The Mazan case and the logic of masculinist protection underlying patriarchal legal systems

This article offers a feminist socio-legal analysis of the Mazan case—the 2024 trial of 51 men for the rape of Gisèle Pelicot in France—and the 2025 consent law reform it inspired. Combining feminist legal theory, critical legal analysis, and situated reflection, it examines how patriarchal societies and legal systems convert gendered violence into narratives of protection and progress. Drawing on Iris Marion Young’s analysis of the logic of masculinist protection, the article shows how law, politics, and public discourse surrounding the case reproduced the patriarchal bargain that casts men and the state as protectors while shielding them from accountability. Through analysis of the myth of the “good man”, judicial responses to sexual violence, hierarchies of victims, and the structural affinities between patriarchal and security logics, the article argues that the Mazan case offered only the illusion of remedy, confirming the patriarchal system it appeared to challenge.