Women have very little idea of how much men hate them (Germaine Greer)

The absurdity of being asked to justify the need for feminism in a world where men in positions of extraordinary power were humiliating themselves for access to a convicted pedophile sex trafficker is almost hard to process. 

In that context, the question isn’t whether feminism went too far. It’s how anyone can still pretend it went far enough. It’s difficult to take critiques of feminism seriously in a world where male solidarity routinely outranks basic moral judgment. 

Liz Plank

 

One of the foundational acts of the Roman empire was the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that carried off the city’s effluent and made its glories possible. The Romans thought of it as sacred and gave it its own presiding deity, Cloacina.

The Epstein archive is the Cloaca Maxima of the contemporary American empire, a vast sewage system that underlies and enables the triumph of gilded misogyny. Epstein is its sacred monster, the presiding deity of the cult of rapacity to whom men of privilege sent up their supplications: let us prey.

The Epstein files (and we should remember that millions of documents are still being withheld, presumably to protect the guilty) are the underground waste disposal system of a very open and massive construct: the backlash against feminism. These are secret histories of a counter-revolution. Epstein and all those within his astonishingly expansive sphere of influence – bankers, speculators, political players, but also scientists, intellectuals and artists – are culture warriors. The war is being waged on women. What we see in the files is a coherent and concerted reaction by elite men against one of the great revolutions of history: the feminist revolt of the 1960s and 1970s.

Fintan O'Toole

 

It’s not all men. It’s not all billionaires. It’s not all power brokers. But it’s a lot of the ones that have been dictating a lot of the terms about the place. It’s not even that it’s a lot of men, it’s the fact that the slippery networking, covering-up, the leveraging and assumed exclusivity of what was a men’s club cult seems so normal, so familiar, so assumed for them all. Like it’s what they do all day, in their outside lives.

Sarah Wilson