The media is on fire about the Epstein files, and rightfully so. The files reveal the way an entire class of men – wealthy, celebrated, entitled – routinely connected with each other to share contacts, socialize and enjoy themselves, often at the expense of others. In Epstein’s world, the others were girls, often very young ones.
We’re getting a glimpse into a world of men that’s global in scale and nearly timeless. “It’s a man’s world,” sang James Brown in 1966, “but it would be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.” The intersection of men, money, sex and power is at least 10,000 years old. Tales of Epstein is just the latest chapter in a story still being written today.
Although the work of Sigmund Freud has been criticized as being too reflective of a Victorian Era of sexual repression, he was on to something. His idea that sexuality and its power are active even in the infant disturbed many people, but Freud tapped into a biological and behavioral reality; for men, a cigar is never just a cigar.
Freud’s Pleasure Principle is now understood chemically; the release of Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin and Testosterone drive behavior, sexual and otherwise. Freud was largely right: we’re all about sex, not in an absolute sense, but in terms of the ways in which we seek and satisfy desire. While his ideas shocked the world of the early twentieth century, understanding the affective power of desire goes back thousands of years. The Buddhist Wheel of Karma depicts sexual desire and its effects as an essential link in the “chain of causation” that keeps the wheel of human behavior turning and forms a worldly ring of attachment surrounding six realms of suffering.
Notably, in a man’s world, suffering is regularly and systematically inflicted on women and girls. Poet and author Robert Graves called it a 10,000-year war on women, and built a convincing case that Greek Mythology and The Bible are prime examples of the way Neolithic males initiated a process of systemically rewriting history to denigrate the role of women and to relegate them to a postscript in a male-centric story. That effort continues today.
Feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan writes of silenced women, their voices lost or hidden behind cultural tropes and inhibited by the risk of suffering punishment. She explains that women have had but two choices: to remain silent, or become accomplices to the exercise or aping of male power, hence Ghislaine Maxwell and Kristi Noem. In a man’s world, a woman must either be silent, play along, or risk being marginalized, ostracized and penalized.
The extent of the male network represented in the Epstein files is enormous and revealing. Stretching from academics to enlightenment gurus, techbros to corporate capitalists, attorneys to financiers, and intellectuals to ex-Presidents, all sorts of men wanted in on the action. Not all wanted sex with young girls, but all of them desired something about money, power, and making the connections that provide them. Fueling the entire enterprise was sex, not simply its physical acts, but the symbolic and literal power it represents to many men.
Psychiatrist Jacques Lacan redesignated the pervasive behavioral power of sexualized desire as “jouissance,” which can be roughly described as a paradoxical, intense form of “enjoyment” or “pleasure,” a drive that exceeds the limits of Freud’s Pleasure Principle, often manifesting as painful, destructive, or transgressive satisfaction. That sounds about right.
