French actress Adèle Haenel and singer-songwriter Pomme, who have won popular acclaim and distinction in their separate professions, contributed to the emergence of a #MeToo movement in France with their personal accounts of sexual harassment by men. In the case of Haenel, her story was first detailed in public in a lengthy investigation by Mediapart which rocked the French cinema establishment, while Pomme (the stage name of Claire Pommet) gave her own account in an open letter and video interview published on Mediapart. Both identify themselves as lesbians, and that is, according to statistics, not a trivial coincidence.
In a joint study published in 2013, sociologist Brigitte Lhomond and epidemiologist Marie-Josèphe Saurel-Cubizolles, citing statistics from a landmark 2006 survey in France (‘Contexte de la sexualité en France’), observed: “Women who have had homosexual relationships are most often victims of sexual assault, whatever the type of assault and whatever their age at the time of the assault. During the course of their lives, 52% of them declare that they suffered sexual assault, against 19% among those who had only heterosexual relationships.”
More recently, in the latest study on “violence and gender relations” (Violences et rapports de genre, which takes the acronym VIRAGE), published earlier this year by France’s national institute of demographic studies, INED, a chapter dedicated to LGBT people found that bisexual and homosexual women are together between four and five times more numerous than heterosexual women in declaring they had been victims of sexual violence within their families.
Yet another study, published in April 2020 by the office of France’s ombudsperson and upholder of citizen’s rights (le Défenseur des droits), and which was similarly based on surveys, also concluded that lesbian and bisexual women were vastly more exposed to such violence inside the family. “Whereas 2.5% of heterosexual women report having suffered in the family environment fondling of their genitals [and] forced or attempted sexual relations, there are, respectively, 9.8% among lesbians and 12.3% among bisexuals” who report falling victim to such behaviour. It found that in the case of men, 6% among homosexuals and 5.4% of bisexuals declared they experienced similar sexual violence.
The disproportionate numbers of lesbians and bisexual women among victims of sexual violence identified in the different studies could, arguably, be even greater than that published in the statistics, given the possible reluctance of some – as also male homosexuals – to encourage theories that the abuse determined their future sexual orientations, a hypothesis which no scientific study has yet given credence to.
Calling to order the heterosexual norm
Nevertheless, the question of the sexual orientation of women victims of sexual violence is the subject of relatively little research, and this may be explained in part by the enduring taboo that surrounds the issue. Those studies that do exist offer several explanations for the over-exposure of lesbians and bisexuals to violence. “Beyond gender, it appears that sexual identification is linked to specific forms of violence, which more precisely concern women’s bodies,” wrote researchers Tania Lejbowicz and Mathieu Trachman in the chapter of the INED study “Violence and gender relations” dedicated to LGBT people.
Whereas in the case of heterosexual couples the closed doors of the conjugal relationship can become “the last bastion of masculine resistance to feminine autonomy” as Maryse Jaspard, a demographer specialised in socio-demographics, put it in a 2008 essay on domestic violence, the bodies of lesbians can represent for men the last bastion of indifference to their domination, and which thus must be conquered and brought back on the ‘right path’ at all costs and all means.
In a four-part radio documentary entitled ‘Raped: a story of domination’ aired last December by public broadcaster France Culture, one of those interviewed was Anne Tonglet, who in August 1974, together with her lesbian partner Araceli Castellano, was assaulted and raped by three men over a period of five hours while camping in a creek near the southern French city of Marseille. The two young Belgian women had reportedly earlier resisted the advances of one of the men. “It was obvious that it was a punitive expedition,” said Tonglet.
The men, when arrested, claimed the women were consenting, and initially they were not prosecuted for rape. “People said of us that we were no innocent little things,’ said Tonglet in a separate interview with Belgian state radio RTBF last year. “We were lesbians, on top of that, and nudists […] We had gone looking for it. We were the guilty ones.” It was only after a landmark legal battle by lawyers, led by the celebrated late militant feminist Gisèle Halimi, that the three men were sent for trial four years later, when one was found guilty of rape and the two others of attempted rape. They were handed jail sentences of, respectively, six and four years.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Reappropriating forbidden bodies
An object of hate as much as one of fantasy, the body of lesbians is also extremely sexualised. In July 2019, Google changed its algorithm in France for searches of “lesbian” – in French, “lesbienne” – because the results that came up were mostly pornographic, on sites created by men, and for men.
Even if the situation has evolved, lesbians and bisexual women still suffer from the consequences of such fantasising. “The masculine fantasy driven by pornography plays a very important part,” said Lucile Jomat, head of the French anti-homophobia association SOS Homophobie. “While a single woman is already sexualised, two women together are hyper-sexualised.”
“There is also this image that their sexuality is inexistant, that they simply engage in ‘preliminaries’, a term which means nothing,” Jomat added. “In porno films, women are seen waiting for a virile man who will finish the job. Whereas lesbians in reality live outside the hetero norm. They don’t have need of men in their lives.” Which is what costs them dearly. “Men have the need to re-appropriate their bodies because they can’t stand that these bodies are forbidden to them,” said Jomat.
In a preface to a 2015 report on lesphobia commissioned by SOS Homophobie, sociologist Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz observed that young lesbians account for a large number of those who suffer from aggressive behaviour in the public space because they lay claim to their liberty of movement within it. “Furthermore, the non-recognition of lesbianism as a form of sexuality in its own right leads to the fact that its presentation can be interpreted as a sign of availability, or as an outrageous attitude that must be contained,” she wrote. “Indifference, a refusal [or] a sharp rebuttal towards a masculine proposition regarded as ‘licit’ can appear as a tacit rupturing of a heterosexual contract.”
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Because “lesbians are not women” as was argued by Monique Wittig, the late, self-described radical lesbian and one of the founders of the women’s liberation movement, in her essay The Straight Mind, they represent both a target and a fantasy, and a danger. In her book Le Génie lesbien, French journalist, feminist and LGBT militant Alice Coffin writes: “Men no doubt very well perceive that lesbians are the biggest threat against patriarchy and the system of masculine domination. They know that their defeats have come, and will come, from blows delivered by lesbians.”
#MeToo lesbian: a misinformed debate
When a #MeTooGay movement emerged in France following an article by Matthieu Foucher published in September last year in the French edition of Vice, and which was followed by an outpouring of accounts of sexual abuse on social media (as reported by Mediapart, in French, here), the question was raised as to why there has not been a #MeTooLesbian movement, notably given the disproportionately greater number of sexual abuse victims among lesbian and bisexual women. But there are two very different realities here, and which are not addressed by the same semantic.
With #MeTooGay, the stories posted by men were only about sexual violence committed by other, and often older, men. The perpetrators of rape and other forms of sexual assault do not differ according to the gender of the victims. “The sexual violence reported in statistical studies by lesbians and bisexuals is above all committed by men,” commented INED researcher Tania Lejbowicz. “For a certain number, this concerns intra-family violence they were subjected to when young, and perpetrated by men members of the kinship.”
That well-documented observation does not mean that there are not women who commit sexual violence against other women. While specific data is not available, it is suggested by some that there is as much violence committed within lesbian couples as among heterosexual partners.
Sociologist Vanessa Watremez is one the few who have carried out research on the subject, which was published in 2012 (in French here). She wrote that violence “within lesbian relationships would appear to be around the same as in heterosexual relationships: between 25% and 33% of couples”. But she warned against “a series of biases and mistakes” that surround the subject. “These studies don’t use the same definition of violence,” she underlined. “Some limit it to physical violence, and others do not differentiate between the forms.” Among these is psychological violence.
“We realise that, according to whether the violence is committed within a female couple or an opposite-sex couple, it does not take the same form,” said Tania Lejbowicz, referring to the results of an ongoing study she is leading, based on two surveys, one of the general population (Virage en population générale) and the other specifically of the LGBT population (Virage LGBT). “The violence within a female couple is less often physical and sexual, and more often psychological. Also, this psychological violence proves to be of a lesser intensity than in couples of opposite sexes.”
Lejbowicz added that the available data requires careful contextualising. “What is necessary to note is that a large amount of the conjugal violence reported by lesbian and bisexual women was committed in a previous relationship with a person of the opposite sex,” she said.
Indeed, in a number of studies in which women who had cohabited or had occasional relationships with other women are asked about their experiences of conjugal violence, the context of the violence and the gender of the perpetrator is not detailed. In an essay published in 2009 by the University of Pennsylvania, entitled Views of Intimate Partner Violence in Same- and Opposite-Sex Relationships, the authors referred to the findings of a US Department of Justice’s National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) published in 2000. “NVAWS […] asked about assailant gender, which proved useful: Women who had lived with a female partner were substantially less likely to report abuse by a female intimate (11.4%) than opposite-sex cohabiting women reported abuse by a male intimate (20.3%),” the co-authors wrote. “Thus, the higher rate of victimization among women who had ever lived with a female intimate resulted from experiences of abuse at the hands of male, not female, intimates.”
A greater propensity to recognise violence
Other factors may explain the disproportionate numbers of victims of sexual violence among lesbian and bisexual women. For the section dedicated to the LGBT population in its “Violence and gender relations” study (Virage LGBT), the INED demographic studies institute created an online questionnaire which was accompanied by a campaign in association with LGBT organisations publicising its existence. “The problem is that it’s not necessarily representative of the population, in the sense that the respondents would be people already attentive [to the issue], even militant, who will be potentially more likely to report violence suffered,” said INED’s Tania Lejbowicz. But she added that among lesbian and bisexual women who answered the parallel questionnaire that was addressed to the general population (as opposed to the specific ‘Virage LGBT’ survey), there was a large number of them who reported having been victim of sexual abuse.
In their joint study published in 2013, sociologist Brigitte Lhomond and epidemiologist Marie-Josèphe Saurel-Cubizolles advanced another hypothesis for the disbalance. They underlined that lesbian and bisexual women were more likely to identify the violence, because of both their experiences and their social position as a discriminated minority. “It is possible that these women who had homosexual relationships are more inclined to recognise the aggression they suffered and to denounce it. Indeed, in the CSF [Contexte de la sexualité en France] survey, the vast majority of lesbians, [and] close to three-quarters of bisexual [women] and two thirds of [women] heterosexuals had already spoken about it before being questioned.”
INED researchers Mathieu Trachman and Tania Lejbowicz shared that view in their comments in the latest VIRAGE study. “In this perspective, homosexuality and bisexuality, like gender, are not only factors of vulnerability but are trajectories and specific experiences that can influence the ways in which one perceives and measures certain violent situations,” they wrote. Thus, LGBT people as a whole would appear to be potentially more inclined to denounce sexual violence whereas, as Trachman and Lejbowicz put it, “others see it as the ordinary course of things”.
The 1978 trial and convictions of the rapists who in 1974 assaulted lesbian couple Anne Tonglet and Araceli Castellano resulted, in 1980, in a legal reform in France which widened the criteria that defined the crime of rape. “Of course, this combat owes as much to heterosexual women as it does to lesbians. To all feminists,” comments Alice Coffin, writing about the case in her book Le Génie lesbien. “But there is nothing trivial about the fact that the women victims who for the first time found the courage to demand, over a period of four years, that their assailants be recognised as guilty of rape, were engaged in a story of lesbian love.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.