Writing personally, I both applauded Gisele Pelicot and felt that what she had to do should have been finished long ago. What has been wrong?
One clue is her own snappy phrase about shame changing sides. Unlike blame or guilt, shame does not have a clear side, including legally. We often welcome people being shameless - but that applies to Donald Trump as well as Gisele Pelicot. In Western capitalist societies shame often seems to disappear altogether rather than just change sides.
Then again, shame threatens to reappear big time in precisely the places where in the 1990s we thought there was going to be this new public space of free debate and thrashing out ideas. Wokery has begun to fade, but fear of a social media storm on any expression of controversial opinions remains, and it's the nasty thick skinned characters who won't care. Fear of hostility is not the same as shame, but that can turn into shame once it becomes regular practice. Gisele Pelicot has reminded us that freedom of speech for rape survivors is a recent achievement, but now that is needed for others. The old simple legal principle remains best: I should be free to say what I think or feel even if others are unsettled thereby, but I should not be free to threaten or intimidate them.