22. Epstein: Why are We Talking about “Elite Complicity” and not Male Supremacy?

Understanding the engine is the only way to stop this machine

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Content warning: If you clicked on this post then you already know that there is no avoiding the truly terrible. Please take good care of yourself and skip over any portions that you need to. I tried to create blocks to indicate graphic descriptions.

Also, I know my posts are long, so I thought I’d put a TOC here in case you want to jump to any particular point.

• Was it corruption or a social contract or are they the same thing?

• The familiarity of contempt and dismissal.

• The banality of Epstein’s violations.

• Epstein’s status and lifestyle are aspirational for tens of millions of men.

• Complicit women don’t mean male supremacy isn’t a fact.

• The double standards and forgetting.

• What now?

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(Apologies for double email, was having a backend problem with drafts.)

Women and men are having remarkably different responses to ongoing Epstein revelations. For many men, there is episodic moral outrage; for many women, there is the feeling of nonstop emotional distress of sadness, anxiety, and rage.

Women are reliving memories of harassment, sexism, and assault. Women are often reliving our memories of harassment, sexism, and assault, thinking about our children’s vulnerabilities, seeing ourselves in the position of Epstein’s victims. Meanwhile, men in general aren’t only not feeling overwhelmed, but focusing on legal technicalities, procedural issues, class analysis, and political framing.

What it really comes down to though, is that men are consuming information while women are processing the knowledge of how fungible and extraneous we are. How easily used and thrown away.

Men who have been sexually or physically abused as children more typically respond as women do, but most men simply aren’t as upset as women because, unpalatable for many, I know, the same systems that enabled Epstein et al are buffering men psychologically, emotionally, and physically today.

Everyone is reaching for language and analytical paradigms that can explain what happened, using vocabulary that mainly describes the violence rather than the core beliefs driving it.

Pedophilia is both a pathology and a crime, but focusing on it suggests that Epstein represents an exceptional but temporary rupture, one that began with monsters and will end in their containment. Patriarchy describes the institutional male dominance through identity and family formations, religious hierarchies, and political systems, but it, too, explains “how” rather than “why.”

Broligarchy is a variant that identifies an elite subset of men. It sharpens more widespread critiques of global elites that currently dominate the conversations I’m hearing. These are about class warfare, unregulated capitalism, and systemic corruption, all vital to understanding how wealth buys access and impunity, but they describe the how not, other than some vague “power corrupts,” the why. “Elites!” unhelpfully erase the centrality of gender and race in Epstein’s network and suggest that anyone with wealth and elite status would behave the way Epstein and others did.

None of these answers the important question posed, in relation to the Epstein Files, by Representative Ro Khanna: “We must ask ourselves how we have produced an elite that is so immature, reckless, and arrogant.”

It is possible to hold several ideas at once—that Epstein was a predator protected by a ruling class and that this ruling class is structurally and systemically male supremacist. It is possible to move from looking at symptoms to looking causes.

To answer Khanna’s question, you have to center male supremacy.

Was it corruption or a social contract, or are they the same thing?

What is the nature of the Epstein network’s elite corruption exactly? That people knew what he was doing and said nothing? That they continued to affiliate with him regardless of what they knew? That some of them took money from him and perhaps participated in his crimes?

Epstein didn’t thrive because so many wealthy and prominent people participated in acts of extreme depravity, but because of they were silent about his ‘open secret.” There is no complicity that isn’t anchored to the casual and “fun” background of sexism, misogyny, and racism of his milieu or to the ease with which he could leverage legal, tax, and social systems.

He wasn’t only a “pedophile” or a member of the “elite”; he was the ultimate beneficiary of systems designed to protect him, as a wealthy, white, man.

He didn’t, for instance, break as many laws as he used in his favor: property rights, privacy rights, the shield of tax-exempt philanthropies, the silencing power of contract law, and the deference disproportionately afforded to “rational” men. He took advantage of laudable philanthropy to build institutional proximities that burnished his reputation and maintained his image as a smart, rational person entitled to respect, deference, and legal protections. Those legal protections are grounded in traditions that continue, today, to prioritize men’s reputations and privacy above women’s safety or testimonies. This is what the current administration, for instance, does: redacts the names and images of men involved but exposes those of Epstein’s victims.

Epstein didn’t break the social contract; he just perfected it. He was the beneficiary of a pact and a legal system that still typically values an elite white man’s privacy over a child’s personhood, his reputation over a woman’s reality.

From its inception, our legal system has valued men’s privacy, particularly white men’s, over others’ personhood. In 1622, for example, Virginia overturned a core aspect of the English legal tradition: the patriarchal principle of children’s lineage. This law turned the sexual violation of Black women into a financial instrument and Black children into economic assets. Epstein also treated people and sexual violence as capital investments.

Many people today, for instance, are expressing a particular outrage about references to “torture” in the files. Why is rape not considered torture? Because we are socialized to think of sexual violence in terms of private life and individual crimes, as aberrations rather than a structural constant that enjoys pervasive institutional protection. In legal and social definitions, torture is viewed as an instrument of the State, an administrative act. By contrast, rape has been historically relegated to the private sphere, categorized as a crime of passion, by a lack of self-control, a misunderstanding, and a “personal” violation.

The operating factor is the role and intent of the perpetrator, not the status or suffering of the tortured person. This division protects what is practically and effectively the right to rape through the jurisdictional immunity of private enclaves, you know…bedrooms, a ranch, or a private island. This sequestering of crimes into the private sphere works in much the same way that diplomatic immunity does. Epstein legally created private preserves where he exercised sovereignty.

Given the excessively low rates of penalty for incest, stalking, rape, and other forms of sexual violence, it’s clear that Epstein’s elite status didn’t mean he was unique in his protection; it just meant that he possessed the ability to scale that protection and extend it to others. Today, his New Mexico ranch still hasn’t been searched by law enforcement. This is the place where he wanted to keep 20 women so that he could “seed the human race” with his superior DNA. (Peter Nygard, who was charged with abusing and trafficking Black girls and women on an island estate in the Bahamas, was obsessed with their stem cells.)

All of these legal tools, mainstream beliefs, and systems allowed Epstein to build a web of indebtedness, the reach of which we have yet to understand. That indebtedness is how male supremacy is maintained.

The familiarity of the contempt and dismissal.

The files are replete with respected and intelligent men—professors, doctors, lawyers, philosophers, politicians, bankers— objectifying girls and women as they mocked their intellects. Epstein could consistently rely on being taken seriously by Serious People, on the passive shrugging, easy laughter, and silence when women were dismissed, denigrated, or excluded as equals and peers. The majority of these people didn’t rape children, but they did openly and breezily express contempt for women and for the idea that they could be held accountable to them.

These quotes come from the scientists, professors, economists, politicians, royals, and billionaires found in the Epstein files:

“Wrinkly old hag... Just because she is ri=h [sic] she thinks she can talk down to everyone … nasty cunt … bags of cottage cheese in her pants.” “As long as you bring your harem!” “She describes being kept in a stall like an animal, told that having sex with strange men will make her less of an animal.” “Desperate time... running out of girls.” “JE didn’t want Spanish or dark girl... not dark.” “Wanted make sure under 18 b/c he wasn’t believing them... messed up by bringing more older girls.” “Commemorate her performance in a school play.” “Only 13 days to go, buddy!!!!! — where and when’s the party?” “I have a friend who I think you might enjoy having dinner with... She 26, russian, clever beautiful, trustworthy.” “Locker room talk... it’s hypocritical to pretend that men and women don’t do it.” ”They asked if she could bring younger girls... they have to look young at least.” “Pussy is, indeed, low carb.” “Women are on the upswing to power... Their methods I might not agree with but I recognize the weapons are limited.” “Is that a sop because of all the depravity you’ve done against young women? Your new sop is that women’s thinking is the future?” “They exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries... arrange food... grace a table... provide sex.” “Pro or civilian?” “He likes beautiful women... many of them on the younger side.” “He knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” “I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people’ ... he stole her.” “They asked if she could bring younger girls... they have to look young at least.” “Your littlest girl was a little naughty.” “I loved the torture video.” “I ordered sweet young coconuts from Thailand for you, and they just arrived...just so you don’t have to drink juices from old hairy things.”

Every single woman I know can recall moments in her life when she first heard men say things like these and nothing happened. The times that, faced with sexism, racism, or sexual threat, she experienced the complicity of people and institutions who purportedly cared for her, their quietly abandoning her to keep the peace, not cause a fuss, not take what was happening too seriously. Every one has stories of widespread silence in the face of the casual insults, sexist jokes, harassment, men expressing disdain for women. We all saw the nation vote for one openly boasting about sexual predation.

The sexism, racism, and silence go hand-in-hand with tolerance for sexual violations, well-understood ways to communicate status, belonging, and power. This is true whether we are talking about Epstein, rapes related to mass incarceration, Dominique Pelicot, or the millions producing and sharing non-consensual intimate images and deepfakes of women.

Epstein is dead and gone, people are resigning or being investigated, but all of this remains true.

If everyday complicity weren’t rife and if people didn’t give sexism and misogynoir a pass, then “grab them by the pussy” would have brought an immediate end to Trump’s aspirations and we could all be talking about the 11th season of Sense8, but here we are.

The banality of Epstein’s violations.

Epstein’s empire is a synecdoche, the salient features of which — providing men access to women, male entitlement, institutional protection, powerful fraternal networks, and pacts of mutually assured destruction—replicate themselves at every level of society.

Every day, millions of women and children are subject to the coercion, control, and violence exercised by Epstein. Legal categories and softening euphemisms disaggregate the facts of people sexually abusing and exploiting tens of millions of children and women, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening right under everyone’s noses. “Lolita Express” sits alongside incest, college “red zones,” “dating violence,’ forced and legal child marriage, human trafficking, the rise of men choking women during sex, “sex tourism,” legalized marital rape, and violent pornography. Sometimes victims are girls and women, vulnerable boys, incarcerated men, or trafficked poor ones. Women and girls, however, account for 99% of people trafficked for sex, and the majority of people married or raped as children, assaulted on campuses, and depicted in punishing sexualized content.

This begs the question: what is the actual nature of people’s shock? The Epstein revelations are horrific, but as 𝙅𝙤 ⚢📖🏳️‍🌈 expertly explained last week, they are not, in fact, rare or surprising. Even among members of the “ruling class.”

Status building and fraternal bonding based on hurting and violating children and women is hardly limited to Epstein. This violence is so ordinary and global that it isn’t even considered newsworthy on most days. just background noise, mainly treated as private, unchangeable, minor tragedy. Media typically require spectacles, like the Pelicot trial or the Epstein case, to bring cases to light. This begs the question: It’s hard to fathom the public being actually shocked because of evidence that children were harmed or because survivors were apparently speaking the truth.

Both statistics about child abuse and rape, and the years during which most people ignored women victims’ testimonies, prove that society has a high tolerance for both and is inclined to protect rapists, not those assaulted. The epistemic injustices of our systems all exist outside of Epstein. Any sexual assault victim understands control of narratives, men’s presumption of innocence, the privileging of higher-status people’s reputations, and the institutional and legal undermining of victims.

Take this New York Times article about the “staggering complicity” of the world’s elite. The author bookends a quote from an Epstein exchange — “Thank you for a fun night…your littlest girl was a little naughty.” — with “If anything, the raft of new details has spiraled into feverish new speculation with little or no factual basis,” and, “Lacking context, such messages are subject to speculation about their meaning and provide fresh opportunities for those intent on drawing attention to themselves and their views.” Like victims? We do have context, if you believe girls and women.

As Kate Manne writes, conspiracy theories continue to undermine victims. But here is an influential mainstream publication dismissing them almost completely. Is their testimony speculation with little or no factual basis? Sometimes when people say, “littlest girl,” they mean “littlest girl.” Do we in the US not have enough context yet? Can we not make reasonable assumptions or, better yet, actually trust women who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by describing what happened to them? After all, we now, to many people’s chagrin, have corroborating evidence.

People’s shock seems to stem not only from graphic details, but also from the almost total inability to deny what happened any longer. Everyone is being forced to look at the truth that so many prominent men, as well as the institutions that serve as our social, political, and symbolic trustees of authority, were involved and did nothing. And I know women were involved (see more below), but women make up a relatively small number of named participants (in addition to Maxwell, the other three most commonly named are two royals and a lawyer). Maxwell was Epstein’s collaborator in crime, but the others served mainly as functionaries and social facilitators.

How is it possible that so many “elites,” so many, many men and institutions were complicit? The reasons a) Epstein could tap into elite networks, b) people and institutions absorbed his money and laundered his reputation, c) so many influential people were his friends, even after he was found guilty of raping children, d) it took so long to prosecute him are the same: because what happens to women didn’t matter to the men who knew him and wanted to be with him.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The people and institutions named as complicit are invested in and benefit from systems that historically excluded women from leadership positions or made it hard for them to achieve or maintain them. For women to effect institutional change, we need critical mass and supermajorities, but we still rarely achieve either. It’s not incidental that many of the institutions named in the Epstein Files became #MeToo battlegrounds. It’s also no random coincidence that Epstein’s network of “anti-woke” “iconoclasts” was dedicated, as the Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto explains, to defeating this movement.

“Elite complicity” can’t be divorced from the fact that at so many of the Epstein-invested institutions women continue to face discrimination and are grossly underrepresented in influential positions. In many of these spaces, when women doexert authority in ways men are freer to, the result is punishment and greaterexclusion. This matters because men don’t generally hold other men accountable for sexual threat, harassment, and violence. They are more likely than women to look away if it serves their own interests. In 2019, for instance, more than 60 of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) women faculty members signed a protest letter because “the school” had accepted donations, and hidden much of the fact, from a convicted sex offender, a known child rapist.

Epstein’s lifestyle is aspirational for tens of millions of men.

“Epstein,” Virginia Guiffre wrote before dying, “liked to tell friends that women were merely ‘a life-support system for a vagina.’”

Isn’t this pretty much the central thesis of Manosphere influencers rebranding women’s dehumanization as evopsych or “traditional values,” or whatever other way they can find to disdain women and reduce them to biological, sexual, and reproductive tools for men?

There’s a straight line from “locker room talk” to Epstein’s emails to the Internet’s red pilling. Compare the quotes that come from the Epstein files to those from Manosphere influencers with hundreds of millions of followers:

“Women are the property of men. They are his property. And a man has the right to do whatever he wants with his property.” “If you’re a man of high value, you should have multiple women... They are just there to provide you with energy and sex. They are a resource. “If you don’t own her, someone else does. Feminism is just the state trying to take away a man’s property rights over his household.” All of these are from Andrew Tate. Nick Fuentes? “I think women are basically children. They’re like dogs. They’re not really people in the same way men are.” “Women are essentially decoration. They are there to look beautiful and keep their mouths shut while the men run the world.” “Women want to be raped.” Or, here’s Fresh and Fit: Women don’t have a soul. They are merely biological machines designed to seek out the strongest male and extract resources.” “We need to stop treating women like they are our equals. They are a utility. A high-value man uses that utility to build his empire.” Rollo Tomassi (The Rational Male):“The only thing a woman brings to the table is her youth and her fertility. Once those are gone, she is a depreciating asset with no value.”

For an unfathomable number of men, Epstein’s lifestyle is the goal. Epstein’s wealth, status, and “freedom” to do as he pleased are the aspirational peak of today’s male supremacist backlash. They want the same access and impunity that Epstein perfected and offered others: a world that, for “winners,” is one without the word “No.” The entire premise of Manosphere influencer culture is that consent, free and independent women, and feminism in particular, hurt men by restricting their right to natural dominance.

Boys and men in search of self-improvement and dating tips end up gathering in spaces where they are learning how to “succeed” by performing masculinity as competition, performance, and domination of others, especially women. Even though Manosphere nodes are diverse, men are consistently learning that masculinity requires women’s submission.

The higher you rise in Manosphere status, the less the rules of consent and equality are supposed to apply to you. Many of the loudest voices openly talk about sexual violence as a masculine status right and portray civil rights and legal accountability as feminist, DEI attacks on men, their authority, and “tradition.”

Calling Epstein et al outliers and monsters ignores the continuum of belief and desire that runs from their abuses to the seemingly countless digital forums where men are to fraternize over denigrating and hurting women.

Men bonding over the violation of others matters in a way that “elite corruption” simply ignores. Epstein et al gathered to do this. But so do tens of millions of men, every day. Two hundred and sixty thousand (260,000) South Korean men joinedthe “Nth Room,” 70,000 found their way to a Telegram rape tips forum, and at least 32,000 joined Italy’s Mia Mogli group. On MaskPark, 900K+ Chinese men uploaded non-consensual images of their wives, ex-girlfriends, daughters, and even mothers, often accompanied by doxing information. In less than nine days, men using Grok created 4.4 million deepfake images, 41 percent of which were nonconsensual sexualized images of women; 23,000 appear to depict children. Rapelay and No Mercy were games designed to let players stalk and “rape” women, including, as an option, mothers and sisters. Men are already using smart glasses to covertly film women and share their pictures.

I’m not saying that all of these men want to do what Epstein did to children, but it is notable that, today, conversations about men being attracted to and “having sex” with children are no longer restricted to the dark web; they’ve migrated into intel forums, the Manosphere, and radical libertarian circles where people sanitize child rape in the language of “biological “realism,” personal liberty, and anti-feminism. Human beings can build belonging and community around anything.

Online, users are doing what they’re psychologically and culturally incentivized to do, but the entire economic engine of the internet is built on principles of non-consent, initiated in products, and now supercharged by AI, designed to profit from sexual threat at scale. Never forget that Facebook started with Facemash or that one of the reasons YouTube was launched was to share video of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe failure.” (If you haven’t yet, give Laura Bates’ Age of Sexism a read for an in-depth discussion of this.)

It’s important to note that, even if male supremacist ideals appeal to men across demographic groups, even though the Manosphere is diverse and expanding globally, the promise being made to boys and men is never only about wealth/masculinity, but also whiteness. Access to white femininity, especially when packaged in a childlike aesthetic, is a potent form of status-signaling in Epstein’s world, the Manosphere, and our larger cultures and mediascapes. It is a visual, embodied shorthand for biological “superiority,” purity, and “quality.” “JE,” one message reads, “didn’t want dark or Spanish girl, not dark.” To quote another message, from the former chief executive of Barclays describing a 2014 Super Bowl ad, “It’s all about hip black in hip cars with white women.” This is why “premium” victims were recruited from Eastern Europe. It’s also why American culture is so heavily invested in physically adultifying girls and infantilizing women. Epstein extracted these ideals from the bodies of girls and women and used them to burnish his and others’ feelings of worthiness and power.

Centering elite power without explaining how “elite” and “male,” the way “Man” and “Whiteness,” are co-constituted (see Sylvia Wynter) turns sexual threat and violation, even the rape of children, into secondary effects of wealth and greed, instead of the defining mechanism of supremacist domination that they are.

This is what María Lugones long ago identified as the logic of elimination deep within the coloniality of gender. To the trustees of authority that Epstein cultivated, children and women were not people to be protected, but territory to be used and abandoned. They were categorically outside of our social contract long before their abuse even began. This is why of it all.

Women’s complicity doesn’t mean male supremacy isn’t a fact.

Which brings us to the women who prop up this power. People are pointing out that women —as friends, acquaintances, girlfriends, lawyers, retainers—were present and knew what was happening, as if to say, “It’s not only men! Women are evil, too.” Women were Epstein’s accomplices, bankers, lawyers, and friends.

Whether as mothers, teachers, wives, and community leaders or as sex procurers, legal advocates, and social facilitators, women are teachers of patriarchal norms and cultivators of supremacist identities and relationships. As individuals, they often facilitate, normalize, and profit from white supremacy and male supremacy, from the abuse of children and other women. Many don’t just trade out of self-interest but gladly wield power against others by actively legitimizing power. We all know these women.

Like men, though, women are also not a monolith but are sorted to maintain shifting gradients of power between men. Male supremacy establishes the structural framework of dominion, while white supremacy does the sorting, tiering people within it. In male supremacy, for instance, men are not universally granted male entitlement but ranked in hierarchies that concentrate power among a relative few. In the US, this means that mainly white, cis, publicly heterosexual men sit at the top of a system that abjures homosexuality and transness and disparately criminalizes Black and Brown men.

Women are also ranked by race, class, and ethnicity, sexual and gender identity, and, depending on where they stand, protected or abandoned. Each tier is offered a different deal. White women and wealthy women, for instance, get provisional power and protection if they play along. The Miss Annes, Karens, and Noems. Sitting on top of, as Dr Stacey Patton points out, the list of the scariest of them all, Pam Bondi. They are the nuns, the board members, the book banners, the reputational laundresses, the wellness and ‘trad’ wife influencers, and the cool-girls and pick-me girls of the patriarchy. The very supremacist boundaries they enforce, however, will ultimately, always, exclude them.

Black and Brown women are tiered for exploitation, disposal, and elimination. Today, for example, while Black people make up approximately 14.4% of the U.S. population, Black women and girls account for more than 36% of missing persons. Black girls are four times more likely to “go missing” than their white counterparts. The same sorting mechanism renders Indigenous girls and women even more invisible. More than 4 in 5 Indigenous women experienced violence in their lifetime, 56 % sexual violence. On some reservations and in certain counties, Indigenous women are murdered at rates more than 10 times the national average. The cultural doubt and carelessness applied to all women becomes an absolute erasure for women of color. And from our society? Crickets.

Racial sorting and its wider eugenic agenda set the tone for status-seeking men’s desire. The more socially and culturally “innocent” a girl and “protected” a woman, the higher the status of the men who can violate them and remain untouched. This was also evident in the pattern of Harvey Weinstein’s assaults.

Complicit and entitled women are as morally culpable as men for their transgressions, but women negotiating a male supremacist world to secure proximity to power are not the same as men, even within a diverse class, structurally benefiting to perpetuate male dominance.

Women’s protection and immunity are always fragile and conditional. This is why Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace, theoretically powerful women at the top of the MAGA world, are no longer employed. The minute they stepped out of their roles as lackeys and thought they could hold powerful men accountable or exercise authority in any agentic way, they were traitors and ousted.

Likewise, Ghislaine Maxwell. She is a truly despicable person, but also a pitch-perfect example of the contingent protection granted to white women for being compliant and protecting men’s power. Even her central role was never going to generate outcomes that would ultimately protect or benefit her or other women. Despite the growing list of men in Epstein’s orbit and the evidence of gruesome crimes, she is also the only person currently in jail.

The double standards and forgetting.

Never let anyone tell you that the presence of women negates the fact of male supremacy.

Women aren’t magical creatures who can operate outside human culture and society. Of course, women are complicit in the systems we live in. Expecting women to “be better,” as a matter of biological essentialism, is part of the problem itself.

Every election since 2016, people have bemoaned that so many non-Black women voted for Donald Trump while more or less ignoring the fact that more than half of men, more in 2024 than in previous years, did. Why hold men and women to a different standard, especially when a central problem for women, society, and democracy is men not holding other men accountable?

Women are held to a higher moral standard because they are expected to act in their own individual self-interests and to be caretakers for other women. When they vote for a candidate who displays contempt for them, it’s a “betrayal” of some biological essence. But, under male supremacy voting for the person whom the men around them vote for, the one who is promising them other avenues of status and power (like race and citizenship) is a better bet. So, for men, is voting for an agenda dedicated to restoring racialized male power. These incentives are how caring about a man boasting about sexual assault is dismissed as an unpleasant distraction instead of a disqualifying core ideology.

The Epstein case is gruesome, but if anyone still needs proof of male supremacy expressed through sexual abuse and maintained by institutional tolerance for sexual violation, it already exists in spades: thousands of protected raping Catholic priests, the insulated sexual abusers of the Southern Baptist Convention, decades of Boy Scout leaders hurting the children in their charge, sexually predatory UN peacekeepers “helping” in Haiti, the child-trading men of Rotherham, the rape camps of Darfur. So many doctors and health care workers have sexually assaulted women in their care that there’s a subgenre: medical sexual abuse. The Pelicot case? There are now similar cases being prosecuted in England, Germany, and Sweden. Then, of course, there are the prisons, the detention centers, the orphanages, the military, on college campuses, during wars. Then there are the names: Dominique Pelicot, Larry Nassar, R. Kelly, Jerry Sandusky, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, George Tyndall, Roger Ailes, Jimmy Savile, Sean Combs, Peter Nygård, Jean-Luc Brunel, and many more. These are just the ones I can name off-hand.

People’s shock at “elite complicity” and what it represents hasn’t gone nearly far enough.

What now?

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that while the list of men who could have and should have stopped Epstein continues to expand, the reason we are even here today is because of one remarkably brave, angry, and dogged woman, Julie k Brown.

The reason so many women are speechless with rage today is that they know that, most of the time, men’s homosociality trumps women’s safety or equality, trumps basic human decency. The Epstein files describe a trajectory that we see every day when it comes to tolerance for sexism, racism, misogyny, and sexual violence: the cultural and institutionalized slide from conformity to complicity to corruption to criminality.

The majority of men in the world are not engaging in overtly male supremacist spaces or behaviors, but they also are not recognizing, confronting, or trying to support movements to dismantle them. Many, in fact, in increasing numbers every day, are angry about women’s independence, increased status, and success.

The terms of Khanna’s question are ultimately about aggrieved masculine entitlement. “Immature” and “reckless” might sound like personality flaws that all of us can grapple with, but they reflect a specific power dynamic in which men respond with anger, resentment, and defensive hostility when the privileges they were socialized to view as a masculine birthright are challenged or denied.

This entitlement is the psychological glue that held Epstein’s network together. It is the connective tissue between Epstein, the Manosphere, and much of our everyday lives. This entitlement, particularly expressed through sexual threat, is why women are forced to do “safety work,” the invisible, constant, and unpaid chore, assigned to us at birth, of maneuvering around a world that considers men central and treats us, in different degrees to be sure, as public resources.

If we continue to discuss Epstein as an anomaly or a sign of neutered ‘elite’ excess, we are essentially signing onto the promise of the next, rote episode of cruelty and exploitation.

I, too, am struggling with the world that rewarded Epstein and in which, today, a frightening percentage of men are again choosing to build fellowship by mutually endorsing the violation of women and girls, ideally, in their minds, without limits.

By naming Male Supremacy, we can disrupt this contract and make the process of elimination visible; we force systems to see the people it has spent centuries erasing and exploiting. We can start by fostering, in men, a progressive imagination, one that allows them to build resilience to the corruption and complicity of far-right masculinity.

Until we name male supremacy as the engine behind this cruelty, as the central corruption of our systems and lives, we will continue to describe outcomes without ever addressing the problem itself.

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Defining some key terms

Broligarchy: A term for the contemporary alliance of technofascists and ultra-wealthy “iconoclasts” who believe their status grants them a form of impunity, aka jurisdictional exit, from democratic and egalitarian social goals. It primarily describes a specific class of high-status white men who use technology and financial arbitrage to build private enclaves where they can exercise sovereignty.

Elite Corruption: A framework that focuses on the betrayal of institutional trust by those in power. While accurate in describing how wealth buys silence, it often acts as a “laundering” category—one that degenders the problem by framing sexual violence as a byproduct of greed or “recklessness” rather than a central mechanism of control and power.

Patriarchy: the entrenched social, economic, and political structure that privileges men across institutions—family, law, education, and economy—intersecting with class, race, and capitalism. These structures maintain men’s primary leadership in the political, moral, epistemic, religious, and economic spheres. While patriarchy maps the formations of institutions, it mainly describes the “how,” rather than the foundational “why.”

Male Supremacy: The foundational ideological belief system. It is the core belief that cishet men are inherently superior to and entitled to the bodies, labor, and agency of others.

White Supremacy: The sorting machinery of Western Enlightenment ontology. As theorist Sylvia Wynter suggests, this system over-represents a specific kind of white, bourgeois Man as the only universal “Human” and our systems, global, flow from there. It explains why and how your systems so easily disappear certain people while insulating and enriching others.