“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” — Declaration of Independence (1776).
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”— Thirteenth Amendment (1865, after the deadliest war in US history).
“America! America!”
“God mend thine every flaw”
“Confirm thy soul in self-control”
“Thy liberty in law!” — from the original version of “America the Beautiful,” conceived by Katharine Lee Bates on the summit of Pikes Peak, Colorado (conceived 1893, first published 1895).
Funny thing about sex. After centuries of Puritan shame and self-denial, modern, developed societies have come to see sexual acts as what they are, one of life’s supreme pleasures. In legalizing same-sex marriage, our Supreme Court, in
Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), implicitly recognized that
consensual sex, whether or not for procreation, cannot be outlawed in a society that calls itself “free.” What people do for pleasure,
voluntarily, in private, and with few or no negative consequences for others, should be their own business.
But
coerced sex is another matter. Nearly every human society has laws against rape. And rightly so. The fact that most males are bigger and stronger than most females should not be an excuse for society tolerating one person forcing another to be the instrument of his pleasure and her pain, remorse and shame, let alone involuntary childbirth.
But what happens when the forcing is not
directly physical and violent? What happens when the whips and chains are merely metaphorical, i.e., verbal threats and psychological leverage? Shouldn’t the same rules apply?
The recent memoir co-authored by Virginia Roberts Giuffre,
Nobody’s Girl, highlights the issue. It was published after Giuffre’s own suicide. You needn’t read the whole book to get the sociopolitical gist: you can glean that from
this short TV interview with her surviving co-author.
Guiffre had the misfortune to be born to a violent, uncontrolled and abusive father. Early in her puberty, he molested her sexually during a camping trip. When she protested and resisted, he dragged her into the family camper and beat the hell out of her. Although other family members and possibly bystanders were nearby and undoubtedly heard, no one raised a hand or voice to help her.
In her interview, the co-author explains brilliantly that this horrible and tragic incident taught Giuffre “how the world works.” Is it any wonder that she much later became one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual slaves, held in bondage by mere verbal threats, Mafia-Don-style, to harm her brother, whom she loved?
None of this is subtle. It’s wrong at a basic emotional and human level. It’s wrong even if the violence or harm was a mere threat, not actual, and even if the threats were directed “only” at another.
Understanding its deep, human wrongness doesn’t require much intelligence. You don’t even have to be smart enough to know that tariffs are a form of tax. Sexual slavery is wrong even when the violence or coercion is merely covert, implied or suggested. It’s the coercion that matters, not the means.
No doubt there are predatory men who can “smell” the susceptibility of women like Giuffre to coercion and abuse, just as animals smell fear. Through emotional intelligence and twisted experience, they learn how to exploit this sort of weakness.
God knows that Trump is well practiced in the art of Mafia-like coercion. Just think of all the ostensible MAGA pols who express reservations or even revulsion in private and yet refuse to speak (or vote!) in public lest they lose their position and power. Trump has them in his grip as surely as Epstein and Ghislaine held young ladies as psychological sex slaves in their involuntary orgies, and by much the same means.
The Brits get it. They took away Prince Andrew’s title as Duke of York on suspicion of complicity in Epstein’s coercion. Should our own President, if shown to have also been complicit, not suffer a similar fate?
The extraordinary thing about Donald Trump is his uncanny ability to get millions of people to believe things that are just not so. It’s a remarkable skill. He’s a veritable virtuoso of twisted emotional intelligence, playing on voters’ fears, rages, hatreds and prejudices as if they were some celestial grand piano.
He succeeds because he has legions of willing accomplices. Media businesses and their owners find it in their interest to push his twisted schemes so as to preserve and enhance their own wealth and power, lower their taxes, and evade the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. (This is also how Rome’s democracy fell.) Anonymous Internet geeks can get their fifteen minutes of fame—and sometimes a share of their own wealth—by the same means.
It’s all possible because ordinary people have to apply their cerebral cortices to a minimal knowledge of history and human nature to see what’s going on. Among other things, they have to be able to understand that foreign countries don’t pay tariffs. That sort of societal “protection” failed in ancient Rome and is failing our democracy today, at Trump’ s characteristic “Warp Speed.”
But sex is different. No special study, knowledge or experience is needed to understand. All females instinctively sympathize with women like Giuffre because all have known her fear and uncertainty personally, even if only while walking through dark alleys in questionable areas.
All males have sexual impulses that we have to control and suppress in a civilized society. We all have mothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, wives, lovers, and/or female friends whom we have to protect. We all know instinctively that sexual slavery is wrong, and that it is our evolutionary and civilizational job to protect the “weaker sex.”
Trump also knows this instinctively. His
analytical intelligence is, without a doubt, among the lowest of any American president’s—if not the single lowest ever. That’s why he seems genuinely unable to fathom that tariffs act like a form of tax.
But Trump’s
emotional intelligence is undoubtedly among the highest even among pols, who rely on emotional intelligence for their living. That’s why he can hold in thrall so many pols and voters who should know better: he grabs them by their amygdalas, without engaging their Reason.
So Trump knows that
l’affaire Epstein has engaged the nation’s emotions in a way that no political issue has or can. And, if only vaguely, he understands why. That’s why he has spent so much effort, sometimes laughably, to distract us. That’s why, as the noose closes, he’s getting defensive, petulant, and even nastier and more deranged than usual. He understands in his gut that this is a gut issue that no informational lie can heal.
At the end of the day, it was a simple act of erasing three minutes of the “Watergate Tapes” that brought an end to Richard Nixon’s twisted presidency. We don’t yet know to what extent Trump knew of Epstein’s ring of sexual slavery or to what extent he tolerated or even participated in it. But it’s clear that Trump fears any hint that he knew of it and failed to stop it or even to try.
Whatever the facts, Trump has gone all out to keep the Epstein Files from the light of day. But there is nothing so tantalizing to ordinary people as the sex lives of the rich and famous, and nothing so deep in our emotions as the desire to protect those whom we love.
Trump knows this instinctively, just as he “knows” anything. That’s why he’s freaking out. And that’s why the fear and “loyalty” that so many weak-willed, cowardly pols have toward him is fragile. They could turn against him in an instant, and for reasons far more deeply embedded in our human souls than a three-minute tape erasure.
Let it be so.
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