It’s hard not to make the connection between the abuses of Epstein and his powerful accomplices and the softer version, which is this mistaken, culture-wide idea in the West that constantly tells men that money and status are what women are really attracted to, and that everything else is peripheral or unimportant.

I’ve spent the last seven years mercilessly criticizing this belief, precisely because its kinship with predation has always been obvious to me. Before the Epstein files, there was Diddy; before him, R. Kelly; before them, a grim procession of men whose wealth and status were endlessly transmuted into impunity, as though power itself conferred moral exemption, granting access to women and girls without limit, accountability, or the slightest hint of human restraint.

It’s the dehumanizing, transactional marketification of the most sacred human things—attraction, affection, love, Έρως (Eros)—pretending that all of these things have nothing to do with mystical wonder, inexplicably joyous sensations, or mutual feelings of compatibility, reducing them to a purely self-interested market exchange—their precise opposite.

When a society believes that women are something a man “earns” with his status and wealth, dehumanizing women into a consumer product, this will be the inevitable result. If women are “rewards” for men with enough wealth, in a society that worships men with obscene wealth, you can expect men with obscene wealth to take this to obscene places.

Epstein is Western patriarchy taken to its logical violent extreme, and the lonely, isolated men who think I’ve been too critical of patriarchy are its most faithful casualties—men clinging to a myth that has already devoured their capacity for love, meaning, and human contact, yet which they cannot relinquish without losing the last tattered explanation for their suffering.

I say we decouple the idea that status and wealth—or a punishingly narrow, Eurocentric ideal of beauty—are what make someone deserving of love and affection, and remember instead that Eros has always belonged to the full, riotous human multitude: to every shade, every body, every history, every tenderness that refuses to bend the knee before hegemonic power.