Patriarchy created the conditions for Epstein

As age 30 approaches with light speed, I’m reflecting on how my younger self imagined my life would look right now.

As a teen, I watched movies like Charlie’s Angels and 13 Going on 30, imagining that I would have a high-powered job, a close group of friends, and regular spa appointments. I thought I would be a completely different person, and of course, I am.

But in reality, I feel most myself when I embody who I was when I was 13. That girl who knew the fuck she was. She loved singing and posing for Photo Booth pictures. She still loved her body. She wasn’t afraid to be silly and post questionable things on the internet. Today, when I close my eyes and imagine dropping into my body at that age, I feel genuinely powerful.

What I realize now is that I am remembering who I was before patriarchy could fully get to me. Girls at this age have a sort of untamed identity that quickly shifts as we hit puberty. Society starts to define us and dump all its projections on us. The scrutiny only intensifies as womanhood progresses, sharply increasing when we become mothers (or choose not to). Patriarchy greases up our hands with the expectations of womanhood until who we truly are slips out of our grip.

I came across a graphic from a post about the Epstein scandal that shows sexual assault peaking at around 13 to 14. At precisely the moment when girls are about to step into womanhood, they are targeted most viciously by sexual predators.

For my book Matriarchy, I have been doing extensive research on existing matriarchal societies. From Asia to Central America, across all these societies, the most important and elaborate celebration is the initiation ceremony (also called a puberty feast) for girls. This celebration is much more significant than weddings, and there is no comparable ceremony for boys.1

The difference in how patriarchal and matriarchal societies treat this liminal age says everything about how the structures operate.

Patriarchy is fundamentally an extractive system in which people’s energy is captured and funneled toward the accumulation of power at the top. This happens most completely to women, who are converted into vessels for the system’s needs rather than our own.

A young preteen girl is, in most cases, still connected to her own source. Her energy hasn’t been captured and redirected towards the system yet. Where patriarchy harvests this energy, matriarchy honors it.

The matriarchal initiation ceremony is a recognition of her inner power, and a pledge from her community to protect and cultivate it.

After watching the Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich documentary, one quote from a survivor stuck with me:

‘“Before Epstein, I was something else. The way I saw myself a long time ago was like this flower, a flower that was opening up. And afterwards, it was like somebody just picked up that flower, plucked it from its roots and stomped on it and smashed it.”

This is the perfect way to describe what our society at large does to girls. And our response, when we bother to respond at all, is to punish the most visible perpetrator and move on.

But we don’t even do that. We rarely imprison perpetrators. We almost never believe survivors. Clearly, punish and move on is not an effective strategy.

Regardless of who we punish, the system continues to create new predators and recycle the same conditions that made young girls vulnerable in the first place. The world would still be a deeply dangerous place to be a daughter.

The problem with our society is that it takes situations like Epstein as an example of “evil people doing bad things” and not as the reality, which is that Epstein is the logical outcome of a system that normalizes abuse at every level of society, especially against young girls.

Our society allows people who scam, lie, manipulate, and abuse to amass great power. Epstein wasn't an outlier. He had the specific skill set that allowed him to exploit structural vulnerabilities in our society.

Preteen girls living in poverty have zero structural power and zero societal protection. Patriarchy treats them as disposable. Epstein knew that and used it to his advantage. Every institution that was supposed to protect these girls failed them at every turn.

Epstein and his friends never expected to be held accountable because they truly believed these girls were disposable. They never expected that anyone would care enough to stop them, and for a long time, they were right.

To grow up as a young girl under patriarchy is to understand at a visceral level that you have no power and even less respect. But in a twisted and disturbing way, the rampant sexual abuse inflicted on young girls is a recognition of the power that they hold. The Epstein case especially gives this away.

The obsession is the confession. You don't build a decades-long global operation around something worthless. The scale, the money and planning involved, the ritual quality of it, reveals an almost vampiric scheme to harvest something from these girls.

The men associated with Epstein were accomplished. They were professors, authors, influencers, businessmen, politicians, scientists, researchers, philosophers, and investors, all of whom had climbed to the top of the patriarchal hierarchy. This hierarchy rewards a very specific set of qualities: ruthlessness, lack of empathy, a willingness to exploit, and the suppression of your own humanity. To get where they got, they had to abandon enormous parts of themselves. They had to become, in a real sense, less alive.

They had no framework for restoring that aliveness in themselves. So they hunted whoever still possessed it, and they just… took it. Over and over and over again.

A system that normalizes extraction will always replicate this cycle. The people at the top are the most depleted of all, because they've taken the most and generated the least. They depend on continuous extraction to maintain the illusion of their own power.

This is why replacing the people at the top changes nothing. Patriarchy and matriarchy are not the same operating system with different users. They are built on opposite understandings of what power is and where it comes from.

A social structure is basically an ecosystem. Patriarchy is one way of organizing the ecosystem, and matriarchy is another.

An ecosystem provides more nutrition and beauty when there is a diverse range of species living in it with reciprocal connections to each other. Together, the plants, trees, bees, birds, butterflies, and slugs work in harmony. All species are equals. Some are older and have more resources, which they share with the younger and more vulnerable.

Natural checks keep any one species from growing beyond the system's capacity. When the balance of life holds, the ecosystem becomes stronger.

This is exactly how matriarchy manifests in human communities.

Patriarchy instead functions like an industrial monoculture. We have figuratively and literally mown biodiversity away and planted a single crop, pouring fertilizers and pesticides on the soil to keep it “productive”. It provides, but at a cost.

The soil becomes degraded. The pests keep coming in larger numbers. The system becomes weakened and strained, requiring more input to create less output. Vulnerable organisms that rely on reciprocity struggle to thrive. The safety and resilience of the system erode.

In depleted social systems, exploitation scales more easily. What looks like individual deviance is really the outbreak of a system that has lost its ability to regenerate and heal. When we respond by punishing individuals without restoring the underlying ecosystem, all we’re doing is spraying pesticides. The pest problem is temporarily solved, but they return the next season.

The Epstein case is the pest outbreak at the end of a long degradation process. The soil was already depleted. The biodiversity was already gone.

He became powerful and evaded accountability because our society recognized itself in him. His depravity matched the system’s.

Healthy ecosystems do not depend on individual moral restraint. They depend on structure.

Patriarchy claims to offer stability, order, and rational leadership. The Epstein case exposes that lie. Almost every institution that claims to keep us safe — law enforcement, finance, government, academia, social elites — ignored or belittled the suffering of survivors.

Patriarchy claims men with power are fit to rule because they are rational and restrained. The Epstein case proves that men with power are predatory. That patriarchy is designed to protect power, not people.

If a system allows the most powerful men in the world to abuse that many young girls for that long without accountability, the system is not broken. It’s being honest about its true priorities.

Epstein is gone, and very few care to restore the soil. The next pest outbreak is already on its way with different faces and names.

In systems design, when something proves to be harmful or destructive, you redesign it so that thing never happens again. Punish and move on is what our society does instead. This is their system. And we don’t have to accept it as normal.

Our inability to imagine living in a different social structure than patriarchy continuously feeds the dysfunction of the system. We tell ourselves, “this is the only way to live”, “anything else is unrealistic”, or “there is no alternative”. The system sustains itself by making us believe it’s inevitable.

That’s why matriarchy as a concept is so powerful. It interrupts that inevitability. Its very existence refutes the idea that patriarchy is natural.

I don’t want a world where men like Epstein rot in prison only after they create a sphere of misery. I want a world where men like Epstein can't be created in the first place.

I don’t want a world where young girls are plucked from their roots and stomped like they’re nothing. I want a world where girls on the threshold of womanhood are so deeply honored that their petals explode out into the world with joy and vigor.

This is not only possible, but it’s our birthright.

I was never ceremoniously initiated into womanhood. Most of us weren’t. We were shamed, our bodies concealed, our voices muffled.

But when I close my eyes, I feel a memory of an ancestress crossing this threshold surrounded by a loving society that reveres how precious she is, that spares no expense to let her feel cherished, that watches her with awe and delight as she unfolds.

I can’t even fully picture what that looks like because I was never shown it. But my grief is the giveaway. If you feel the loss of something, that means it existed once.

A world where daughters are honored will return, because we will create it. That’s the power of being human. We can look at this depleted soil, this neglected ecosystem, and consciously choose to nourish it back to health.

We know what was here before. Our daughters are counting on us to grow it back.