Fwd: CULTURE WARS Irish journalist Fintan O Toole on Epstein and friends as culture Warriors
Mary Hunt
Begin forwarded message:From: Woman Spirit <womanspir...@gmail.com>Subject: CULTURE WARS Irish journalist Fintan O Toole on Epstein and friends as culture WarriorsDate: February 11, 2026 at 8:08:21 AM ESTJeffrey Epstein and his friends were culture warriors – the war they waged was against womenWhat is the opposite of woke? Certainly not slumber. It is, perhaps, aroused: hyper stimulated, prowling, predatory, constantly alert to the scent of sex, power and money.
You don’t have to be a fan of wokeism to see in the Epstein files the archive of its antithesis. This is what the identity politics of the elite looks like: a lust for exploitation that never sleeps.
One of the foundational acts of the Roman empire was the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that carried off the city’s effluent and made its glories possible. The Romans thought of it as sacred and gave it its own presiding deity, Cloacina.
The Epstein archive is the Cloaca Maxima of the contemporary American empire, a vast sewage system that underlies and enables the triumph of gilded misogyny. Epstein is its sacred monster, the presiding deity of the cult of rapacity to whom men of privilege sent up their supplications: let us prey.
Unlike the benign Cloacina, Epstein’s cult demanded human sacrifice, preferably that of young virgins. (“He likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Donald Trump smirked in 2002.) The scale of the demand was vast: the US department of justice estimated that Epstein sexually abused more than a thousand girls.
Those girls were, in this system, fungible assets, their value interchangeable with that of the dollar. They functioned as currency in an elite gift economy, passed around as tokens of status – to be granted the right to use their bodies was to be in with an ultimate in-crowd, a charmed circle of mutual enrichment and reciprocal advancement.
Sexual predation was not a mere perk of membership. It clearly functioned as a rite of passage. Either directly through participation in the abuse of these girls, or indirectly through choosing to ignore what we might call ambient rape – the muzak of misogyny that played all the time in every room of Epstein’s mansions – collusion was established and maintained. Guilt was shared – but so was the sadistic pleasure of male domination. “Pain,” writes one of Epstein’s anonymised scientific correspondents, “is interesting.”
The Epstein files (and we should remember that millions of documents are still being withheld, presumably to protect the guilty) are the underground waste disposal system of a very open and massive construct: the backlash against feminism. These are secret histories of a counter-revolution. Epstein and all those within his astonishingly expansive sphere of influence – bankers, speculators, political players, but also scientists, intellectuals and artists – are culture warriors. The war is being waged on women.
At one level, this is all about unrestrained power. But at another it is very much about restraint: on women’s right to object to sexual predation. “Just as the Me Too movement has gone too far so has Botox” (Soon-Yi Previn to Epstein). “Bugs me a little the metoo (sic) entitlement What does an actress think if she goes to a producer hotel at 2am?” (Name of sender blanked out). “MeToo. MeNotTrue” (physicist Lawrence Krauss). “Good news btw is that woman on conciliation committee seems like a sweetie.. she is old.. not some young metoo bitch” (Krauss to Epstein on a hearing into his behaviour at Arizona State University). “The hysteria that has developed about abuse of women” (Noam Chomsky to Epstein). And so on.
[ Noam Chomsky’s wife apologises for their ‘grave mistake’ in Epstein ties ]
But the backlash is against much more than the immediate threat of the #MeToo movement. What we see in the files is a coherent and concerted reaction by elite men against one of the great revolutions of history: the feminist revolt of the 1960s and 1970s.
This was a movement defined in a much earlier generation by Rebecca West: “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
The insistence on female equality created a deep tension between the capitalist system and the patriarchy that helped to create it. The expansion of economies necessitated the movement of women from the domestic sphere into the paid workforce.
That gave women educational assets (in the US now, 47 per cent of women aged 25 to 34 have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 37 per cent of men) and political power (since 1984, female voters have outnumbered men at every US election).
[ Ghislaine Maxwell refuses to answer questions in US Congress Epstein probe ]
These trends are almost impossible to reverse: for all the “trad wife” fantasies of the resurgent right, the economic cost of driving women back into the kitchen is too high. So the patriarchy has had to fight back through culture. The visible part of that response is the reinforcement of gender stereotypes through fashion, “beauty”, film, the nagging childhood signifiers of pinkness and princesses.
Beneath the glossy surface, what holds up this structure of power is what holds up every structure of power: implicit and explicit violence. Violent misogyny never went away, of course – it is literally at home in every society. Yet it needs to be validated as an elite practice, a way of life not just for unkempt thugs but for the rich and famous. It needs its own cloak of glamour.
What the Epstein files show is that there is no jarring contradiction between, on the one side, high-flown discourse (pretentious discussions on the nature of consciousness), ostentatious philanthropy, private jets, private islands, gorgeous mansions – and on the other side, the cannibalistic consumption of young female lives.
The grammar of wealth meets the vocabulary of the brothel. One indelible image from the files is a photograph of a wall-sized mirror from one of Epstein’s houses on which is imprinted in big capital letters: “F--- ME LIKE THE WHORE I AM.”
A comedian called Jackie Martling sent Epstein a joke: “There was a time in Ireland, /when the women chased the men ... /But the men, the fools, took out their tools, /And chased them back again.”
This is what chasing women back again sounds like in the private chatter of the very filthy rich. What it smells like is the effluence of extreme affluence.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WomanSpiritIreland" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to womanspiritirel...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/womanspiritireland/CAPXkA9Y3m4%2Bx0F9CcCPRDNYrF4Jgw%3D5GnUri3KUg3Lsq9mBd%3Dg%40mail.gmail.com.