Patriarchy and sexual terror are about power as expressed in the most atavistic way as subjugation and dehumanization of others; the power to turn people into things you can use. Patriarchy is about the theft of the soul.

    Like the freaks in a carnival show, monsters define the limits of the human and help us establish normality and the tyranny of other people's ideas of virtue. But this othering also grants immunity and permission as well as vilification and dehumanization of that which is different, for it allows us to ignore systemic evils and inequalities through constructions of personal responsibility derived from the doctrine of original sin and its basis in law as the innate depravity of man; here be monsters, not ourselves.

     In the case of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, serial predators whose crimes against humanity defy comprehension in the way that the Holocaust does as intrusive forces and atrocities beyond our frames of reference, the astounding scale and baroque abominations and perversions of their crimes offered concealment even as they were performed before a global audience of the wealthy and famous due to their manipulation of elite privilege and making their peers complicit as a strategy of blackmail.  

     This is how fascism operates, and its components patriarchy and racism; by making those who could bring them to justice complicit in their crimes. As Peter Carey said in regard to his novel A Long Way From Home; "You can't be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide."

     If we are to challenge and bring a reckoning to patriarchy as systemic unequal power and as sexual terror, we must avoid othering its agents and perpetrators, for this enables the restoration not of balance but of our comfort with our own privilege.

     There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified boy Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; "You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You're powerful or you're weak. "

      Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important.

      It's a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the  Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; "by any means necessary."

     As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; "We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression."

     And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; "A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"

     Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, the American and Napoleonic Empires, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real, as Thomas Mann taught us in Death in Venice and Vladimir Nabokov in his reimagination of it as Lolita; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.

     I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter's morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?

      All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche's warning in Beyond Good and Evil; "He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee."    

      The trials of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, like those of their fellow sexual terrorists Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar, are seizures of power as revolutionary struggle in which the victims refusal to be silenced has triumphed over the immunity of hegemonic elite wealth, power, and privilege; the Scarlet Letter has no power to shame women into submission through victim blaming in our society any longer, for in refusing to be silenced these courageous women have seized it as an instrument with which to dismantle the Patriarchy.

      Force is brutal, terrible, but also fragile, for it fails at the point of defiance and disobedience. Enacting the role of the Jester of King Lear and the girl who cried "The king has no clothes", parrhesia or what Foucault called truth telling, the witnesses of these iconic trials and of the historic turning of the tides of the #metoo movement have shown us all how to wage liberation and revolutionary struggle.

     As Max Stirner wrote; "Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized."

      As I wrote in my post of July 21 2020, How Patriarchy Works: Unequal Power, Identities of Sex and Gender, Autonomy Versus Authorization, Complicity and Responsibility, and the Social Use of Force;  Here I began thinking about the murder of Vanessa Guillen, toxic masculinity and violence, and the military as an atavism of rape culture in tidy categories of Hegelian-Marxist history and the dialectics of revolutionary struggle, when I quickly realized that patriarchy is a spectrum disease which corrupts and subverts its victims and its perpetrators alike, and this is its true terror.

     At the intersection of power asymmetries and identities of sex and gender lie issues of authorization versus autonomy, with crucial consequences for complicity and responsibility in our legal system which arbitrates the social use of force.

     In her now classic work Ring of Power, Jean Shinoda Bolen interprets Wagner's great opera in terms of patriarchal forces which dehumanize us because they cripple and steal our capacity to love. Of particular interest here is the figure of Brunhild as Daddy's Avenger and victim of internalized oppression.

     So I looked again, but this time not at the primary struggle for power and ownership between male perpetrator and female victim, but at two female monsters who are parallel figures as enablers and accomplices of sexual terror, Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.

     Moreover they are characters embedded in fairytale narratives with which we are all familiar; the etiology of their disfigurement and monstrosity lies in the malign effects of inequality as a moral debasement and leprosy of the soul. For the study of such things I return to Margaret Atwood's masterpiece Cat's Eye, her novels Interlunar and Life Before Man, to the thematic companion volumes The Handmaid's Tale and The Edible Woman, and to the foundational critical work by Sharon Rose Wilson, The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.

     A study of Margaret Atwood is illuminating and instrumental to understanding the elements of patriarchy and the operations of its systems, especially in the context of female on female violence in secondary order power relations. Allow me to elaborate.

     Cat's Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson's Snow Queen and Grimm's Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson's Ice Maiden and Grimm's Girl Without Hands.

     Fearful door images echo Grimm's Fitcher's Bird; Risley's dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin's fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood's vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.

     Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare's King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story.

     Thematically Cat's Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood's driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.

     Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson's Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher's Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde's Salome, Dante's Inferno, Ovid's Metamorphosis, Coleridge's Kublai Khan, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Irving's Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It's a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.

     Interlunar reimagines Cocteau's Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel.

     The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid's Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher's bride.

     The Handmaid's Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.

     Margaret Atwood's parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid's Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.

     Among Margaret Atwood's Great Books, The Handmaid's Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important series ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.

     It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of patriarchy and authority, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party around the time of the novel's writing; Margaret Atwood's motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and its threat to global democracy.

     It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.

     And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict between Anima and Animus with that of the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.

     So we return to our Brunhilds and twin monsters Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, who Janus-faced represent corruption and perversion, the dual spheres of action of feminine power turned against itself by the forces of patriarchy and shaped to the uses of predation and misogyny.

     Melania's message on the coat she wore to tour a migrant concentration camp, "I really don't care. Do U?' and Ghislaine's self-description in Vanity Fair, "'I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews," reflect the disease of power in its political and sexual contexts, and as a First Cause of both racist hate crimes and crimes of sexual terror. Unequal power is a precondition of them both.

     And these are direct quotes from enablers and accomplices of crimes against humanity which define the limits of the human, and who are not marginal figures whose malign violations of our values and dehumanization of others occurred in a trailer park brothel or secret sweatshop of slave labor but   at the pinnacle of our society's ruling class. Their existence is an indictment of the flaws of our nation and of our civilization, and a measure of the distance we have yet to travel in the realization of a true free society of equals.

    As Margaret Atwood said in her 2015 lecture to West Point cadets; "Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, 'It can't happen here.' Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances."

     As written by Jonathan Freedland in his article in The Guardian entitled, The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises a question some may think naive: why?; "The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises so many questions, and yet scarcely discussed is the one that perhaps matters most. Naturally, there's huge interest in whether Maxwell, convicted this week of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for sex with her one-time boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, will seek to reduce her sentence by naming names – opening up the pair's notorious little black book and telling prosecutors who else among the rich and powerful abused the vulnerable minors Maxwell trafficked for sex.

     In Britain, much of that interest focuses on Epstein's longtime pal, Prince Andrew, who was so close to the couple he invited them on visits to Balmoral, Sandringham and Windsor: it's lucky the prince doesn't sweat, because if he did, he might be drenched now. So far he has refused to answer US investigators' questions – not for his own sake, you understand, but according to multiple reports, to save the Queen from embarrassment. Because a 61-year-old man hiding behind his 95-year-old mother would not be in the least bit mortifying.

     There are other questions, such as: how many others enabled the travelling child abuse ring that Epstein and Maxwell operated, turning a blind eye to what was surely obvious? Or: when else would the BBC respond to the conviction of a child sex offender by interviewing a brother of the offender who refused to accept the verdict of the court? And how come that Today programme interview with Ian Maxwell came so soon after the BBC had given a platform to one of Epstein's lawyers, presenting him as if he were merely a neutral expert?

     All those questions matter, and yet the one that preys on my mind is more timeless. It's the question that arises in all such cases of human cruelty yet which one hesitates to ask, lest the inquiry seem naive: why?

     The coverage of Maxwell has probed that a bit, suggesting for example that Ghislaine Maxwell was conditioned, as the daughter of the publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, to cater to the whims of a monstrous man, and simply transferred her allegiance, and her service, from one monster to another. Growing up surrounded by wealth and power, where the deference of officialdom was taken for granted, would have had its effect too. Ghislaine Maxwell may well have assumed that people like her and Epstein were granted a special kind of impunity, that they could break the laws that restrained the appetites of lesser mortals, because for most of her life that had indeed been the case.

     And yet, both those answers are unsatisfying as explanations. There are plenty of abusers who did not grow up with either a Maxwell-style father or Maxwell-level wealth and, conversely, there are people whose upbringings were comparable to Ghislaine Maxwell's but who did not go on to commit terrible crimes.

     So the why question lingers, just as it did in sharper and more horrific form at least twice in the last month alone. December 2021 began with convictions for the father and stepmother of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes in a case so appalling, I confess at the time I could barely read accounts of it. The six-year-old was subjected to a regime of sustained torture which was, incredibly, filmed by those who inflicted it. The little boy was made to stand in isolation for up to 14 hours at a time, without anything to eat or drink. He was beaten. To punish him, his father took the football shirts he loved and cut them to shreds in front of him. Perhaps most unbearable of all, the jury was shown footage of a weak and frail Arthur shortly before his death saying: "No one loves me. No one is going to feed me."

     When the man and woman guilty of destroying Arthur's brief life were found guilty, there was revulsion, of course – and on Friday their sentences were referred to the court of appeal for being too lenient – but the public conversation moved without pause for breath to the policy implications. There was intense debate about the state of children's services, about the damage done by austerity, about target-driven culture, about the recruitment and retention of social workers and so on. But what was missing was a much less sophisticated question. Why would two people do such terrible things to a defenceless child? How could a father cause such pain to his own flesh and blood?

     There was a similar reflex 11 days later, following the verdicts in the equally soul-draining case of Star Hobson, a child, a baby really, who died at just 16 months, having been punched to death by her mother's partner as her mother did nothing to save her. Once again, the pair filmed their months of cruelty against the little girl, apparently finding the videos amusing enough to send to friends. And yet the immediate talk was not of how two people could do such a thing, but of a local "child safeguarding practice review" and whether control of children's services should belong with the local council or the Department for Education.

     I understand the impulse to concentrate on these institutional, bureaucratic issues. The assumption is that there will always be people capable of horrendous brutality, that that fact will never change, and so the sensible focus of our attention should be on prevention. I get that. And yet the sheer speed with which we move to technocratic answers, barely even asking the harder human questions, begins to look like displacement activity. It's as if we can't bring ourselves to contemplate the puzzle of what humans are capable of, because we have no idea what we'd say.

     Earlier, God-fearing generations did not find this so difficult. Nor do those who still have traditional faith. They have recourse to a vocabulary that includes the notion of evil and wickedness and that allows them to talk about it. But those words don't trip so easily off the secular tongue.

       Instead, we look for explanations in psychology or economics, assuming, to adapt Stephen Sondheim's lyric, that if people are depraved it's because they're deprived, whether of love or money. That view persists. There was an echo of it in the closing argument from Maxwell's defence lawyer, when she asked "why an Oxford-educated, proper English woman would suddenly agree to facilitate sex abuse of minors". Only the poor or poorly educated behave badly.

     We can see the flaw in such reasoning, even before you get to the insult it delivers to all those who endured great privation, emotional or material, without becoming abusers. And yet, the absence of easy answers does not give us a licence to stop asking hard questions. We need to be able to stare wicked acts and evil deeds in the face, rather than to comfort ourselves that they exist solely as functions of failed systems, errors that could be eliminated given the right policy tweak.

     This need not be a bleak endeavour. I think of Julie K Brown, the Miami Herald reporter without whose fearless pursuit of Epstein's crimes this week's reckoning might never have come. I think of the courage of the victims, who kept up the fight for justice at great cost. Unfathomable evil is part of the human story, but so too is unimaginable good."

Margaret Atwood on the true history that inspired The Handmaid's Tale

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/72565.Margaret_Atwood_s_Fairy_Tale_Sexual_Politics?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ih1GSGSmOm&rank=1
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/451808.Ring_of_Power?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=X9Cbb9nwpg&rank=16
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/31/ghislaine-maxwell-case-question-why-human-wickedness?utm_term=61cf765e71e567e4607c63188ce152e3&utm_campaign=BestOfGuardianOpinionUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=opinionus_email&fbclid=IwAR2Ju6OoS27d0YcDiiLY00gGJRimwf6prCiJajBIRxAIA1fRVgrABKC4bSM

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/15/a-long-way-from-home-peter-carey-reviewhttps://themagicians.fandom.com/wiki/The_Beast

 This free site is ad-supported. Learn more
​