12. From Ghislaine Maxwell to The Tea Hack
Both show that everything is about regulating men's access to women, not keeping women safe
Convicted sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, serving a 20-year prison sentence in Florida, was just transferred to a lower-security federal prison camp in Texas. Her being moved follows a week of coverage about the FBI and the Department of Justice wanting to talk to her.
As this story developed last week, so did this one: The Tea, a viral app touted as a safe, women-only space where users can warn women about predatory men, was hacked, exposing more than 72,000 women's photos and 13,000 women's government-issued IDs. The hackers organized the breach on 4chan.
While these stories appear unrelated, they revolve around the same fact of life: in our societies, men are supposed to have default access to women and girls. To maintain that norm, women are generally only encouraged and taught to keep male predation to themselves or talk about it as individuals, with men's permission, and within patriarchal constraints. Breaking that rule provokes defensiveness, threats, panic, and disciplining. So, this week, The Tea users are being terrorized for self-segregating, sharing information, and seeking collective safety; Maxwell, by contrast, is being rewarded, as an individual, for her collaboration and facilitation of systems that protect men, especially powerful men.
Women are constantly finding new ways to connect and limit men’s access
As girls, we are socialized early to know that we have to keep ourselves safe from men who, by and large, continue to act with casual entitlement and impunity. We all know the breast grabbers, back rubbers, tongue kissers, and, a relatively recent flavor, the unsolicited-dick-pic portraitists.
Offline, our safety speech looks like gossip, whisper networks, and, even now, graffiti on bathroom walls, private methods traditionally limited by racial segregation, space, and materiality, but were and still are better than the alternative, which was nothing.
Online, these same habits have exponential reach and power, perhaps an unintended consequence of Silicon Valley's idea of "revolutionary tech." Gossip now looks like Excel spreadsheets, graffiti is list servs, chatty knitting circles are Facebook groups populated by tens of thousands of women. Apps expand women's networks and reach even further.
So The Tea, which hit No. 1 app on the Apple store last month, is a familiar tool because it automates one of our most long-standing survival strategies: talking among ourselves. It was inspired by Facebook's hundreds of city-based "Are We Dating the Same Guy?" (AWDTSG) groups. The London version, for instance, has more than 90,000 members. In essence, the app and the pages work like a scaled-up version of MeToo’s 2017 Shitty Media Men list. Like them, the SMML was not a legal document, a court, an investigative report, or used for formal criminal complaints. It was a way for women to identify patterns across our experiences and warn each other. Think of them as distributed intelligence and obstacle avoidance platforms, like Waze, but for dating.
There’s always backlash against these tools, mainly centered around the possible harms to the men being discussed. Just as with The Tea and the Facebook pages, for instance, the SMML triggered fear and outrage, with critics warning that it was a dangerous forms of mob justice. The woman believed to have created the list, Moira Donegan, was doxxed, sued, and subjected to years of legal harassment.
Today, the women who used The Tea now live with the fear of having their names and locations publicly revealed, and many, who were there because they had terrible experiences or were assaulted, have been traumatized all over again. Seeking punishment, especially criminalization, of men, however, is rarely the primary intent of women's exchanges; safety is. But what women primarily continue to get for trying to find ways to be safe from male violence is confirmation that they can’t expect society and systems to help.
Men's reputations are still more important than women’s safety
Due to deep-rooted societal structures, gender norms, and cultural beliefs, even possible threats to men’s reputations still take precedence over women’s safety. This is why so many men are worried and feel threatened by women talking amongst themselves. Many mothers of boys and men share their concerns.
But what is the nature of the perceived threat? How is it understood or expressed? It is a fear of reputational harm, of violence? Or is it the broader, less articulated threat posed by women autonomously restricting men’s default access?
Because men's default access to women is a systemic norm, women banding together to refuse that access is perceived automatically as hostile. It is a threat, but not so much to men as individuals as to the system in which they operate. Casting women's desire for safety (not even pursuit of legal action, accountability, or justice) as assault is a psychologically palliative way to justify men's "self-defense" arguments and outright irrationality (for example, equating the risk of false allegations of rape with the risk of rape). It’s an easy way to engage in dangerous false equivalences.
Take the man who developed The Tea and who recently boasted on X: "I'm the designer behind the mega-viral Tea dating app. If anyone wants to build the equivalent for men, my DMs are open."
What The Tea did for women, disrupt men's pervasive license to harm without consequence, has no gender reversed parallel. Saying there is is a frankly stupid and self-serving fantasy rooted in entitlement, callousness, and cultivated ignorance.
There is no “equivalent for men” of The Tea because women are not engaging in widespread multi-dimensional assaults on men, supported by social systems. There aren't Telegram chats where 70,000 women have gathered to teach each other how to drug and rape girls and women. There aren't games where women score for raping men, including their fathers and brothers. There aren’t mainstream mass media and porn industrial complexes that profitably eroticize women's denigration of and violence against men. There aren't sprawling subreddits, sex dolls, and robot brothels devoted to women’s fantasizing about men's humiliation, mutilation, or death. There aren't algorithms pushing millions of girls toward content celebrating dominance over male partners. Men aren’t covering their drinks, buying rape whistles, avoiding exercising outside, or paying extra to get home every night because they’ve had threatening or harmful run-ins with women they know and/or women they don’t know.
The designer's claim suggested a remedy not to men's vulnerability but to a trope: the "crazy ex-girlfriend" who is irrational, obsessive, or violent. Sure, some terrible women do terrible things, but while the trope mirrors the harms women experience, it does not accurately and statistically reflect the extremely lopsided dynamics of gendered and sexual harms. What it does do is reduce public awareness of the pervasive and diffuse crisis of male violence, representing it, instead, as a gender neutral matter and in terms of individual men's problems with quirky women and their emotional instability.
The state’s monopoly on male violence extends to men’s violence against women
The kind of gender-based violence that both the Epstein/Maxwell and The Tea stories revolve around is typically framed in terms of individual criminality or interpersonal harm, but it’s more accurate to understand what is happening as state-sponsored violence enacted through abandonment, re-traumatization, legal practices, and punishment.
The state holds a monopoly on violence, determining when, where, and against whom it is used. It’s a structure that operates through nested systems of domination to secure various forms of hierarchy. In the context of gender, the state is to men what men are to women: it grants them authority, protects their interests, and regulates their rights and access to resources. The state governs men as its primary citizens, and, in turn, many men, as the state initially conceived through slavery and couverture, expect to govern women, extracting labor, access, children, obedience, and silence.
For women, particularly women of color, men and the state have always acted as gatekeepers, deciding what we are allowed to say, do, ask for, or expect in the way of rights, safety, or justice. And just as many men won't respect women's boundaries unless compelled by other men, the state mainly intervenes to stop male violence not to protect women but to protect institutional or social orders, or specific men.
What does this look like?
Anyone arguing that women seeking safety endangers men en masse ignores society's baseline deputization of men to enjoy and enforce unchecked access to women's in homes, streets, schools, at work, and online.
Skip to the next section if you already know these facts by heart, but if not:
Pervasive street harassment that limits girls and women's freedom of assembly and movement, with little or no intervention or reporting.
High rates of stalking, with low rates of prosecution, and law enforcement that inconsistently classifies the crime.
Widespread doubt about women’s rape claims persist, reporting is low, and convictions are virtually non existent. Between 63% and 90% of sexual assaults go unreported, often due to fears of retaliation or the belief that police won't help, because they often don’t. Despite decades of rape kit activism, hundreds of thousands of rape kits remain untested nationally or, worse, are just destroyed. Nearly one in three women in the U.S. experiences intimate partner violence. Only about 1% of rapes result in felony convictions.
Protective systems routinely fail to safeguard girls and women, instead criminalizing them for survival, self-defense, and traumatic responses: 84% of incarcerated girls experienced family violence, and up to 90% of incarcerated women have endured emotional, physical, or sexual trauma.
Restraining orders are violated constantly and are particularly ineffective against serious abusers. Gun control laws still contain loopholes, most notably "boyfriend loopholes" that allow abusive ex-partners to access firearms. Meanwhile, reproductive coercion, not illegal in most states, coupled with anti-abortion laws, allows men to use threats of prosecution or forced pregnancy to trap and control women.
And all of these facts live within the context of a topic everyone would rather look away from: incestuous rape is endemic, primarily perpetrated by men against their daughters. One in three to four girls and one in five to seven boys are sexually abused, most by people within their families. Between 1980 and 2022, roughly 15 percent of American families experienced incest. While women do abuse children, 97–99% of perpetrators of sexual violence against girls and 60–80% of abusers of boys are men. Only 20 percent of incest victims ever name their rapists or turn to law enforcement. Only the very slimmest minority of perpetrators are ever named, formally charged, denied access to their victims, or penalized. Most jurisdictions, studies have revealed for years, never bring charges and rely on informal, religious, or social interventions that do little to protect children.
When girls and women defend themselves, resist, or retaliate, they often face further assaults and prosecution rather than protection. Women are far more likely to be denied self-defense and stand-your-ground claims that are commonly accepted for men. Women who kill abusive partners receive average sentences of 15 years, compared with 2–6 years for men who kill women partners. These outcomes are especially harsh for Black and Indigenous women and girls, whose resistance is more readily criminalized. They're made worse by low prosecution of white men as perpetrators, especially in cases involving women of different ethnicities.
Even when women are not incarcerated, they face severe penalties for naming or resisting abuse and violence in courtrooms. Mothers are more than twice as likely as fathers to lose custody of children when they file abuse complaints against a partner. Even when courts validate abuse allegations, mothers are more than three times more likely to lose custody than men to abusive partners.
Courts often fail to recognize abuse histories, and most jurisdictions lack dedicated legal frameworks to account for the dynamics of intimate abuse and the complex trauma of prolonged victimization.
The vast majority of incarcerated girls and women, more than 90%, have experienced some form of childhood abuse or sexual trauma. Most have experienced violent victimization by an intimate partner. This doesn’t mean women aren’t also capable of being abusive, but intimate partner violences simply isn’t a risk factor for men’s incarceration.
The criminalization of girl's’ and women’s survival and trauma fuels both intimate-violence-to and sexual-assault-to-prison pipelines, disproportionately filled with non-white girls and women. Here, too, people with disabilities, Black, Indigenous, and trans people who defend themselves from such violence have to navigate the serious risk of being criminalized instead of being offered care and protection.
When women of color report threats or violations, they are far less likely to be believed or have their claims investigated or prosecuted. They are, in fact, far more likely to be criminalized themselves. Furthermore, racial disparities like these are even more explicitly pronounced when perpetrators are white men, since the legal system continues to show leniency toward white men, especially in cases involving non-white victims. This is the same system that results
Rates of sexual assault and domestic assaults perpetrated by the police, in jails (an estimated 80K sexual assaults annually), and in the military (where victims are more likely to be dishonorably discharged than perpetrators) also illustrate the pervasiveness of intimate violence and failures to reduce or punish that violence. Police routinely disbelieve or shame women+ who report abuse, and officers may themselves perpetuate abuse or cover it up.
Even when women seek solutions outside of legal frameworks and strive for non-carceral approaches to safety (which we often do), we are either dismissed or penalized for stepping outside of frameworks that the state demands. Patriarchal, carceral logic punishes women for naming aggressors either way.
Financial and economic dependence on men regularly deters women, especially mothers, from seeking legal recourse or fleeing abusive situations. Legal systems frequently fail to register how a lack of housing, healthcare, or childcare add additional obstacles for women in systems that rely on the concept of “individual choice” in “neutral” proceedings. Ninety percent (90%) of homeless women experience severe physical or sexual abuse, typically in relation to a spouse, in tandem with financial control and coercion.
Today, Republican’s are actively trying to eliminate no fault divorce in order to return to the traditional, patriarchal standard of marriage being based on men maintaining control over women’s choices and bodies.
Lastly, to put a very fine point on all of this, the words “rapists’ parental rights” are strung together in a way we are expected to accept and treat as legitimate and coherent. They are used to give raping men lifelong access to and control over women they’ve violated. States vary wildly in their statutes regarding these rights, but coupled with proliferating anti-abortion laws, rapists' rights will almost increase, not decrease. Many anti-abortion states are giving private citizens, including, potentially, rapists and their family members, the right to sue anyone who gets and abortion or aids someone in obtaining an abortion.
Honestly, this is a short list and I’ve already gone on far too long. The facts above paint a vivid picture of how systems, the ones we are supposed to rely on, are structured to maintain and legitimize men’s access to women’s bodies, labor, and lives and to penalize them for resisting.
This isn’t protection but a regulated permission structure
Women are allowed to be safe, but only insofar as that safety doesn't impose excessively on men's access, movement, potential, or power. Neither laws nor mainstream social and religious norms are meant to protect women; they regulate women and regulate men's access to women. Most institutions and processes that we are supposed to trust and depend on help us primarily insofar as outcomes won’t disrupt the status quo of male entitlement. People may think the law, courtrooms, and the criminal justice are gender neutral, in fact, many think skewed against men, but they are deeply patriarchal. As the treatment of women above illustrates, these aren’t systems of prohibition but of permission that primarily manage men's differential treatment (racial disparities in sentencing for crimes, in mass incarceration, and sexual violation, for instance) and access to women.
Legal proceedings, rules of evidence and testimony, adversarial frameworks, and individualism in how the law works disproportionately benefit men, especially serial abusers and especially in cases of intimate violence.
Courts limit the admissibility of pattern evidence, shared experiences, or historical context, especially if perpetrators act over long periods of time. This atomizes and fragments survivors' narratives, ensuring that even widespread abuse remains legally invisible. Legal systems isolate women’s claims and make it relatively easy to disallow collective redress. Because gendered violence is so often intimate, it is rare to have witnesses. Women who might testify in support of one another or who want to file class actions are often denied the ability to.
Women's speech is also frequently preemptively framed as suspect and aggressive, the underlying assumption behind biases and courtroom proceedings that disadvantage rape victims. At the same time, however, individual men's reputations are treated as protected property and social capital, legally shielded and culturally defended. NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), for instance, work as tools of enforcement to silence women, protect men's reputations, and secure their institutional power. These legal mechanisms and systems continue to ignore the complexities of gendered, intimate, sexual, and reproductive violence, including financial abuse and coercive control.
What gets lost in all of this is the power of victims’ collective testimony and women's desire and ability to expose not just individual harms, but the patterns and systems that enable abusers.
The Larry Nassar case stands as a radical exception to this norm. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina allowed 156 women to deliver victim impact statements. Although not part of the trial's evidentiary phase, the women’s collective stories shifted public understanding and narrative, helping to make institutional reforms possible. But that case is rare. More often, even numerous credible accusations, backed by what might seem like irrefutable evidence, dissolve under legal scrutiny designed to isolate, discredit, and deny.
Men's permissions to access to children and women are revoked only when public exposure of malignant behavior becomes too great a risk to too many people; when lawsuits become too numerous to flagrantly ignore, when big money and major brands are at risk, or when too many powerful men are threatened. It’s often the case that this happens, ie the Epstein/Maxwell case, only because a woman or a group of women are dogged and relentless. Even then, revocation of permission is conditional and, more often than not, temporary.
These problems are not solved simply by putting women in positions of power — as police officers, prosecutors, or judges, because to achieve those positions, women typically have work within patriarchal constraints, using patriarchal practices. They have to apply precedent that has been overwhelmingly shaped around men's experiences and decided overwhelmingly by men in men’s interests. Systemic pressures on women law enforcers, women lawyers, and judges ultimately, therefore, tend to confirm unstated male norms under the guise of neutral law and justice.
Protection versus power: why survival strategies are not vigilantism
It's often the case that when women organize for our safety, we are accused of being vigilantes, but this reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what vigilantism is.
Vigilantes don't resist power; they enforce it. They step in when institutions fail to uphold the social order and act to restore it, not disrupt it. That's precisely what the Tea hackers, not the Tea users, were doing. The hackers acted not against institutional norms but in total alignment with them. Their goal was to threaten and discipline women who had the audacity to think they could gather without male oversight to impose limits on men's access and impunity. They retaliated against women breaking a cardinal rule: that women don't get to name men, judge men, or warn other women, certainly not in public, and not together.
The Tea Hackers are foot soldiers of technopatriarchy. The hack might seem like outlier digital activism undertaken by a small group of extremists, but they are the cultural heirs to people who burned witches, tarred and feathered “unchaste” women, attacked women who demanded voting rights, viciously punished Black and white women for crossing racial lines in love and solidarity, shaved women’s heads after wars, lobotomized women for even hinting at a desire for independence, bomb abortion clinics and threaten patients and escorts, continue to kill women to assert control and protect their honor.
Men “defending” themselves see their actions as forms of virtuous violence, moral corrections in the broader system in which regulating women is a critical structural necessity. Tech-enabled correction generally follows the same unimaginative gendertrolling scripts evident in the early doxxing and online hit lists of abortion clinic patients and doctors, the harassment of women out of gaming and tech, incidents of mass nonconsensual sexualization, targeted deep fakes, coordinated defamation projects, anti-rape disinformation campaigns, and DDoS and swatting attacks on women politicians and activists. Like The Fappening and Gamergate, two mass actions and notable turning points of online misogyny, The Tea hack wasn't just about privacy violations but putting women in their place and threatening people who refused to operate within conventional patriarchal comfort zones.
Women only gatherings are not “the reverse” of men-only spaces.
The Tea is just one way that women today are demonstrating their desire and ability to circumvent men’s default access. Women are seeking even the most simple and limited ability to be carefree in environments that emphasize safety, fun, and efficiency, and set aside constant vigilance.
This feeling, space, and brief respite from worry are basically what Uber began offering this week in its U.S. rollout of a feature titled “Woman Preferences,” which allows riders to choose to have a woman driver (all riders, which begs the question of the safety of the drivers.) The feature was first launched in Saudi Arabia in 2019 and is now available in more than 40 countries. It was developed in the context of Uber itself disclosing that between 2017 and 2022, its service resulted in thousands of sexual assaults in the U.S.
Even this most basic ability to ask for a driver less likely to rape you, has provoked men's defensiveness and resentment. Comments from aggrieved men range from fears of potential slippery slopes to claims of "reverse" discrimination. Ninety percent of victims of ride-share assaults are women assaulted by men. This feature only disadvantages one group of people: predatory men whose access to women is a little bit more limited.
The same is true of women-only clubs and nightlife events like The Blackout Room, House of Zim, Mona's Ladies Lounge, and Diva Paris. Lesbian and queer communities have long created safer spaces, but now straight cis women are also flocking to events and safe, joyful spaces free from the male gaze, harassment, and possibly being drugged and raped.
When men come together as men, it is often to perpetuate or build power, but when women do the same, it is to survive that exact power. Unlike male-only clubs and institutions, women-only events and platforms serve as temporary sanctuaries, providing safety and reprieve. They emerge out of women's experiences of violence, vulnerability, and threat. They are not based on women seeking dominance over men and a higher status, but a desire for peace.
Institutional male fraternity to maintain male dominance, on the other hand, continues to be actively pursued and achieved through male flight. It is already invisible to most people and embedded in many institutions, including religious hierarchies, boardrooms, legislatures, legal systems, technology, sports, and more. Across entire industries, male-only and extremely male-dominant leadership effectively constitutes a horizontal occupational sector, nationally and globally. Here, too, our experiences are atomized by design.
Women don't want to control or dominate men; we often want to be left alone, be safe, and have fun. Men are generally welcome if they can respect us and our desires and if they have set aside the uglier dimensions of hetero-masculinity and its entitlements. In my experience, these relatively simple wants, things men can often take for granted, are usually difficult for many men to appreciate. When many men think about women socializing or even just talking among themselves and conclude that hostility against men is the norm, it is because that is how men have experienced men's spaces acting on women.
Which, you’ll be glad to know, gets us to the end: Ghislaine Maxwell
Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein's exploited this permission system for decades. If the rule is that women are only supposed to name men with men's permission, guidance, and to men's benefit, then there is no better example than Ghislaine Maxwell. Her craven abuses and proximity to power, her critical role in facilitating and engaging vulnerable girls and women for Jeffrey Epstein and his multi-billion dollar enterprise, and her continued leverage within the justice system I've described here all illustrate the structural realities of male supremacy.
As Epstein’s collaborator and enabler, she made powerful men’s access to girls plausibly deniable, discreet, fun, and organized. She explicitly used her femininity to groom girls, hide risk, and to smooth over abuse by cloaking it in trustworthiness and the convincing pretense of safety through proxy mothering or sisterhood.
Maxwell has continuously operated as a male supremacist collaborator, for which she was long rewarded. So, it’s no surprise that she is again making herself useful to predatory men and their institutional interests. While survivors, hers and others, continue to fight doubt, be discredited, doxxed, sued, threatened, and incarcerated for acting against this system, she is, unbelievably, being granted some ease and being tapped as a holder of some vital unrevealed truth.
She’s now in a low security prison camp housing Theranos scammer Elizabeth Holmes and Jen Shah of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
Now that the FBI and DOJ are once again considering the possibility that she might be useful, she is being rewarded. She’s open to being interviewed, she says, but only in exchange for immunity from prosecution. She’s being allowed to and encouraged to speak a) as individual, b) with state permission, c) in men’s interests, and d) in ways that undermine the collective claims and safety of her victims and other victims.
No one is even pretending that her role in today’s political circus is about justice. Everyone understands it’s about leverage in a conversation with and about men with competing interests. She’s getting attention not as a vicious predator but as a potential partner to the state and a way for influential people to control an increasingly destabilizing political narrative. She is serving prosecutorial and political interests and using state-sanctioned channels to serve male institutional interests. (Mind you, despite all of the men involved, note that only she, a woman, is in jail for what was clearly a criminal enterprise involving hundreds of men raping children.)
Sure there are women involved in what is going on, but that doesn’t alter the structural machinery in which they operate. It doesn’t change the fact that no one involved at the core of these machinations even has to pretend they are remotely interested in girls’ or women's safety or in genuinely exposing or overthrowing the culture still empowering predatory men.
Talk less about the monsters, more about the machinery
The Tea hacker will probably never face consequences for their actions and today everyone is talking about the Epstein situation in terms of how it will play out politically.
I’m more interested in the opportunity both stories afford us to challenge people’s assumptions and to reframe conversations. It’s easy to demonize people like Epstein and Maxwell because they did genuinely horrific things, but they didn’t do them alone, and they got away with their abuses, were enriched by them, because the system we all live in enabled and rewarded them.
The most urgent conversations we can have right now are not just about them or terrible individual men. They are about the ways people who find cases like these horrible can connect them to their own lives and attitudes, their expectations, and behaviors.
I’d say talk to the boys and men in your life, but a whole lot of women are also immersed in beliefs that prioritize men and male supremacist systems. Ask them questions: why do you think women need to build safety infrastructures outside the law? What does it say about our world that women are more likely to be punished for warning each other than the people who hurt them are? Why do you think men respond to women’s boundaries with rage or ridicule? Can you see the problem with equating the risk of rape and the risk of being falsely accused? Do you believe people when they talk about abuse? How do you benefit from their silence? Do you understand why going to the police isn’t a viable option or solution? Do you give boys and men space to admit to their victimization?
These aren’t rhetorical questions but starting points for understanding change and accountability.
Women will never stop talking to each other, no matter how hard patriarchal men and society try to make them. If men in particular are serious about listening to women and supporting girls and women in their lives, if they want to be part of building something better, they’ll stop demanding their own emotional protection in the face women’s lives and fears and start confronting the attitudes and violence, particularly among men alone, that makes our speaking out, among ourselves or publicly, so necessary.
The ideas I’ve written about here are part of my upcoming book, All We Want is Everything, out in November. If you’ve found them useful and of further interest, please check it out. Preorders really help authors and are much appreciated!