Mary Wakefield, Commissioning Editor for The Spectator, a leading conservative magazine in the U.K., has published an editorial that attempts to link adult content to an ongoing rape prosecution in France. The piece, titled “Pornography and the Truth About the Pelicot Case,” uses the case of Dominique Pelicot to present generalizations and debunked theories about the effects of watching adult content.

Wakefield's Editorial Links Adult Content to French Rape Case

Wakefield’s editorial focuses on the prosecution of Dominique Pelicot, who is described as an admitted rapist who drugged and raped his wife, Gisèle, for years, and also invited other men to participate in the abuse. The article seeks to frame this prosecution with generalizations and notions about the supposed effects of watching adult content online. Wakefield’s piece offers no new evidence or context about the case itself, instead devolving into a diatribe about porn.

In her editorial, Wakefield implies that adult content online is like a cancer. She includes anti-porn claims about brain science, referencing a bonobo-human behavior correlation, and offers her own musings about why people watch taboo content. Wakefield states, “Pelicot is a monster,” and adds, “But what has shocked France most is how very many normal Frenchmen he was able to find, in and around his Provencal village, who were up for having sex with an unconscious woman.”

Wakefield criticizes French feminists for targeting France’s systemic patriarchy or the lack of proper sexual education. She argues that the real target should be found elsewhere. Wakefield compares feminist marches in France condemning the incident and the culture which produced it to “hounds inexplicably swerving away from the scent and setting off in entirely the wrong direction.” She asserts, “What happened to Gisèle has zip all to do” with a lack of sex education, proclaiming, “It’s not patriarchy that’s to blame, but pornography. It’s porn which leads a human down into the sludgy gutters of his own psyche – and if the feminists of France really wanted to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain. Not just from the obviously illegal stuff, but from all of it.”

Generalizations and Debunked Notions

Among Wakefield’s claims are that Pelicot’s “atrocities themselves are bound up in and emblematic of the porn industry’s central operation: the monetization of taboo.” She also describes all of pornography as a “whole great, growing, metastasizing, $100 billion mess” devoted not to “selling sex so much as selling transgression.”

Wakefield’s rhetoric includes pseudo-brain science, stating, “The dopamine hit that drags human bonobos back to their laptops time after time is a result of busting through a taboo,” and that “that’s why it’s progressive. Once a taboo is normalized, it loses its transgressive power, so you look for another. And some men (not all men, but enough men) keep chasing that feeling until they end up in a chat room with Dominique Pelicot.”

She endorses the “slippery slope” theory, suggesting that porn watchers are always searching for a more intense high. Her evidence includes a previous article published by The Spectator, edited by Boris Johnson, where a writer claimed to have “lost control” over his porn searches and concluded that “most male sexuality is designed by evolution to be an unscratchable itch; a desperate, unsatisfiable urge.”

Wakefield concludes by claiming that “instead of developing a clear understanding of how porn acts on a brain, we’ve all become slowly habituated to it, slowly boiled alive in porn culture like frogs.” She also condemns Pride events and kink communities, implying a connection to Pelicot’s crimes.

Wakefield's Past Controversies

Mary Wakefield has been a controversial figure due to her involvement in a scandal that affected the Conservative government of Boris Johnson in 2020. Wakefield and her husband, a Tory politician, faced criticism when it was revealed they had bypassed social isolation protocols during the COVID pandemic.

The New York Times reported on The Spectator’s ties with the governing elite, noting an uproar over a 260-mile drive made by Mr. Johnson’s adviser, Dominic Cummings, and his wife to his parents’ house in northern England, violating Britain’s lockdown rules. The report mentioned that Wakefield “wrote a vivid account of how she and her husband both fell ill with the coronavirus,” but “she did not mention that they had actually gone to Durham, a journey that brought charges of hypocrisy and calls for Mr. Johnson to dismiss Mr. Cummings, at a time when the government was already under fire for Britain’s rising death toll, ravaged nursing homes and hapless test-and-trace program.”

Key Facts

  • Mary Wakefield, Commissioning Editor for The Spectator, published an editorial linking adult content to a French rape case.
  • The editorial, “Pornography and the Truth About the Pelicot Case,” discusses the prosecution of Dominique Pelicot, who drugged and raped his wife Gisèle and invited other men to participate.
  • Wakefield’s piece contains generalizations, debunked notions about adult content, and compares porn to a social cancer.
  • Wakefield criticizes French feminists for focusing on patriarchy and lack of sex education, arguing that porn is the real cause.
  • Wakefield has previously been involved in a scandal concerning the violation of COVID-19 lockdown rules in the U.K.