You Don’t Just Protect, You Correct: A Teachable Epstein Moment

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

I had to stop reading what was in this recent release of more Epstein Files. I am not sure if I can look again because the sickness in it is far more insidious than one can stomach. I have access to all of them that can be accessed so I can access the details of more of them should I choose to do so. Don’t send me any of them, please.

Many of the men who have clamored for the release of these files have done so primarily to make political capital out of them. They don’t actually care that much about what happened to those girls. And I don’t care if they get angry about what I just wrote. 

These are the same men who rarely, if ever, confront men who have sexually violated women and who never organize as a collective group to publicly state that this behavior is wrong. They tend to just tell women and girls in their orbit how to avoid certain types of men. That is honorable, but… 

the responsibility is still left on women and girls to police men’s behavior. And before I hear that typical smokescreen that says “she should have known better than to…” please know that those kinds of statements not only prove that this heinous sexual behavior exists, but it also tacitly condones that behavior since the men in these scenarios are allegedly not responsible for their behavior because the girls and women should have expected to be violated based on their location or their appearance, not on certain men’s inability to behave themselves. 

An excited 16-year-old girl who just met her favorite male singer and who foolishly follows him up to his hotel room when he says, “I have invited a few friends up, come join us,” should not expect to be raped. He never should have invited her up for a variety of reasons—the first reason being her age and the second reason being that she is a stranger that he just met. 

An impressionable 16-year-old boy with a crush on his neighbor, a 35-year-old woman, should not expect to be forced/seduced by her because he mowed her lawn and then helped her take her groceries in the house. Importantly, his initial feelings of violation should not be replaced with congratulatory praise for his participation in the act which confuses her wrong behavior towards him as some male rite of passage for him. 

These same men crying out for Trump and his sexually perverted team members to be brought to justice are not trying to destroy or collapse the current legal system at least until they have covered their asses and the asses of men they know that might not easily swim out of the Epstein quagmire. Illegality and sexual impropriety were built into the system. It’s still there. 

(from The Arbitrary Ages of Consent: The Epstein Files by Leslye Joy Allen on Substack)

It is not that all men (or women) are potential sexual abusers; it’s just that the ability to get away with it or have it somehow described with less severity is enshrined in the very definitions and expectations of masculinity. Rape is rarely forgiven by ethical men, but excessive male sexual prowess and promiscuity often is.

So here’s where it gets dicey, particularly for women. I have several good Black male friends, most of whom I have known since elementary school. There isn’t one of them that would not protect me if they witnessed me being physically harmed in any way by anyone.

There isn’t one of them who would not go, or at least want to go, after someone they believed had assaulted me sexually. Yet, if something like that happened I would not be likely to tell them because they would either end up in jail due to a physical confrontation with my offender or they would be injured or killed for their efforts. That kind of love is gratifying; yet some of the things that kind of love can produce is scary, and it can occasionally make certain scenarios worse. So…

the real onus for ethical and righteous men is not simply protection, but correction. If men do not confront other men about their behavior, their sexism, their misogyny, their misogynoir, and their double standards then the process of bringing sex offenders to justice will always be processed first through that “Boys will be boys” lens.

(from “The Evidence of Things Not Seen” and the Epstein Files by Leslye Joy Allen on Substack)

Furthermore, a woman’s chronic need for protection from rape or other forms of assault essentially means that the problem remains chronically intact. The only way to end this is to end the manner in which men think of women and how they interact with and talk to other men; and whether they can do the most unpopular thing to do, which is: confront other men. 

Additionally, the sexual violation of boys by men and women will continue to be swept under the rug by the perverted tenets of masculinity that insist that a boy or man should be silent because to speak up about his abuse is anathema to the myth that all men are physically and psychologically strong simply because they are men. It is male sexual assault victims’ equivalent to that nonsense that says, “Big boys don’t cry.”

Every opinion, good or bad, biased or unbiased, informed or uninformed, is also a confession. Silence, when the needs of the hour demand that you speak, can be proof of cowardice or a desire to conform to the status quo or an admission that you are protecting the guilt of someone else or even your own. 

Justice for Epstein’s victims and prison time for the participants in these heinous actions is only a first step. Yet, we won’t correct the alleged norms that generated and aided and abetted Epstein and his cronies as long as their actions are seen as some anomaly rather than proof of a perpetual problem. 

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work and research with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp or become a paid subscriber to me on Substack to help me sustain my research.

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author.  Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers.  All Rights Reserved.

The Arbitrary Ages of Consent: The Epstein Files

by © Leslye Joy Allen

Any belief that is based on distorted facts or on lies will eventually swallow you whole. Any weird science that has been used to perpetuate myths and half truths can get you injured or killed. 

I read an abstract of an article from 2009 called Pedophilia, hebephilia and the DSM-V awhile back. DSM-V stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. This quote from its abstract stood out:

“One possibility would be to replace the diagnosis of Pedophilia with Pedohebephilia and allow the clinician to specify one of three subtypes: Sexually Attracted to Children Younger than 11 (Pedophilic Type), Sexually Attracted to Children Age 11-14 (Hebephilic Type), or Sexually Attracted to Both (Pedohebephilic Type). We further recommend that the DSM-V encourage users to record the typical age of children who most attract the patient sexually as well as the gender of children who most attract the patient sexually.”

The abstract noted in 2009 that the term “hebephilia,” which described an adult that had a sexual preference for pubescent children ages 11 to 14, had not caught on. That term still has not caught on. 

Pedophilia, which describes someone who has a marked sexual preference for children who have not yet begun puberty is still the preferred term to designate adults who have a sexual preference for underage youth. I am going to play devil’s advocate here.

What is missing from these definitions is the alleged safety clauses for children aged 15 and older. What’s blatantly clear, at least it was in 2009, was that anyone aged 16 or older could be classified as a pedophile as long as their victim/s were at least 5 years younger. In other words a 16-year-old male classified as “pedophile” would necessarily be or attempt to be sexually active with a child/children 11-years-of-age or younger.

If you’re scratching your head, you should be. I can understand a grown man or grown woman looking at a 15 or 16 year old and thinking that those teenagers are awfully cute. Yet, propriety and ethics and morals and good old common sense should remind these same adults that these “teenagers” have no business climbing into bed with them for any reason. It’s called decency. 

After I read the recent, pathetically weak reporting on what has been released so far from the Epstein Files, I knew I needed to revisit some of the data on pedophilia. Here’s why? 

White Western science has a tendency to describe any and all rotten ass behavior as some form of mental disorder rather than defining certain behavior for what it is: the “I-do-what-I-do-when-it-suits-me-and-when-I-can-stay-in-control-when-I-do-it” syndrome.  White male patriarchy, in all of its excesses and perversions, is protected by the science. 

The white or Black guy that cannot get any woman to have sex with him because he doesn’t know how to talk to or court well-educated adult women might end up in a sexual tryst with a vulnerable and impressionable 16-year-old because he found her attractive because she’s physically well-developed, but mentally she’s still a kid—and his sick, predatory, control freak ass already knows it. 

I am not willing to paint such men as “mentally ill” as much as I am willing to paint them as ethically and morally corrupt. In other words, they are rotten to the core. 

The revelation that there is in excess of over 1.7 million documents in the Epstein Files and that there were at least 10 co-conspirators that aided and abetted Epstein and other men of his ilk ought to tell you something. 

(Young Ruth Bader Ginsburg & Kamala Harris)

If the frontal cortex of your adult brain doesn’t reach full maturity until you are at least in your mid-to-late twenties, ask yourself the following questions: 

Why is the average age of sexual consent across 30 states in the United States only 16-years-of-age? Why do only a handful of states place the age of consent at age 17, with a remaining 11 states placing the age of consent at age 18? 

Do not tell yourself that lie that you were wise when you were between the ages of 16 and 18. It doesn’t matter if you remember that lovely moment when you and another 16 year old decided to do the deed because you were just a couple of horny teenagers. It does matter if that 35-year-old guy that you thought was so cool for being interested in you ran his hand up your dress and coerced you into a sexual scenario that you were not ready for. 

The Supreme Court was established in March of 1789. Yet, it wasn’t until Ruth Bader Ginsberg (long before she was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993), argued in 1977 in “Sex Bias in the U. S. Code” that she co-authored for the Commission on Civil Rights, that boys and men could be and often were raped and/or sexually exploited. So many men were so damned caught up in patriarchy and male sexual prowess that they didn’t even know to look out for themselves. They still don’t.

The young prosecutor Kamala Harris remembered her high school best friend as having been molested by her father. She pressed her friend to tell her what was going on. Young Kamala remembered that her friend often did not want to go home. 

Kamala told her mother what was going on with her friend; they took this girl into their home. When Kamala made the decision to become a prosecutor she specialized in prosecuting pedophiles and rapists. Do you think if she were president we would be getting Epstein updates in dribs and drabs? I think not.

© Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work and research with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp or become a paid subscriber to me on Substack to help me sustain my research.

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author.  Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers.  All Rights Reserved.