It is an odd coincidence that memoirs written by Malala Yousafzai a victim of the Taliban and Virginia Giuffre a victim of Jeffrey Epstein were released on the same day. The coincidence begged the question of which victim and which scars are more readily embraced by mainstream empathy. It is undeniable that every time one looks at Malala’s face one is reminded of the rapacious brutality of men. Her scars are visible and a constant rejoinder to the world of what men can do to women or in the particular case girls.
Yet that brutality, assigned to the “barbaric” far away men is also easily rationalized. The Taliban are in the imagination of most, an extreme case of patriarchal bloodlust wed to religious zealotry. In them we have the grotesque realization of the perpetual other-opposed to education, desirous of a woman-less world or at the very least one in which women are left sequestered and perpetually sexually available to their husbands. In the West, the specter of the Taliban was used to plaster over the misogyny of more proximate predators. Thank God we are not shooting women in the face for the temerity of desiring an education the message read, and everybody in the West read and internalized the smug satisfaction of living in a better place-one where women are “free” and can go to school.
Reading Virginia Giuffre’s brave memoir is to witness the cruelty of invisible scars. Giuffre did not get shot in the face by a band of savege men intent to on teaching a girl a lesson-and yet-the evisceration of her sense of self was also systematic and complete. The sort of violence perpetrated by the Taliban presents a neat and tidy story-bad men elsewhere undertaking acts of cruelty on women elsewhere. The targeting of Malala possessed the elements of a Greek tragedy; with a chorus instructing all on to how to feel, what sort of justice to demand and how many tears to shed for a perfect victim. Malala the icon was hollowed out into a vessel and into it was poured all the empathy of the world. Here was the catharsis affirming that the West so eager to award and anoint the girl shot in the face- has the better morality, the more equitable society.
Nobody’s Girl-as Giuffre’s memoir is an assault on all this. Giuffre was never physically disfigured but her innocence was taken bit by torturous bit by men without unruly beards or AK-47s . Sexually abused by her own father since she was in elementary school-Giuffre’s early life was a pantomime of horrors-her only solace a horse named Alice with whom she shared the hyper-vigilance that characterizes the abused child. By the time she fell into Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sordid hands she had been raped by everyone from her father, to strangers, to family friends and then a line of older men with a penchant for nubile girls.
I have yet to get to the pages where Giuffre is given out to Prince Andrew. Those I have read until now are enraging. The mask that men like Epstein wear-a mask of wealth and education and open-mindedness makes them the perfect abusers. There are no misogynistic edicts here, no religious zealotry and yet here is a torture just as brutal; and an enslavement and objectification of women that strips all humanity from them. If the Taliban refused education, Epstein sets himself up as the educator-Giuffre not only gets instruction on how to please a man-but also lectures her on game theory, string theory economics etc. This is all of course while making her into a complete instrument of his sexual pleasure available at his beck and call.
Epstein’s justification for raping girls was the idea of “coming of age”. He tells Giuffre that once a girl “comes of age” or begins to menstruate-then she is ready for sex. In this way a man three times the age of Giuffre…she is seventeen and he is forty seven when they have sex for the first time, justifies his pedophilia. Ironically, this coming of age theory is also the one used by the Taliban to begin their prohibitions on women. Once a girl "comes of age” in Afghanistan today she is no longer able to go to school or go anywhere really without a male guardian.
Misogyny then is a universal sport. The bearded mullah and the grey haired debonair Manhattanite Epstein are united in the cause. The central idea is the same-women exist for male pleasure, lesser beings whose existence must be edited controlled and made servile for it to be permitted at all. And yet, Epstein was a darling of the very western feminists who were such champions of fighting the Taliban. He was a Clinton darling-something he often boasts about to Giuffre as he rapes her.
These masked Epstein-esque misogynists are everywhere in the Western world. They don’t look like the Taliban but they think like them-religious zealotry replaced by the capitalist lust for acquisition and consumption. In the most opulent surroundings, redolent with art and aesthetic marvels-Giuffre is groomed into sexual slavery-everything from her diet to her appearance to her rest controlled by the wicked whole of which Epstein and Maxwell are equal halves.
Why are some victims worth more empathy than others? Women like Giuffre, survivors of incest, sexual assault and sexual trafficking are never handed Nobel prizes-their wounds are not visible and the bleeding out of their innocence is not the product of a gunshot to the head. They die of a thousand rapes-each one part of a process of entombment of the self, a destruction of the inherent human dignity that is as necessary as breath itself.
I will keep reading Giuffre’s memoir…so there will be more on this.
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