Off topic and pedantic question. I'm not a native english speaker so, please don't take this in any other way.

In the last sentence you said "hero to women". Is that the correct usage? Or should it be " heroine to women"?

Gisele Pelicot said she was reacting to remarks by Guillaume De Palma – one of the lawyers for the defence – who told the court that "there's rape and there's rape" in a possible attempt to back up some of the men's claim that they assumed they were participating in a libertine couple's sex game.

Don't feel too bad for them now.

I was talking to my wife about this yesterday, and ultimately this is a kink that’s dicey as fuck. There’s no way to play it 100% without running the risk of rape.

I mean, if you’re a guy who gets off on women being asleep/passed out when you have sex with them, knowing that they’ve given express consent kinda kills the vibe. But you can’t expect to have sex with someone who hasn’t given you express consent.

So in the end I fall down on having zero sympathy for the guys who claim they thought she was in on it. She’s either told you it’s cool or she hasn’t.

IANAL. <-- disclaimer.

Consent is not part of the definition of rape in France.

Currently it is defined as any sexual penetration act perpetrated by « violence, coercion, threat or surprise ». Court have also ruled that trickery falls under "surprise". So I can't tell you I'm a astronaut to get laid either (HIMYM was basically a TV show about a guy in a suit raping women). This was ruled during a case where a serial rapist used a model's picture on dating apps to invite woman to have sex in the dark with a blindfold at his place. Turned out he was a 60y old average dude and not Chris Hemsworth and the charge were initially dropped before reaching our higher level of court. (Yes that case was fucked up on too many level...)

There's currently a long standing debate in France, which predate that trial, to include consent as part of the legal definition and a commission has been mandated earlier in the year to study the issue. It's probably not going to happen for a while since we have other political issue at the moment and the right wingers currently clinging to power aren't exactly feminists.

The pro argument are relatively simple to imagine. Rape is when someone does sex stuff you don't want. So it seems to make perfect sense. That's what the Belgian law has and what the EU is pushing.

From what I understand from the people against it, it is more technical. In our legal system, you need to prove that a crime has been committed (innocent until proven guilty) but somehow they think it would shift to burden of proof to the defense because the only way to include it in our legal system would be to assume "non consent" by default and the accused would then have to prove consent.

The other anti argument is that absence of consent is impossible to prove and that the current definition is build to cover the case of non consent with provable definition.

There are probably as many lawyers on both side of the argument and as I said, I am not one of them, law is complicated I'm not qualified to have an opinion on what would be better.

Either way I'm just not really sure adding consent would change most of the outcomes as the main issue to convict is usually the lack of proof and witnesses and most cases ending up deadlocked by a "he said - she said" scenario.

From a purely legal standpoint "consent" isn't required in that case. It falls under "surprise".