My Review

Is it wrong to find oneself hoping that certain names show up in certain ways in the Epstein files? Were I still going to confession, would I have to confess that desire?

I find myself lately a theater critic. The fellow playing the president is all wrong: he’s too shallow in his delivery, too obvious in his gestures – and what is the makeup artist thinking? The victims with their blowouts are being forced to play it all flat out of the audience’s presumably correct belief that those of us watching can’t handle any subtlety in those parts. The men of Congress think we don’t recall their orations from Act I, even though intermission was just long enough to buy a box of Jujubes. In God’s name, where is the director of this thing?

If I sound callous, I suppose it is because if you cook bitterness too long, that’s what you get. Here we are in another cycle of “everyone knew but no one said anything,” as if – if we just repeat that lament enough times – things will change before the next generation of girls get their periods.

First off, could we please give up the labeling of Epstein as a pedophile and come to a common understanding that he was a hebephile? Pedophiles are sexually attracted to prepubescent children. Epstein was quite obviously attracted not to young children but to adolescent girls – nearly flat-chested, hipless. Gangly rosebuds.

I’m not insisting on the correct labeling of hebephilia because I think what he did was acceptable. It was not. Nor am I doing it to be pedantic or to show off my days in sex research. It is, rather, because the jerk (my music teacher) who popped my cherry was himself a hebephile, and I grow weary of feeling disappeared in the space that imagines no mischief between pedophilia and normal adult sexuality. If we learn from Epstein’s released ink that Donald Trump did indeed dip his quill on “The Lolita Express,” it won’t be because Trump was a pedophile. It will be because some of the girls had by that point rounded out enough to suit Trump.

Sometimes I think about what I’m going to flash back to on my deathbed, and I hope it will be the orcas or my toddler laughing and not all the years I’ve spent pondering the philosophy of age of consent, trying to parse out why it matters, and whether a hard cutoff age of consent makes more sense than something like the 2n-7 rule.

What exactly is wrong with a man of nearly 40 fucking a girl who is 16 and whose body (in my case, because of severe and undiagnosed lactose intolerance) looks like she is 12 or 13? As I watch Epstein’s victims cry before stands of microphones that read to me as cancerous sea corals, I think the answer must be that they should have had the chance to figure it out on their own, slowly, with a person their own age, someone just as bumbling.

But then sometimes I come to a different conclusion: that the problem is caused by having your first sexual experience be even more lousy than the average. That if you are bumbling along with someone your own age (as I also did, kind of simultaneously, with a nice, hopeless trumpet player one year my senior), the electrical charges of first sex don’t solidify and become those cancerous corals when they hit the liquid between your legs, the way they do with a hebephile who stinks of cigarettes, cheap aftershave, and toupee glue.

But the truth is that the reason most people are disturbed by girls or boys “too young” being fucked by men too old is that they wanted to own those sexual rights themselves in order to decide how they would be meted out, how the attached resources would be distributed, how the kinship networks would expand. (If I sound bitter, it may be because I have been callous too long.)

Presumably when the current show is over and the documents are finally released – if they ever really are – we will learn more of the academics who are now unfortunate enough to have taken Epstein’s money and counsel. I’ll admit that as I look to see who he funded or considered funding, I find myself assuming he was gravitating toward sex researchers who might tell him his tastes were perfectly normal, his actions even evolutionarily superior. But no. He seems simply to have been attracted to scientists (mostly men, many of them physicists) supposedly suffering for their “dangerous” ideas.

At the center of Epstein’s academic circle was John Brockman, literary agent, with whom I had a kind of brush. After I published my exposé on the Bailey book controversy in 2008, Steve Pinker (who was tangentially caught in the Bailey mess) offered me an introduction to his literary agent: Brockman. I asked Steve instead for a reference for a Guggenheim, so that I could undertake a much larger study of the phenomenon of activists attacking scientists for political reasons. I was interested in the problem because I had been such an activist; indeed, to say I was ambivalent about my findings in the Bailey case is to underestimate how confused I felt at that point in my life.

With a recommendation also from Dan Savage, the Guggenheim came through for the project I was then calling “Galileo’s Ghosts.” It was a while before I hit upon the better title: Galileo’s Middle Finger. When the manuscript was done, I went back to Pinker and asked for that referral to his agent. Being a relative nobody, I was quickly shunted to Brockman’s wife, Katinka Matson. Presumably as a favor to Pinker, she did read the manuscript, and then she called me. She proceeded to tell me the book did not fit into any existing genre and that I seemed to style myself as some kind of Nancy Drew, wandering around solving the question of who really did what.

I suppose these things were true, but her tone was one of utter disgust – almost revulsion – and I felt duly humiliated, at least at the surface.

“Never mind, never mind!” I kept saying to her, trying to get off the call.

She came across as such a shark – a mean old shark – I recall that, when I hung up, I was crying but also laughing. I knew the book was good. I didn’t know what would happen to it, but I knew it was good.

It wasn’t too long after that that Mark Oppenheimer called me because he was doing a profile of Dan Savage for the New York Times and Dan had suggested he interview me. Mark and I chatted for a long time and he ended up asking me what I was working on. I told him I had this book manuscript and I didn’t know what to do with it. He said I should send it to him, so I did, and he loved it and asked me if he could give it to his agent, Betsy Lerner, and I said of course. And Betsy read it and said it was very good but I needed to cut it by about a third, and she told me how to do it, and – being an angel who fell from heaven – Betsy got me a deal with Penguin and then shepherded it through the ridiculous experience of a succession of four editors (because Penguin was a random house at the time).

I remember thinking – hell, I still think – how much better the book would have done if it had been born into the clubby little world of Brockman and Edge, which (deliciously for me, you now see) turns out to have been the clubby little world of Epstein. Betsy saved my baby from that fate, and so even if my baby never got to meet Prince Andrew, well, it also never got molested.

There are plenty of unfortunate scientists who are needlessly tainted by their brushes with Epstein, and I feel for them. But there are a few who have tried over the years to justify hebephilia as a perfectly normal, yea even superior form of sexuality, and I won’t mind if they have to answer some awkward questions. Popcorn. Extra salt.

But the truth is that where the Epstein in America drama keeps leading me is the feeling I often have – that heterosexuality is quite hopeless as a long-term project. Because in naturally selecting in males and then in females what would make them produce living offspring, we have also wound up with what makes it impossible to experience sex the same way.

As long as we women are watching completely different movies from the men fucking us – as long as sex leaves men complete while simultaneously leaving women desperately wanting what their children will need (a need so deep we don't even realize that's what that empty feeling is) – we will always end up embittered, calloused.

Still, it seems a good idea to get there via bumbling. I remember the trumpeter asking me, couldn’t I open my mouth more while we kissed? I could.