Not one but two princes now metaphorically await their fate in the Tower of London after the sensational arrests of the Andrew formerly known as Prince, and Peter Mandelson, so recently Ambassador to the United States and famously dubbed the Prince of Darkness long before the current scandals.
They represent the most elite UK casualties so far in a crisis that could yet see off the current prime minister and threaten the monarchy itself. The precipitating factor has been the whiff of financial, rather than sexual, misdeeds – very serious allegations, actually, that could be said, if true, to have treasonably betrayed state secrets, costing us all money that should have gone towards the nation’s health, education, etc. If so, off with their heads!
But important as these investigations may be, they are of course just an incidental consequence of the all-consuming Epstein saga, which, in its sexual dimension, looks so ridiculously overblown and beyond rational debate that we may feel all we can do is dismiss it with a fatalist shrug. That is the temptation given that Jeffrey Epstein himself, the allegedly monstrous “convicted paedophile”, was never known to have had sexual relations with any preteens or even wanted to. Nor is it a criminal offence to be a paedophile.
The seemingly wilful imperviousness of the politico-media classes to such realities is not encouraging. By charging ahead regardless, they change what words mean. They change reality. Let’s not split pubic hairs, they insist. “Grooming”, or “procuring”, or “trafficking” of younger women under about 25 (or is it 35? Or more?) is definitely paedophilia, and it is creepy even to question that. And just being a paedophile is an offence, because it is perceived as offensive.
Our role as MAPs in this vast, hegemonic onslaught of body-negative discourse is marginal to the point of invisibility at the moment. Nevertheless, it makes sense to assess where we stand, in order to adapt and survive. It affects us all, not just the elite figures named in the so-called “Epstein files”, anxiously awaiting further disclosures as these presidents, princes, billionaires and globally famed intellectuals may be.
We need to understand, first of all, that the millions of files in question are just a ragbag that includes all manner of uncorroborated tittle tattle reported to the authorities and kept on file. And all sorts of correspondence that had nothing to do with sexual scandal, including an email from retired classics professor Thomas Hubbard to the Epstein Foundation appealing for funds (which were not forthcoming) for a scholarly institution he heads, the William A Percy Foundation. That email recently appeared in hostile press coverage insinuating an illicit connection with the man himself.
His response is instructive. Instead of joining the unseemly rush to monster Epstein and trot out the nauseating mantra “my thoughts are with the victims”, Tom came out fighting, putting out a feisty press statement saying he knew of no evidence that any of Epstein’s contacts had been non-consensual at the time.
Some, he said, were “self-conscious sex workers who recruited others into his orbit and are now making cynical claims of victimization to cash in on his estate and business partners”. He added: “Like over 1,000,000 Americans, he did have a conviction for a sex-related offense, but from what I could see in 2015, it was for something that would not even have been illegal in most European countries…”
I have known and admired Tom a long time, partly thanks to my own work some years ago as a research assistant with the late historian Bill Percy, after whom the William A Percy Foundation was named. There have been Heretic TOC blogs carrying Bill’s obituary and several pieces on Tom’s doughty challenges to the follies of our age. One of his more notable contributions was his book Censoring Sex Research: The Debate over Male Intergenerational Relations (Routledge, 2013).
To Tom’s defence of Epstein, I would add that even within the so-called victim accounts we see another story struggling to get out. Epstein was quite possibly the nice guy many friends thought he was, and pleasant to his undoubtedly numerous young lady friends, as I wrote in Epstein: am I missing something? It is remarkable that one so-called “survivor”, Juliette Bryant was sending him chatty, affectionate emails years after her alleged “horrific” abuse as can be seen here on Jmail, where Epstein’s emails can be seen as he would have done.
Yet Bryant sensationally told Chris Hansen (of To Catch a Predator notoriety) in a YouTube interview about a month ago that this abuse had included medical experiments performed on her at Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico. Bullshit! Even her performative distress on this video clip looks fake.
But that hasn’t stopped other claims about goings on at the ranch – girls strangled and buried in the grounds, sulphuric acid used to dissolve bodies, babies sacrificed – being taken so seriously by the local authorities that a multi-million dollar enquiry has been launched. Bonkers!
One email from 2019 in the Epstein files offers to supply – for a price – video evidence of Epstein raping children. An obvious scam, it says you will get the evidence once you pay one Bitcoin for it, which on the date in question would have been worth around $7,500. Nice little earner, even then! As for the serial lies told by the most high-profile allegator, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, no need to reprise them here. Just check out Michael Tracey’s excellent take-down journalism.
I’ll just throw in a “fun fact”, as he called it, from one his tweets:
Annie Farmer received $1.5 million for claiming she was a “survivor” of “hand-holding.” Literally. When she testified in the Maxwell trial, the judge was compelled to instruct jurors that she hadn’t been subjected to any “illegal sexual activity”.
Now that’s a not-so-little nice earner! And Giuffre’s equally baseless claims against the then Prince Andrew were a much bigger one. As Ben Gunn points out in Quillette (thank you, Warbling J Turpitude, for alerting me to this article) she had all the time in the world to file a criminal complaint but didn’t. Instead, she accepted a financial settlement, all the while declaring it wasn’t about the money.
I started by saying we could just shrug off this nonsense but that it makes sense to get a handle on it. Among the more insightful commentators who have attempted to capture the zeitgeist in this regard are Richard Hanania, Brendan O’Neill, and, finally, a writer as quirky and intriguing as his name, Thomas Peermohamed Lambert.
Hanania’s work has already been commended by others here in the Comments, so I won’t dwell on it other than to mention this recent piece. Some may find it rather elitist in its dismissal of conspiracy theories coming from less well off, often poorly educated people with what he calls “low human capital”, and why they obsess over paedophilia. But he has a strong point: “losers”, he says, feel the need to look down on someone else.
Like Hanania, O’Neill examines why the Epstein saga has become such a big deal, and how conspiracy theories about it have converged towards agreement between Left and Right, for different reasons. In O’Neill’s case, he homes in on one very specific aspect of the phenomenon: Epstein’s Jewishness , and its importance for conspiracy theorists.
On the anti-Zionist Left, it has been claimed Epstein was a Mossad agent, plotting against the Palestinians through his friendship with leading Israelis such as former prime minster Ehud Barak. But that is a weird claim. As O’Neill points out, in recent years Barak has sided with the the anti-Zionist radical Left. I might add that Epstein was also a big fan and friend of Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most prominent and longstanding critics of Israeli governments, notably as regards the “atrocities” (his word, although I concur) committed against the Palestinians long before the also atrocious rampage by Hamas on 7 October 2023.
On the racist Right, Epstein’s alleged misdeeds have been used as an excuse for attacks on “the Jews” as the source of all evil. Go onto X, he says, and you will see, “It’s all there. Jews control world affairs. They are the puppet-masters of the powerful. They use sexual corruption and blackmail to dominate governments.” But the truth is, he adds, that the FBI has found not so much a sliver of evidence that Epstein was blackmailing powerful men with surreptitiously filmed clips of them abusing girls.
An extensive search of his homes, his emails and his bank accounts turned up nothing to suggest he was engaged in sex-linked extortion with the rich and powerful. Yet they’re all over social media claiming the files prove the super-rich kill children and eat their flesh. They have revived the Jew hatred of the 1200s, “giving rise to unhinged cries about how that most warped people have a cannibalistic urge to sacrifice the innocent. The blood libel reborn.”
Which brings me to our third writer, Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, he of the oddly hybrid forenames, one Christian in origin, one Muslim. A young and highly acclaimed debut novelist last year, his contribution is so colourful it might smack of fiction but is actually grounded in serious anthropology – a combination of attributes that is both irresistibly fascinating and devilishly dangerous.
Lambert’s schtick is to draw a comparison between Epstein’s elite circle of friends, with their secretive gatherings in remote locations such as a private island and a desert ranch, and numerous completely separate and independent tribal secret brotherhoods dotted around the globe, first studied by the anthropologist Franz Boas over a hundred years ago, to which only a privileged elite could belong. A distinguishing characteristic was that membership involved bizarre rituals.
Up to this point we might just be talking about the tribal equivalent of the Freemasons, which go back many centuries but which nevertheless belong to modern “civilisation” rather than older, prehistoric cultures. What Boas discovered, in the Pacific Northwest region of America, with Percy Amaury Talbot and other anthropologists later making similar findings in Africa and elsewhere, was alarmingly different. Their rituals were not just bizarre, they were grotesque. These were cannibal cultures. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, notably, “the secretive Poro society wormed its way into just about every important political position with initiates sacrificing their own first-born sons to reach the highest ranks”.
By 1950, similar cults had been found on every continent, albeit their actual rites and secrets had little in common. What all human societies seemed to require, rather, was an excuse for secrecy itself. But why?
The next breakthrough, according to Lambert, came in the 1990s, when archaeologists in France and Italy began to notice indications of cannibalistic human sacrifice in Palaeolithic cave dwellings. These cannibal cults invariably seemed to emerge in “transegalitarian” societies – those who were caught somewhere between flat, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and stratified, feudal societies with established hereditary classes.
Could we be in a comparable period of uncertain, volatile, alarming, transition today? In an important sense, says Lambert, the Epstein revelations are simply the latest chapter in the ancient history of secret societies designed to enforce boundaries between a cosy elite and a terrified rank and file. But, he says:
…it is the more feverish rumours, like the cannibalistic orgies in the upstairs rooms of pizza restaurants posited by QAnon, that are most telling of Epstein’s sociological significance. Suddenly, spontaneously, people with no familiarity with the Hamatsa, the Ekkpo or the Poro, are devising imagery straight out of the ethnographies of Boas and Talbot. It is as if ordinary people know, instinctively, that the greater the inequality, the stranger and more occult the rituals that reinforce it need to be.
Is he right? I am confident he is not, for reasons I could go into, but I’d much rather heretics here read his article, come up with their own critiques, and discuss them in the Comments space. Lambert’s theory is mesmerising, and that is why I have dwelt on it at some length. My belief is that if we are to retain our own sanity amidst the crazy junk that is going around – including very sophisticated junk such as Lambert’s – we need to engage our brains and confront all this weirdness unflinchingly.
IT’S THE PLATFORMS, INNIT?
The UK is taking another step towards banning social media for under-16s this week as technology secretary Liz Kendall launches a consultation on the policy. According to the Guardian, insiders are increasingly sure prime minister Keir Starmer will back the idea.
When I last blogged on the subject in “How to rewild Generation Doomscroll” a year ago, I acknowledged that the public and political momentum towards a ban could be a classic case of yet another moral panic, but also admitted there is a real problem that ought not to be ignored, because there is just too much evidence out there of elevated rates of mental illness among teenagers, and of social media sites that “encourage troubled teens to harm themselves in a whole bunch of awful ways, including a morbid focus on weight reduction (anorexia), self-cutting, and even the promotion of suicide.”
I still believe there is a genuine and massive problem to be addressed, but the case presented for an under-16 ban looks weaker now than it did when evidence claiming to show social media as a primary cause of teenage angst was confidently advanced by psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Remarkably, a ban was also backed by Lenore Skenazy, who had made a name for herself as an advocate for liberating children, even preteens, from stifling and unnecessary restrictions. She was dubbed World’s Worst Mum after letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York Subway alone, but managed to turn the tables by hosting a TV series with that title. Her book and website Free-Range Kids were also massive.
More recently, though, there has been a significant challenge to the case put forward by Haidt. Speaking in the House of Lords last month, Claire Fox spoke of new research at Manchester University debunking the claim that social media has increased teenagers’ symptoms of anxiety or depression. Baroness Fox may be known to heretics as the libertarian director and founder of think tank the Academy of Ideas, and is often to be heard on BBC Radio’s flagship ethics programme, Moral Maze.
She also said the chair of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group, Professor Louis Appleby, had pointed out that self-harming in the young began well before social media took hold in that age group. And she added: “An Oxford University study of nearly 12,000 children showed no correlation between screen time, including social media, and mental health. Instead, the way in which children engage with social media is what determines its impact and – shock horror – in many instances, evidence shows the positive impact of social-media use.”
For another thing, the politics of the 12 months since I last visited the subject here have not been encouraging in terms of what Lenore Skenazy, especially, was advocating for the “rewilding” of children. She pointed out that children and younger teenagers have been increasingly trapped at home from early childhood onwards (thanks partly to parental fears over “stranger danger” but also the closure of youth clubs, sports facilities, etc., in times of public spending cuts) with little to do but online activities including “doomscrolling”.
Skenazy felt an under-16 social ban could only work if coupled with giving kids greater real-life freedom, letting them get out and about, spending plenty of face time with their peers and socialising with adults other than their parents – adults who in all likelihood would be either friends of their parents or otherwise trustworthy people (including MAPs) known to them. While it makes sense for parents to warn their kids against “wrong uns” (as my parents did), teaching kids that “stranger” equals “”predator” merely encourages timidity, keeping them ignorant of the world and holding back their social education.
She was right, but the political discourse in recent months has been all about restricting youngsters online, with next to zero emphasis on real-life rewilding. Without such rewilding a social media ban on its own would be disastrous in itself, not least because, as Fox points out, the online world is by no means entirely bad for them. As she said in the Lords:
Despite histrionic headlines, social media can be used for self-educational ends. There is a new generation of autodidacts who are teaching themselves coding, video producing, editing and even musical instruments, languages and chess. I know that sounds rose-tinted and a bit glib, but social media often is a tool for connections – finding your tribe, making new friends – and a place where you can cultivate solidarity and autonomy as a young person. It can be a counter to the social trend towards fragmentation.
How refreshing to hear this! I might also add that we can always find extreme cases in which kids have lost their lives after visiting sites encouraging suicide etc., which is tragic and terrible, but in one recent case blocking kids’ online access has likewise proved disastrous. In India last month it was reported that three sisters, aged 16, 14 and 12 killed themselves together by jumping from a high balcony at home. They were said to have been upset that their father had taken away their mobile phone. While this was clearly a rare, bizarre case, the same could be said of death and other extreme harm with a clear connection to social media use.
All of which leaves with a question. What is to be done?
The big problem with state intervention is that laws restricting personal freedom tend to go badly wrong. Such laws are often passed in haste (yes, in an atmosphere of moral panic), with too little detailed consideration of their practical consequences, which often include the possibility of them being applied too broadly and in a heavy-handed way by often over-zealous police and other enforcement agencies.
It is becoming ever clearer that this is not the way forward. As for what might be, I have “listened to the victims” on this one, or at least to their parents – the ones whose children have died in social media tragedies. Real victims, in other words, not the bogus ones who are so often loud in the media, as in the Epstein case. A piece in The Times a few days ago made for sobering reading, but with positive suggestions. The print-edition headline speaks for itself: “Social media killed our children: the club that no parent wants to join”.
The report by Caroline Scott (The Times Magazine, 26 February) on a group called Bereaved Families for Online Safety includes genuinely harrowing accounts and a range of opinions, as might be expected. A running theme was danger from the algorithms, and the attention economy that is driving the social media platforms.
One parent I found particularly persuasive was Ian Russell, founder of Bereaved Families, whose 14-year-old daughter, Molly, took her own life in 2017 after viewing social media sites that encouraged self-harm and suicide. What he is looking for is more accountability from tech companies, who have been irresponsibly fostering extreme content because it is attention-getting, driving users’ eyes and advertisers’ money in their direction.
The most effective way to reign-in such excesses may well be through civil lawsuits rather than laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act, which has been both ineffectual (a few porn companies have been fined for breaching age restrictions but the fines are being left unpaid) and unnecessarily heavy-handed on those (including teens and preteens) who would not be harmed simply by seeing “what comes naturally”.
The first lawsuits claiming that Instagram and YouTube deliberately harm children are now under way in the US, while TikTok and Snapchat have already settled out of court. The latter two platforms may have escaped relatively lightly, but if the Insta/YT case goes all the way these corporations could face punitive damages on a scale big enough to impact their policies. They wouldn’t be able to avoid paying, either, which would jeopardise their operations in their biggest market.
Significantly, Russell also established the Molly Russell Foundation in 2018, which undertakes research and campaigns for greater social media accountability. He now believes, in the light of his long and research-informed engagement with the problem, that a blanket social media ban distracts from the real issue: pathologically unsafe platforms by design. The focus, he feels, should be on eliminating toxic algorithms and addictive recommendation systems, rather than removing children from online spaces. I agree. How about you?
‘RADICALISATION’: WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Continuing the social media theme, an online-focused article in the Guardian last month gave us the dramatic headline “Police arresting 1,000 paedophile suspects a month across UK”, with a strapline under it telling us “National Crime Agency says rise in child sexual abuse being driven by technology and online forums”.
Crime reporter Vikram Dodd added in his opening paragraph that “the number of children being rescued from harm” has risen by 50% in the last five years. While we are all too familiar with alarmist claims by the police and “child protection” lobbyists, the NCA seems to be stepping up its use of language familiar from counter-terrorist action when talking about MAPs, notably the word “radicalisation”.
Dodd continues: “The National Crime Agency said the growth in offending across the UK was driven by technology and linked to the radicalisation of offenders in online forums, encouraging people to view images of child sexual abuse by reassuring them it was normal.”
Rob Jones, the NCA’s director general of operations, reportedly said that these days “Children are more reliant on the internet, and what we see from offenders is a move to collaborate and coordinate activities on the dark web, but to use the open web as a discovery platform to identify and abuse vulnerable children.”
Dodd continues:
Jones said potential offenders were introduced to material by algorithms, and forums told people interested in the sexual abuse of children that they were not criminals.
“I think, societally, things have changed … If you go into an online forum and you’ve got a sexual interest in children, you’ll be told that you are normal.
“Because of the way algorithms drive people with like-minded interests together, because of the way people operate, they will be told that what they are doing is normal, it will be rationalised, it will be normalised, and then you will see almost a radicalisation process where their behaviour will be encouraged, and they will be told that everything they’ve been told, that’s told them it’s wrong throughout their life, it’s the opposite.”
Jones said offenders were “determined” and had adapted to avoid detection, but that technology companies could and should do more.
Unusually, and ironically, I find myself, as per my previous item above, agreeing with the NCA that the tech companies should be doing more to avoid children being harmed on the social media platforms. It’s just that we probably do not entirely agree on the nature of the harms in question!
What should alarm us, though, is talk of forums that contribute to “radicalisation”. Which forums, exactly, do they mean? And how would they define “radicalisation” and guard against that term’s potential chilling effect on the legitimate expression of opinion? How would they ensure the concept would not be used to inhibit scientific research that might contradict the mainstream view of harm?
What about a forum you may have heard of, called Heretic TOC? Do our heresies count as ““radicalisation” to be eliminated? Or my book Paedophilia: The Radical Case, in fully legal circulation for decades but with that dangerous word “radical” right there in its title.
So, we should ask, Where are you going with this, NCA? Quo vadis? What is your end game?
AELLA’S BIG KINK SURVEY
Now something more upbeat: apparently, a wonderful new information resource. I cannot be too sure about that because I have not had the time to explore it properly yet and probably lack the skill to get the best out of it. Those here who are better trained than I am in carefully drawing valid inferences from big data sets are encouraged to check it out for themselves and tell us what they find.
This new resource is Aella’s Big Kink Survey. The name Aella may well be familiar to some heretics here as a camgirl who became one of the highest-earning creators on OnlyFans. Not just a pretty face, she has also written extensively about the psychology and economics of online sex work, conducting extensive surveys and research in the field. Psychologist J. Michael Bailey has called her online surveys “some of the broadest insights that we have into sexuality in the 2020s”.
Aella posted about her Big Kink Survey recently on Mike’s Sexnet forum, which is where I heard about it. She said:
Hey! My big kink survey is now nearing a million cleaned responses, and I’ve made a powerful explorer for you to check evidence for any hypotheses you may have about sex or fetishes.
There’s around 900 variables to explore, most of those fetish related. There’s also a ton of stuff around childhood, personality, porn use, religious upbringing, physical appearance, current menstrual cycle position, etc.!
It’s at BigKinkSurvey.com! It’s got a ton of data on various stuff I’ve seen asked about in this listserv – fisting, trans sexuality and childhood, offender rates, pedophilia, etc. I recommend using the searchbar or radial explorer to more quickly find what you’re looking for.
This is such a labor of love and I’m really excited about it.
Her post included this bar chart as an example of what you can find:
This looks fascinating but I am not at all sure how to interpret the figures given with the chart, apart from their depiction of what appears to be a positive correlation between those who experienced spanking in childhood and those who later find it sexually arousing. I would be very wary indeed about reading too much into this without further information on the work.
Note a further comment by Mike Bailey recorded in Aella’s Wikipedia entry. He has criticized her “casualness” but praised her willingness to brook controversy and said her work was worthwhile.
As I say, it looks worth exploring… with care. So, intrepid explorers, over to you!