The Epstein Sleight of Hand

Despite millions of released pages from the Epstein files, neither you nor I will ever know if Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile. More unsettlingly, obsessive public fixation on Epstein’s purported pedophilia eclipses the abuse he and his network inflicted on hundreds of young women and girls, many but not all of whom were under the jurisdictional age of consent. Circuiting the unconscionable conduct of Epstein and his network through accusations of pedophilia! and pedophile! does more to shore up fascism than to stop sexual violence, and it does nothing at all to support survivors of sexual violence. The more apt P-word for all this is patriarchy.

Pedo panics profoundly thwart a more socially and sexually just world, redirecting our attention from the social and economic inequalities that pave the way for men of means to sexually abuse girls and women and get away with it.

Insofar as pedophilia names a persistent sexual desire for children, it is a term that tells us about someone’s internal state of mind. Unlike “gay” or “straight,” there are not many people self-identifying as pedophiles; Epstein never did so. (There are, though, support groups for people who are sexually attracted to children but who refrain from acting on those desires.) Epstein, it appears, focused most but not all of his sexual predations on teenage girls, many of whom are indistinguishable from the ideal type marketed to men’s heterosexual desire in media, advertisements, and pornography.

Is the problem merely semantic, then? Is the real issue that Epstein might be more accurately described as an “ephebophile”—one who is attracted to postpubescent early teenagers—rather than a “pedophile,” which properly describes sexual attraction to prepubescent children? To the contrary: the what-kind-of-pervert-was-he game makes singular (as pathology) a problem that is systemic—namely, the sexual exploitation of vulnerable and impoverished girls and young women by rich men (and their women abettors). Epstein’s conduct looks less like a manifestation of pedophilia and more like a manifestation of capitalistic greed and men’s sense of entitlement. This combination bears more resemblance to heterosexuality as historically practiced than to child sexual abuse. (Lydia Polgreen and M. Gessen recently came close to this conclusion, too.)

In a New Yorker interview with David Remnick, Julie K. Brown, the journalist chiefly responsible for exposing Epstein’s crimes, said:

The police were . . . hearing that there were things happening at Epstein’s mansion . . . [but] every time they went to investigate, all the women who were coming and going who they saw on the street and stopped were of age. So they couldn’t find any evidence that a real crime was being committed.

But did the young women who were one day, one month, or one year over the legal age of consent suffer any less from the sexual activity that Epstein and other men forced upon or coerced out of them? It is helpful to draw comparisons between Epstein’s abuses and some of the recent revelations about Cesar Chavez, which allege that he sexually abused the same people from their girlhood into their young adulthood. This suggests that, for Chavez as for Epstein, the explanatory variable is not pedophilia but power.

In nearly every journalistic account of the terrible Epstein saga, some version of the phrase “girls and young women” is used in reference to the victims of Epstein’s abuse. The “and young women” have become an afterthought. As Remnick tellingly puts it, Epstein had “lots of girls underage and otherwise around him for the obvious purpose” (emphasis added). What about the otherwise? We skate by the traumas and injuries experienced by hundreds of young women when these reports elicit only our disgust at an apparently atypical desire for children. In one incident, a fifteen-year-old lied about her age and pretended to be eighteen. That lie does nothing to excuse Epstein’s behavior—behavior that entailed force, manipulation, coercion, rape, and violence against girls and women. If, according to advocacy organization RAINN, “69% of sexual assault victims are between the ages of 12–34,” then Epstein looks less like a monstrous outlier than an abusive man who had more means, and therefore more victims, than other men who assault girls and women. The most common denominator across Epstein’s victims is not age, but sex: female.

Several months and infinite Epstein scandals ago, podcast host Megyn Kelly got skewered for raising a similar-sounding objection to the one I have been raising here. “There’s a difference,” Kelly suggested, “between a fifteen-year-old and a five-year-old”—an undeniable observation for which CNN commentators cherished the opportunity to call the conservative pundit “stupid” and “ignorant.” Kelly was raked over the coals because it sounded as though she was saying that abusing teenagers is not as bad as abusing young children. But what Kelly’s comments nearly addressed but could not—perhaps because of her avowed war against wokeness and disdain for feminism—is that the difference between five and fifteen is a difference not of degree (bad is bad), but of kind (perverse, pedophilic desire versus nearly normative men’s heterosexual desire for girls and women in compromised circumstances). When Kelly offered that Epstein went for the “barely legal type,” she might have added that “teen” and “hentai” (Japanese animation featuring, mainly, childlike girls with outsize bodily proportions) are two of the most popular searches on Pornhub, domestically and globally.

What are some of the political costs—or put more cynically, political purposes—of cataloging Epstein as a pedophile, and thereby mislabeling his behavior as so outside the boundaries of our quotidian inequalities of gender, wealth, and their cross-contaminations?

In theGuardian, historian Joan Scott argues that part of why we so desperately need much-maligned gender studies is because feminism comprehends that Epstein’s abuses were practices of gendered hierarchy, as “predations of toxic masculinity” rather than as some biological inevitability of bearing a Y chromosome. True enough, but the other reason we so desperately need gender studies is because it is gender studies scholarship that so clearly reveals the fascistic political function of branding one’s opponents as child molesters and pedophiles.

Nothing directs disgust, hatred, and fantasies of extermination toward others more effectively than claiming those others sexually prey upon children. InWho’s Afraid of Gender?, philosopher Judith Butler shows that the specter of sexual and sexualized harm to children has been leveraged by authoritarian powers all over the world—in Argentina, Hungary, Russia, the United States—to crack down on immigrants, LGBT communities, gender studies scholars and departments, and political opponents.

Reconsider the virality of the conspiracy theory that Epstein was a ringleader for a Jewish–Zionist network of “satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” as Candace Owens outraged. Portraying Epstein primarily as a pedophile—and a billionaire pedophile at that—works in lockstep to condemn as sick and deranged the “Epstein class,” a condemnation that no doubt sounds like a criticism of wealth inequality, but just as equally sounds like condemnation of anyone who has a last name that rhymes with Epstein—in a word, Jews.

Labeling gay people, trans people, and Jews as pedophile child molesters is libelous. It’s also old news. In the case of calling Epstein, and maybe even Donald Trump, a pedophile, the accuracy of the appellation is beside the point. What is the point? By trafficking in pedophile-scare conspiracy politics, all of us who are rightly appalled by Epstein’s conduct and coverup unintentionally contribute to a vapid and vicious political discourse that dehumanizes—and therefore makes more disposable—any disliked people or groups, such as Jews, gays, immigrants, academics, and Democrats (remember Pizzagate?). When we dehumanize people we do not like or with whom we disagree by calling them pedophiles, monsters, and “domestic terrorists,” governments all the more easily arrogate authoritarian power to quash them.

Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell promised all sorts of things to girls and young women in order to sexually exploit them: money, modeling contracts, educational scholarships, and so on. There is no single solution to stop the Epsteins and the abetting Maxwells of the future from committing similar atrocities. But, certainly, one thing that would make poor and disadvantaged girls and young women less vulnerable to sexual exploitation is if they were less poor and disadvantaged—given more resources, more opportunities (the modeling industry isn’t so harmless, either), and more choices. These sorts of suggestions are “unsexy,” as philosopher Martha Nussbaum once wrote, but they would do a whole lot more for survivors than hurling self-satisfyingly all-caps accusations of “PEDO!” into the blaring echo chamber of social media.

_{Source image: Greg Schmigel / Unsplash}

Contributors

Joseph J. Fischel Joseph Fischel is author of Sodomy’s Solicitations: A Right to Queerness and Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice. He is Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale University.

Topics

• Culture & Politics

Tags

• child sexual abuse
• criminal legal system
• sex offenders
• sexual abuse
• women and the law