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 killed himself at the end of his rampage in Santa Barbara, left behind a manifesto that offered many of us an introduction to the misogynistic world of “incels,” sexually frustrated young men who blame their problems on women, and gather online in dark places to vent.
“There is no creature more evil and depraved than the human female,” Rodger wrote. “Women are like a plague.”
Someone soon created a Facebook page, “Elliot Rodger is an American Hero,” which paid tribute to his “ultimate sacrifice in the struggle against feminazi ideology.” At the time, such misogyny was shocking because it seemed so antisocial, out of date and off the wall. But really, the tragedy simply tore the lid off a phenomenon as old as time. Turns out, misogyny is alive, pervasive and as dangerous as ever.
A spin through recent events proves it.
On Monday, a panel of United Nations 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 of crimes against humanity.”
The offenses, including sexual slavery, reproductive violence, enforced disappearance, torture and femicide “were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, extreme misogyny and the commodification and dehumanisation 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 ham-fisted handling of the Epstein files, which has put survivors at risk of “retaliation and stigma.” And in an unsubtle swipe at Trump, the panel also writes, “Any suggestion that it is time to move forward from the ‘Epstein files’ is unacceptable. It represents a failure of responsibility towards victims. Resignations of 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 far more seriously. On Thursday, the former Prince Andrew was arrested on suspicion of passing confidential government information to Epstein, though, maddeningly, the royal has never been charged with a crime relating to sex with underage girls.
The files themselves absolutely drip with misogyny.
In email exchanges, women are referred to as b-words and c-words, their physical attributes harshly judged. The word “pussy” is flung around with abandon by Epstein and his many correspondents. The longevity doctor, Peter Attia, for example, who was hired recently as a contributor by new CBS chief Bari Weiss, joked lewdly in 2016 about the nutritional aspects of oral sex using, of course, the p-word.
“I concede sexism,” the celebrated linguist Noam Chomsky announced to Epstein in a 2016 email.
“We see behind the grand façade usually presented by men who run the planet, in government, academia, royalty and business, from presidents to Andrew the former prince,” wrote The Times of London columnist Helen Rumbelow after spending two days perusing the files earlier this month. “We see the contrast between their public distancing and their private networking. But we also see their everyday exchanges making the cogs of the world turn, oiled by porn-saturated woman-hating.”
Rumbelow quotes a note that Epstein wrote to himself about an unnamed woman, a “wrinkly old hag, just because she is rich she thinks she can talk down to everyone. Everyone knows her husband is f—ing young russians… nasty c—… bags of cottage cheese in her pants.”
What a crime, being wrinkly, old and female.
And then, of course, there is the gut-wrenching case of Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman who was unwittingly drugged by her husband and raped over 10 years by at least 50 strangers in her own bed. The crimes were rooted in what she describes as “millennial-old misogyny.”
At his rape trial, her husband, Dominique Pelicot, testified that “I wanted to force an insubmissive woman into submission.”
Her rapists came from many walks of life: a nurse, a journalist, a soldier, a prison warden, farmworkers, a supermarket employee, a restaurant manager, a software technician. She was stunned at their variety as she faced them in court, “but they did share one thing,” Pelicot writes in her disturbing new memoir, “a sense of entitlement … because power had always been on their side.”
The violence she endured, explains Pelicot in “A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides,” “is the grubby reflection of the domination and predatory activity that still structure our world.”
All these things were happening during the same period of time: Rodger’s simmering resentments that led to a grotesque act of violence, Epstein’s rank sexism and crimes against girls and Dominique Pelicot’s incomprehensible violation of his wife.
Today, we have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has long been accused of sexual impropriety toward women and who does not believe women should serve in combat. Tuesday, he elevated the white Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, inviting him to speak at a Pentagon prayer service. 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. (Calling himself a “paleo-Confederate,” Wilson has also argued that chattel 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. By 1994, “The Little Rascals” movie resurrected the club. The movie’s most quotable line came from a breakup note: “Dear Darla, I hate your stinking guts. You make me vomit. You’re scum between my toes. Love, Alfalfa.”
Turns out, it wasn’t really a joke then. And it’s not a joke now.
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