The main thing that keeps going through my mind is the scale of the whole thing. It feels almost endemic.
This may just be reflective of my life stage at the moment, but I can’t help thinking that the Epstein affair is all part of a much wider, general culture of women not counting.
It starts at home. A woman who puts herself, her time and her ambitions on the back-burner to support her partner’s career. The facilitator, because she doesn’t matter as an individual. At work, she’s shouted down in meetings and is the butt of insidious little jokes at her expense because her function is to be decorative and to entertain, nothing more. Outside she’s stalked, cat-called, grabbed because men think her function is to be their plaything.
To men in power, she’s just a service animal. Her abuse is just collateral damage, sacrificed for the “greater good”: protecting or courting another powerful man.
That’s how men like Mandelson got the job of Ambassador; how Andrew M-W went unquestioned for so long. People knew about their association with Epstein, but turned a blind eye because women don’t matter.