How to Change the Social Conditions that Enable Predators like Jeffrey Epstein
The #MeToo movement fizzled soon after it helped expose Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes. #MeToo was a necessary sociopolitical reeducation for a society that had morphed from patriarchy to post-patriarchy without updating its psychosexual rules. After #MeToo taught the population the concept of consent and that, without consent, sex was a crime, The Miami Herald finally published Julia K. Brown’s investigation of Epstein’s pyramid scheme which traded sexual currency for social currency. The scandal ended with Jeffrey Epstein and Jean Luc Brunel, two elite pimps who ran sex trafficking rings for billionaires, dead in jailcells. Their fellow culprits purchased silence with NDAs that revictimized their victims by confirming the insurmountable power divide. The FBI suppressed Epstein’s confiscated tapes, and accountability was blocked. #MeToo was felled because it focused on the selective prosecution of the rich and famous rather than substantive societal changes. It became a footnote in the ongoing war of billionaires vs billionaires that dominates the post-patriarchy.
I believe the next step in our quest for justice must be to release willing signatories from their NDAs without penalty in exchange for public disclosure.
But the greater next step we can take as a society is to understand the overall context enabling our serial abusers so that we can demand comprehensive change.
Patriarchy was the result of the Agrarian Revolution, which organized humans in settlements run by militarized bureaucracies that enforced the mass reprogramming of mating habits around patrimony. Patriarchy confiscated the means of reproduction, erected a legal wall between mother and fetus, and forced men to buy the loot, selling women’s personhoods to assigned fathers and husbands whom it charged for access to their purchased wombs and legitimate heirs. By attaching identity and legacy to patrilineage, patriarchy kept men indebted and working so obediently that humans moved from a subsistence to a growth economy sustained by geographical borders, symbolic money, succession order, and the economic institution of slavery.
Post-patriarchy was the result of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization made slavery unnecessary. Multinational corporations made borders unnecessary. DNA tests made lifelong monogamy unnecessary. Economic migration made familial subordination of women unnecessary. Profit motivated the elites to fund research into the mystery that motivated patriarchy: paternity. Patriarchs thus funded the science that toppled patriarchy. Commercial products like birth control, IVF, sperm banks, egg donation released women from their reproductive imperative, released men from their obligation to god and nation, severed familial and community controls, and put all individuals to work. Patriarchy was superseded by a disorderly post-patriarchy, a meaningless simulation of patriarchy. Post-patriarchy replaced meaning with money. Post-patriarchy rescinded the right of one person to own the body of another because autonomy improved output and consumption. Its delegitimization of slavery reaffirmed the fertilized woman’s right to her reproductive body, and post-patriarchy made abortion free on demand. But it did not make motherhood free on demand, because the one system post-patriarchy kept sacrosanct was the patrigenerational wealth feed. money could buy the perks of patriarchy.
Eager to gain equal access into the masculinized economy, feminists showed disdain for motherhood and excluded maternity rights from our fight for reproductive rights. Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, exemplified the complicity of feminists who enabled abusers like Jeffrey Epstein and Hugh Hefner, both staunch supporters of reproductive rights, who used women as trophies, had protected sex with thousands of women, and exploited them for social and financial power. In a 2011 interview, Virginia Roberts Giuffre disclosed that Jeffrey Epstein wanted to install her in a mansion and pay her a monthly income “to bear one of his children,” and to look after that child, if she signed papers ensuring that “the child would be his and Ghislaine’s.” Through its erasure of mothers, post-patriarchy’s economy perpetuates rape culture.
When Virago Press published my first book in the 1990s, I was touted as a postfeminist and f/32 was called “the most dangerous novel ever written by a woman.” In the 2000s my work was discussed in academic papers with titles like, “Postfeminist Media Culture” and “Mediating third-wave feminism” and by panels titled, “Are We Post-Feminist Yet?” My postfeminist moniker alerted me that we had entered the post-patriarchy stage. In my next book, Satyricon USA, I showed the sexual state of the union as the result of an unprecedented change in human consciousness: “This is the first time in human history that we separated sex from procreation and it is bound to produce long-lasting evolutionary changes.” Our Pyrrhic victory of culture over nature confused us to the point of malfunction. The alarm I sounded was lost in the spectacle of the fall of the empire that my book described. I was called “the most authoritative and compelling writer of sex in the English language.” I learned to refrain from publishing my research in order to protect it. Twenty years and tens of thousands of interviews later, I have concluded that the way out of the existential risk of post-patriarchy is to expand the patri-based distribution of wealth so it includes mothers. After six millennia of dispossession, society needs to revaluate and reward motherwork separately from sexwork.
A mother income based on the recognition of mothering as a job recompensed at fair market value through voluntary contributions will standardize the substantive value of mothering, protect those most vulnerable, heal economic disparity, raise subreplacement fertility levels, enable us to renegotiate family units and pursue parenthood on its merits, and re-educate humans to value things differently than patriarchs did. I see no other overall solution to the current post-civilizational crisis.
