The Epstein scandal has given us a glimpse into a sordid world inhabited by powerful men

Jeffrey Epstein was a vile man who courted vainglorious politicians, celebrities and multi-millionaires who put libido before morality, ego before principle and vanity before judgement. 
Epstein was an abhorrent gang master who traded in the bodies of vulnerable young women, using them as collateral in deals with a network of high-powered men who were willing to rape without question. 

Girls were groomed, trafficked, recruited and forced to have sex with some of the world’s most puissant men protected by their privilege, position, and bound together by the collegiate silence tacitly enforced by the knowledge that what they were doing was wrong. Men who would espouse morality to the world – some in charge of ruling it – but who privately traded in depravity. A prurient fraternity which eschewed the normal social mores of decency and swam in a sewer.

Depressingly, the last few weeks have given us a further glimpse into a sordid world that men inhabited and where women merely existed. Young girls, no more than pawns in a game of machismo, were used, abused, disregarded and ranked by looks, age and compliance, and talked about by their country of origin rather than by name. Where men indulged in grubby fantasies about ‘transing’ children where you could take the most sexually desirable bits of a boy and a girl and essentially create a sex toy.

What flies off the pages of the Epstein Files is a metaphor for men punching the air – masters of their own universe – bros just doing what bros do. Epstein, fully aware of his own joke, talking about setting up a charity for the victims of sex trafficking and prostitution – like a fox building its own chicken coop. He couldn’t have been more brazen. But predators are good at that.

Unquestionably, Epstein was evil, and his male handmaidens culpable [and I can’t begin to understand Ghislaine Maxwell’s role] but I can’t be alone in listening to the hypocrisy of politicians sitting in Holyrood who decry Epstein and his supine friends for the violations they inflicted on women and girls, while at the very same time, voting against attempts to ban men paying for sex in Scotland because, by some insane rationale, they see Scottish girls who have their bodies pawed at, ejaculated over and assaulted as being somehow not the same as the victims of a far-off sex scandal that only reveals its true purpose to our homegrown moralisers when they could link it to a political scandal and rinse it, expediently, for all of its political worth. 

Where do they think Scotland’s prostitutes appear from? The women and girls that Epstein bought and sold were the same as the vulnerable women and girls who are on the streets of our cities, or working from pimp-controlled flats and brothels operating in the guise of saunas. The same girls who are victims of homegrown grooming gangs that prey on Scottish girls but, unfathomably, our government was so reluctant to investigate.

Listening to the likes of Maggie Chapman describing prostitution as being like any other manner of paid-for work, such that the protections that should be offered are not in banning the purchase of sex by men but in the form of offering trade union solidarity and collective bargaining to the women forced into it, rather than removing the systemic imbalances in our society that force women into a position of having to let men pay to rape them, is Trumpian in its tone.

And to those who say that offering your body for sale can be a sign of female empowerment, taking money to have your bodily orifices invaded in any way the buyer may choose, by someone you have not chosen, isn’t consent – it’s an unfair transaction rooted in the inequality of poverty and biological sex. Even the Scottish Government, despite its reticence to act, recognises prostitution as violence against women.

The failure to back Ash Regan’s Unbuyable Bill, even in principle, was another indictment of the poor integrity and inconsistency of our politicians that constantly use the ambition of tackling violence against women and girls like a political slogan rather than a call to action.
This sixth session of the Scottish Parliament has been squalid, consumed by matters that have proved divisive.

Regan is right, this has been a parliament where legal protections for dogs – most of which have been unnecessary – have taken precedence over the safety of women and girls which is, apparently, a government top-of-the-list priority. 

The Epstein affair has exposed a political scandal the likes of which we have not seen since the days of the Cold War and most notably, the Profumo affair. That is monumental and deserves critique, questions raised and the guilty exposed, but it is women and girls who are the victims here and that should not be overshadowed by political point-scoring.

Of course, the scandal attests to the pillars of power, how they are constructed, and politicians will aye do what they do, and this may yet topple an already beleaguered prime minister for his absurd judgement in appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador when his links to Epstein were already known. But for me, this is not principally about politics, albeit Mandelson is an important sideshow. Fundamentally, this is about the world and how men move within it, and how they see women.

And in my darker moments, I wonder whether Epstein was just voicing what many men think. That women can never be equal because it is men like him and his depraved cohort that pull the levers of power. That sex and the range of impulses revealed override everything that should make us civilised.

And when you see grown men talking about women as ‘pussy’ and playthings for them to do with as they choose, you understand better why it is that when boys are presented with a fresh fall of snow their instinct is to inevitably draw a penis and a set of balls. It’s making their mark, like a tomcat spraying its territory.

And that’s where our focus should be – on stopping misogyny at source. And it should be done in the name of Virginia Giuffre. Not Epstein, not Mandelson, nor Starmer.