At six million views, Oppressed Majority’s viral sensation reimagines gender violence

There is a harrowing moment in Eléonore Pourriat's Oppressed Majority (Majorité Opprimée) when Pierre - an ordinary guy living in a world where women are in charge - tells a mistrusting police inspector (a woman) of a sexual assault in which he says: "She pinched my testicles … then she took my penis in her mouth and bit it"?

"It is the complex of castration," Pourriat says. "The worst fright of men. I wanted it to be not so realistic but frightening."

The film follows Pierre in a world where women run around barechested, unopposed, piss in the alley, shout abuse at men, threaten them sexually - slowly creating a build-up to a climate of fear where men are under a constant cloud of oppression, where freedom seems to be forever conditional on the grace of a dominant gender... women.

Except that it's this reversal of roles that makes the stomach churn: after the initial cheeky observations of male cultural dominance over women, the brutal sexaul assault of Pierre, and the chilling reception of both police and his wife to his ordeal, suddenly turn this everyday story of violence into a horror story.