We find ourselves in a moment of retrenchment, a time for the shedding of the silly fictions of what was previously referred to as “political correctness” (now also dismissed as “woke,” or “DEI,” or “affirmative action”), a time for sighs of relief that we (“we”) can finally relax and simply speak what is increasingly cast as the mere, obvious truth. The cultural atavisms that had been made of workplace sexual harassment (although atavistic they were not, in actual lived experience), racial micro- and macroaggressions (even less so), and the primacy of canonical thinkers of Western thought are now undone, the retreat and prodigal return to the warm, paternal arms of their legitimation requiring only the better part of a year. How quickly the etiquettes of inclusion were shed! “We”s of all kinds are being recast, reconsolidated into what they once were. Common sense will be restored, and viewpoint diversity, no matter what the viewpoint, defended. The n-word is free speech; pussies are grabbable again. This is the miserable horizon toward which universities are cheerfully slouching in the Epstein era.
Allow me to meander my way to my point. Of course, to name this time as “the Epstein era” is to overstate a symptom to the point that it starts to look like a cause. If there is something epochal about this time, it is certainly not Jeffrey Epstein. But I think to name it such, if even for just the space of this little discussion, offers us a framework for this moment that might allow us to glimpse some of the energies circulating within, or perhaps underneath it. And, certainly, Epstein and his behavior do gesture to a thick, unsavory knot in which many of the uglier drives of our moment are tangled: the widening gap between the billionaire class (to imagine that there are enough billionaires for them to constitute a “class”!) and working people; the exploitation of laborers, especially those with vulnerable legal status in the United States, by wealthy profiteers, including in the context of the commercialization of sex; our widespread cultural comfort with the total disenfranchisement of children and minors and the inexplicable subsequent shock when they are then taken advantage of by more powerful adults; the mutual embeddedness of economic extraction and sexual exploitation.
As a historian of sexuality, what people generally want to talk to me about, when it comes to Epstein, is the sex, generally glossed through the frames of “pedophilia” or “trafficking,” both highly-ideological monikers that perform a weird kind of dissemblance with regard to what Epstein is accused of doing in New York. Let me be very clear that I am not seeking to defend Epstein or excuse any of his admitted or alleged conduct; we know that he pled guilty to the Florida State offense of “Procuring a Person Under Age 18 for Prostitution” in 2008, and aggregated testimony from countless other women makes it clear that his efforts to coercively extract sex and sexual labor from legal minors extended well past the date of his 2008 plea deal. But what feels like a uniform cultural response of fever-pitch shock at the details that continue to surface from the various, staggered releases of the Epstein files has confused me. Epstein’s conduct is outrageous, in the sense that it constitutes an outrage, a word that, significantly, in the period I study is also an archaic term for rape. But, like rape, this conduct is nothing if not predictable; one might say that Epstein and his outrages represent heterosexuality, as a sociosexual form of vertical integration, at its most atomic. An older, white, wealthy man promising young—sometimes minor—working-class and status-vulnerable women access to his money and power and then using their positional defenselessness to exploit them—as a colonial Americanist, I can tell you there are literally dozens of eighteenth-century novels that tell this story. The intense, conspiracy-laden focus on the allegations against Epstein seems inversely proportionate to the number of actual consequences experienced by anyone (except Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein himself) exposed as a participant in Epstein’s traffic in women. And that same intensity works to create a distance—a categorical, if fictional distinction—between Epstein’s behavior and what has been inculcated into both men and woman as one of the many structuring conditions of heterosexual desire: the desire of older men for women who look like (and sometimes are) teenagers. To call Epstein a “pedophile,” “sex offender,” or “sexual predator,” is to mask how deeply banal his sexual aspirations were, which is also to say that there may be something to learn, here, from responses organized by outrage.
None of the outrage is misplaced, of course, and we should never tolerate or condone similar conduct or similar patterns of the exploitation of young people or workers of any age, including but not limited to the arenas of nonconsensual and/or commercialized sex. But I think it’s worth asking what the outrage is doing, what function it serves when it is a response to something that is—and I don’t mean this in any way as an endorsement or condonation—normal. Sexual violence is normal and normalized, as decades of Black, Native, and materialist feminist scholarship and activism has taught us—although, as Joan Scott points out, access to the core writings in this conversation is harder and harder to come by, between book bans; state legislative bans on critical ethnic studies, critical race theory, African American history, and gender and sexuality studies; and impending federal regulations seeking to prohibit funding for research into any of the aforementioned topics. Sexual desire for women who look like, or are, teenagers, is also extensively normalized, produced, and naturalized as a putatively biological desire for men and as a beauty standard for women.
The sheer fervor of the outrage at Epstein, in this time and in this moment—a fervor some have termed a simple sex panic—outpaces that circulating any of the more recent sexual violence scandals—those of Matt Gaetz, Eric Swalwell, or Donald Trump himself. Why? Is it the extent of his conduct, allegedly occurring over years and involving dozens and possibly hundreds of young women? Is it that the women he allegedly victimized are mostly white? Is it that the scandal itself came into view at more or less the same time as the PizzaGate conspiracy and benefited from some of the similarities between the two stories? It is of course also quotidian to push back with intensity on the violence inhering in normal conditions of everyday life; we might call this resistance the earth beneath grassroots organizing and agitation. But the outrage, here, doesn’t actually look like pushback; it looks more like grief. It looks, at least in part, like rage against the retrenchment of cultural common sense back into the low hopes and uninspiring norms of a pre-BLM, pre-#metoo, pre-tipping point, pre-woke time. I am not suggesting that any of these movements saw the social, political, or cultural gains to which they aspired—far from it—but rather that they represented a shift in the normative culture of liberal hope that did, to some degree, change the horizon of political aspirations even as it did not necessarily change our distance from that horizon. That a conglomerate of powerful forces within the contemporary political climate—the federal government, the Trump administration, major funders, think tanks, and of course universities, etc.—are now working, in sometimes unadmitted coalition, to claw back those shifts and force a hard reset of the political horizon to a McCarthy-era vision is what is fueling the depths of outrage—especially liberal outrage—at Epstein.
Epstein has become a spectacular emblem of the combination of political voicelessness and craven impunity that has paved our slide into a deeper authoritarianism, an utterly generic angel of history reminding us of the unending string of failed attempts to speak truth to power. Universities style themselves as victims of this moment, but for the most part they are, in fact, collaborators, if not outright handmaidens of it. Imagining themselves as needing protection in this moment, they fail to protect the fundamental mission that so many of them have rearticulated in its barest, most unobjectionable form in the last year, colluding in their own capture while ostensibly simply trying to duck. At the university that employs me, the value of “improving the world” in a “diverse community” was recently unceremoniously removed from the university mission statement in Spring 2026, replaced with a thoroughly unobjectionable, one-sentence avowal to “create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”
So, while the Epstein files tell us little about universities themselves, they nonetheless paint a detailed picture of at least a decade-long creep toward university capture, itself the result of an increasing awareness by elite interests of the university’s potential as site of cultural power enabling a retrenchment into an earlier political status quo. We don’t need Epstein for this analysis, but he is nonetheless everywhere to be found; when the most recent tranche of the Epstein files, about three million pages, was released in late January 2026, the names of a few Yale affiliates floated to the top, revealing emails to Epstein from faculty ostensibly seeking to curry favor with a man who held himself out as a potential donor. While this behavior is more or less de rigueur for researchers who direct labs or who are responsible for fundraising surrounding their work, it’s nonetheless an interesting coincidence, to say the least, that the names that floated to the surface, at least according to the reporting of the local college newspaper, happened to be those of two individuals whose public statements—in one instance around the racial reckoning that began anew on Yale’s campus, as it did all over the country, in 2015, and in another, around the legitimacy of remarking on a female student’s attractiveness in a letter of recommendation—provide something like a trail of bread crumbs outlining the path that led to the moment of retrenchment we’re in. On the front end, Epstein wrote approvingly to one faculty member after seeing a highly-publicized video of said professor being lambasted by a student for statements by the faculty member’s wife (that this professor had allegedly endorsed)—statements that allegedly defended students’ ability to wear “offensive” Halloween costumes as an iteration of free expression. Epstein wrote the faculty member, who was also a Head of College at the time (a student life position): “watched that you tube with horror … you were great.” Fast forward ten years, and a different faculty member who had corresponded extensively with Epstein—at one point seeking to make plans to have Epstein visit New Haven—defended a 2011 email he had sent to Epstein in which the faculty member recommended a former student for a job in Epstein’s orbit, including the note that she was a “v small goodlooking blonde.” Epstein, now dead, could neither approve nor disapprove, but the second faculty member recently defended this 2011 comment in the year of our Lorde 2026, writing “‘This one [Epstein, potential employer] was obsessed with girls (like every other unmarried billionaire in Manhattan; in fact, like every other heterosex male), and if I hadn’t said what I did in that letter ten-odd years ago, he would certainly have called me & asked for a lot more aesthetic detail. (This is how men behave.)” Q.E.D., apparently.
Cover image: A hole in the ground.
