In 2014, a young man named Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured 14 others, using guns, knives and his BMW as a weapon. Rodger, who committed suicide at the end of his attack in Santa Barbara, left a manifesto that offered many of us an introduction to the misogynistic world of “incels,” sexually frustrated young men who blame women for their problems and meet online in dark places to vent.
“There is no creature more evil and depraved than the human woman,” Rodger wrote. “Women are like a plague.”
Someone soon created a Facebook page, “Elliot Rodger is an American Hero,” that paid tribute to his “ultimate sacrifice in the fight against feminazi ideology.” At the time, such misogyny was shocking because it seemed so antisocial, outdated and out of the ordinary. But in reality, the tragedy simply uncovered a phenomenon as old as time. It turns out that misogyny is alive, omnipresent, and as dangerous as ever.
A turn by recent events demonstrates this.
On Monday, a United Nations panel of experts issued a statement raising the possibility that Jeffrey Epstein's years of trafficking and exploitation of women and girls “may reasonably meet the legal threshold for crimes against humanity.”
The crimes, which include sexual slavery, reproductive violence, forced disappearance, torture and feminicide, “were committed in a context of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, extreme misogyny and the commodification and dehumanization of women and girls from different parts of the world,” the experts said.
The statement also implicitly rebukes President Trump's Justice Department for its clumsy handling of Epstein's files, which has put survivors at risk of “retaliation and stigma.” And in a not-so-subtle attack on Trump, the panel also writes: “Any suggestion that it is time to put the 'Epstein files' behind us is unacceptable. It represents a lack of accountability to victims. Waivers by implicated individuals alone are not an adequate substitute for criminal accountability.”
Accountability may be elusive in the United States, but other countries take Epstein's crimes much more seriously. On Thursday, former Prince Andrew was arrested on suspicion of passing confidential government information to Epstein, although sadly the royal has never been charged with a crime related to sexual relations with underage girls.
The files themselves are absolutely full of misogyny.
In email exchanges, women are referred to as b-words and c-words, and their physical attributes are judged harshly. Epstein and his numerous correspondents use the word “cunt” with abandon. Longevity doctor Peter Attia, for example, who was recently hired as a contributor by new CBS chief Bari Weiss, joked lewdly in 2016 about the nutritional aspects of oral sex using, of course, the f-word.
“I admit sexism,” noted linguist Noam Chomsky announced to Epstein in a 2016 email.
“We see behind the grand façade often put up by the men who run the planet, in government, academia, royalty and business, from presidents to the former Prince Andrew,” Times of London columnist Helen Rumbelow wrote after spending two days examining the archives earlier this month. “We see the contrast between their public distancing and their private contacts. But we also see their daily exchanges turning the gears of the world, oiled by pornography-saturated hatred of women.”
Rumbelow cites a note Epstein wrote to himself about an anonymous woman, a “wrinkled old hag, just because she's rich she thinks she can talk down to everyone. Everyone knows her husband is fucking young Russians… nasty… bags of cottage cheese in his pants.”
What a crime, to be wrinkled, old and a woman.
And then, of course, there is the heartbreaking case of Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman who was unknowingly drugged by her husband and raped for 10 years by at least 50 strangers in her own bed. The crimes had their origins in what she describes as “millennial misogyny.”
At her rape trial, her husband, Dominique Pelicot, testified that he “wanted to force a rebellious woman to submit.”
Her rapists came from many walks of life: a nurse, a journalist, a soldier, a prison warden, farm workers, a supermarket employee, a restaurant manager, a software technician. She was stunned by their range when she confronted them in court, “but they shared one thing,” Pelicot writes in her haunting new memoir, “a sense of entitlement… because power had always been on their side.”
The violence he endured, Pelicot explains in “A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides,” “is the dirty reflection of the domination and predatory activity that still structures our world.”
All of these things happened during the same time period: Rodger's simmering resentments leading to a grotesque act of violence, Epstein's sexism and crimes against girls, and Dominique Pelicot's incomprehensible rape of his wife.
Today we have Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has long been accused of sexual misconduct toward women and who does not believe women should serve in combat. On Tuesday, he elevated white Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, inviting him to speak at a prayer service at the Pentagon. Wilson has called the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, a “bad idea” and promotes a strict patriarchal structure where women must submit to their husbands. (Wilson, a self-described “paleo-Confederate,” has also argued that slavery produced “genuine affection between the races.”)
A century ago, when Our Gang convened the He-Man Women Haters Club, it was supposed to be a joke. In 1994, the movie “The Little Rascals” resurrected the club. The film's most quotable line comes from a breakup note: “Dear Darla, I hate your stinky guts. You make me throw up. You're scum between my toes. Love, Alfalfa.”
Turns out it wasn't really a joke then. And now it's not a joke.
Blue sky: @rabcarian
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