Episode 08: Dead to the world

Warning: this episode includes discussion of sexual violence and suicide.

In this episode: Cressida and Joshua talk with Megan Burke about sexual violence against people who are unconscious (including asleep, drunk or drugged, or medically anaesthetized) in the digital age, and in particular what it does to a survivor’s sense of time. We introduce the 2024 Pelicot trial in France, where a husband was convicted of raping his wife, whom he had drugged without her knowledge, and recruiting tens of other men also to do so (26:09), and then discuss a well-known Canadian case, R. v. JA, which centred on whether consent can be given in advance to sexual activities that will happen while one party is unconscious (35:57). Megan talks about the importance of gendered images for all of us (44:47). We all discuss “the cultural scaffolding of rape” and the states of mind that enable this kind of sexual violence to continue, including in the case of Chanel Miller, who wrote a memoir about her experience of sexual assault on the Stanford University campus—and about the cultural scaffolding of resistance and hope (46:30).

Mentioned in this episode: Megan Burke, PhD @thinkingwithmegan is a philosopher, writer, and consultant, as well as the author of When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence, and Becoming a Woman: Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Trans Existence; Cressida J. Heyes, “Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media;” Chanel Miller, Know My Name; the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. JA (2011); Manon Garcia, Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial; Nicola Gavey, Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Thumbnail image credit: photo collage by Jesse Lenz first appeared in Rolling Stone September 17, 2013 to accompany Nina Burleigh’s story “Sexting, Shame, and Suicide: A Shocking Tale of Sexual Assault in the Digital Age.”

Transcript

Cressida: 00:00

Are you a good sleeper?

Megan: 00:02

I am. Friends have told me I have good sleep hygiene.

Cressida: 00:05

So you always go to bed at the same time or...?

Megan: 00:07

It's seasonal, I think. But yes, I like to go to bed at around the same time. I prepare myself for that. Like usually I'll do like some kind of restorative yoga practice after I walk my dogs. I drink chamomile tea. I mean, and you know, I try to set up my day to do that. And I don't get frustrated if I can't, but I think sleep is really important, safe sleep, comfortable sleep. Sleep is really important to being alive. Just what it is to have yourself be able to rest in a really full way, which I think, again, is what's devastating about the kind of violation we've talked about. To lose that, to not trust in that. I mean, it's just, it's devastating. And that's because I understand sleep to be so significant to my capacity to exist in the world. So grateful to be a good sleeper, but I also practice it.

Joshua: 01:17

Today on Sleep is the New Sex, we're talking about sleep and sexual violence.

Cressida: 01:23

And just a warning for listeners: this is a difficult topic, and today's conversation includes explicit discussion of rape, as well as a number of mentions of suicide. In fact, it was a really difficult episode to make, and we've done a lot of drafting and reworking, and among other things, we struggled with terminology in this episode. So I often refer to the people we talk about who were sexually assaulted in the cases that we reference as victims, and only sometimes as survivors. And the same is true for our guest. Partly because what happened was so incredibly destructive in their lives, and partly because a number of them lost their lives to suicide, so literally did not survive. But we do also say survivor, and for some people, survivor is always a preferred term as it picks up on the continuing existence of a person after and beyond the trauma of sexual violence. So we're also warning you that we're going to be talking about suicide in this episode. And a couple of times we do also say "committed suicide," that phrase. And I know that the phrase "died by suicide" is preferred by some people. So we just wanted to acknowledge that. But whatever words we use, what we have to explain, I think, is even harder.

Joshua: 02:44

Yes, so a bit of a heavier episode. And we've decided to call this episode Dead to the World, which is also actually the title of an article you published. What were you getting at with that title?

Cressida: 02:57

Yeah, so in kind of recycling that title for this episode, I was riffing on the idea that I had when I first used it, which is that if you just Google the idiom "dead to the world," you will be told it just means very soundly asleep. So that seems apropos. But also, it has this connotation of being oblivious to what's going on. Like you're so soundly asleep you can't be woken up. You have no idea what's going on around you. But I think it connotes something else, a second kind of meaning that the world is looking at you and seeing you as dead. So you don't exist for the person who violated you, and sometimes even for larger communities of people who were looking at you while you were asleep. So there's a kind of relationship of absence involved in that phrase, dead to the world, that I think operates in both directions.

Joshua: 03:50

Yeah, I have to admit, until making this episode, I'd only ever thought of it in those first two senses of the person being asleep. I hadn't thought of it as what the person dead to the world is to the person who is alive to the world, I guess. Yes. So today we'll be talking with Megan Burke, the author of When Time Warps, The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence, and another book entitled Becoming a Woman, Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Trans Existence.

Megan: 04:20

Thanks for having me. I'm Megan Burke, they/them pronouns. I'm associate professor of philosophy at Sonoma State University. And yeah, I spent a good deal of time researching sexual violence with a particular interest in the way it impacts experiences of time. So that's my specific way into considerations of the harms of sexual violence.

Cressida: 04:46

So I thought I could start by trying to explain a little bit about how I came to the topic of thinking about sleep and sexual violence. And really, this is quite a long-standing interest of mine. For a short while, much earlier in my life, I was an anti-sexual violence activist and I did a lot of direct crisis work as well as policy work. And so, as a feminist philosopher, I've always been interested in that topic. And in the early teens, the 20 teens, which is when, believe it or not, I first started thinking and writing about sleep, there were several very highly publicized cases of young women who were sexually assaulted while they were unconscious. So the Steubenville case happened in 2012. There's the case of Audrie Pott that I've written about also in 2012. And then there was a Canadian girl, young woman called Rehteah Parsons, who was sexually assaulted in 2011 and committed suicide in 2013. There's a case that Megan is going to talk about, Daisy Coleman, who was sexually assaulted in 2012, aged 14, and committed suicide sometime later in 2020. And then the last one that I'm going to just rather arbitrarily really put in this grouping is the case of Chanel Miller, who was sexually assaulted on the Stanford University campus. And that case became quite well known for various reasons, one of which is that she subsequently wrote a memoir about her experience of the mostly of the legal system. And that one happened in 2015. So it felt like these cases were always in the headlines in one way or another. And so they have a lot in common, those cases. They're not necessarily representative either. It seems important to say that. There are reasons why they got taken up by the media. People drew all sorts of, in my view, incorrect inferences from them. But they did involve a youth culture that was committed to heavy drinking, particularly at social events. And so in all of these cases, the victims, and most likely, but we don't really know the perpetrators were drunk. This was a period of time, I know it's not that long ago, but the 20-teens, probably to some listeners at least, feels like a long time ago, involved the use of roofies or rohypnol is the drug name. So various kinds of drugs that were being given to people in drinks without their knowledge. So there was a lot of awareness, consciousness raising about the risks of being roofied. Right. You might remember that. I mean, it's still, of course, a risk, but it was a kind of wave of alarm about that happening. And it was really the first, I would say, period of time when it was completely ubiquitous that people would take photos and video of each other and that there would be so many platforms ready to hand for them to circulate those images. So all of those things are relevant to these cases because in all of them there were other people around for at least some of what was happening. In several of them, there were photographs and videos taken of the assault, which were then circulated among the young people who were in attendance, among the perpetrators, but also among other third parties. And they, of course, came to serve as evidence later. So there's a new kind of construction of community through the circulation of these images, but there's also a new kind of evidence. So so much of the history of sexual violence is uh how to prove, where of course there are loads of rape myths about the unreliability of victims, particularly if they're women, and so much uh prejudice in favour of perpetrators. And it's so difficult to prove that you were sexually assaulted if it's just you and the person assaulting you, as it so often, still so often is. But in these cases, there was a kind of evidence that just would not previously have been available. And so I started to think about them as cases that had a lot in common and were of their time in an interesting way.

Joshua: 08:60

I wonder, do you think is this a moment of history that has come and gone, or is this something that's still with us?

Cressida: 09:10

It's still with us, obviously. But I mean, there's a bit of evidence that Gen Z drinks a lot less, both men and women. And I think that's kind of important.

Joshua: 09:20

Yeah.

Cressida: 09:21

I'm a Gen X British woman, and I read a terrifying survey once that said that we drink the most of any group of women in the world, but it's not true now.

Joshua: 09:30

Well, it's good to be the best at something.

Cressida: 09:32

Yeah. I could certainly believe it of the culture I grew up in.

Joshua: 09:35

Right. That rings true.

Cressida: 09:36

Yeah, yeah. But I grew up where youth culture was very heavily oriented around consuming alcohol. And that does seem to be quite a bit less true. It seems to have lost its allure. There's a lot more science about just how bad it is for you. And I don't know who's influenced by that really, but it certainly seems like it's different. But the possibilities for drugging people, on the other hand, have proliferated. And the possibilities for filming things and finding places to put those videos have also proliferated.

Joshua: 10:08

Definitely.

Cressida: 10:08

Yeah. In some ways, it's a kind of scarier culture now, but a less alcoholic one. Maybe that's all I can say.

Joshua: 10:16

Some of the conditions are different, but the phenomenon that you were identifying that united those cases has kind of carried on.

Cressida: 10:26

Yeah. And and I feel like it's important to clarify at the beginning that several doctor friends have said to me, unconscious is not asleep. And that's medically correct. But what I wanted to do as a sort of existential philosopher is to think about cases of sexual violence where the victim was in some kind of altered state where they might have been asleep. And there are certainly some cases in the record of people who are woken from sleep by being sexually assaulted or who managed to sleep through at least some amount of sexual violence. There are also people who have been sexually assaulted while they've been anaesthetized. So there's quite a lot of medical violence involving people who are under anaesthetic, people who are in a coma or have a head injury, as well as people who've been roofied with other kinds of illegal or subcultural drugs. So there's actually many different ways of being, I'll just say, unconscious.

Joshua: 11:27

Right.

Cressida: 11:28

And there are examples of sexual assault against people in every single one of those states. And they tend to get treated really differently in the literature. And there's particularly victim blaming. So the cases that I just described are very often treated as if, well, those young women got drunk. What did they expect? Right.

Joshua: 11:47

Yeah.

Cressida: 11:47

So we're all familiar with that kind of classic victim blaming stuff around sexual violence. So part of what I wanted to do was to show that what the cases had in common was the vulnerability of the victim. And nobody can actually avoid being asleep. You might be able to avoid the other ways of being unconscious, but you can't avoid being asleep. So there's something disingenuous about the idea that if women or anybody who's vulnerable to sexual violence, gender queer people, children, right, just do the right things, that sexual violence will go away. Of course it won't go away because people who might be sexually assaulted change their behavior. It will go away when people who commit sexual assaults change their behavior. I wanted to sort of make that point, but through a different path. And once I got going on it, it was really amazing how many examples there were in every category. So one of the things that happened is, and this often happens to a certain kind of academic, I think, is I would give talks about this, and people would come up to me and they would tell me about being sexually assaulted or somebody they knew who was sexually assaulted. Wow. Under these same conditions. Like the very first talk I gave, the first two questions, one was a young woman who said, This happened to a friend of mine last semester.

Joshua: 13:14

Wow.

Cressida: 13:15

That she had got drunk and woken up with a guy who was doing things to her that she didn't want and she didn't really understand how she got there and what had happened.

Joshua: 13:23

Oh, how horrifying.

Cressida: 13:25

It was horrifying. And we then had to do a little intervention to try and get some support to that woman so that she could pass it along to her friend. And then the second question was a guy who said, When I was a boy, I was put on a train journey by myself. He didn't say how old he was, but sort of young teen was kind of the implication. And I fell asleep because it was a long train journey. And when I woke up, there was a guy next to me who had his dick out and was trying to feel me up. So that was that was another auditorium full of people moment where you're just like, it's a very, you know, not a completely different scenario, but again, there's examples you can think of. So I get told these stories all the time, which is one of the ways that I've realized just how widespread this is.

Joshua: 14:10

Yeah.

Cressida: 14:11

But it's also true that the cases that we know about are cases that for whatever reason the media thinks are worthwhile to run stories about. And there are all sorts of not so honourable reasons why the media thinks the story is sensational, sensational enough to merit being covered. Or cases that have made their way into the legal record. So there's a lot of legal theory that cites case after case that involve this kind of violence. So those are the two ways really that I collected an archive of cases that I could talk about in writing.

Joshua: 14:48

It's a heavy archive.

Cressida: 14:50

Yes, absolutely.

Joshua: 14:52

I can say from just listening to this interview and even going into a few of the sources that you've already cited, felt very, very heavy. It was the hardest prep I had to do for the podcast for sure.

Cressida: 15:08

Yeah.

Joshua: 15:09

And one of the harms that comes up in this conversation with Megan that I found especially thought-provoking and disturbing is the type of community that gets established, like really constituted, if we're using language from political theory, that gets constituted through this group experience or this community experience at the expense of the unconscious victim or survivor. And the way that that community is built both on their you know exploitation and their abuse, but also their exclusion. And so this person wakes up into really a world that they are excluded from, but is also entirely established and constituted on that exclusion and on their abuse.

Cressida: 16:06

Yeah, and it's made possible in new ways by digital technologies.

Joshua: 16:10

Right.

Cressida: 16:11

So taking video of people and sharing it, yeah, part sort of social media groups that then network people who are sharing those videos and images and and so on. So, yeah, so there's all sorts of possibilities for doing that that exceed what used to exist. And I think that that's the impulse was perhaps there before, but the technology has made it so much easier. And so we asked Megan how they think about this, how they think about this kind of community building.

Megan: 16:55

Yeah, I mean, I think that language of recall and like recalling these events as they're circulating and and your memory emerging through other circulation of your own experience is really interesting. And I think one way I've tried to, along with other folks who are, you know, thinking about similar topics, to understand what's happening in those moments, that that community is being built, that social world is being built around your experience while excluding you, is really the issue of reputation. And I think this is really important to think about in relationship to young women in particular, especially the way that misogyny is operative and the way social worlds are built, particularly among like adolescents at a really developmental time, but even beyond like, say, like a high school context, but that a young woman, a girl's reputation can be ruined, right? And that reputation is really existential. It's not just a matter of being popular, but having a certain kind of reputation is a really formative way that misogyny operates. And so if one's reputation is set up in such a way that what it's really hard to recover from it, which is, I think, what is often happening when these images are being circulated of an experience of rape and you're being excluded from that narrative. And it's so fundamentally about you, is that reputation is devastating, not just in the existential sense, but as we see as a result of suicide being the response in the like the most like brute visceral sense, there is a kind of shame and dread that comes as a result of this misogynistic operation of reputation. And that, I mean, that works for girls and women or those perceived to be girls and women all of the time, that reputation is so formative to how they are in the world. But I really think that's so important to consider that like what's going on in these images is that the image world is setting up this existential scene that then is framing your entire existence. And that's that's devastating. It's really, I think, difficult to figure out how to recover from that as images will continue to circulate, right? They are like the velocity of how they're moving, the way they're shaping your future out of your control, I think is so difficult to figure out how to recover from because yeah, it's like, how do you shut that off? How do you stop it? Like, I think that's the question is how do you stop that? And how do you ignore it? How do you move through that when it's you know so significant?

Cressida: 19:41

Yeah. And there's a connection here to issues of digitally generated pornographic images of women based on Facebook photos and so on, that the undermining of a woman's sexual reputation through humiliating her with that kind of image is a very effective way of just destroying somebody as a subject, right? That person ceases to exist, except as these images from the perspective of some of the participants, right? So for some people who are looking at them, this person just lives in these pictures. And you can't get rid of them in the way that we used to be able to destroy hard copies of things.

Megan: 20:24

Yeah, right. There's like this other interesting dimension of the past that shows up when you encounter these images or even videos of yourself. You know, so it's like you've had all of these experiences, these violations happening to you, and you've encountered them not consciously, and now you're like re-encountering your past and not in a joyous way at all. I mean, what a devastating way to consider what your life has been, you know, for all of us, whether we're aware of it or not, what has been in our past is so central to who we are now. And then to like have these encounters and you didn't know about them. I it feels even just in my in my own body difficult to conceive of what that is like to live through, to have to like re-encounter your past. Your whole trust in the world just shatters.

Cressida: 21:21

So for you, that experience is refracted through time. It's something to do with time. Can you tell us more about what that is? Like what's the experience of time that's different here?

Megan: 21:32

Such an important question. And it's not the only experience. So just to be clear to everyone that time is just one feature of a traumatic experience. It's just one I've been really drawn to because, in general, what studies on trauma show is like that you rupture with your past because of this experience you've had in the present. You're no longer who you were before a violation or before experience of trauma. And then there's this recovery of your future that you have to kind of go, how how can I move on, given this that it's not only possible to be violated, but that I was violated, that myself was ruptured. So there's this relationship to the past and the future, and this like struggle in the present. It's just like loaded. The experience of time is really loaded. You've paid attention to this case with Audrie Pott and Daisy Coleman, who were two teenagers in the United States who were both raped while not conscious in 2012 at a party, and they both committed suicide, really tragic. And at different times, Audrie Pott very immediately after her experience, and Daisy Coleman years after. And I've kind of really spent time with Coleman's experience because Coleman or Daisy Coleman was really working to recover her her future and recover who she was, and working really, really hard to get the sense of herself back. And this is really common for any victim or survivor of sexual violation. But I but I think that the quality of her relationship to her future, as like trying to like remember and having to recall what happened to her and like revisit photos of what happened to her and see photos of her circulated and not have any memory of this. I there's something there that I think is really part of that deep struggle to get your future back and to re-narrativize your relationship to time. I mean, I think it's a significant part of how to consider the harm. Like, how do we understand the character of harm that occurs in this particular form of sexual violation? And I think one way to think about that is just not only how vulnerable we are when we are sleeping, but just how significant sleep is to our capacity to exist in the world, not just in a practical way. But I think this is where philosophical considerations of sleep are really rich in terms of, you know, gesturing to how fundamental sleep or restfulness as a form of anonymity, a way to like put yourself on pause for a moment is a condition for re-entering the world as you are, like not an anonymity. There's a lot of, there's several, you know, phenomenological texts we could talk about that talk about sleep as actual sleep or just like getting to withdraw or recede from the world while you're waking in a way that you're not seen so much, you're not like on display. Like we can't be on display all of the time in our lives. And to to lose that or to not trust in that anymore, I think is a significant dimension of harm, which I know is a thing that many survivors of this form of violation experience. So then to continue to struggle with sleep, to not sleep for days, maybe months, even longer, like we know the effects of that. We all know what it is like to not get sleep, right? And there's existential effects, there's psychological effects. And I think that's also a way to consider like the harm. And yeah, you know, it's why I take sleep seriously. Like I know it's important for my capacity to have a future and a future that feels good. So, like that affective relationship to my future is is reliant on good sleep. And good sleep does require that others also allow, afford me the capacity to have have good sleep. And that could be materially, but also emotionally, psychologically, and so forth. And so that's maybe how I would understand both the character of harm and the difficulty of recovering, recuperating, and and recreating one's future. The safety of sleep has been cut right through.

Joshua: 26:09

So there was a case in France in 2024 that made international headlines that you and Megan talk about in the next section. And I'll just give a preview of that case. It's about Gisele Pelicot. Gisele Pelicot, who was married to Dominique Pelicot, and for a very long period of time, Dominique Pelicot was inviting men into their home. And 10 years, I think.

Cressida: 26:42

Almost 10 years, yes.

Joshua: 26:44

For 10 years, was inviting men into their home, drugging his wife, and then allowing, encouraging these men to have sex with Gisele. This happened without Gisele's awareness completely. And I think the circumstances through which Dominique was eventually caught are in themselves sort of absurd and extraordinary. Do you do you wanna, or do you want me to... He was in a supermarket.

Cressida: 27:11

He was in a supermarket. Yeah, he was upskirting. And he was upskirting, which is in the UK people use that word all the time, but I've discovered that Canadians, lovely, innocent Canadians don't always know what upskirting is, but it's where you hold your phone down low to the ground, so and then you try to get a picture up a woman's almost always a woman's skirt, so that you can catch a glimpse of panty or leg or who knows, right? So he was doing that.

Joshua: 27:38

Very sneaky, Dominique, but not sneaky enough, I guess, because he was caught. And it was only as the police were going through his phone on those grounds that they discovered all these other meticulously documented and stored videos of what he and these other men had been doing to Gisele. Um, I say other men, I think it was correct me if I'm wrong, was it in the 50s the number of men?

Cressida: 28:01

Yeah, there ended up being 50 co-defendants. So there were 50 men who were identified and were able to stand trial, and there were probably 20 -something more who were on the videos but could never be identified and so never were involved in the trial. Just they're out there somewhere.

Joshua: 28:27

Jeez. And so yeah, we were talking about community and the sort of like perverse community that gets built out of these crimes. And this is quite an extensive network that Dominique had established.

Cressida: 28:41

Yeah, so he advertised on a website, a kind of subterranean website called "A son insu" meaning "without her knowledge." I t was a sort of sub-thread on a website called "coco." And he was advertising for men who lived within 50 kilometers or something like that of Mazan, which is the town that that Gisele and Dominique lived in. And so it wasn't like hard for him to find men who lived within 50k of his home who were willing to sort of come and play...some of them said they thought it was a kinky game. Some of them said, well, you know, it was his wife and he'd given permission. So it was a thing between this couple, and he was the one who was in charge. Or people had stories about why they said yes. But there were men who showed up and then left without doing anything. There were men who found out what he was expecting and then just didn't pursue it. But also none of those men who ended up, you know, in some theoretical way doing nothing wrong also never reported him. So none of the men who were involved ever made any kind of police report or did anything else as an ethical response to this, even if they weren't legally implicated because they had sexually assaulted Gisele Pelicot.

Joshua: 30:00

Right. I definitely want to circle back to the inactivity of the other men and the way that society enables men like Dominique to do what they do. But I think another really important piece of this case to highlight is of course, I've been talking a lot about Dominique, but the more important figure here is Gisele and the fact that most of this happened and she has no memory of it. And in fact, throughout you know this period of 10 years, began to experience increasingly loss of memory or time lapses and you know dissonance between probably what her body knew to be true and what her partner was telling her.

Cressida: 30:51

Yeah, in in France they have this phrase "soumission chimique," chemical submission. So the idea that drugs can be used to make people pliable to sexual assault, but also to erase their memory. You can't remember what happened to you after you've taken a roofie, right? And and so Giselle had no memory of any of these things, but he was giving her benzos, benzodiazepine drugs like lorezepam, or though it was a different "-pam", I think. But but you have to give somebody really big doses of those drugs, especially if they're taking them regularly, for them to completely conk out and have no memory. So she was taking significant doses of these really powerful sedative drugs that he put in her dinner, in her drinks. And so no wonder she was experiencing periods of feeling woozy and confused as you know it sort of carried on, and she's getting older. She's not a young woman. At the time of his arrest, he's 72, and she's, I think, almost exactly the same age.

Joshua: 31:54

Oh, wow.

Cressida: 31:55

So this is happening to her through her 60s and into her 70s. Yeah, she thought that she had early onset dementia. Right. And she went to see loads of doctors, and he went with her and was solicitous about her health. But it was only him being caught and this being revealed that, you know, she has to go down to the police station, and the police say, I'm, you know, he's been caught up skirting, but that's not the story here. We're very sorry, but we found these videos of you being raped, and we're going to show them to you. And that's the first time that she realizes what's happened.

Joshua: 32:33

Very similar to what we've been talking about with Megan. Like this is somebody waking up into a community that has been established on their total exclusion to their total like ignorance in the sense that they had absolutely no idea that it was happening, and then are forced to see themselves from a very annihilating perspective, I guess. Yeah.

Cressida: 33:02

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a very strange way of realizing that you've been sexually assaulted to watch a video of it happening of which you have no memory. And so in that article, "Dead to the World," that's what I was trying to make sense of was what's the specific harm, what's the specific damage that's done by that kind of experience, which is a different kind of damage, but no less awful, I think, than the experience of being continuously aware of a sexual violation of some kind. So, I mean, we're talking about lots of different cases here, whether it's drugs, whether it's alcohol, whether it's people being woken from sleep itself, and there are lots of cases of that too. But what we're talking about is losing a big chunk of your past, not to innocent, peaceful sleep, but to this reality that was going on for Gisèle Pelicot outside her consciousness that she can only really understand retroactively by watching video of things happening to her. So the question for me in this case and others like it is how can she re-evaluate her life? How can she reintegrate herself into an experience that's not even really an experience?

Megan: 34:27

That re-evaluation is so, I mean, it's so striking, right? Just, I mean, I don't how does one do that? And I think what you see in her case, what at least what I was trying to understand in like Daisy Coleman's case, or even in Chanel Miller's case, who was the victim, Emily Doe, in the Brock Turner, who is the all-American Stanford swimmer who raped Miller while she was unconscious by a dumpster after a party, is like these attempts to recuperate right that event and oneself from that event. And there's like there's no one way to do it, right? All of the different forms of struggle to recuperate oneself. And I think, yeah, in the Gisele Pelicot case, it's like that bravery to just sit in a courtroom, I would imagine is like one attempt to re-engage in in a certain kind of way. But I couldn't imagine even the heaviness of doing of doing that. And and also just how convenient in the kind of misogynistic context we live in for victims like Pelicot to just like have it passed off as an illness, right? Or have it perceived as dementia. Yeah, I mean, there's just so many layers there that are are so heavy and difficult to to think about what it would be like to have to recuperate oneself from from that past that one doesn't have a conscious experience of.

Cressida: 35:56

Yeah.

Joshua: 36:06

So this question of consent is often framed as a very simple yes means yes and no means no. But what's interesting when you go into sort of the legal history of consent, this is actually a much harder question to much harder question to answer in the context of partnerships, especially with regards to sexual consent.

Cressida: 36:35

Yeah, I mean a lot of sexual violence happens between people who are in an established relationship of some kind and where consent to sexual activity may have been previously given. And that makes it in the eyes of the law, and I think in the eyes of our culture, more difficult to say that sexual assault has occurred when it's in a relationship, but it's where it most often happens.

Joshua: 37:01

Right. So and so there's this case called R v JA that was decided on in 2011 at the level of the Supreme Court of Canada. And this case involved one partner choking the other partner into the woman until she was unconscious, and then while she was unconscious, inserting a dildo into her anus. And then the woman in the relationship woke up to the partner doing this, and they then proceeded to have vaginal sex from that point on.

Cressida: 37:41

Yeah.

Joshua: 37:42

And as far as the record is concerned, she didn't immediately withdraw consent or sort of claim that that had been wrong in the moment, but then later reports to the police that she was sexually assaulted and that she hadn't given consent for what happened while she was unconscious.

Cressida: 38:01

Yeah, it's a tricky case. I mean, I I don't think we have to get into the weeds of R v JA.

Joshua: 38:08

Yeah, sorry about that.

Cressida: 38:09

No, no, no, I mean I think we should say what happened, even if we do have to check the little "explicit" box!

Joshua: 38:15

Right.

Cressida: 38:15

But they're a couple, they're I think a common law couple.

Joshua: 38:18

Right.

Cressida: 38:19

And the it's an abusive relationship. Like he is a violent man and he's been violent towards her before, and he has convictions for domestic violence. So I think that's important because it shaped the way that the various levels of courts, because this went all the way to the Supreme Court, received this case. But it's also true that they had a certain level of violence in their sexual activity and that she had consented to the erotic asphyxiation. And that's also, I think, even more so now than at the time, a bit of a red flag because erotic asphyxiation is really on the increase as a kind of sex play, but it also morphs very quickly into sexual violence. And so involuntary choking is really dangerous, first of all, especially if you actually render someone unconscious, you can really easily kill them or at least cause them some kind of damage. But this was agreed to, but then when she came to, she realized he was doing things that she maybe hadn't agreed to. But it was in the context of them having sex, a couple having sex. And so the way that the case has been received, I think sometimes glosses over this history of violence. But it is also important to think about the kind of consequences for couples who engage in various kinds of kink who might want to be able to say you can make me unconscious and do this to me, right? Might want to give consent in a much a context of a much greater degree of sexual freedom than we actually see in this relationship. And so it raises an interesting philosophical question, really, for the Supreme Court of whether it's possible to give consent for something that will happen to you while you're unconscious sexually. Yeah. Because of course, we do give consent to things that will happen while we're unconscious in medical contexts all the time.

Joshua: 40:18

Right.

Cressida: 40:19

You have to sign all kinds of elaborate consent forms when you go in for surgery. You know, if you find this, what will you do? If you, if you think this is this is merited, will you remove this bit of me? Or will you, you know, so actually there's other contexts where it's very routine to say, yes, you're going to render me unconscious and you're going to do things to my body, and I'm going to describe what it's okay or not okay for you to do. And so it's not completely outside the realm of human life, you know, but it has a different connotation when it's in the context of sexual relationships, because then it's about sexual violence versus consensual activity.

Joshua: 40:59

Right. And I think what really fascinates me about the like philosophical reasoning in R v JA is this question does consent sleep? Does consent go to sleep? Or does is consent also unconscious? Like kind of behind the surface level horrors of what happened, there's this philosophical question of is the sleeping body completely absent, right? Or are you able to, before being completely absent, sort of leave something sustained like consent, right? That that survives your body being dead to the world, right? And the court really like goes back and forth on this, and the reasoning is intriguing, but the the answer is no. The answer that they come up with is that no, consent also goes to sleep when the body is unconscious, so is consent.

Cressida: 41:60

And the Supreme Court decided eventually that consent had to be active and ongoing, that you could never give consent for something that would happen to you sexually when you were unconscious.

Joshua: 42:12

You can only have consent if the person is awake and able to give consent at all times.

Cressida: 42:20

The reasoning-- you can read the reasoning and I'll put the link on the website-- but the reasoning had a lot to do with trying to protect people who are vulnerable from sexual violence, that they then would not have any way of remediating. So cases like Pelicot are very extreme, and nobody's ever suggested that she gave consent. But cases like R v JA are much more ambiguous, right? And I mean, in in maybe in the case of R v JA, that doesn't seem so controversial once you know a bit about the history, but there was a lot of anxiety in legal communities when R v JA came down. And you can see this in the dissenting opinion as well, because it wasn't unanimous. A lot of legal minds worrying about whether, you know, your average married couple are in bed, and let's say the husband leans over and gives his wife a peck on the lips to wake her up in the morning, and she opens her eyes and says, Hello, darling. So there's some we go to some lengths to make this seem like the most charmingly benign kind of scenario possible. Is that a sexual assault? And there was even one legal blog I read where a criminal lawyer sort of described exactly that kind of scenario, right? The innocent husband kissing his wife to wake her in the morning. And then someone wrote in the comments, you know, I'm just waiting for the case of Charming, P. to be tried, i.e. of course, Prince Charming, who does exactly this in Sleeping Beauty--callback to Beauty Sleep episode. And this the idea that it's ridiculous to treat Sleeping Beauty as a story of sexual assault, which brings us back around, I think, to our own, our own skepticism about those stories and thinking, well, actually they are sort of creepy, at least.

Joshua: 44:20

At minimum.

Cressida: 44:20

Yes, at minimum creepy. So coming back against this kind of trying to render sexual approaches to sleeping people as innocent. When I think about these sort of scoffing about Prince Charming as the defendant, we're back to Sleeping Beauty and corpse chic.

Megan: 44:48

That aesthetic dimension is something that I've been interested in for a long time as a way to make a connection between people who have not experienced any form or this particular form of sexual violation and just the dominant kind of image world and culture of gendered aesthetics, are to, I think, often evacuate any kind of active agency from those who are or are positioned as girls and women, right? Like that is the way to get a good reputation. That is the way to be desirable and that kind of assuming of this like sleeplessness in one's wakeful life, it connects those experiences and I think in really powerful and important ways. So that aesthetic dimension that shows up and is like animated in the most intense and vicious way in those experiences, I think also traces right in into just everyday experience. So it's like, yes, why do you desire to be like sleeping beauty? Right. I mean, and that's that's the aim, is like to get people to desire this for themselves, which I also think, yeah, is one reason why a conversation like this is important for people who have not been victims or survivors of this form of violation is that it's very much connected to what we've all been socialized to or subjected to, or how we've been taught to perceive people who are girls and women or raised to be so.

Cressida: 46:30

What's difficult to understand about the Pelicot case is just what is erotic about this and why is it appealing to so many people. And that's very difficult for a court process to explain. So the philosopher Manon Garcia has just published a book about the Pelicot trial, which she attended. So it's called Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial. And at the beginning, there's a point where she says this should really mark the end of a belief in the legal system as restitution for sexual violence. I think feminists gave up on believing in the legal system a long time ago, but maybe not in France, right? Maybe feminists there are still like it can work for us, but this is the end. And there's lots of interesting things that she says, but one of them is this thing that it's very difficult to for her to understand what's erotic about what these men did. I mean, Gisele Pelicot is an older woman, not to play into the ageist stereotype that older women aren't attractive, but she's drugged, she's snoring. That's mentioned several times, that while she's being raped, she snores. She's obviously completely out of it. She is dead to the world. And yet these men walk into that bedroom and decide that they're going to rape this woman, or in their language, have sex with this woman. And there's this great place in the book, or actually awful place in the book, where Garcia starts talking about Nicola Gavey, who's a New Zealand author, who writes about the "cultural scaffolding of rape," which I think is an interesting concept, right? The way that we kind of set up all of these beliefs about sexuality and sexual violence that then enable rape to both to happen but also to be tolerated. And then Garcia says, "it's striking in this respect that a judge in the Avignon court was repeatedly astonished by the inability of certain defendants in the videos to achieve or maintain an erection. No one seemed to find it reassuring that the spectacle of a deeply sedated Giselle Pelicot might pose an obstacle to arousal. At no point, apparently, was it considered that male desire could possibly be anything other than a standby position waiting for the first opportunity for rape." And when I read that, I thought, yeah, that is totally weird.

Joshua: 48:54

Yeah. That is weird.

Cressida: 48:55

For me, the thing that you would want to explain would be, how could this be sexy?

Joshua: 49:00

Right. Yeah.

Cressida: 49:01

But for the court, what seems to be in need of explanation is why could some of them not get it up? Yeah. And it's like, shouldn't you be explaining the reverse? Yeah.

Joshua: 49:13

You know? But that's not the question they were asking.

Cressida: 49:15

Not the question, no. So no matter what the truth of whether the men involved found this sexy or not, what the court thinks it has to explain is why it wasn't for some minority some of the time.

Joshua: 49:28

Weird. Very weird.

Cressida: 49:29

Yeah.

Joshua: 49:30

Yeah.

Cressida: 49:30

Totally creepy.

Joshua: 49:31

And again, it's not because everyone was assuming this is obviously very sexy, this situation. It's that the assumption about male sexuality is that it is just always on. It is alert and it is just waiting and looking for an opportunity when it should be harder to explain why this would be conducive to sexual arousal, this kind of situation.

Cressida: 49:59

Yeah. This idea that male sexuality operates kind of constantly just of desire. Of desire. It doesn't seem yeah. It's constantly there waiting for an opportunity and will take any opportunity.

Joshua: 50:14

Yeah.

Cressida: 50:15

It's actually a myth, but it's sort of powerfully shaping how we receive people in these cases.

Joshua: 50:21

You know, this is a an interesting case of a philosopher looking at a judicial system and reflecting on it. But there's actually a fairly rich history in the discipline of philosophy of philosophers reflecting on trials or going to trials.

Cressida: 50:40

Right. Yeah, at one point in the introduction or near the beginning of the book, Garcia mentions Arendt. The philosopher Hanna Arendt goes in 1961, I think, to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. And Eichmann is one of the last Nazis to be tried. And he was considered to have this enormous organizational logistical role in the extermination of Jewish people. And what Arendt famously concludes is that he's kind of a buffoon, that he's a rule follower, he's a very conventional man.

Joshua: 51:13

Yeah. He's a loser.

Cressida: 51:15

He's a loser.

Joshua: 51:15

Yeah.

Cressida: 51:16

He doesn't really reflect critically on what he's done. He's annoyed that it's being challenged because he thought that he was a good bureaucrat who followed the rules. Yep. And that in that simple desire to please his superiors and to be good at what he did without thinking about the meaning of what he did, he's evil, but it's the banality of evil.

Joshua: 51:39

That's right.

Cressida: 51:39

And that's the famous phrase that Garcia echoes, and she says these guys hadn't thought about consent. They hadn't thought about women's freedom or sexual expression. They hadn't thought about whether a husband really does own his wife's body. They just kept saying, But he told me I could do it, and I went and I did it. And I didn't intend to do anything wrong. My my state of mind was innocent, so I must be innocent. Like the most facile kind of explanations for what they did. So we don't get anything profound out of the testimony of these of these defendants because it is so banal.

Joshua: 52:20

It does not take a monster the way that we think about evil. It does not take that kind of evil monster for horrific evil crimes to be committed. And we're thinking about Dominique and we're thinking about the rest of the men involved in the trial. These don't have to be masterminds. They don't have to be adept criminals. They can actually just reflect the sort of banal scaffolding that has allowed them to act the way that they act.

Cressida: 52:58

We're going to say a little bit more about the Miller case, talking with Megan. And I think in that case, Brock Turner, who was the defendant there, was represented, including by feminist commentators on the case, as a monster. And I think the truth is that he was actually a pretty average young man, certainly duplicitous, certainly entitled. Certainly there's lots of negative things we could say about him, but ultimately pretty ordinary. And so the attempt to make him into this huge villain of the piece, I think, is a complicated sort of strategy. And when we think about the very intense forms of humiliation that Chanel Miller experienced at the trial that she talks about in her memoir, then it seems to sort of come back around to the community of voyeurs that we talked about at the beginning. And maybe there's a community of voyeurs that's enjoying looking at the defendants as well, right? That making these men into monsters is a part of community building, a different community perhaps, but still a building of community that isn't quite getting something that's going on underneath. Understanding the appeal of these narratives that are so invisible to us and so tacit is a way of being able to stand up. As Chanel Miller did, actually, she's written a memoir about her experience of being sexually assaulted by Brock Turner on the Stanford University campus and of the trial that she went through. So it's the main part of the book really is about her life between the assault and the trial, but then the weightiest section of it is about the trial and the really intense forms of collective humiliation that are enacted upon her in the trial. So that's another venue for kind of the same sort of stuff. Everybody sits around and they look at pictures of her on a giant screen, pictures that have been taken of her at the crime scene when she was unconscious, pictures that have been taken later for evidentiary purposes, including pictures of her vulva, pictures of her, you know, her hair, pictures of everywhere that she has a bruise on her body. So pictures of her body that are being shown in a courtroom. It's it's being done ostensibly for forensic reasons to prove that she was sexually assaulted. But it's exactly the same thing as circulating pictures over Instagram. Yeah, right. Yeah. So she has a commentary on that. And what's interesting about her is that she is still able to find her voice and to say this is what it's like to be the person that they're trying to destroy, to erase with all of these practices. And in her case, they're practices that eventually secure a conviction of the man who sexually assaulted her, which I have very mixed feelings about because I'm just not sure that the c arceral system is the place to look for justice when it comes to sexual violence, but that's not really something that she engages. So she's talking about how a system that she thought was going to get justice for her actually just goes through all the same gestures, right, as people who are texting each other pictures.

Megan: 56:27

Yeah. I mean, I think that point about the carceral system is really important and like a whole other conversation in itself about what's the right venue for not only securing some kind of justice, but for recovering a life, right, is really what we're talking about when we're talking about people who've endured sexual violation and especially of this kind, and with the kind of visibility that someone like Chanel Miller has endured, or Daisy Coleman, or Audrie Pott. I mean, the it's like the names are endless, right? But I think what's significant to me, or like the questions I focused on, you know, not sidestepping the critique of the carceral system, but it's like, what is it? What is it for the person who has endured this harm to recover herself, right? And the title of Chanel Miller's memoir, Know My Name, I think is just like indicative of an attempt to recuperate oneself and to change the narrative, which again, like to go back to the point I made earlier, there's not one way to do it. But I think what I've tried to understand as like consistent thread is that there's this grasping for selfhood again. And it often involves dealing with one's anonymization and like re-entering the wakeful world in a very specific way that involves naming oneself. And that doesn't always, that's not always successful, right? I think the case of Daisy Coleman is really a very tragic example of that, where this is a young woman who was doing survivor advocacy, who was giving lots of media interviews to speak about her experience and persisted to do this for years until she committed suicide, right? So it's like these are attempts to name oneself, to recuperate one's life, and they're not always successful, but there seems to be something like consistent in that effort to enter the world. And these are just the ones that that are publicized, right, in mainstream venues. And there's obviously we know so many more that are not. And yeah, I mean, what is it like to kind of have to deal with that form of anonymity? I think is a is a really interesting question, too.

Cressida: 58:43

Well, and Gisele Pelicot seems to have adopted the strategy of I'm going to go public. And I sense that she is absorbed in the support that she's getting. So people actually all over the world, but lots of crowds of people, mostly women in France, holding up signs of support, doing demonstrations and rallies, people outside the courtroom every day, crowds holding up signs saying that they support her, calling out to her as she goes into the courtroom saying, you know, we we're on your side, we're with you. And I think there's all sorts of reasons why she might have been able to mobilize that. And I think that she is, whether she intended to or not, generating her own community of meaning and support, where different kinds of images and stories about her life are being built and circulated. And that I think, thinking about her, thinking about Chanel Miller, that's the only way to sort of get something back after these sorts of cases, is to say, I am going to make my own community of meaning. And that's why we need a certain kind of feminist infrastructure, because there has to be meaning to make, right? It has to be public meaning that we can understand. A message that people can connect with. And there is now enough feminist infrastructure that we can do that.

Megan: 01:00:09

Yeah, I think that's such an important point to highlight in terms of what it looks like to resist a particular narrative and a particular project that's rooted in violation. It's like it's not just a survivor or a victim creating a narrative for themselves. It's really about a being with this, right? Another community that is formed and it requires other people to participate. It would not be enough, say, for just Chanel Miller to like narrate this for herself. She needs readers, she needs other people to take up her new narrative for herself, just like she's Pelicot, right? And so I think that just is such a powerful point. Like, how do we resist this collectively, not say not through the carceral system, but we're just talking about building a different form of sociality? It's like it's really not just a survivor project. It's really about a different form of being with and taking up a different kind of image world that's really significant. And I think that's highlighted, say, in Daisy Coleman's case, where she was finding a community, but like that community kept getting interrupted by her past in a really significant kind of way, which I just think is again about this like damage to reputation that can be done when there's not this other rich, resistant community being formed and taken up by others around you, especially people who don't know you.

Cressida: 01:01:39

Yeah. So we can imagine that in a way, the community of men who wanted to rape a woman without her knowledge was already formed. Rape culture is always there, it's always already formed. Dominique Pelicot didn't have to work all that hard to find it, but Gisele Pelicot has to work really hard to tap into something, but it's also already formed. It's also that we have already formed infrastructures of meaning around rape and consent. And there's enough meaning that that community can be mobilized, even if it's pretty much always mobilized in in resistance or in response to a kind of default. And so I think that that's hopeful and should be cultivated at every opportunity, really.

Megan: 01:02:25

Yeah, definitely. And that reality that that it is already here as well is a good thing to remember in the face of just like such devastation and that it's persistent, right? And but that there's also this other persistence that we have to continue to tend to and make appeals to and show up for. And it it is already here. We just have to continually take it up and show up with and for one another is a good reminder that hope does is also an underbelly of of this reality.

Cressida: 01:03:06

So I think that's probably the most positive note we can find to end on. What a tough episode.

Joshua: 01:03:14

Yeah, what a what a tough episode. This has certainly been, and listening back to the interview as well, this has definitely been the most difficult episode to discuss. There is a lot of content that is really hard to sit with and think about. So I hope that everyone has stuck around because I think as hard as it is, there are a lot of really important topics that we touch on in this episode. And assuming that you did stick around, thank you very much for sticking around and listening to this episode.

Cressida: 01:03:49

Yeah, thank you to all our by now many listeners. We rely on you to travel with us through both the fun parts and the difficult parts, and we do appreciate you very much. This is our first episode of 2026, so we hope you have a safe and happy new year and year to come.

Joshua: 01:04:06

Yes, thank you. And we're back in two weeks with an episode about sleepy stereotypes, where we interview scholar Danielle Wong about her trip down a rabbit hole into the world of Tumblr in the 20 -teens, creep shots, and the history of Chinese migration.

Cressida: 01:04:23

You can find Sleep is the New Sex on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts, as well as on our website sleepsthenewsex.ca, that's ca for Canada, which also includes show notes that will connect you to everything referenced in the episode. This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiyaw, Nitsiitapi, Metis, Nakota, Dene, Haudenashonee, and Anishinabi, lands that are now known as part of Treaties 6, 7, and 8 and homeland of the Metis. As we talk about the history and meanings that sleep, rest, leisure, and productivity have for us, we also want to recognize the way each of these ideas participates in the history of colonialism that has shaped and continues to shape relations between settlers and First Nations.