You Know, You Can Just Say "Patriarchy"

I pride myself on not blogging in anger, here at the Jude Doyle Newsletter Experience. It’s a conscious change from the blogs of my youth, when righteous outrage was the only thing anyone would pay me for, and I had to make myself angry all day, every day, in order to survive. 

I’ve grown. I’ve matured. I’ve evolved. Except when I haven’t. There are times when the anger seizes me, regardless of my best intentions, and I realize that I am either going to Blog About It or I am going to be caught setting fire to trashcans in the local mall. 

It’s time to talk about the Epstein Files, y’all! Specifically, it’s time to talk about the nice, normal, reasonable, usually correct men of social media, who keep posting takes about the Epstein Files that go like this: 

At this point, I am going to be brutally fucking honest with you: I was not raped by a billionaire, and neither were any of the rape victims I know. 

Epstein’s extreme wealth, and that of his clients, absolutely does matter: It gave him reach, and resources, and connections, and more than the usual level of impunity. Most notably, it gave him influence, and allowed him to engineer the far-right global resurgence from behind the scenes — a project he participated in with many other rich people who shared his interests. That’s a very important angle to this story that I will absolutely not be covering today. 

Because, even though wealth made Epstein a more effective predator, it did not make him a predator. If it did, sexual assault and abuse would not be endemic. They would not be experiences shared by the overwhelming majority of women, along with a surprisingly high number of men. We already have a theory to explain all that, and it also does a pretty good job of answering all these questions about why (for example) men with seemingly different politics might still be able to bond over the sexual exploitation and assault of women. 

That explanation is patriarchy, and feminists have been talking about it for a very long time now, so you’ll forgive me if I get pissy when you can’t find room for it in any of your 3,000 scathing tweets. If you, a non-billionaire Man of the Internet, ignore patriarchy as an explanation to this problem, you are not only letting yourself off the hook, you are telling the vast majority of victims that they do not matter. 

That's my pitch, and it might sound "emotional" to some of you, so let’s back this up: In the absolute most conservative estimate of child sexual abuse rates in the US, one in nine girls and one in 20 boys is sexually abused before the age of 18. Again, that’s the lowest number I can find: Other statistics say it’s one in four girls and one in 13 boys. Others say it’s one in four and one in six. 34% of those assaults take place before the age of 12; boys, specifically, are more likely to experience their first assault before age 10. This does not mean girls have it easier: Teenage girls are one of the most at-risk demographics, and are four times more likely to be sexually assaulted or raped than the general population.

Even as adults, young women are more likely to be targeted; in 69% of all sexual assaults, the victims are between the ages of 12 and 34. But — again, according to the most conservative statistics — one in five women and one in 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives. Some sources put this as high as one in four women and one in 26 men, factoring in attempted rape. Overall, 81% of women and 43% of men have experienced “some form of sexual harassment or assault in their lifetime.”

You know what’s nice and calm and un-emotional? Math. Let’s do math together. There are 172.6 million women currently living in the US, as per the most recent census, and one in five of them has been raped, making 34.5 million rape victims. There are also 902 billionaires in the US, as per the most recent numbers. If we’re only counting completed rapes, only counting women, and only counting assaults in the US, then each of those billionaires still has to rape thirty-eight thousand, two hundred and forty eight (point three!) women to make up that number. 

Jeffrey Epstein raped a whole lot of girls, but he didn’t rape that many girls. And we’re still not factoring in attempted assaults, or different forms of assault, or the fact that our billionaires are also going to have to sexually harass nearly half the men and basically all of the women currently living in the country in order to make that math check out. It’s not that I put it past them — Elon Musk would definitely sexually harass every woman on the planet, if he could, and he’s trying even as we speak — but it just isn’t feasible with our current technology. Nor does it line up with on-the-ground reports. 

The recorded facts of child sexual abuse, or of sexual assault in general, do not speak to a reality in which a few depraved billionaires commit monstrous acts of which normal men and women are incapable. They speak to a world in which sexual violence is ordinary. Common. Normal. Tolerated. And, yes, they do speak to a world in which one group of people, more than all others, is encouraged and permitted to rape: Up to 99% of all people who commit sexual assault, and 96% of the people who abuse children, are men. 

Men commit the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults upon women. Men commit the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults upon men. Men are the ones abusing girls, and men are the ones abusing boys. 94% of female victims report only being assaulted by men in their lifetimes; so do 71.9% of male victims. 

Now: Acknowledging this does not mean we're subscribing to some TERF-flavored brand of essentialism wherein testosterone or "manhood" causes inherent, biological rapaciousness. The idea that rapists “can’t help themselves” only helps rapists. This is a social problem, and as such, some structure of social incentives must be encouraging this behavior. So:

• If one class of people is committing nearly all the rapes on the planet, and that group of people also holds disproportionate power in society, what can we conclude?
• If rape overwhelmingly takes place along a power differential, and mimics the structure of power in society — men rape women; adults rape children; bosses rape employees — what does that mean? If the compulsion to rape were "irresistible," or biological, or apolitical, wouldn't the rapes be more randomly distributed?
• If sexual assaults or alleged assaults which do not accord with social hierarchies – say, a Black man or boy assaulting a white woman, one of the only historical instances in which "false rape allegations" have ever been a real problem – are punished with overwhelming violence, and if assaults that do conform to social hierarchies (an NFL player raping a fan; a billionaire raping a poor teenager on his private island; a young white man raping an equally young Asian woman behind a dumpster) are excused or overlooked or, at most, given a slap on the wrist: What does that tell us?

What explanation could possibly account for all these disparate and seemingly unconnected phenomena? What are we looking at here?

Billionaires! 

No. It's patriarchy: A regime of sexual violence, in which rape is the privilege of those in power and the disciplinary tool used to keep those without power in line. 

So why do men with (seemingly) different politics bond over sexually abusing and exploiting girls? Patriarchy. Why do men with power so often use sexual assault to celebrate and confirm that power? Patriarchy. Why are Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky and Elon Musk and Donald Trump all on the same page, specifically in re: sexual violence being cool and fun and normal? What do they have in common? Patriarchy, because if it were only the money holding them together, then your brother-in-law and your college frat buddies and your girlfriend’s father and your ninth-grade social studies teacher and your local Catholic priest wouldn’t believe the exact same thing, and they do.

Guys you know are doing these things. Guys you like are doing these things. If you are a man, the world is set up to allow you to do these things. If you’re not ready to face that, then you’re not ready for this conversation. 

Get ready, because Virginia Giuffre did not die for us to only solve half this problem. Billionaires should not exist, but neither should rapists, and though that Venn Diagram overlaps, it is very far from being a circle. Too often, when people talk about “the billionaire class,” they seem to be saying that the responsibility for sexual abuse and assault rests over there, with some inhuman cadre of monsters they’ll never meet — and not with them, and their friends, and their family members, even though each and every one of them has benefited from patriarchy in their lifetimes. (So have I — this post is going to get way less blowback than it would have if I’d posted it under my deadname.) It’s the same problem I have when people frame the Epstein case as a matter of “raping children,” not raping girls — the implication is that raping a child is clearly off-limits, because children are pre-sexual, but raping an adult woman, or even a girl who was on her way to being a woman, might be okay. 

It’s not okay. It’s not okay when billionaires and presidents do it, but it’s also not okay when your uncle Greg does it, or when the guy at the gas station does it, and no, it’s not okay when women do it, even though they do it a lot less often: There are no unimportant assaults, and no unimportant victims, and that’s the point. 

Patriarchy implicates all of us; it molds all of us; it gets us all dirty. Even those of us who don’t commit assault are part of rape culture; we ignore it, or we excuse it, or we minimize it, or we vote for people who’ve done it. We blame the victims; when we are the victims, we blame ourselves. We’re all in the shit, and as long as we locate the problem out there or over there, with some group of people that is decisively Not Us, that shit is where we’re staying. 

So just say “patriarchy.” Just say it! Find 10 characters’ worth of room for it in one of your 5,000-character tweets! Take five seconds to just blame yourself, and your own complacency, instead of blaming Others and Monsters, because once you do that, you’ll begin to see what power you have, and whose life you’re affecting. When you do that — only when you do that — things might start to change. 

Patriarchy is everywhere. I don't recommend it.

Book announcements at the bottom this time: The fifth issue of Be Not Afraid is in comic shops now; the sixth and final installment will be out on Wednesday, February 25th. Comixology is still missing some issues, but you can download the entire series to date on Google Play or through Penguin Random House.

Dead Teenagers, a slasher about getting stuck and growing up, will be out on March 18, 2026 from Oni Press, with truly tremendous art by Caitlin Yarsky. Add it to your pull list wherever you buy comics, and read the extended preview here.

Finally: DILF: Did I Leave Feminism, my third book of non-fiction, is available wherever books are sold, via Bookshop.org, and (in smell form) at Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.