Gold Medal Girls

Between traveling and preparing for traveling, I missed all of the Winter Olympics save for a few clips that bubbled up and pervaded the zeitgeist. Enter: Alysa Liu, US figure skater winning the gold though this was about anything but her pursuit of medals. Alysa was absolutely incredible to watch because, at the age of 20, she’s something we don’t really get to witness in our culture anymore. Something so rare it hardly exists. A young woman who isn’t performing, who is at home in her own skin, who is joyful, unselfconscious, authentic. It was if, in her astoundingly smooth routine, we just stumbled upon what almost felt like her own private moment, jumping and twirling alone in her bedroom. But she did want the world to see this, and she was proud to generously share what she considers her artistry more than her athleticism.

She wore gold and let her light shine from the inside out. As written in the NY Times,

I think a lot about this magical inner girl inside of me, long muted, the one who got snuffed/smothered/suppressed when I started “achieving” good grades and got a goofy eyeglass prescription. When I started to become aware of “other” families, what “normal” people thought, the “gaze,” and boys I was too shy to talk to. When I stopped singing “The sun will come out tomorrow” at the top of my lungs in the backyard, letting the tune giddily carry along the river, and started wearing short skirts in the chilly fall to get the attention of that secret crush of mine, Dave. When it stopped being about who I was but how I looked. How shocked I was many years later, a Yale grad, an author, an adjunct writing professor, when my dad asked me, ever awkward me, why I never pursued modeling.

An interview with 60 Minutes recounts how Alysa was a teen queen by 13, winning the national title in skating. By 16 she competed in the Beijing Olympics, and the notorious demands of the sport and its power over her spirit and body had burnt her out. She completely quit, traveling, taking college classes, having her “best life” without missing it at all. Until suddenly, the urge rose from within to get back on the ice. Soon she decided to come back on her own terms, re-emerging on a sort of Taylor Swiftian own-your-own-catalogue kind of level:

I get to pick my own program music. I get to help with the creative process of the program. If I feel like I’m skating too much, I’ll back down. If I feel like I’m not skating enough, I’ll ramp it up. No one’s going to starve me. Tell me what I can and can’t eat.

Most importantly, she fired her dad who had pushed her to her limits with his desire and demands for her success outranking hers; she would now be in charge of her career, the rink now a stage for a self-possessed star. No longer a slight girl but a strong woman. Raccooned hair, pierced, fierce, and free.

Sadly, when you think of these young female skaters, you might think of the prime target age of the Epstein trafficking ring, these girls just entering puberty, girls young enough to be their daughters, or granddaughters. In one of his many crass interviews with Howard Stern through the years (compiled here in their terrible glory by CNN), Donald Trump sets his lowest boundary at 13 when the shock jock host asked if he has an age minimum. (Not to mention he loves to comment about how hot his own daughter is).

No, I have no age—I mean, I have age limit. I don’t want to be like Congressman Foley, with, you know, 12-year-olds.

I think of pageant girls, aspiring models, or just the everyday teens attracted to the promise of $200, who were fed into the Epstein machine, groomed and ground at the rate of a few per day until the numbers reach upwards of 1,000. I think of how moldable girls can be now with online filters and heavy make-up, commodified like the plastic Kardashians. I think about the pornification of our beauty standards and our bedrooms. I think about my own teenage girls and what they are up again in this hyper-sexualized/commercialized world; will they make it through this confusing noise to the elusive promise of becoming confidant adults who can advocate for themselves and determine their fates, who can become whatever they want. But can they? How can we override the message they receive instead, when they witness a series of highly qualified women always lose the highest office (“we’re not ready for a female President”) while arguably the worst man on earth gets to take over twice, if not indefinitely.

I feel it weighing heavily now on so many women, the dispiriting truth in the ongoing, ever-worsening Epstein story, of how pervasive, accepted and even sanctioned sexual abuse is, how despite the seeming victory of the #MeToo movement, how far we’ve supposedly come through the decades since Suffrage and the Women’s Rights Movement, that nothing seems to be happening to these many men implicated in the files (at least not enough in America and least of all for our very President). You might think it’s now a rich people problem, a hazard of wealth and the heightened access to whatever they want that comes with that, no matter how young, but this fascinating, if disturbing article debunks that.

In the essay, “There is one word that explains how so many men can be in the Epstein files. So why is no one saying it?” Celeste Davis bemoans the revelation in the files that every kind of powerful man imaginable is in there, those we’d least expect, like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra (“God is a construct. Cute girls are real”), physician Peter Attia, linguist Noam Chomsky.

No sector of society is safe.

Leaders from each and every one of the institutions that run our world—politics, business, tech, academia, wellness, philanthropy, entertainment, spirituality—are all over these files.

It’s gross. It’s everywhere. It’s destabilizing.

Leaving us asking… how? How could this happen? How could so many people let this happen? In plain sight? For so long?

The author charts how media generally answers these questions, gathering a list of articles that point to Wealth, Elite Networks, Institutional Failure, or Blackmail.

Everyone is asking how did these men get away with so much rape?

No one is asking what would cause so many to want to rape so much in the first place?

It’s as if the Epstein files have exposed an entire field being taken over by noxious weeds—miles and miles of weeds—and then instead of digging to the root to eradicate the weeds’ seed, we are hyper-focused on what exact water and fertilizer enabled the weeds to grow so high.

We’re acting as if weeds/rapists are just a given.

She wants to get to the bottom of why we have rape in the first place.

Why aren’t we talking about why so many men when given power continually choose to use that power to rape women?

WHY AREN’T WE TALKING ABOUT THAT?!

Money and corrupt elite networks of billionaires are certainly not off the hook here. Those are important conversations to have.

But while money may have enabled Epstein’s sexual abuse, it didn’t create it.

One in four women have experienced sexual abuse. Billionaires seem to do a lot of raping, but they can’t do THAT much raping.

Davis brings up the haunting case of the Gisele Pelicot, whose husband easily found over 90 men to have their way with his drugged and unconscious wife in their little French town. How hundreds more must have seen the post where he solicited for this opportunity and didn’t report it. This makes me think of that sting operation show that aired from 2004-2007 “To Catch a Predator” and how men congregate every time in any place to access a supposed underage girl (despite how popular that show was). Not billionaires, just regular guys, your neighbors, supposed “good” men. Not monsters.

The world is not divided into monster men and good men.

Rather, the world we live in seems to plant a seed in the minds of men, that when watered with enough power, opportunity or anonymity this seed so very, very often blooms into rape.

Not every seed blooms into a weed. Not every man rapes. But they all exist in the same fertile soil for it to be possible.

Let’s dig instead into this soil. Is the rape instinct innate in men? Is it boiling up in the testosterone? Studies show no. (Findings determine, to name a few: “sex offenders do not have higher testosterone than non-sex offenders,” and, “trans men who who increase their testosterone do not become more abusive or start raping.”)

Is it cultural then? Yes. Entirely.

The World Health Organization has concluded that “Violence against women is rooted in and perpetuated by gender inequalities.”

The UN also came out with a report linking rape with gender inequality that said, “As gender equality improves, the prevalence of violence against women is lower… This is borne out for both physical and sexual forms of abuse. …Countries with greater equality between women and men have lower levels of violence against women.”

Gender inequality in this context means the devaluation of female status and the dominance and entitlement of men. Along with this for men comes the pressure to live up to standards of masculinity and the shame of falling short, or what psychologists label, “masculine discrepancy stress.”

The one word she’s looking for that explains why so many men (who fall short or live up to expectations) still end up in the files, and in the Pelicot case, and into the trap of “To Catch a Predator”? Patriarchy.

It seems weirdly anachronistic to even say the word. Haven’t we come further than this? Aren’t we past that by now? Wasn’t feminism already won? Obviously not. The Epstein files and all these other cases against women and girls prove how very far we have to go to rejigger the societal, systemic imbalance.

Jonah Mix, in 2016, writes about the exploitation problem of pornography:

I’m not interested in a world where men really want to watch porn but resist because they’ve been shamed. I’m interested in a world where men are raised from birth with such an unshakable understanding of women as living human beings that they’re incapable of being aroused by their exploitation.”

Imagine that. I can begin to imagine such a world when I watch the incredible skating of Alysia Liu and have renewed hope for the rise of many more girls she might inspire in whatever their passion pursuits, existing outside the smothering structure as much as possible, creating their own choreography.

And I foster my own long-lost inner magical girl, who grows larger and louder inside of me the older I get. She is 52 now and gaining strength. Soon she may surpass me.