Meditations in an Emergency

12/20/2025

Feminism has been a long campaign to give women equal rights, to make us equal in society, under the law, and in access to power. It has radically changed the social landscape and of course it has also not yet changed it nearly enough. Undoing something so embedded in this culture for so long – not centuries but millennia – is not a failure if it has not finished the job in a matter of decades. People who do not think feminism has done much forget how different things were before that wave washed over everything. The very language to identify sexual harrassment and marital rape had yet to be coined, and marital rape was not a crime (likewise, domestic violence was a more neutral term for what was then called wife-beating, and feminists delegitimized it and invented the domestic violence shelter). Women were largely banned by law and custom from almost all positions of power. The justification was our supposed physical, intellectual, and moral inferiority and our lesser value.

Which meant that women were not believed about rape, were blamed for rape, were shamed for rape, were terrorized and punished and ostracized for speaking up, and were often told that they were attempting to ruin a man’s life rather than that he should face consequences for violating theirs, because his life mattered more than hers. That inferiority extended to the only recently partially dismantled idea that women are somehow more unreliable, subjective, delusional, vindictive than men, and therefore less to be believed when the subject is rape or related gender violence. There is no other crime in which the victim is so routinely treated as the guilty person to be put on trial.

All this was a form of silencing that protected perpetrators and made women and children more vulnerable to violence and abuse. The Epstein case is a prime example. Clearly all those Ivy League academics and captains of industry saw him dragging young women and girls from place to place, leering and joking and in some cases offering them up for rape and sexual exploitation by other men. The predator formerly known as Prince Andrew is almost the only one to be seriously punished for it, though it has been nice to see Harvard’s Larry Summers face some minor social and professional consequences for his misogynist email exchanges with Epstein (which makes me wonder if Obama is rethinking his appointment of this creep to his cabinet).

What has happened over the past dozen years is a shift in the credibility, audibility, and consequence of women and girls testifying about sexual abuse, and a shift in how seriously the society takes those crimes (because they were until recently often dismissed or leeringly snickered about, as is clear in the Epstein birthday book). I wrote about this in my 2020 memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence: “At the beginning of 2013 a dam broke. Behind it were millions of women’s stories about sexual violence, violence made possible by their inaudibility and lack of credibility and the inconsequentiality of their stories. Torrents of stories poured forth. … Violence against bodies had been made possible on an epic epidemic scale by violence against voices. The existing order rested on the right and capacity of men to be in ­ charge —​­ of meaning and of truth, of which stories mattered and whose got told, as well as of more tangible phenomena (money, law, government, media) that maintained the arrangement. And it rested on the silence or silencing of those whose experiences demonstrated the illegitimacies of the status quo and those atop it.”

Rape is a peculiar crime. It is an assertion that the rights and pleasures of the perpetrator matter infinitely, and those of the victims not at all. It can for the most part only take place in a society which makes the perpetrator matter more than the victim. So it is both ritual enactment of and enforcement of inequality. Feminism has broken some of the silence and brought in more equality, which is why crimes committed decades ago by men who had impunity at the time have in recent years sometimes been prosecuted, belatedly, but effectively.

The rules are changing – which is not to say they are changing enough, that we are at the victorious end of a quest for justice and equality, just that we have made some progress. And, of course, some backlash. But I do not believe that the backlash overwhelms or reverses the progress. It has been profound to see men who believe ardently that women too have certain inalienable rights and champion them, who have unlearned some of the myths about rape that were part of rape culture, who have championed justice for victims and abusers.

And it is undermining loyalty to Trump as nothing else has, and it is an important part of how the Trump regime and the Republican Party are falling apart before our eyes. This does not mean that the Trumpists are powerless; they are flailing and grabbing for all the kinds of power that they can. Trump appears to be disintegrating, rotting, collapsing before our eyes, mentally and physically, and Republicans in Congress – first of all with the vote to release the Epstein files – are breaking from him. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once his most loyal MAGA follower, has broken with him and denounces him regularly. The Epstein files seem to have been his breaking point. Breaking point in the loyalty of so many right-wingers, and maybe a mental breaking point for him. I welcome this breakage. I welcome what belated, flawed, imperfect version of justice may yet come.