I once heard a 78-year-old man say in front of his wife: "Every man would prefer to be with a 21-year-old. Heck, I would if I could!"

And just a few months later, a giggling English public schoolboy in his thirties told me that his drunken friend had burst out at a stag do that he loves 18-year-old girls. "Of course, we all do if you really think about it," the Englishman in his thirties said to me. "But you're not meant to say it out loud."

The following day I called up my best male friend and bluntly asked him if he, a man in his thirties, was attracted to teenage girls. He said: "No because I'm not a paedophile." I laughed with relief.

But it provoked a fascinating and complicated conversation, one we have revisited with the latest drop of the Epstein Files, about the definition of paedophilia, and where or how to place the cases like those described above where the objectified body in question is post-pubescent, but housing a definitively more immature mind than the pursuer. This imbalance is obviously critical to the attraction—at its most basic, the immature mind of a teenage or barely-grown woman provides less resistance to objectification than that of a fully-formed adult. At its most insidious, the power inequity generated by the maturity imbalance—and all the other imbalances it entails, like financial and social—facilitates the exploitation of that desire.

Over the past month, I have seen this behaviour labelled as "paedophilic" endlessly—it has even united the left and right in their shared outrage of Epstein's elite sex trafficking scheme wherein teenage girls were raped by a redacted list of powerful men. I have also read some brilliant pieces which extrapolate from the sex crimes of these powerful men to paint a picture of our paedophilic culture. Investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr published We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world, a gripping piece arguing that we collectively repress the knowledge that teenage girls are victimised in every environment by predators seeking to exploit them for either sexual or financial gain. Cadwalladr is bang on the money here: a 2018 report by Coventry University widens the motivational categories of perpetrators of child sexual exploitation to include the very many who are not attracted to children but traffick children or make/distribute child pornography for financial gain.

Cadwalladr goes on to write that Epstein is a mirror into the wider world which "reveres female youth and innocence despises female age and experience." Claiming this is the darkest revelation in the Files, she says:

"Epstein was a paedophile. And this is Epstein’s world now. We’re all living in it. It’s just that some of us knew that already. That, I think, is why my words wouldn’t come this week. And why other women I know have struggled too. A dark shadow has been exposed that we already knew was there."

A few weeks later, a little-known Substack which averaged around 30 views per week went viral with the essay, The Mass Grooming of Gen Y. In it, writer Tyra Tyrell gives an intimate and uncomfortable account of become a teenager in the early 2000s and subject to the bombardment of heroin chic culture, the sexual exploitation of models, and the barely-there fashion trends which exposed teenage bodies to the world. Like Cadwalladr, Tyrell makes a connection between this broader culture and the information revealed in the Epstein Files that the power and cultural brokers of our world were actively targeting and raping teenage girls:

"I heard recently that women are struggling even harder than when #MeToo retraumatized us all with memories of the time we were either assaulted or made a narrow escape. I spent my entire therapy session yesterday unloading about this feeling, trying to understand why I feel more violated today than I did in 2018 (or even in 2009, when I had my own narrow escape). I think it’s somewhat easier to cope with one or even a handful of horrible memories of assault than it is to face the truth that our entire girlhoods were shaped by pedophiles."

Whilst I am grateful for every woman speaking out about the Files, and particularly gladdened to see our collective refusal to write Epstein off as a flaw rather than a symptom of endemic violence embedded in our culture, I disagree with the conclusion that what the Files reveal is a paedophilic culture. I think targeting vulnerable teenagers in post-pubescent bodies is distinct from exploiting vulnerable children in pre-pubescent bodies, and I think it reveals more about how our patriarchal culture seeks to exert control over and disenfranchise adult women as a collective political body than it does about the patriarchy's repressed sexual urges towards children.

Before we move on, I want to make it very clear here that said distinction does not preclude such activity from being labelled as "paedophilia". I do not think the law is a great metric for identifying the demographics of adult vs child (if anything because I think we remain children long after we turn 18) and I am certainly not making the argument that teenagers are adults. However, if we are to read Epstein and his cohort as emblematic of our wider culture, then the possibility of this exploitation being motivated by power, control and hatred rather than sexual attraction is extremely important.

The Difference Between Paedophiles and Rapists

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines paedophilia as experiencing "recurrent and intense sexual fantasies, urges, or behaviours with prepubescent children under the age of 13". There is an ongoing debate about where that age limit should be drawn because, as argued in this paper, correlating paedophilia with only an attraction towards pre-pubescent bodies serves to "adultify" children's bodies who go through puberty early. This is particularly harmful for Black girls who are more likely than other racial groups to go through puberty as early as 8, but be marked as "nondeviant sexual targets" because of their sexual development. Because of this, anyone who assaults a victim with this profile—a young child who has begun sexually developing—is currently not classified as having a mental disorder.

Importantly, paedophilia is considered a disorder. Perhaps more importantly, not all paedophiles harm children, and not all child sex abusers are paedophiles. The German government invested in a brilliant campaign over a decade ago to facilitate therapy for people who identify as being sexually attracted to children but have never offended, including by refusing to consume child pornography. In recent years, "virtuous paedophile" support groups have sprung up online for paedophiles to anonymously find support in their commitment to never offend, marking an important distinction paedophilia as a sexual attraction and paedophilic sexual abuse as an act.

Even within the subgroup of child sex abusers, as mentioned, there are both paedophilic and non-paedophilic offenders, and they abuse children for different reasons. Sociological research identifying the beliefs of sex abusers allows us to now effectively identify people who are more likely to commit sexual abuse, or reoffend, simply by understanding how they view the world. There are very important overlaps and distinctions between different kids of perpetrators, but ultimately the research points to different motivations that delineate categories of sexual abusers.

Paedophilic abusers often believe that children are sexual beings, that they are not harming their victims, and that children are less intimidating than adults and thus more responsive to the abuser's needs. They are typically "socially inept" and motivated by intimacy. Non-paedophilic abusers are typically mixed offenders, assaulting both women and children. They tend to be approach sexual contact with children as a backstop for when adult sexual companions are unavailable. Like paedophilic molesters, they downplay any harm caused to the children. They are sexually motivated. Finally, rapists of women are aggressively motivated, and are more sadistic than child sex abusers. They view the world as hostile, think of women as sexual objects, and are driven by an entitlement to fulfil their own desires.

Now, the worldviews of these offenders do overlap: Entitlement and the belief that the world is hostile and dangerous crop up across the groups. However, broadly, rapists' motivations are defined by sadism, mixed offenders' by sex, and paedophilic child abusers' by intimacy.

When it comes to Epstein's trafficking ring, it seems unlikely these men were seeking intimacy from their victims. In fact, compare what one known Epstein associate named multiple times in the Files—Donald Trump—has gone on the record as saying with the worldview associated with rapists and mixed offenders, not paedophiles. Trump's infamous "grab 'em by the pussy" line, and his insistence that women allow male "stars" to do what they want both reveal the belief that women are sexual objects. Offenders who believe women are sexual objects think that "women enjoy all sexual encounters — even when it is coerced, because they were created to meet the sexual needs of men".

All of this research is harrowing and upsetting, but it points to Epstein and his fellow abusers as rapists and mixed offenders, not paedophilic abusers. Rather than acting on their sexual attraction for children, or seeking what they saw as comfort from children, these men were titillated by the fact they could do whatever they wanted to these vulnerable teenage girls, girls who they believed existed to fulfil their sexual desires—girls who would be much less likely to prevent them from fulfilling these desires than adult women.

Child-Like Women Are Weak Women

One of the analyses making the rounds about our "paedophilic culture" is that the insistence on thinness, girlish outfits and revealing fashion reveals a fetishisation of under–developed girls bodies. Women are pressured to shave and be small, so the theory goes, in order to look like young girls, revealing how collectively repressed paedophilia finds a way to fulfil its needs.

But there is an alternative analysis, one which reveals the far-more widespread problem of misogyny. Demanding women be diminutive versions of themselves isn't so that they can resemble little girls to the delight of the secret paedophilic desire buried in the soul of every male power broker—it is an insidious and effective way of communicating that women must be disempowered and disenfranchised in order to be acceptable. Simply, women must be non-threatening to adult men if they are to be considered attractive.

This is a boon to patriarchy because child-like women are weak women, whereas adult women are a powerful political force. Women's suffrage has changed the nature of public spending, governance, and, of course, anti-violence legislation. Women as a collective body are an active barrier to patriarchal control and exploitation, not just of their own bodies but of marginalised groups and, critically, more-than-human bodies. Women have led the charge for increased climate spending and tighter environmental regulations. Women, left to their own devices, would change the nature of the human world. Women are a threat to patriarchy.

This doesn't mean all women, of course—plenty of Epstein's associates were women who, even if they did not participate, had no qualms about his abusing women. I wrote some weeks ago about we should not be surprised that his sex trafficking failed to provoke a moral opposition in elite circles when their own wealth and power is gained from exploitation. Power, and its corrupting force, does not discriminate based on gender. Nonetheless, women generally speaking have different political goals to their male counterparts—goals which are a threat to capitalist accumulation. Castrating women, so to speak, by pressuring them to under-nourish themselves, and infantilise their own demeanour, erodes their political power from within. Women actively harming their bodies and minds in their bid for male approval—which in turn is an attempt at securing safety in a world which victimises women—are not the kind of people who have the time, energy or political imagination to even dare dream that a different world be possible.

Following this, is it all surprising that Hollywood culture has re-embraced extreme thinness at a time of male authoritarianism? Women are reducing themselves so as to appear non-threatening and secure themselves against the sadism of the new regime. It is a bitter pill (or injection) — embrace misogyny to escape persecution. Female stars are starving themselves into skeletal inconsequence to deflect the hostility of male impunity. This, at a time women need to be the strongest and most strident versions of themselves, for sacrificing the needs of the collective to protect oneself only ever creates an illusion of safety, an illusion so precarious its maintenance demands as much effort as revolutionary action.

For revolutionary action is the only defence against the kind of systematic and organised abuse conducted by Epstein and millions more men around the world. These men believe they are untouchable, and create systems of social, financial and political security to protect their entitlement to do what they want, when they want. This is the nature of patriarchy, the belief that the world exists as a playground for the individual to exploit for his own gain. It's why sexual abuse and capitalist exploitation go hand in glove. It's why women must fight against the extremes of wealth accumulation and power concentration to truly protect against the violence of patriarchy.

What the patriarchy knows and wants women to forget is that we are excellent fighters. We continue to struggle even in the face of death. Olympe de Gouges was executed in 19th century France for daring to rewrite the Declaration of the Rights of Men to include women. Her comrades battled on after her death. In Iran today, women face execution for protesting against Sharia Law, but that does not stop them. When a group has decided that the goals of their collective are bigger than their own lives, they become unstoppable. Only adults can make that choice. Patriarchy wants to capture us in girlhood to prevent us from rising up.

This goes far beyond the confines of discourse. The physical power in women's bodies is a critical tool for raising political consciousness. From the suffragettes in the early twentieth century to the Kurds of the 21st, women arming themselves defensively against a culture of patriarchal violence is critical to liberation. It cannot be done on a diet. Women need muscle and volume and daring, qualities which reinforce each other to dispel the myth of submissive and subdued femininity and replace it with the reality that hell hath no fury like a woman.

Girls simply cannot protect themselves in a man's world. They cannot unmake a man's world, nor fight back in a man's world. But women are not girls, not when they strengthen their minds and their bodies and extend their concern beyond the confines of their own physical form and embrace the collective nature of the oppression they share with their sisters everywhere. This was how women's liberation began, and this is how it must continue. That liberation is such an almighty force that male authoritarianism is doing everything it can to isolate, harm and eradicate women's bodies. From the repeal of Roe v. Wade to fat loss injections, Western patriarchy seeks to undermine women's political power by killing us off, burdening us with unwanted children, and starving us into submission. Adult women are a threat to patriarchy if we organise collectively against its impunity. And if we don't, who will be there to protect our girls?

Paedophilia is a disorder, yes. But so is misogyny, and it is misogyny which characterises the Trump administration, Epstein's abuse, and even capitalism itself with its dependence on the exploitation of women's bodies to produce an economy. There are some paedophiles who abuse children, and others who live in terrible shame for their feelings, isolating themselves so as to never harm the most vulnerable among us. There is no such distinction within misogynists. Misogyny is always defined by suspicion, if not outright hatred, and always seeks to exert power over women to pre-empt the threat women represent to male power and security. We live in Epstein's world, yes, and it was made for men like him. Only women can tear it down.