The Arbitrary Ages of Consent: The Epstein Files

Posted on December 26, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

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.

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Threading Grandma’s Needles, and Kamala Harris

Posted on March 18, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️ Leslye Joy Allen

When I was a small girl around the age of 4 or 5, my maternal grandmother would often ask me to thread her needle. I was a late born baby to my parents and Grandma was well into her seventies when I was born.

Grandma was a scholar who read a couple of books a week. I knew instinctively that the reason why she asked me to thread her needle was because the eye of a sewing needle is narrow and often hard to see. The best pair of eyes could have trouble getting that thread through that tiny eye. By the time I was around 4 or 5, Grandma was in her eighties, and I enjoyed doing what I could for my Grandma.

(Stock photo of an elderly woman’s hands threading a needle, Alamy)

Grandma’s eyes were not as steady as they once were; and neither were her hands. But once that needle was threaded, she could sew up a storm. As I have now passed the age of 60, it now takes me damned near 15 minutes to thread a needle. But you do what you can and what you have to do. This brings me to another observation.

For several months this year, after I rolled my herbie-curbie (that’s the name for our garbage cans on wheels in Atlanta) to the curb of my driveway, I arrived back home and instead of my herbie-curbie being left at the curb of my driveway as is customary, someone had rolled it all the way up to the gate to my backyard so I wouldn’t have to retrieve it.

Last week, I was home when the sanitation workers were out. Before I exited my door to retrieve my herbie-curbie, I saw my 20-something neighbor who is autistic grab its handle and roll it up to my gate. He went from house-to-house doing the same thing—saving his older neighbors the trip to the end of the curb.

I bring this up because when I finally saw who was doing this favor on his own, it dawned on me that he was doing what he could do to assist his neighbors.

Then I thought about all of these folks barking about where is Kamala Harris? During the first wave of complaints, she was actually in fire-ravaged California assessing damage, talking with the mayor and governor and firefighters, and assisting her neighbors who had lost their homes.

The second wave of complaints came recently. Now, I have already said that Harris is a private citizen and has done her duty while so many others fail to do so much as contact their representatives and complain.

What is most annoying is the manner in which folks have complained. I watched Harris lose weight on the campaign trail after being given a near-impossible task of organizing a campaign in just over 100 days after a stubborn Joe Biden took his sweet time stepping aside when so many of his colleagues begged him to do so.

I have also been around white women who felt like I was their property and who felt like I was obligated to do whatever they requested, and were insulted when I said “No” even when my work or school schedule and obligations would not permit me to accommodate them.

I have been around men (black and white) who treated me the same way. That is an unfortunate experience that Black women have endured ever since we have been here in this country. We are not supposed to have own lives, but we are supposed to stand ready to salvage somebody else’s. Wedged between battling racism and sexism and misogynoir simultaneously, we are often left hanging when we are having problems.

Instead of these complainers interrogating the majority of white women and men who voted for Felon 47, they want Harris out there speaking for them. And if she did, you know good and damned well Felon 47 and his minions, along with his bought-and-paid-for news rooms would paint her as a “Sore Loser” while his dumb-as-cat-shit voters nodded in agreement while he continued to pick their pockets and threaten their livelihoods. Unlike my sweet autistic neighbor, they do not do what they can but they expect someone else to do it.

Instead of bothering to contact Kamala Harris’ office or website or her page on IG to ask her a question, they went on a rampage of demands. They don’t even know what she might be doing behind the scenes.

So, let me share this bit of my history. I represent only the third generation of my families not born into slavery. I will leave you with what my paternal Great Grandmother said to her mistress who just couldn’t believe Great Grandma would want to leave her mistress and be free. With a nap sack on her shoulder, and right before she went searching for her other siblings who had been sold to other slave owners, she said the following:

“You can do your own work and you can pick your own cotton.”

©️ Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

Pawns and Queens: Analogies For a New Era

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

We historians often find data in some file in an obscure archive, in letters written by someone’s grandmother, in photos, newspaper clippings, legal records. Our discipline demands that we dig, analyze, rethink and revise, constantly. I liken our work to studying the function of each piece in a Chess game. We get different perspectives about the same set of circumstances depending on which Chess piece we examine.

I was a mediocre Chess player. I had a few friends who played like champions. So, I often just watched them play. I remain, however, fascinated by the game’s objectives and, specifically, the roles of Pawns and Queens.

Pawns are the most numerous pieces in Chess; they are the foot soldiers. Each player has eight Pawns. A Pawn can move one or two squares forward if that move is its first move. After the first move, a Pawn can only move one square forward unless the square is blocked by some other piece. A Pawn can capture or attack another piece, however, by moving diagonally to the left or right.

The Pawn is the only piece in a Chess game that can change ranks. Depending on the skill of a Chess player, a Pawn can become a Bishop, a Rook or a Queen. In spite of a Pawn’s ability to advance to a higher rank, it is still considered the lowest ranking piece in the game. It is only worth one point.

The objective of the game is to capture your opponent’s King where that King has no way out, which means Checkmate. While the King is considered the most important piece in the game, it is the Queen that is considered the most powerful piece.

Queens are the only pieces that can move across the board in any manner as long as they are not successfully blocked by other pieces. If you lose, it is highly likely that you lost because your opponent’s Queen checkmated your King. Chess players feel much more confident when they have successfully captured or blocked her.

You can still win the game without capturing the Queen, but you have to be extremely strategic and precise to do so. You can also win without making good moves with your Pawns, but it is highly unlikely.

Chess is now over 1,500 years old. While there is some skepticism about its precise origins, many Chess historians believe that the Indian board game called “Chaturanga” was the earliest predecessor of Chess. There were many other versions that followed, but are too numerous to mention here.

In early versions of Chess, there was a piece called “Vizier” or “Advisor” for centuries. In the 1500s, in the era of great and powerful Queens in Europe, like Spain’s Isabella and England’s Elizabeth, “Viziers” or “Advisors” were redesigned and renamed “Queens.” You can learn an awful lot of world history just by examining Chess.

So here’s the deal: There is no such thing as a Chess game where Queens/Women Heads of State/Women in general are not powerful and flexible while the Kings/Men Heads of State/Men in general are highly important but who have or exercise fewer tactical moves.

There is also no such thing as a Chess game where Pawns/Foot Soldiers/Laborers are not essential to success, even while they are considered less important.

Apply any and all of the above to what you see happening in the United States and the world right now. I refuse to tell you how to analyze and interpret this history because there are so many interpretations and analogies that can be extrapolated from this board game.

All I will say is that nothing is going to change or be corrected without the skill of devoted Pawns, and the power and daring of Queens.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

Shutterstock photo of a Pawn and a Queen on a Chessboard.

Kill the Snake

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

Harriet Tubman was a nurse, a scout, and a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War. She is best known, however, as a leader of the Underground Railroad where she led many African American enslaved people from the state of Maryland to head north to Canada.

A majority of Black American runaway slaves never made it to Canada, which was the intended destination. Most of them landed somewhere in the Northeast where American chattel slavery was abolished during the 18th through the early 19th centuries.

I want to point out two things about Tubman and about Black American women during the late 19th century.

First, Tubman always kept a rifle or gun under her dress just in case one of her runaway slaves decided to run back to their plantation. After all, these journeys required hundreds of miles on foot while they worried about bounty hunters who searched for runaways in order to reap financial rewards. Slave patrols roamed all night looking for slaves out after dark without permission. If a slave was caught, punishment was severe, and occasionally fatal.

Tubman let her fellow Black freedom-seekers know that she would shoot them dead before she allowed any one of them to run back to their former owners who would inevitably beat them until they confessed about her mission, which would jeopardize the safety of everyone involved. All of the slaves who headed North with Tubman believed her. She never once had to use her gun.

Second, Tubman was clear about her mission to free and save her people. Her demand to, “Kill the Snake before it Kills you,” was her reference to the slave-holding Confederacy and its Army in the American South.

She did not necessarily want anyone to be killed, but she underscored that the Confederate Army was the Snake; and the Snake had to be stopped no matter the casualties it suffered.

During Reconstruction (1863 to 1877) after the Civil War ended, the Republican Party of the North sought to solidify its political dominance and economic control over the South. So, by 1870 it gave Black men who were former slaves the right to vote.

In spite of the fact that no women were granted the franchise, Black families sat down together and decided together how to cast that one vote afforded to male adults in their households. Many Black men were escorted to the polls by their wives, sisters, and mothers who also hid guns and rifles under their dresses just in case some white southerner/s, aka snake/s, decided to harm these Black male voters.

In this new year of 2025, we are again at a moment in our history where our capacity to protect ourselves and those we love, and our capacity to survive economically and to be free is at stake.

We must face the reality that we may have to do things we never thought we would ever have to do in our lifetimes. We must do more than complain about our representatives who are complacent, thereby complicit, about the objectives of the incoming administration.

We do not yet know what we may have to do. But I think about all of those Black women in the late nineteenth century prepared to protect Black men who were going to vote for the first time in their lives.

I also think about some of my sheroes like Congresswoman and former presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm. I think about her mentee, Congresswoman Barbara Lee. I think about the fact that Black Panther Party membership was 70 percent Black women. Then I think of Vice-President Kamala Harris and former First Lady Michelle Obama.

After I remember all of these sisters I admire, I then think of my late maternal grandmother who was a coed at then Clark College during the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 with her gun under her dress for her protection. I then remember my paternal aunt who had molotov cocktails thrown at her during protest marches in the 1960s, and one thrown in her home because she dared to register Black folks to vote.

Then I remember Tubman’s order to “Kill the Snake before it Kills you.” Then I prepare myself in the event I have to carry out this order, figuratively and literally.

(Photo of Harriet Tubman by Harvey B. Lindsley, ca. 1871-1876, courtesy of the Library of Congress)

No Contradictions

Posted on January 5, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

When I started to hear negative commentary about Kamala Harris’ racial and ethnic background, I started reevaluating how “White Supremacy” works again.

Many people are completely unaware that when the Greek explorer Herodotus named the continent “Αἰθιοπία” (romanized as “Aithiopía”), his definition included the continents of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Herodotus’ term literally means “Land of Burnt Faces.”

Those kinds of cross-cultural connections and collaborations do not help white supremacy to flourish which is why you rarely hear anything about them. The objective of white supremacy is to make certain that peoples of color look to white folk, and white men specifically, for acceptance, guidance, deliverance, and redemption, but not to each other. Sexism works exactly the same way. A man, not a woman, may rule you and grant you favor in some screwed up patriarchal world as sexists imagine it.

African-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois’ heir apparent Vijay Prashad noted that many Indian men arrived in the USA in the late 18th and 19th centuries, married Black American women and disappeared from most histories. Suraj Yengde, both in his books and in his portrayal of himself in Ava DuVernay’s masterpiece film “ORIGIN,” noted that we must find reconnections with each other. His research on Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar is fascinating.

Ambedkar was a Dalit, or as he was once called, an “Untouchable.” He wrote India’s constitution. He earned two doctorate degrees and when he came to the United States he wanted to meet his fellow American untouchables. So, he visited Harlem where the Black folks lived. (FYI: Martin Luther King, Jr. was introduced as a fellow “untouchable” when he visited India.)

This is exactly what Shyamala Gopolan-Harris did when she left India to go to school in the United States. She gravitated toward communities where she was less likely to be mistreated. So, she headed to Berkeley, California which was a hotbed of activism—there were Civil Rights protests, anti-Vietnam protests, the Free Speech Movement and the work of the Black Panther Party in nearby Oakland was the world that her daughter Kamala Harris grew up in.

I bring this up because we know so little about our early histories and connections. I don’t bring this up with any foolish idea that everyone is going to suddenly start singing “Kumbaya” and start getting along all the time. Yet, we know more about what Prashad accurately identified as white power structures that, during the late 20th century, deliberately created the myth that “Southeast Asians” were a model minority, a minority he emphasized that was designed as a weapon against Black Americans.

Felon 47 and his minions have lined up a small cadre of Southeast Asians to serve in his administration to do two things: 1) make the administration look less racist than it is and, 2) to also entice India, which now has a larger population than China, that its population is seen somehow as superior. South Africa did damned near the same thing during apartheid.

When Black Americans visited South Africa during its apartheid era, Black American visitors were given passes written in Afrikaans that translated into English as “Honorary White Person.”

Now, the fact that I personally know at least seven Southeast Asians who identify quite accurately as “Black,” does not matter. The fact that so many folks on the continents of Africa and Southeast Asia have near identical DNA doesn’t matter either. When I read the book “A Passage to India,” I noted that an Indian character in the book was described as a “little Black man.” It was the first time I ever saw such a description of anyone outside of a specifically African or African American context. My point, however, is much simpler.

We Black Americans can continue to roll our eyes at the brown guy wearing the turban at the local gas station and vice-versa OR we can recognize and identify our participation in upholding white supremacy while its foot remains situated on both our necks. Before you bother to tell me about the guy at the gas station that you don’t like, remember that he is an employee and all you are is someone pumping gas. White supremacy makes all of us its pawns.

If you are honest, you also remember that moment when you got bad service at a Black-owned business and thought to yourself that you got bad service because the business was Black-owned. The fact that there are, were, and will be folks who simply are not good at customer service regardless of their race or ethnicity or nationality did not enter your mind. That kind of thinking is white supremacy in action too.

Kamala Harris knows this better than anyone. She knows who she is and she didn’t need anyone to tell her who she is. The fact that anyone dared define her speaks not only to their arrogance, but also to their presumptions that they actually have such a right to do so.

She was perceived by some folks as a contradiction and by some folks as having split loyalties. The only thing that actually requires split loyalties is white supremacy. It cannot thrive or survive without its clear contradictions. Let me write that again—It cannot survive or thrive without its clear contradictions. It functions with the assistance of the people who it is designed to either oppress and/or control and/or regulate. Repeat that until you get it. So, no contradictions.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Tag Archives: Kamala Harris