Trump at the G7 is whining because Macron is doing things his way instead of Trump’s way. Isn’t the entire world supposed to do things Trump’s way? If not, why not?

Macron had ripped up the script before anyone even landed in the seaside resort of Biarritz: picking a fight with Brazil over Amazon forest fires, surprising the Europeans with a threat to block a trade deal with Latin America, and keeping allies guessing about what trick he would pull next.

Did Macron “pick a fight” with Brazil over Amazon forest fires, or is Bolsonaro picking a fight with all of us by clear-cutting the Amazon? Who is really the baddy here?

With mounting threats to the global economy, divisions over Iran, and the Amazon fires creating a sense of crisis about the environment, the French organizers also want to avoid leaks that could lead to the kind of public bust-ups that have marred other recent international gatherings. For better or worse, G-7 meetings are a critical institution when it comes to addressing truly worldwide problems.

What the French hosts can’t control is a U.S. leader who already seems on edge, after spending Friday lashing out at the Federal Reserve and China as the trade war he began risks tipping the world into recession.

Trump “already seems on edge”? Trump is permanently both deranged and stupid. He’s not in a mood, he’s always on the edge of some abyss or other.

As soon as they landed, U.S. officials complained that Macron was trying to fashion the weekend’s agenda to isolate Trump, framing it around climate change and straying from the G-7’s original purpose as an economic bloc. French officials at every level had been difficult to deal with in preparation for the summit, the Americans said.

How do these US official propose to separate economic issues from climate change? Do they think there’s no connection? Do they think global fires and rising sea levels and crop failures are not going to touch the economy? Do they think famines and mass migrations and wars float free of economics?

Trans activism does wonders for your feminism, I must say. Stamps it right out.

Sally Hines, Professor of Sociology and Gender Identities:

Re GC feminist protest pranks @ManchesterPride, please, just…[GIF of woman making the “sit down and be quiet” gesture]

Thing is, most of them are (at least!) my age and they really have only *just* discovered protest! Such a yawn. I don’t want to people watch them. They have nothing to teach me. I say, with #pride, Please. Just. Go. Away. You are not fun. You are not pretty (though yep, vacant)

Old, boring, and ugly, the professor of gender identities calls feminist women.

We get more progressive every day!

(It’s a Sex Pistols joke, the people cry. Oh well then, not misogynist at all!)

And he wasn’t even elected.

Boris Johnson has asked the attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, whether parliament can be shut down for five weeks from 9 September in what appears to be a concerted plan to stop MPs forcing a further extension to Brexit, according to leaked government correspondence.

An email from senior government advisers to an adviser in No 10 – written within the last 10 days and seen by the Observer – makes clear that the prime minister has recently requested guidance on the legality of such a move, known as prorogation. The initial legal guidance given in the email is that shutting parliament may well be possible, unless action being taken in the courts to block such a move by anti-Brexit campaigners succeeds in the meantime.

On Saturday Labour and pro-Remain Tory MPs reacted furiously, saying that the closure of parliament, as a method for stopping MPs preventing a potentially disastrous no-deal Brexit, would be an affront to democracy and deeply irresponsible, particularly given the government’s own acceptance of the economic turmoil no-deal could cause.

And the fact – striking to an outsider at least – that Johnson isn’t even an elected PM.

Shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer said: “Any plan to suspend parliament at this stage would be outrageous. MPs must take the earliest opportunity to thwart this plan and to stop a no-deal Brexit.”

The prominent Tory remainer and former attorney general Dominic Grieve added: “This memo, if correct, shows Boris Johnson’s contempt for the House of Commons. It may be possible to circumvent the clear intention of the House of Commons in this way but it shows total bad faith. Excluding the house from a national crisis that threatens the future of our country is entirely wrong.”

Maybe the idea is to get ahead of climate change by smashing everything ourselves first.

Rebecca Kukla – Philosophy, Georgetown, and cop of all things trans – has a public Facebook post from last week about how her piece for the Institute of Art and Ideas was drastically cut without her knowledge and how the Institute of Art and Ideas didn’t tell her it was a multi-person piece and that she would be posting in the company of TERFs. She includes the uncut piece, and what she says in one of the cut parts is interesting.

There is no such thing as ‘the’ transgender experience and identity of course; the experiences of transgender folks are as varied as the experiences of anyone else, and transgender people also do not share a single identity. Some trans folks identify with one of the two binary genders and some do not. Some take themselves as always having had their current gender; others experience their gender as shifting. Some care about medically altering parts of their body and others do not. No philosopher can speak to ‘the’ experience or identity of a whole group.

No doubt, but on the other hand, if it’s that various and undescribable, I have to wonder what the word “trans” even means. Some identify with one of the genders and some don’t – ok so what does it mean then? Anything and everything?

But what comes next is what really interested me.

That said, I think that philosophy can contribute a lot to contemporary discussions of gender and transgender identity. Indeed, each of the traditional major branches of philosophy provides useful tools and lenses for thinking about these issues. Using the tools of metaphysics, or the study of what exists and how, we can ask what it is to have a gender, and what personal identity is. A metaphysician might ask what role gender plays in identity, whether one’s gender is (or is sometimes) essential to one’s personal identity, and what it means for gender and identity to change. Epistemologists, who study knowledge and justification, can examine how each of us knows our own gender, and by what standards, and – separately – how we take ourselves to know other people’s genders. If I feel certain of my gender, is my certainty warranted, or could I be wrong?

We can do all that, can we? We can ask what it is to have a gender, and what personal identity is? If we can, why is it that we get yelled at and called names when we do? We can ask what role gender plays in identity, whether one’s gender is (or is sometimes) essential to one’s personal identity, and what it means for gender and identity to change? But the people Kukla calls “TERFs” do ask those questions, and Kukla ostracizes them and demonizes them. We can examine how each of us knows our own gender, and by what standards? We can ask how we take ourselves to know other people’s genders? We can ask if we could be wrong about our gender? We who are not trans can ask that too? But then why does Kukla call philosophers who do ask those questions “TERFs”?

That’s a real question. I don’t get it. She lays down how people can systematically think about this subject, but meanwhile she is prominent among the philosophy academics who do their best to ostracize and punish people who do try to systematically think about this subject. She was one of the fiercest voices attacking Rebecca Tuvel for her attempt, and at the beginning of this post she says:

Today I found out that without giving me any hint of this in advance, it was published as part of a symposium including Bindel, Stock, and Lawford-Smith, among others. This completely recontextualizes my original piece. I would not have agreed to what looks like a friendly ‘debate’ with them and would have written a different piece if I had.

Because they ask what it is to have a gender, and what personal identity is.

You couldn’t make it up.

If you read the post don’t miss the comments, because “Rachel” McKinnon turns up under the name “Her Thighnes” [sic] and goes on at massive length about how important it is to nail these things down first and how he does lots of meeja and here is his whole correspondence with the BBC and are you impressed? It’s hilarious, in a disgusting way, and all the more so because Kukla after an initial groveling acknowledgement ignores him.

Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker introduces us to an academic who thinks white people are Superior:

Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is the academic who perhaps best represents the ideology of the Trump Administration’s immigration restrictionists. Wax, who began her professional life as a neurologist, and who served in the Solicitor General’s office in the late eighties and early nineties, has become known in recent years for her belief in the superiority of “Anglo-Protestant culture.”…

Last month, in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, in Washington, D.C., Wax promoted the idea of “cultural-distance nationalism,” or the belief that “we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance.” She went on, “Let us be candid. Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white, for now; and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.”

“Let us be candid” – that’s academic for “This is not politically correct but.”

Also, does the US belong to Europe and the first world? Are we sure? It’s an outlier on a hell of a lot of metrics – proportion of the population locked up in prison; maternal mortality rates; infant mortality rates; proportion in poverty; levels of inequality; number of people in debt; murder rates; gun violence – and so on. Does that look very first world?

Chotiner interviewed her.

During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Wax expounded on her beliefs that people of Western origin are more scrupulous, empirical, and orderly than people of non-Western origin, and that women are less intellectual than men. She described these views as the outcome of rigorous and realistic thinking, while offering evidence that ranged from two studies by a eugenicist to personal anecdotes, several of which concerned her conviction that white people litter less than people of color.

He asked her if she was promoting cultural-distance nationalism, and she said she was.

I was basically speaking to my fellow-conservatives. I was speaking bluntly, and with elision. I was saying, “Well, if you do discuss it or you even advocate for it, people are going to say, ‘Oh, you are saying we are better off with more whites than non-whites. That is the equivalent of the position you are taking, and that is going to spook conservatives.’ ” Not knowing that there would be this limousine-liberal meltdown, I probably should have spelled out in more explicit terms that the media and people on the left are going to interpret your neutral criterion as a racial one, or at least they will be upset that it has racial effects, and you will be tarred with that.

Ah yes, limousine-liberal, because liberals are all rich and conservatives are all poor but honest. Trump for instance – never seen a limousine in his life, or even a golf cart. Did not take a golf cart while the other G7 leaders walked that one time.

The rest of the interview is just bizarre because there’s no mention of scholarship or research, it’s just Wax talking off the top of her head about trying to figure out why some countries are So Awesome and others are shitholes, and she offers up some explanations she thought up inside her own head. But the subject is an empirical one, and there is research on it. I’m pretty sure Jared Diamond brought a lot of it together in Guns, Germs and Steel and I’m also pretty sure there are syntheses for more scholarly readerships too. It’s not a subject people can figure out by just thinking about it and offering examples of what they see when they visit France.

We can make observations about this, and, frankly, every summer I do the grand tour of the upper-middle-class, cognitive élite watering holes to visit all my friends, and I notice that these are places that people love to go. They love to go and hang out with other people from the quote-unquote “same ethnicity” in nice, quasi-European, decorous, neat, clean, quiet, litter-free, beautifully maintained, orderly places. That’s where they like to go.

People like to hang out with people of the same ethnicity. Is that what you said?

Yes. Yes, they do. I mean, I was recently in the Berkshires. If you look around, it’s ninety-eight-per-cent white. Why do people go there? It’s not very vibrant. It’s not very diverse.

You think they go there to be with other white people, you mean?

Well, I don’t think they think about it that way, but that’s the result.

Is that why you go there, or that’s why you think other people go there, or both?

I go there because it’s nice.

When you asked—

That’s how we have nice things. It’s nice. We go to places that we consider nice.

There’s a funny bit where she explains how Trump has his good points.

I mean, the President is impulsive, crude, boorish. He’s indecorous. That whole indictment is absolutely right. But, on the other hand, there are many things he says and does that I think are completely consistent with our core values. He engages in locker-room boasting about grabbing women, but, the fact is, he’s a serial monogamist but at least he’s gotten married. He’s never fathered a child out of wedlock.

Chotiner delicately hints that she doesn’t actually know that, but if I’d been there I would have zeroed in on the “at least he’s gotten married” bit. Well, yes, but he was violent to Ivana and he was fucking Stormy Daniels while Melania was recovering from childbirth so, you know…how does that count as a plus, exactly?

But, anyway, he does believe in freedoms. He does believe in free speech. He does believe in democracy.

Inexplicably, Chotiner ignored that one. He what? The hell he does. He believes in free speech for himself; for everyone else it’s subject to conditions, especially the condition “how does it affect Donald Trump?” And he doesn’t believe in democracy either; he’s trying his best to suppress the vote of anyone who might not vote for him. He insults everyone in government who doesn’t kiss his ass. He insults people who don’t vote for him, he insults whole states, he insults Democrats and liberals and independents and socialists, he pretends he can make us do what he wants just by saying “I hereby order.” He loves Putin, he loves Kim, he loves the Saudis. He doesn’t in the least believe in democracy.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School is apparently embarrassed by her.

Marina Hyde on Andrew Windsor’s claim to be shocked, shocked by the news about Jeffrey Epstein:

Or as Buckingham Palace finally put it in a statement denying any impropriety on behalf of the prince: “The Duke of York has been appalled by the recent reports of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes.”

I’m slightly sorry for the royal flunkies who had to issue this line, given that most of us are suffering eyeball strain from all the rolling we’re doing. Even so, I do feel we need further clarification on what precisely the Duke is appalled by. Is it just the “recent reports”? Because if we’re meant to believe that Prince Andrew is appalled by ALL of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein – both the ones alleged and the ones he served actual jail time for – then allow me to treat this statement with all the dignity it deserves. To wit: BULL. SHIT. Bullshit Prince Andrew didn’t know what sort of guy his friend was when he was snapped walking with the Tier 1 sex offender, after he got out of jail, in a photo the New York Post headlined “PRINCE & PERV”. Bullshit he didn’t know why his close friend WENT TO PRISON FOR A YEAR, but kept hanging out with him anyway. Bullshit if, as Brockman recounts, he lay on his back in that guy’s house, with a Russian attending to his feet, talking over her head to men of the world about the nocturnal licence afforded to minor European royals, and he didn’t know roughly what he was swimming in. Bullshit. I get we have to pay for Andrew’s lifetime of jollies; but we don’t have to have our intelligence insulted by him.

Andrew was complaining because Prince Albert of Monaco got to go out in the evenings and nobody cares but if Andrew does he’s in big trouble. Wah. Sounds like Trump, doesn’t he.

The plain fact is that Andrew continued to be friends with Epstein even after he pleaded guilty to procuring an underage girl for prostitution. I guess it was the old she-said, he-said thing. Or as the then-Palm Beach police chief put it: “This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ – and the shes all basically told the same story.” Obviously, Epstein got away lightly with his grotesque plea deal, because 50-something:1 isn’t the ratio you need. Even last year, they still needed 60 accusers to stop Bill Cosby. Donald Trump’s 17:1 she-he ratio is nowhere near enough to keep him from the highest office on the planet.

As for where we go from here, perhaps a multimillion-pound royal wedding would indeed be helpful. It should be quite the opposite. Where Princess Anne pointedly didn’t, Prince Andrew demanded all the titles and trappings for his two daughters – security details, civil list money, full royal weddings – and was furious when denied some of them. Yet Beatrice and Eugenie still live like … well, princesses.

So instead of distracting from the miserable stories of the female attendees of various Epstein mansions, these gilded lives should throw them into even more shameful relief. They suggest the kind of man – and we’ve all met them – who has a two-tier view of the female sex. There is a world for their daughters, hopefully insulated from men like their friend Jeffrey, and then there is another world for the girls who service their friend Jeffrey.

Yet decent, humane people know there aren’t two kinds of women and girls – there are just women and girls.

But there aren’t as many decent, humane people as we would like there to be.

And so with the girls in the stories that swirl around Epstein and his circle, which includes the Duke: either broken, or yet-to-be-broken. But ultimately, breakable. They are all daughters, too, your Royal Highness. The Russian masseuse on your feet, the 17-year-old runaway on whose bare hip you have your hand in that fateful picture in London, the terrified 14-year-old who ran screaming from your great friend’s house in her underwear, who you must have read about at the time, because I did, and I didn’t even know the guy. And all the others.

Because there aren’t two kinds of women, the good and the slutty. There is only the one kind.

Back in June I did a post about a lawsuit by a trans woman against the Times.

The hearing at the Edinburgh Employment Tribunal, which began on Wednesday, could have far-reaching implications for UK’s news outlets. In addition to the standard employment law charges such as discrimination and victimisation, the case also rests on an argument that has never before been tested.

O’Donnell and her lawyer — Robin White of Old Square Chambers — allege that it wasn’t just what happened in the newsroom but also what those inside it published in the newspaper about trans people that constituted a hostile, anti-transgender place to work.

Sly. Very very sly. Bring one case and (if you win) make it so that the news media can no longer write or broadcast anything critical of trans activism or trans ideology. Wouldn’t that be awesome.

The Tribunal has ruled.

A transgender former journalist at The Times has lost an employment tribunal claim that she was the victim of discrimination and unfair dismissal.

Katherine O’Donnell had claimed that there was a “toxic environment for trans people” at the newspaper and criticised its reporting of transgender stories.

…

John Witherow, the editor of The Times, appeared as a witness at the tribunal and defended the paper’s coverage of transgender issues. He denied that there was bias or inaccuracy in its reporting.

Judge Jane Porter dismissed Ms O’Donnell’s claims of direct discrimination, harassment, victimisation and unfair dismissal after hearings that lasted a total of 19 days. In her judgment she wrote: “The tribunal does not accept the evidence of a ‘boys club’ during the claimant’s employment . . . there was a significant number of senior women in powerful positions.”

A spokeswoman for The Times said: “We are pleased this judgment dismisses all the claims made by the claimant and confirms that The Times took reasonable and appropriate decisions and did not show any anti-transgender bias towards its staff.”

I don’t think trans women should be complaining about boys’ clubs as applied to themselves.

The evil David Koch is dead but his evil will live on until planet death snuffs it out too.

While he certainly enjoyed the fruits of his labors to deregulate U.S. industry and reduce taxes on the super-wealthy like himself, he will never have to experience the consequences of his biggest achievement: putting the entire planet on the brink of crisis in the service of enriching himself and a few other fossil fuel billionaires. And we, the people and future generations who are going to live with the fallout, will never see him or the small cadre of wealthy conservatives who funded decades of climate denial face any form of justice.

Koch’s death was first reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer Friday morning and confirmed by his surviving brother, Charles, shortly thereafter. The two brothers were tied as the 11th richest people on the planet on the Forbes 100, with an estimated net worth of $50.5 billion each. They amassed so much wealth in part through business savvy—you likely don’t go a day without coming in contact with something made by some subsidiary of their privately owned Koch Industries conglomerate—and in part because they spent a comparative pittance of that fortune on turning our political system into a fucking nightmare. Funding astroturf groups like Americans for Prosperity and conservative politicians has led to widespread deregulation and huge tax breaks for their businesses, allowing them to take an even bigger share of the pie.

And above all it has blocked efforts to deal with global warming.

[T]he Koch brothers’ businesses from fossil fuel extraction and refining to petrochemical and fertilizer production all rely on being able to emit carbon pollution with abandon. In the 1990s, as the world moved toward an awakening on climate change and the need to address it, the Koch machine moved to block any regulations or price on carbon that would cut into their profits by funding doubt and denial. Greenpeace estimates the brothers spent $127 million from 1997 to 2017 funding 92 organizations that muddied the waters on climate change, a move that helped make international efforts to combat climate change, like the Kyoto Protocol, worthless. They funded a network of overlapping climate denial organizations to kill a 2009 bill that would have created a cap and trade system, a very business-friendly climate solution they rejected on principle.

It’s a pity they didn’t both die decades sooner.

The smoke from wildfires was bad here last summer but it didn’t actually get dark in the afternoon. Stinky and unhealthy, yes, but dark, no. São Paulo on the other hand…

In the middle of the afternoon on August 19th South America’s largest city went dark. Under a thick, black cloud at 3pm, the lights flickered on in São Paulo’s skyscrapers; on the motorways brake lights started to glow in the city’s bumper-to-bumper traffic, and many Paulistanos were worried. Social-media users posted pictures of the gloom, juxtaposing the dystopian afternoon sky with fictional apocalyptic places such as Gotham City from “Batman”, Mordor from “Lord of the Rings” and “the upside down” from “Stranger Things”.

Meteorologists scrambled to explain what was going on. But the most likely explanation, most accept, is that fires burning far away in the rainforest are to blame. Climatempo, a popular private meteorology website, reported that a cold front brought low-lying clouds which then combined with smoke to form the thick black smog.

And there’s another one.

Meanwhile in the US, middle distance runner Jonathan Eastwood will be running as ‘June’ in the women’s races. Jonathan can run 800m faster than @damekellyholmes at her peak. Looks like we have another ‘exceptional woman’ about to hit the track. Sorry women, time to move over.

More joy of sport for you.

It all makes a sick kind of sense.

Jeffrey Epstein reportedly told women and young girls that he was a modeling scout for Victoria’s Secret. The financier never worked for the lingerie retailer, or even, technically, for its parent company, L Brands. But he had a close relationship with the head of L Brands, Leslie Wexner, assuming an unusual degree of control over Wexner’s assets and personal life, according to reporting by The New York Times. Epstein seems to have exploited his proximity to Victoria’s Secret to facilitate his alleged crimes. According to Alicia Arden, a model and actress, this was Epstein’s ruse when he lured her to a Santa Monica hotel room and assaulted her in 1997. When Maria Farmer, who worked the door at Epstein’s New York mansion, asked why so many young girls were going in and out of his home, she says she was told that they were auditioning to be models for the lingerie brand.

It’s the sexism from both directions thing.

Girls and women are bombarded with messages telling them they have to be hot and gorgeous and fuckworthy, and that they’re contemptible and disgusting if they’re not.

They’re also subject to assault for being hot and gorgeous and fuckworthy as well as for not being hot and gorgeous and fuckworthy.

It totally makes sense that a prolific rapist and trafficker would use catch me-fuck me underwear modeling as a lure for the young humans caught in this stupid trap.

L Brands executives were reportedly made aware, in the mid-1990s, that Epstein was posing as a modeling recruiter for the company. Although they alerted Wexner, he seems to have taken no action. His relationship with Epstein endured, and in 1998 Wexner let Epstein take possession of his palatial mansion on East 71st Street in Manhattan where much of Epstein’s abuse is said to have taken place. Even after Wexner severed ties with Epstein, Victoria’s Secret continued to work with MC2 Model Management, an agency whose owner, Jean-Luc Brunel, has been accused of operating a sex-trafficking operation for wealthy men, Epstein among them. Models from MC2 walked in the brand’s televised fashion show as recently as 2015.

It’s all basically the same thing – an industry based on shaping female humans into fuck toys, and people connected to and raping the products of that industry.

It’s always been about the male fantasy.

Founded in 1977 by a California man named Roy Raymond, Victoria’s Secret was initially imagined as a haven for straight men, something more titillating than the mainstream department-store offerings but less salacious and fringe than sex shops. Raymond told Newsweek in 1981 that he started Victoria’s Secret after having a bad experience in the lingerie section of a department store. The offerings weren’t sexy enough, and the saleswomen seemed uncomfortable with his presence. He wanted to make a place where men could buy provocative, elaborate sexual garments for their wives or girlfriends, and he opened the first store with the help of a $40,000 loan from his relatives.

Men are weird. “Sexual garments” for god’s sake. Somebody should come up with a line of sexy oven mitts; it makes just as much sense.

To make the store more appealing to women, Raymond invented “Victoria,” an imaginary British woman whom he cast as the owner of the company. In the early days, the mail-order catalog featured letters to customers from Victoria, written in the first person. Raymond chose the name of the boutique and its titular owner from the Victorian era, and modeled the store interiors after 19th-century British brothels. It’s unclear exactly what the “secret” was meant to be: Maybe that “Victoria” had sex, or maybe just that she wore underwear.

I’ve had a few laughs over the years wondering what the secret might be. “Ooooh I have a vagina.” “Oooooh I’m naked under these naughty knickers.” “Ooooh I sit down to pee.”

When The Limited took over the brand, the new chief continued the theme. “Women get a little pip, a little perk out of,” wearing lingerie, Howard Gross told Faludi. Gross, who was the president of Victoria’s Secret from 1985 to 1991, went on to narrate what he imagined to be the inner monologue of a woman wearing Victoria’s Secret garments. “It’s like, ‘Here I am at this very serious business meeting and they really don’t know that I’m wearing a garter belt!’”

laughs hysterically

Yeah no guys that’s you, that’s not us. We’re at that very serious business meeting wishing Bill from Accounting would quit staring at our tits.

What does Victoria’s Secret think about women? It doesn’t think of them very much at all—instead, the company speculates about what men want women to be, and then sells that. The result is a bleak vision of heterosexuality, one in which desire is a one-way street running from male to female, in which all women merely want to be wanted by men, and all men want the same thing from women, namely some combination of malnourishment and silence. It’s a vision of sex in which women are not participants or collaborators or subjects with desires or agendas of their own, but something more like ornaments.

So it’s no wonder that Epstein was into it.

[W]e are kidding ourselves if we do not concede that images like those put forward by Victoria’s Secret enable sexual violence like that which Epstein is accused of. Images of women and girls as thoughtless and hypersexual have contributed to a culture of sexual abuse and impunity, a culture in which men feel entitled to treat the women they desire the way those women have always been depicted: as objects.

If we believe in the power of words and images to shape our minds and our lives, then we must also believe in the power of advertising, the power of the assumptions and messages of that advertising, to inform our behaviors. Although the Victoria’s Secret marketing strategy is not, again, a moral equivalent to the rape and abuse of women and girls, this does not mean that we must ignore the plain reality that the two things partake of the same logic: a logic in which women’s inner lives don’t matter, or in which they are at least much less important than men’s sexual gratification. We don’t know what Epstein thought of the girls he abused, but he perhaps thought of them more or less the way Victoria’s Secret assumed men did.

Since I’m writing a blog post and not a piece for the Atlantic, I don’t feel any need to point out that Victoria’s Secret’s marketing strategy is not a moral equivalent to the rape and abuse of women and girls, because duh, so I can just get on with saying both are part of the same hideous, creepy, mistaken, sinister view of women as mindless lumps attached to valuable genitalia.