while Edwards was moved to explicitly disavow underage images, he clearly hadn’t been repulsed by the ones Williams had sent up to that point. Rather, he continued the conversation, which suggests that they were within the realm of what he was seeking. Not sexual images of children specifically, but something — something more extreme, something more boundary-pushing, something that felt forbidden.

I’m reminded of Max, the protagonist of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, a cable TV scheduler imploring a porn producer to deliver something “harder”. He doesn’t know what “hard” means; ultimately, it means tapes containing the “videodrome signal” that destroys his mind and mutates his body. His urge towards extremity allows someone else’s desires to colonise his libido, his body. In the climax, Max is turned into a literal weapon. (Cronenberg is not a feminist, but the plot of Videodrome is a lurid dramatisation of the feminist critique of pornography: it physically reprograms Max.)²

Why does this matter? In the most important sense, it doesn’t. An individual’s culpability for the actions they commit is entirely unaffected by whether their motivating desire was inherent or acquired, or even if that desire belonged to someone else they were trying to please or impress. Personal responsibility abides.

But I also think this is a process that we should try to understand, because it happens to individuals in secret yet it affects everyone around them, to varying degrees of extremity. The material we chose to expose ourselves to will change what we consider to be normal, acceptable or desirable. And when men (because it is important to be honest that this is about men) embed themselves in a cohort that shares an urge for “harder”, they open themselves up to infection by other men’s paraphilias. It is a decision they make, even if they don’t recognise it as a decision.

Part of the horror of the Pélicot case is the sheer number of men involved, almost all of whom lived locally. Gisèle Pélicot saw some of these men, spoke to them in her daily life, and not only did she not suspect them, but furthermore, knowing her caused them to feel no obligation to her humanity.

They signed up through a chatroom called “Without Her Knowing”, they followed a complicated protocol to avoid waking her, and they penetrated her while being filmed (some of the defendants claim they believed they were participating in a consensual fantasy, contra the name of the room; others claim they believed Dominique Pélicot had the legal power to consent on behalf of his wife).

As a woman, this is a harrowing thing to be confronted with: not all men are rapists, but the number who are capable of it is staggering. Even your husband, who you have loved and trusted for decades. Even the man you see at the market. Even the one who comes round to fix your bike. Not all of them will be the man who would harm you, but some of them will be.

The question is, how many?³ There are two parts to the answer. The first, marginally reassuring one is that Dominique Pélicot probably represents a very, very tiny minority: the man with an extreme paraphilia who has both the competence and the sociopathy to enact it. The second, less reassuring answer is that the men who collaborated with him represent a much larger cohort: ones who are willing to partake in a violent, cruel sexual act when an available woman is presented to them.

I think it is unlikely that every one of the 80-some men recruited by Dominique Pélicot through a chatroom called were motivated by a profound, inherent desire to engage in a rape scenario with an unconscious woman. I think many of them will have arrived at the Pélicot home by a process of gradually radicalisation: a boundary probed, crossed, left behind, this process repeated again and again and again until he stands in someone else’s bedroom, over an unconscious woman, to fulfill a desire that was never his to begin with.

This is a different kind of evil to Dominique Pélicot’s, not a different degree (the question of legal guilt is a separate one and will be decided by the court). Without the internet to connect them to Dominique Pélicot’s fantasies, few of these men would have discovered how deep their capacity for evil runs and in what direction. But still, they chose that evil. It is theirs.

1. Although even these apparently neutral interests have been known to go very wrong.

2. I’ve written about Videodrome in this light previously for UnHerd.

3. Depressingly, the other obvious question — which ones? — is almost too futile to bother with. There are risk factors: for example, Dominique Pélicot had a history of “upskirting”, and voyeurism is an offence known to be associated with more severe sexual crimes, as is flashing. However, I must be honest and say that the two times a man I knew personally was found to have committed extensive sexual wrongdoing, I had no suspicions at all. It’s not that I don’t trust men, it’s just that I’m no longer blindsided when that trust is misplaced.