Epstein and the agony of American patriarchy
Why patriarchy doesn't "protect" women and children--and how to use this moment for change--with NYT bestseller Anna Malaika Tubbs.
I don’t know about you all, but I can’t stop thinking about Epstein and the patriarchy of it all.
There are so many questions—how did Epstein get away with it, how did we get to a point where so many powerful men became complicit, but maybe most of all: Why didn’t any of the many, many men who knew put a stop to it when they easily could have?
It’s painful, especially if you’re watching it all from a woman’s body. Or if you’re someone who is raising or cares about a girl child (or any child, but especially a girl), and has to think about their safety in a world that has systems in place that permit this awfulness.
But it’s also very instructive: the Epstein files peel back the mask of American patriarchal power structures—the ones that pretend that women and children are to be “protected” and treated with humanity, and shows that is a farce. A lie to keep us complacent.
Rather, we now know that many of the most powerful people in the world, dozens and dozens of them household names, university presidents, U.S. presidents, CEO’s, tech leaders, members of congress, cabinet members, and on and on, treat women and children’s bodies casually, as property, often disposable. And these powerful people—nearly all men, but not all of them—do not expect to be caught or punished, because, they understand, quite rightly it turns out, that those are the rules.
Remember the statement along the lines of: I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t matter? That keeps coming back to me, and it hits different now. I think it (possibly literally) refers to Epstein and the class of men who, thanks to the patriarchal structures that prop them up—have been getting away with anything and everything, including the most dehumanizing garbage possible. Epstein did what he did with the full knowledge (and often participation and complicity) of the other men in his circle, and at any time one of them could have made a single phone call. Blown a whistle. Given an anonymous tip. No one did. No one did!
So of course men around him made comments like I could shoot Someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Because they were already doing deplorable acts, or knew people who were and getting away with it. The real surprise, in this context, is that Epstein was ever actually prosecuted (and this was all because of courageous women who stood up, not men.)
And to be clear, this is not just a problem of the “Epstein class” and this particular set of men. This is reflective of the entire patriarchal culture that we live in, where abuse and assault are frequent and “normalized” or downplayed, and convictions of predators are infrequent and challenged. This plays out every day in our court systems, media that objectifies women and children and valorizes powerful men, and in our own communities.
Clearly we have inherited a set of dehumanizing garbage ideas that have permeated the highest levels of society, and these ideas keep getting passed on and on in a way that led us to this point. But the interesting thing about this moment is now the mask is off —so there’s space to interrupt this pattern and do something about it.
How in high holy hell did these men—and our culture in general—get this set of ideas and gross entitlement, and how do we root it out? This put me in mind of the work of bestselling author and sociologist Anna Malaika Tubbs, who argues that American patriarchy has uniquely set us up for this. And she argues that this moment offers a portal to something better for our country.
Tubb’s new book, Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us, came out earlier this year and offers a roadmap out of where we’ve come from, and how to chart a new way forward.
For 249 years, she argues, we’ve celebrated a nation that left women and girls outside of the definition of humanity, and erased us.
What we are experiencing now is the logical conclusion of that legacy.
But Tubbs, who has already written a best-selling book about the mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, and many articles about motherhood, race and patriarchy, refuses to give in to the idea that all is lost.
She shows the way that patriarchy has oppressed women and denied their contributions worldwide, but argues that the U.S. has its own uniquely gendered hierarchy. Our very humanity is determined by the gender binary that is also always tied to whiteness.
American patriarchy keeps people in their place, she writes, through reminders of this social order, and by imposing violence and punishment. The actions of the Trump administration are perfect examples of this.
But there’s another way, Tubbs says.
“I visualize American patriarchy as a web stuck to all of us…one you can feel tingling and bothering you,” she writes.
By understanding how it works, she says, “it becomes more visible and tangible. We can put our hands on it, and lift it up, first off ourselves and then off others.”
We spoke to Tubbs earlier this year—in our conversation she offers another way forward. (Conversation lightly edited for length and clarity.)
MR: You write about the history of the Supreme Court’s rulings over the nation’s history, so I’m curious to hear your thoughts about recent Supreme Court rulings that continue to cement the power of American patriarchy, particularly the ones that allow states to block Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood, and that allow parents to opt-out their kids out of lessons focused on LGBTQ+ books. And how are you reflecting on the Trump administration’s undermining of civil rights law broadly?
Anna: Everything comes back to this initial social order that I identify in the book:
The crux of American patriarchy is that our founding fathers defined humanity in the U.S. with this gender binary that only really recognized themselves and men like them – and how that excludes everybody else from accessing humanity.
The rest of us are then told to basically fight for our right to be gendered in this already problematic and limited gender binary that was set up by our founding fathers.
So everything that is coming out of this current administration is being used in service of protecting this original social order.
Our Supreme Court justices are the ultimate protectors of that social order – especially our current Supreme Court. Anything that makes it easier for this one group to hold power (and that takes power or resources or money away from every other group) is in alignment with that original social order.
Planned Parenthood goes against this initial social order, for example, so it makes sense that it will be attacked.
So we’re going to see the diminishing of resources that acknowledge these groups, particularly anything that just says they exist, period – because their existence tells us that American patriarchy is not the full picture, that we actually do have access to choose other ways of living, other ways of organizing ourselves.
MR: I love the idea that you discuss that patriarchy survives because it erases the tools we need to dismantle it. That’s part of the name of your book. What are some of those tools, and what are the solutions and interventions you see?
When I was writing this book, I was thinking of exactly what’s being taken from all of us, and why it’s being taken from us. Words like our intuition and courage and interconnectedness and ancient wisdom came to me.
At first I thought: Oh, those words are not very serious. Maybe they’re a little too cliche. Maybe people won’t take this book seriously if I say that these are the things that we have to reclaim.
But I realized that even my reaction was a result of American patriarchy telling us that those things are not serious.
In fact, that’s exactly what we need to reclaim.
Something like intuition is an ability to hear ourselves over those messages that we talked about in the last question, the ability to still recognize when something feels unjust. When somebody’s telling us that it’s okay for inequity to exist or it’s okay for the people in front of us to be taken away.
If we’re thinking about this current climate, for example, we have to return to being able to hear ourselves and know when something feels wrong and when we feel like we need to stand up against something.
If we’re expanding on something like ancient wisdoms, that means that we don’t trick ourselves into believing that American patriarchy is all that has ever been available to us, that it’s all that has ever existed, and that there are no other ways of living or organizing ourselves.
In reality, we know that American patriarchy was not the first way in which the people of this land organized themselves.
American patriarchy is fabricated, and because of that fabrication, it’s very vulnerable. When we’re aware of that vulnerability, we become much more aware of what it’s trying to hide: the evidence of other ways of living.
I think that returns power to us when we’re aware of how fragile the system is.
These are the things that really bring us the strength to stand up in times where fear is being used to control us and erasure of the past is being used to confuse us, and messages are being sold to us that divide us from one another, so that we turn our attention on each other, rather than on a system that didn’t serve any of us.
MR: White women have often been servants of patriarchy because of the ways white supremacy serves them. With the obsession with “tradwives” and growing numbers of MAGA women, do you have any hope that white women can be allies to women of color and queer women?
I have a lot of hope. I think it’s always necessary to hold on to the hope that everything can be done differently. People can change.
I am always wary of speaking about an entire group of people as if they are all a monolith, because I definitely don’t believe that to be the case.
I also was raised by a white mother, and so I was so grateful and blessed to have a mother who understood allyship and understood how we walk together in partnership, without trying to tell each other what it is to be in the other’s shoes.
I always use my mom as an example of what allyship actually means. My mother, in so many ways, not only through actions, but also in her words, showed me that she wasn’t going to tell me what it was like to be a Black girl in the U.S.
Instead, she was going to walk beside me, and do her part to learn how she could make this world worthy of me, her child.
Defunding Planned Parenthood, for instance, is in the same fight as telling people that their kids don’t need to learn about LGBTQ people. That is the same fight as immigrant families being separated from each other and parents being deported and their children being left stranded on the street. That’s in the same fight as the erasure of Black leaders from history.
It’s all the same fight. Hopefully we realize that before it becomes too painfully obvious over these next several years. Then we can finally do something about it.
What gives you joy, hope and strength in doing this deep research? What are the graces and life affirming lessons of this work?
I always feel so joyful when I’m around my children. I have three kids under the age of five and a half, and every day I get glimpses of what it is to see the world through their eyes, and that’s a powerful thing, because obviously they’re unaware of all of these hardships on a national level. They’re always imagining and dreaming and living in these magical worlds of creativity, and I think that that is something more of us as adults need to reclaim.
It’s always for me about carrying forward a legacy of Black womanhood in the United States. By law, Black children were seen as somebody else’s property, Black women were seen as somebody else’s property, and were seen as less than human. But Black women never believed that to be true.
Black women have always fought for this nation to see things through our eyes, and have fought to shift policy and introduce new laws that acknowledged our humanity and certainly acknowledged the humanity of our children.
That’s the kind of courage and mindset that we all need to have in moments that feel very fearful and feel very heavy and feel very hopeless.
You have to be able to say: Something else exists. This can’t be true. I don’t believe this thing that’s being offered to me, and I’m going to build something different, because it’s the only option I have.
How does the Epstein Files or the current moment have you reconsidering patriarchal structures, or your relationship to them? What kinds of “other ways of living” are you practicing or thinking about, and what gives you hope?
You can find Anna on Instagram, and learn more about her work on her website.
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Further reading:
A version of this interview ran previously in July 2025.
What keeps landing for me is the myth that patriarchy is a protection system. Epstein makes the opposite painfully visible. The same structures that promise to safeguard women and children are often the ones that concentrate power, close ranks, and teach everyone nearby to look away. Not because every man is a monster, but because the system trains people to protect hierarchy before humanity.
So many of us were raised inside smaller versions of that logic. Communities that talked constantly about safeguarding women and children while quietly prioritizing male authority, institutional reputation, and obedience. When something felt off, the instruction was to doubt yourself before you doubted the structure. That’s part of how these systems endure. They erode trust in our own perception long before they demand our silence.
The point about reclaiming intuition and interconnectedness lands there for me. As a structural skill. The ability to notice when something feels wrong, to believe that signal, and to stay connected enough to others that silence doesn’t feel like the safest option. That feels like real prevention work. Not heroics after the fact, but cultures where people trust their internal alarms and each other more than they trust proximity to power.
If there’s a portal in moments like this, maybe it’s that the mask slips enough for people to see the pattern clearly. And once you see it, the work becomes less about waiting for better protectors and more about building networks of accountability and care that don’t depend on hierarchy at all.
Agony is the right word.